Jeff Stickney

Responding to calls for more theoretical and empirical research on ‘effective’ environmental education pedagogies, the author explores the difficulty in doing this in the case of arts- and place-based learning. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy, investigations into performances of these practices reveal that they do not lend themselves to causal enquiry; in talking about their ‘effects’, we mean something very different from the ‘effects’ of climate change or of technologies. The latter, scientific language-game provides for a greater degree of certainty, drawing more on formal education than the ‘system of verification’ operating across the knowledge conveyed through the liberal arts. The former language-game, that of judging the efficacy of arts-/placed-based practices, hinges on more tacit, practical knowledge, acquired informally through acculturation and training. It is more like talking about the ‘effects’ of a concert than the ‘effectiveness’ of a light bulb. Sorting through this conceptual muddle, which is more than equivocation in terms, helps to therapeutically release us from the burden of justifying time-honoured eco-pedagogies, embracing the shallow ground on which these ecstatic and emplaced practices rest. The aim is to free educators from a ‘picture holding us captive’: that of achieving a veritable pedagogical science.

Briefly discussing Wittgenstein’s own elementary teaching experience to provide background, contrast is drawn between issues of efficacy in teaching and normative training into regular patterns or customs of usage. Wittgenstein attended teacher training in Vienna in 1919 and taught in Austrian rural village schools until 1926 when he abruptly resigned after an incident involving hitting a pupil that led to a court trial that lasted several months. The judge called for a psychiatric examination of Wittgenstein, a report that has gone missing. The so-called ‘Haibauer incident’ constitutes a central and smouldering episode in Wittgenstein’s own psychological make-up and ethical self-development—one that he returns to many years later as the basis for his ‘confession’. The effect of this historicist approach is to relativize Wittgenstein’s teaching and his ‘discipline’ to the cultural context of his time—1920s Austria dominated by the Glöckel educational reforms that introduced pedagogy based on social democratic principles. We then examine some of the boundaries Wittgenstein drew between empirical studies, including pedagogy, and conceptual ones. In Wittgenstein’s later writings, he occasionally notes (parenthetically) that his remarks pertain to grammatical problems instead of psychological or causal ones (Z §§318 and 419). Finally, following Josè Medina, we bring home a point of particular significance to analytic philosophy of education concerning adept initiation into practices: what Wittgenstein refers to as ‘mastery of techniques’ (PI §199) requires facility and autonomy within the rules not explicable on causal terms, nor diminished by its origins in normative training. Realizing this avenue through training does not however undermine the rational elements of teaching and learning—the space of reasons—sought by the analytic school. Etiological problems connected to teaching and learning are then distinguished from philosophical issues surrounding ranges of meaningful use and degrees of arbitrariness in relation to rule-following. The conclusion earlier articulated by Standish (Philosophy and education: Accepting Wittgenstein’s challenge. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, pp 143–158, 1995) is that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy draws a sharp distinction between any possible ‘science’ of education and his therapeutic concept of philosophy as the dissolution of grammatical problems. Pulling from work developed over the last two decades, we then present Peter’s signature theme of Wittgenstein as a ‘pedagogical philosopher’, a picture he developed along with James Marshall, Paul Smeyers and Nicholas Burbules.

Here, we examine two caricatures of Wittgenstein in order to show in relief a more accurate portrait of his later philosophy and its significance for education. Curry’s attempt to appropriate Wittgenstein to Philosophy of Geography backfires but gives occasion to explore his geographic metaphors in relation to his ambling method of philosophical investigation. Learning is shown to be the gradual absorption of rich cultural surroundings or background for going on as others do, knowing one’s way about but also sharing in the genius loci of one’s place. Friesen’s attempt to portray Wittgenstein as a ‘tragic Philosopher of Education’ based on a ‘German-first reading’ of his use of the word Abrichtung (training) also dissembles under closer scrutiny. Friesen’s apparent tribunal of Wittgenstein makes it seem like philosophers drawing on him for progressive purposes in education are somehow naïve or duped in overlooking the dictionary definition of Abrichtung. Exonerating colleagues from disparagement, we show how closer reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks on training, teaching and learning take us not into pedagogy but into deeper aspects of post-foundational epistemology, where meaning no longer hinges on correspondence with an external reality.

