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This paper explores the question what kind of educational work can be done in attempts toreclaim or reinvigorate the public sphere. Through a discussion of the intersection of publicsphere and public space, it engages with the work of Hannah Arendt in order to outline aconception of the public sphere as a space for civic action based on distance and theconservation of a degree strangeness rather than on commonality and common identity.The discussion of the educational work that can be done to support the public quality ofcommon spaces and places focuses on three interpretations of the idea of public pedagogy:that of public pedagogy as a pedagogy for the public, that of public pedagogy as a pedagogyof the public and that of public pedagogy as the enactment of a concern for the public qualityof human togetherness. The latter form of public pedagogy neither teaches nor erases thepolitical by bringing it under a regime of learning, but rather opens up the possibility forforms of human togetherness through which freedom can appear, that is forms of humantogetherness which contribute to the ‘becoming public’ of spaces and places.
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This article was downloaded by: [University of Sydney]On: 07 December 2014, At: 16:40Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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Becoming public: public pedagogy, citizenshipand the public sphereGert Biesta aa University of Stirling , UKPublished online: 19 Oct 2012.
To cite this article: Gert Biesta (2012) Becoming public: public pedagogy, citizenship and the public sphere,Social & Cultural Geography, 13:7, 683-697, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2012.723736
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Becoming public: public pedagogy, citizenship and thepublic sphere
Gert Biesta1
University of Stirling, UK, gert.biesta@uni.lu
This paper explores the question what kind of educational work can be done in attempts toreclaim or reinvigorate the public sphere. Through a discussion of the intersection of publicsphere and public space, it engages with the work of Hannah Arendt in order to outline aconception of the public sphere as a space for civic action based on distance and theconservation of a degree strangeness rather than on commonality and common identity.The discussion of the educational work that can be done to support the public quality ofcommon spaces and places focuses on three interpretations of the idea of public pedagogy:that of public pedagogy as a pedagogy for the public, that of public pedagogy as a pedagogyof the public and that ofpublic pedagogyas the enactment of a concern for the public qualityof human togetherness. The latter form of public pedagogy neither teaches nor erases thepolitical by bringing it under a regime of learning, but rather opens up the possibility forforms of human togetherness through which freedom can appear, that is forms of humantogetherness which contribute to the becoming public of spaces and places.
Key words: public pedagogy, public sphere, citizenship, Arendt, identity, education.
Introduction
At 10.00 am on the first of May 1996
Friedemann Derschmidt and four other artists
had breakfast at the Schwarzenbergplatz in
Vienna. This was the start of what since has
become a world-wide phenomenon known as
permanent breakfast (see www.permanent-
breakfast.org). The rules of permanent break-
fast are simple: one person organises a
breakfast in a public location and invites at
least four other people to the breakfast. Those
invited commit themselves to organising
another public breakfast with different people
in a different location, and so on (www.perma-
nentsbreakfost.org: the main idea). The rules
stipulate that every breakfast has to be
recognisable as a breakfast (table, chairs and
food) and that those having breakfast invite
passers-by to the breakfast and explain the
rules to them. The rules also indicate that
everyone is individually responsible for the
juridical implications of having the breakfast
(see www.permanentsbreakfost.org: rules of
the game). The ambition of permanent break-
fast is to breakfast (in German: befruh-
stucken) as many public places and spaces as
possible and do so without advance notice or
Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 13, No. 7, November 2012
ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/12/070683-15 q 2012 Taylor & Francis
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requests for permission, on the assumption that
public places are precisely those places where
things can be done without the need for anyone
to give permission. In this regard, the break-
fasts are claimed to serve as a kind of litmus
test of the extent to which the chosen location
might indeed function as a public space, that is
a space not determined by private agendas or
interests (see www.permanentsbreakfost.org:
Vom Verlust des offentlichen Raums on the
loss of public space).
Permanent breakfast is but one example of a
rapidly growing trend of staging artistic
interventions in public places (see, for example
Hall and Robertson 2001; Minty 2006; Pinder
2008). Such interventions not only raise
political questions about what it means for
spaces and places to be public, which is
particularly important against the background
of concerns about the decline of the public
sphere and the end of public space (see, for
example Marquand 2004; Mitchell 1995;
Sorkin 1992). They also raise educational
questions about what it means to contribute to
the reinvigoration of the public quality of
spaces and places through such interventions
which has to do not only with the impact and
effectiveness of such interventions but also
with their justification and meaning as edu-
cational interventions. The political and the
educational dimension come together in the
idea of public pedagogy. Although much
work on public pedagogy has focused on the
analysis of how media, culture and society
function as educative forces (see, for example
Giroux 2004), the idea of public pedagogy can
also be understood in a more programmatic
and more political way, which is as an
educational intervention enacted in the interest
of the public quality of spaces and places and
the public quality of human togetherness more
generally. The ambition of this paper is to
articulate a notion of public pedagogy that
connects the political and educational and
locates both firmly in the public domain. The
need for this stems not only from the ongoing
privatisation and de-politicisation of public
spaces and places (see below), but also from an
ongoing privatisation and de-politicisation of
education itself, one in which a view of
education as an ongoing collective and political
project is replaced by a view of education as
entirely private, that is, as a means for private
advantage (see Biesta 2006a).
