Learning as Calling and Responding

Drawing on Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue, my contribution to the theorising of education evolves around the concept of calling and responding. Understanding our being in the world according to Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue, means understanding it as an existential dialogue, conceptualized in my thesis (see Jons 2008) as a matter of calling and responding. The conceptualization was undertaken by employing a method of philosophical construction suggested by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994) aiming at reusing old concepts in new contexts, thereby affording possibilities to discover, articulate and discern phenomena of that context in new ways. The construction of the concept was based on a secularised notion of vocation and coined as a relational, ontologically normative and existentially dialogical notion, thereby intending to discover, articulate and discern pedagogical relations in a new way. My presentation will focus on the pedagogical relation between a learner ­– might it be a student or a scholar – and the subject studied, thereby affording a new way of conceiving the process as well as the outcome of learning. Thinking learning within the framework of calling and responding means understanding the learner and the subject as addressing and responding each other. This means that predicaments of the subject - such as the truths it holds and the anomalies it suffers from – addresses the learner in e g lectures, readings, theories, assignments , challenging the knowledge of the learner, and in responding to this address, the learner in turn challenges the truths of the subject. By paying heed to, responding responsibly and challenging each other, the outcome of learning becomes a twofold phenomenon, namely both the learner and the subject reconstituting themselves, enlarged by the contribution of each other’s being-in-the-world. Intending to contribute to the conversation about the theorising of education, this paper affords a relational, ontological normative and existentially dialogical perspective on the pedagogical relation between the student, or the scholar, and a subject.