Walking with Wolfgang Klafki (5)

By Sean Blenkinsop

(For previous posts in this series, see here, here, here and here.)

Welcome back, it is day 4 of this blog and I have just completed what might be the most scenic, ruggedly spectacular in a more traditional sense, section of the trail. It is also a section that leaves me breadcrumbs of an Islamic history throughout. Places names starting with “Al” that are best translated from Arabic, remains of a small 12^th century fishing village high on the cliff over-looking the sea, coins and other remains found along the way by archeologists, and that gets me to thinking about the stories/his(her)stories that we choose to tell in our classrooms. And how those stories can support the aims that have been named in the previous questions—or how they can do the exact opposite.

We’ve reached the 4th of Klafki’s questions:

d)     How is the content structured? {which has been placed in a specific pedagogical perspective by questions a, b and c)?

This question is Klafki at his most practical as he asks the teacher to consider the order and organization of the content itself. But it is also the one question that actually can’t be responded to unless the others have been answered, ’cause you need to know (or at least have an inkling of) the aims before doing content selection.  That also means that I lied, just a touch, above….

At first, as I wandered and wondered, it was hard to really come up with ways the stuff of content can influence and affect the aims outside of those of the subject itself. But then I realized that Klafki was talking not just the actual stuff of content but also about how it is framed for students in the classroom.  Part of today’s walk was through a pretty well-used but now seemingly abandoned landscape. Lots of low-lying plants growing in pretty tough conditions in response to a salty (the ocean is right there), drought stricken, probably over-used environment. It is an environment that could easily be positioned as of limited interest, as lacking in beauty, as being not very significant—or, to switch frames, as a place where with good knowledge humans could intervene and “make something” of it. In both framings I wonder about how land and human relationship to it are positioned and how the selected content for this work, say building a document of the plants present or making recommendations for improving productivity, might reinforce and extend ecologically troublesome positions with regards to the place. And this is where I landed on the topic of story mentioned above.

I also realized, sitting under a shady pine, that Klafki is a little light on the how of practice in his five questions. Where is pedagogy in all this? How is pedagogy aligning with the content and the aims? And why does it seem as if Klafki doesn’t think pedagogy can influence those chosen aims? This is important: our research at the eco-schools suggests that often the best intentions and richest eco-aims, say building relations or undercutting anthropocentrism, can be undermined by the pedagogy employed by the educator.  Imagine the educator walking through this place, naming every plant and then telling the learners the uses for each in turn as a kind of mobile lecture. In spite of themselves the teacher is reinforcing themselves as the centre of knowing, reifying a particular utilitarian orientation to nature, and centralizing a particular scientistic way of knowing. Or, say, the educator picking up a thread that positions Islam in a particular light and furthers the racisms that already exist. This of course then led me to wonder about the question of who is doing the “structuring” of the content Klafki talks about, and what are the implicit assumptions of that structure?

It seems to me that part of the work of Eco-Bildung is about allowing myriad perspectives, stories, and ways of being into the mix, including those of 12^th-century Islam and nitrogen-fixing acacia plants, to better support and challenge the learners in their self-creation. If that’s what we’re after, then only hearing from one, or even a few perspectives, is problematic. Phrased as it is, Klafki’s question might push us toward thinking in terms of a single story for a given situation, topic, or set of concepts. Maybe “structure” is an idea that needs some more troubling from an eco-perspective…