In this chapter, we introduce Ludwig Wittgenstein, initially providing background on his life and education in Austria and his relocation to England to study engineering and then philosophy. Addressing issues of interpretation and significance within the domain of philosophical biography, we reflect on the difficult path by which he came to hold positions of prominence in the philosophical community: first within the Vienna Circle of logical positivism, and later in holding a chair in philosophy at Cambridge University. Throughout this discussion, we mark the transition from his early work in the Tractatus and ‘Lecture on Ethics’, to his later work in the Investigations. The intervening period, in which he trained and taught as an elementary school teacher, is taken up in the subsequent chapters (Ch 2 & 3), along with discussion of his more developed thought on language and its relationship to training and learning. Here we set the stage for his appearance on the scene in Philosophy of Education.

In closing, we look at some ways Wittgenstein has been received in the philosophy of education, not portraying the entire community but focusing primarily on some of our own works. First, by contrast we survey the early use of Wittgenstein in analytic philosophy of education (c. 1960s–70s), where concept mapping of educational terminology was all the rage. We then step back and look at how Wittgenstein employed his many ‘scenes of instruction’ within his later philosophy, showing from another angle the significance of teaching and training within Wittgenstein’s ‘method’ of philosophical investigation. Two examples are then provided: one looking at expert judgment as it applies to assessing the soundness of teacher’s practices or curricula; the other, building on Wittgenstein’s remarks on the arbitrariness of mathematics and grammar, looks at rule-drift in top-down curriculum reforms, where educators often deviate from stipulated rules due to variant interpretation or improvisation within the rules. The multiplicity of language-games of educational reform often results in an archipelago of variant usage instead of the uniformity or alignment envisioned by administrators and Ministries of Education. Finally, we look at entrenchment within deeply rooted bedrock or world-pictures that often go unnoticed as we attend from these ‘pictures’ when looking outward. One of the higher aims of education, supported by Wittgenstein’s genealogical perspective, is to reveal through an ethnographic lens (the view from the margins), otherwise taken-for-granted practices and ways of seeing the world.

Guarding against reliance on his own biography and romantic tendencies in Bildungsroman literature, I draw parallels to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s use of the journey trope and place-based inquiry in the Philosophical Investigations, as an exploration of concept development and confusion that exhorts and guides readers in traversing the borderlands of their own cultural–linguistic practices. l recall Wittgenstein’s journey in search of himself: his retreat from Cambridge to a remote hut in Norway, leading him on a philosophical search for meaning. This self-transformative (Bildung) process of writing the Philosophical Investigations offers new ways for thinking the concept of ‘place’: not the bounding limit of things/beings; rather, working through the linguistic turn in philosophy, as potentially meaningful ‘sites’ in conceptually familiar/unfamiliar landscapes of native languages. The Investigations also carries ancient Heraclitian and Homeric tropes of homecoming and authenticity: ‘searching ourselves’ and ‘becoming who we are’, as found in Wittgenstein’s call to ‘know our way about’—rediscovering the grammatical order operating out of view but pervading the world as we see and know it, as well as setting its limits. Awareness of different languages of place is crucial to appreciating Indigenous discourses of Land-based education—a topic central to discussions of incorporating Indigenous knowledge while decolonizing education. Rethinking Bildungsroman literature in postcolonial terms—through the lens of reconciliation, renaissance, and resurgence —I call for careful listening to Indigenous peoples’ storied landscapes instead of fact-checking them: recognizing their sovereign right to self-govern their own education and resources. The goal is not to assess the truths of Land-based education, as in some epistemological inquiries, nor to make them accessible as pedagogical resources or instruments for non-Indigenous educators. The aim rather is to promote respect for its deep, nearly inaccessible context within Indigenous grammars and ways of life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a reclusive and enigmatic philosopher, writing his most significant work off campus in remote locations. He also held a chair in the Philosophy Department at Cambridge, and is one of the university’s most recognized even if, as Ray Monk says, ‘reluctant professors’ of philosophy. Paradoxically, although Wittgenstein often showed contempt for the atmosphere at Cambridge and for academic philosophy in particular, it is hard to conceive of him making his significant contributions without considerable support from his academic colleagues, his research fellowship and later teaching career at Cambridge. It is this conflicted relationship we explore, between the revolutionary thinker and his base within an educational institution. Starting from a brief biographical sketch of Wittgenstein’s academic life at Cambridge, including his involvement as a student and faculty member in the Moral Sciences Club, we look at how he reconceived the role of philosophy throughout this...

