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Sean Sturm (University of Auckland)

Teaching as Letting Learn: What Martin Heidegger Can Tell Us About One-to-Ones

Human beings will know the incalculable that is, safeguard its truth only in creative questioning and construction empowered by genuine reflection.

Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture (2002a, p. 72)

The teaching and learning that happens in the individual tutorials, or one-to-ones, of learning advisors is unpredictable and hard to measure incalculable even. Here I reflect on my experience of one-to-one teaching through the lens of Heideggers thinking about teaching and learning to reconstruct the idea of co-construction.[footnoteRef:1] [1: I write teaching and learning where perhaps teaching & learning or teaching/learning might be more appropriate to recognise the co-constructed nature of this activity.]

Co-construction as letting learn

Why Heidegger? Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is an at times mystical and often mystifying philosopher, best known for his reflections on what he called being (Sein) and human being (Dasein, literally being there), his influence on and through the Existentialists and Post-Structuralists, and his problematic engagement with National Socialism in the early thirties. He wrote and lectured in a seemingly magisterial masterful and masterly style, and he wrote at great length: His collected works runs to more than sixty volumes. I always thought of him as a writer rather than a teacher (because thats how I encountered him, needless to say).

Figure 1. Heidegger at his desk.

But then I came upon a passage that made me think again, from a late essay called Traditional Language and Technical Language (1960):

The true teacher is ahead of the students only in that he has more to learn than they: namely, the letting learn. (To learn [means]: to bring what we do and allow into a co-respondence with that which in each case grants itself to us as the essential.) (Heidegger, 1998b, p. 261)

This is typical, somewhat mysterious Heideggerese, but the idea intrigued me: As against instructing (belehren), teaching (lehren) is ultimately a letting learn (lernen lassen). I googled letting learn and found another passage, less mysterious, from a lecture series called What Is Called Thinking (1951-1952):

Teaching is more difficult than learning. We know that; but we rarely think about it. And why is teaching more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher must have a larger store of information, and have it always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. (Heidegger, 1968, p. 15; see Heidegger, 1967, p. 73)

For Heidegger, then, what is difficult as a teacher is learning to let students learn. To do so is to allow them to respond freely appropriately, truthfully to whatever it is they need to learn. He calls this process co-respondence (Ent-sprechung). It is the equivalent of the letting-be (Gelassenheit) that he sees as the appropriate attitude to beings, both animate and inanimate. It enables learning to happen. (Heideggers word for truth is Ereignis: happening, or less literally, en-owning.) To slightly misread Heidegger, letting learning happen would entail or embody a genuine co-respondence, a dialogue, between teacher and student.

This is certainly how I feel when I sit down for a one-to-one with a student to talk through some obstruction in their writing process: I have to work with them to find out where the issue lies that is obstructing their work. Often what the student says or thinks is the issue is not which we only find out through talking. But, more often than not, they know how to work out (or around) the issue though they dont know it. For this reason, I take students to know at least as much as I do. This is a useful corrective (as a teacher, I dont know as much as I think); an injunction to take students experience and expertise seriously (as a person, a student knows as much as I do); and a reminder that teachers can learn from the teaching situation. The teaching and learning situation, then, is or ought to be genuinely co-constructed (see Atherton, 2010).

This made me think: How can I square this implicit focus on co-respondence with Heideggers magisterial style? I looked for evidence of his teaching practice. Most of his numerous lecture series have been reproduced as monologues. The late seminars, however, which have been reproduced as dialogues, give us a clue as to his approach (although these were seminars, rather than lectures). As Walter Biemel (1976) puts it:

Those who [knew] Martin Heidegger only through his published writings [could] hardly form an idea of the unique style of his teaching. Even with beginners, he was able in no time to coax them into thinking, not just learning various views or reproducing what they had read, but entering into the movement of thinking. It seemed as if by some miracle the Socratic practice of address and rejoinder had come to life again. (p. 7)[footnoteRef:2] [2: See also Hans-Georg Gadamers testimony (1985), p. 48. On the influence of Heideggers teaching on his students, see Beistegui (2005), pp. 186-187.]

