Between modernity and postmodernity: speech and teaching

Abstract

This article aims, especially, at discussing language teaching today in the context of the so-called post-modernity. The discussion is based on two films and on the book Le maître ignorant, by Jacques Rancière. At first, the text discusses briefly the current context of postmodernity, to then discuss education in general and teaching languages in particular. Rancière reflects about the teacher who ignores what the students know, although he believes in their capacities. The teacher’s attitudes are distinguished from the “master who transmits knowledge”, whose teaching is guided by rationality and is teacher-centered. The ignorant teacher does not indicate a lack of knowledge in the area in which he operates. He wants the students to take their own positions to what concerns knowledge. The teacher turns into a “subject supposed to know”, not as one who knows everything, but as one that makes room for the desire of the students, for their interests. He motivates students to search for knowledge, which is probably different from the teacher’s. Wouldn’t this way of relating to knowledge the “real” learning, the one which passes through the body and makes the body? Such a perspective would let the subject make what comes from the other his own, an expression of his singularity. In this sense, it may not be possible to teach a language, but it is always possible to create conditions for learning to occur, based on the writing of the self.