Caroline Salling - The teacher as the door: Knowledge sharing beyond stable student-teacher orientations

It is teachers’ responsibility to do their best in making knowledge sharing with students possible. To understand which forms of orientation such practices require, studies have focused on the qualities of teacher-centered learning, student-centered learning and learning-centered learning. The focus on receiving might however hinder transgressing the pedagogical practice of giving. This project builds on an in-class exercise experiment facilitating students to prepare a presentation with inspiration from backward teaching design, an impromptu survey of experience of preparedness for sharing knowledge through the presentation-in-preparation and from interviews with two students: one that participated in the exercise before the presentation and one that did not. Bringing these empirics together with bell hooks’ work on engaged pedagogy and with literature on active learning, I show that reciprocity and relationality as pedagogical practice require not only engagement of students but focused facilitation that makes it possible for students to become engagers at all. If education is to live up to its liberatory potentials, such as from deep and distributive sharing of highly relevant knowledge, those of us identified as teachers have to continuously work towards facilitating learning performances in which orientations towards correctness guide students as little as we can make it possible.