According to Hannah Arendt (1971), in her essay Martin Heidegger at Eighty, Heideggers lecture courses and seminars were different in nature from those of his contemporaries. His teaching differentiated between an object of scholarship and a matter of thought and was indifferent to the former (p. 1, quoting Heidegger, 2002a, p. 5).[footnoteRef:3] That is to say, the texts under consideration were thought through as sources of problems of immediate and urgent relevance (p. 1). And that thought was passionatethinking (p. 2): It was unceasingly active but without a goal sighted beforehand and guided thereto (p. 1) and always rethinking, that is, destructive (p. 2), which for Heidegger means critical . . . towards its own results (p. 1). To think through a problem, then, is to make it present in passionate, active reflection. Today this sounds quite familiar, wrote Arendt, because nowadays so many proceed in this way; but no one did so before Heidegger (p. 1). Yet his lesson is easily forgotten in the rush of higher learning today, with its end-stopped (anticipatory and retrospective) language of aims, objectives and outcomes, summative evaluation, etc., that seems to leave no time to let learning happen. [3: In my citations, I follow the pagination of the online version of Arendts essay.]

However, Biemel, Arendt and others have mainly reflected on how Heidegger taught in lectures and seminars.[footnoteRef:4] How he might have taught in a one-on-one situation we cannot know, but what he said about teaching and learning can help us to understand and evaluate how teaching and learning happens in one-to-ones. [4: For Heideggers thinking on university education, see Heidegger (2000a and 2000b) and Thomson (2003). For an excellent exposition of his thinking, see Thomsons Heideggers mature vision of ontological education, or how we become what we are (2005, pp. 141-181).]

Learning in one-to-ones 1: Dialogue

First of all, I take one-to-ones to be potential sites of radical transformation or development, to put it more circumspectly (Crookston, 1994, p. 5). Why? Because one-to-ones are non-content-based, not-for-credit, ex-faculty interventions in learning. Since one-to-ones sit outside the content for credit rgime of degree courses in faculties and allow learners to voice their thoughts and feelings about their academic life and work, they offer learners a place of safety, a relatively secure vantage-point from which to reflect on and validate their experience in and of their institution.

To use the jargon of higher learning, not only are one-to-ones transmissional, but also transactional and transformative (Miller & Seller, 1985, pp. 5-9). They focus not only on teaching and learning as content-driven (about strategies and skills), but also as interactive (about dialogue) and critical (about personal development; see Ukpokodu, 2008, pp. 230-231). As such, they enable students to develop critical consciousness (Paolo Friere uses the more suggestive term conscientization [1970]), to question their own learning, thinking and way of being.[footnoteRef:5] [5: For Arlene Goldbard in New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, community development works by conscientization and empowerment (2006), pp. 21-22.]

For Heidegger, education (Bildung) is even as we learn or think or exist together in some sense individual or individualised, the unfolding of that which is ones own, namely, personal development not outside involvements (Eigenentwicklung, not Fremdverwicklung, literally estranging entanglement), in the language of Heideggers Toward a Philosophical Orientation for Academics (1911). Heidegger (2007) adds: One only possesses truth in a genuine sense when one has made it ones own (p. 15). Leaving aside for now what it is to make truth ones own and even what that which is ones own is such an injunction implies that teacher and learner are both individuals on their own paths of learning, paths that intersect in the teaching and learning situation.

This personal stake in teaching and learning is, nonetheless, predicated on dialogue. As Heidegger puts it in Being and Time (1927): Knowing oneself [Sichkennen] is grounded in being-with [Mitsein] or Being with one another understandingly (1962, p. 161).[footnoteRef:6] Martin Buber (2002) extrapolates from Heidegger that the fundamental fact of human existence is a dialogue that takes place in what he calls the sphere of between (das Zwischenmenschliche; p. 241). As against technical dialogue or monologue disguise