Can on-line ‘place-based learning’ be more than a facsimile or ritual? Using a phenomenology of my pandemic practice, I investigate the meaning of ‘place-based learning:’ entertaining Aristotle’s seminal thought on place as a container to venture into contemporary phenomenological inquiries where places and things are not only conceptually implicated by each other, but immanent and potentially powerful elements in learning experiences. Bonnett’s (2021) ecologizing of education shows that authentic forms must be embodied and emplaced in order to open learners to the more in situ, deeply-contextualized and yet ‘transcendental’ and ‘ecstatic’ reception of the more-than-human realm of nature (as what comes-forth, phusis). But this Heideggerian narrative with which I resonate poses challenges for students and place-based educators. Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach, itself modelled on place-based investigation of language (our ‘home city’), draws me back from metaphysical inclinations to dwell constructively on ordinary discourses rooted in educational practices.

Dedicated to educators who are not philosophy specialists, this book offers an overview of the connections between Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and his own training and practice as an educator. Arguing for the centrality of education to Wittgenstein’s life and works, the authors resist any reduction of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to remarks on pedagogy while addressing the current controversy surrounding the role of training in the enculturation process. Significant events in his education and life are examined as the background for successful interpretation, without lending biographical details explanatory force. The book discusses the importance of Wittgenstein’s training and dismissal as an elementary teacher in light of his later, frequent use of many ‘scenes of instruction’ in his Cambridge lectures and notebooks. These depictions culminated in his now famous Philosophical Investigations -- a counter to his earlier philosophy in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein came to distinguish between empirical inquiries into how education, language or mathematics might ideally work, from grammatical studies of how we learn on the rough ground to normatively go-on as others do – often without explicit rules and with considerable degrees of ambiguity, for instance, in implementing new guidelines during a curriculum reform or in evaluating teachers. The book argues that Wittgenstein’s reflections on education -- spanning from mathematics training to the acquisition of language and cultivation of aesthetic appreciation -- are of central significance to both the man and his pedagogical style of philosophy.

Comparing the early, analytic attempt to define “sound” teaching with the current use of criteria‐based rating schemes, Jeff Stickney turns to Wittgenstein’s holistic, contextualist approach to judging teaching against its complex “background” within our form of life. To exemplify this approach, Stickney presents cases of classroom practice, auditioning dance students, teacher inspection, and mentoring student teachers. These examples highlight problems with the epistemological and criterial construal of teaching, in that both sets of rules tend to constrict unnecessarily the ranges of “reasonable” practice. Shifting to the contextualist approach, according to Stickney, reveals these occluded, political aspects of assessing the “soundness” of teaching and invites a renegotiation of arbitrary limits.

Responding to Michael Luntley's article, ‘Learning, Empowerment and Judgement’, the author shows he cannot successfully make the following three moves: (1) dissolve the analytic distinction between learning by training and learning by reasoning, while advocating the latter; (2) diminish the role of training in Wittgenstein's philosophy, nor attribute to him a rationalist model of learning; and (3) turn to empirical research as a way of solving the philosophical problems he addresses through Wittgenstein. Drawing on José Medina's analysis of the fundamental role of training in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, the paper offers a tour of key passages in the Investigations and other works to develop an understanding of what Wittgenstein meant by ‘mastery of techniques’. In opposition to Luntley's liberal‐individual, or his subject as rational agent, the author explores Wittgenstein's non‐foundationalist, forms of life approach to how we act with agreement. More effort must be given to differentiating Wittgenstein's view from that of the analytic school, which Luntley appears to echo despite his criticism of the analytic divide.

Taking Wittgenstein's love of music as my impetus, I approach aporetic problems of epistemic relativity through a round of three overlapping (canonical) inquiries delivered in contrapuntal (higher and lower) registers. I first take up the question of scepticism surrounding ‘groundless knowledge’ and contending paradigms in On Certainty (physics versus oracular divination, or realism versus idealism) with attention given to the role of ‘bedrock’ certainties in providing stability amidst the Heraclitean flux. I then look into the formation of sedimented bedrock knowledge, or practices of knowing, by comparing Wittgenstein's remarks on animal habituation and initiate training into human forms of life. In the latter case, mastery of techniques—our common education—secures agreement in judgment. Finally, I entertain Wittgenstein's obscure references to Einstein's Relativity in Zettel, showing initiate training as a way of ‘setting the clocks’ with variable degrees of certainty, relative to the language‐games played. Together, these three approaches help us to stop the ‘endless circling’ when philosophers try to address knowledge questions through the logic of object and designation, or verification of correspondence between propositions and things. Instead, attention moves to the way we educate our children and how we employ agreements and bedrock certainties in practices.

Over a decade after publication of Thinking Again: Education After Postmodernism (1998) contention still emerges among Foucaultians over whether discursively made‐up things really exist, and whether removal of the constituent subject leaves room for agency within techniques of caring for the self. That these questions are kept alive shows that some readers have not rethought Foucault, finding what possibly comes after postmodernism. Using Wittgenstein to ‘reciprocally illuminate’ Foucault (after Tully and Marshall), I open teacher inspection and reforms to problematization, as relations to bedrock rules governing games of truth. ‘How, upon entering classrooms, do inspectors know “teaching” is taking place and not crazy and fuzzy things in its name?’ Taking up Hirst's vexing question, I move beyond liberal‐analytic concept‐mapping and neo‐liberal individualism to more fully assay the political ground for judging teaching practices through genealogy. Epistemological, political and ethical concerns intersect as we approach the problem through Foucault's three axes of an historical‐ontology of the present: knowledge(s), power relations, and arts of the self. Drawing on recent Governmentality Studies in Education (Peters., 2009), we aver the impasses of postmodern relativism while finding limited ranges of agency along each axis, as teachers practice freedoms by critiquing and renegotiating rules.

Offering a cautionary tale about the abuses of paradigm‐shift rhetoric in secondary school reforms, the paper shows potential misuses and ethical effects of the relativistic language‐game in post‐compulsory education. Those initiating the shift often shelter their reform from the criticism of non‐adepts, marginalizing expert teachers that adhere to ‘antiquated’ or ‘folk’ pedagogies. The rhetoric herds educators uncritically into the citadel of new discourses and policies that often lack practical foundations; consequently, teachers often dissimulate compliance to the reform in order to evade surveillance within such disciplinary apparatuses as teacher training and regimes of inspection. Turning to Foucault, the author views education reforms in terms of power relations within a form of governance: ‘games of truth’, or political and veridical discourses in which dividing practices for sorting out ‘sound’ and ‘unsound’ teaching practices become institutionalised. Wittgenstein's attention to initiate training in practices points to an alternative to naïve forms of relativism; educators must incorporate the new techniques they gradually master and adapt within a viable, shared form of life. Instead of teachers’ normalization and subjugation in what Foucault refers to as education ‘blocks’, new pedagogic practices are better adopted ‘freely’ as arts of self‐transformation. With Hacking, Foucault and Wittgenstein's accounts of the true‐and‐false are blended into an ‘historical ontology’ of present and emergent paradigms: a critique of the limits set down within education reforms that sanction or legitimize certain conduct. Sympathetic to the journal call, this kind of philosophical investigation and genealogical critique of teaching practices gives us a perspicuous view of the local, contingent and at times arbitrary nature of change initiatives. Critical awareness of how our pictures of education can captivate us heightens respect for professional eclecticism. Without ignoring the mandates and official scripts of public education reforms, experienced educators need to be able to conserve their tried and warranted ‘best practices’, while negotiating ranges of tolerance for alternative means

When assessing North American students' oral participation in classes, should all students be subject to the same evaluation criteria or should teachers make reasonable allowances for Asian students practicing humility? How do we weigh the promotion of 'courage' through character education initiatives with traditional Asian dispositions? Viewing Asian humility in Western classrooms and as it rubs up against liberal principles of equality or justice, and a virtue ethic raises a number of philosophical questions around authenticity, polyvalence, and relativity. I approach first through the lens of liberal philosophy as the 'dilemma of diversity' meets a boundary with communitarianism, and then through the contextualist lenses of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Foucault. Drawing on Tully's political philosophy, I inspect humility as embedded in language-games and then open it to revision through comparative history, inviting participants in the teacher's game of assessment to renegotiate the rules: a process complicated by their reticence to speak up. I also use Medina and Scheman's political reading of Wittgenstein to discuss how teachers can discern humility as performative silence within the classroom, distinguishing between genealogical accounts that show how comportments could be otherwise from perspicuous inspection of interconnected language-games in current educational settings