I develop my argument in the following way.
I start with a discussion of the transformation
of the public sphere, focusing on concerns
about its decline and even its eclipse. I show the
ways in which the idea of the public sphere is
different from the idea of public space, which
allows me to ask the question how public
sphere actually takes placeboth metaphori-
cally and literally. To answer this question
I turn to the work of Arendt (19061975), who
provides a political reading of the public
sphere as a space where freedom can appear.
For Arendt this is not so much a question of
physical location as that it is about a particular
quality of human togetherness which she
characterises as being together in the manner
of speech and action (see below). In such terms
the construction of public sphere can be
understood as an ongoing process of becoming
public. Becoming public is necessarily con-
nected with the condition of plurality which, in
a third step of my argument, I connect with the
idea of a citizenship of strangers. Against this
background I then turn to an exploration of the
idea of public pedagogy. Here, I introduce a
distinction between three forms of public
pedagogy, to which I refer as a pedagogy for
the public, a pedagogy of the public and a
pedagogy that enacts a concern for public-
ness, respectively. I argue that the first two
forms of public pedagogy run the risk of
replacing politics by education, either by
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conceiving of public pedagogy as a form of
instruction, or by understanding public peda-
gogy in terms of learning. Enacting a concern
for publicness, so I suggest, is not about
teaching individuals what they should be, nor
about demanding from them that they learn,
but is about forms of interruption that keep the
opportunities for becoming public open. In
the concluding section, I bring the lines of my
argument together in order to highlight how
public pedagogy can be of political significance
without losing its pedagogical identity.
This paper is a theoretical contribution aimed
at an exploration of the intersection of politics
and pedagogy in the context of discussions
about artistic interventions in the public sphere.
It aims to provide concepts and distinctions that
can help with the empirical study of the
significance and impact of such interventions.
As I write this paper as an educationalist with an
interest in questions of space, place, location
and democratic politics, and not as a geogra-
pher, my ambition is confined to contributing
educational insights to a wider discussion.
The decline of the public sphere
Over the past decades there has been a steady
stream of work in which concerns have been
raised about the transformation of the public
sphere. Such work, which comes from a range
of different disciplines and fields, including
political theory, philosophy, geography, urban
planning, architecture and education,2 tends to
depict the transformation of the public sphere
as a process of decline or loss, one in which
essential qualities of the public sphere are under
pressure, are at the brink of extinction or have
already disappeared (see, for example Haber-
mas 1989; Sennett 1992). David Marquand, in
his book Decline of the Public (Marquand
2004), argues that the public sphere is being
threatened from two sides, one being the
(logic of the) market and the other being (the
logic of) private interest. The neo-liberal shift
from a public logic to a market logic is one
where citizens are no longer involved in
democratic contestation about the public
good but have been turned into consumers of
public services. Such citizen-consumers are
being offered choice, quality and value for
money from a set menu, rather than that they
can influence what goes on the menu in the first
place. The threat from the side of the private
sphere is twofold, according to Marquand.
There is first of all the revenge of the private
(Marquand 2004: 79) which is about the
resistance against the hard, demanding,
unnatural austerities of public duty and
public engagement (Marquand 2004: 79). The
second aspect touches upon the idea of identity
politics. Here, Marquand argues that the
assumption that the private self should be
omni-competent and omnipresent has made
deliberative politics of any sort virtually
impossible (Marquand 2004: 8082).
Marquands evaluation of the decline of the
public sphere stems from what Mitchell (1995:
116) correctly characterises as a normative
conception of public space, one in which the
public sphere is best imagined as the suite of
institutions and activities that mediate the
relations between society and the state.
Marquand does indeed define what he refers
to as the public domain as a space, protected
from the adjacent market and private domains,
where strangers encounter each other as equal
partners in the common life of the society
(Marquand 2004: 27). The key function of the
public domain, according to Marquand (2004:
26), is to define the public interest and to
produce public goods. This implies that the
values that sustain, and are sustained by, the
public domain are not the values of self-interest
but of collective interest (Marquand 2004: 57).
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Hence they are political values. Given that
collective interest may sometimes go against
ones immediate self-interest, engagement with
and commitment to the public domain require
a certain discipline and a certain self-restraint
(Marquand 2004: 57). Marquand argues that
this does not come naturally but has to be
learned and then internalised, sometimes
painfully (Marquand 2004: 57).
In the eyes of authors such as Marquand, the
public domainor with the term favoured by
Habermas (1989): the public sphereis not to
be understood as a physical location, but first
and foremost as a certain form of interaction.
Marquand refers to the public domain as a set
of activities with its own norms and decision
rules, and emphasises that relationships in the
public domain are different not only from those
in the private domain of love, friendship and
personal connection but also fromrelationships
in the market domain of buying and selling
[and] interest and incentive (Marquand 2004:
4). The public domain so understood is thus
basically seen as aspatial Mitchell (1995: 116).
Yet public sphere, in order to exist, needs to take
place, both figuratively and literally. This means
that the idea of the public spherea notion that
plays a central role in political theory and
philosophyneeds to be connected to the idea
of public spacea notion that is more firmly
located in fields such as geography, urban
planning and architecture.
Although we could define public space in a
technical sense as any space that is not
privatethat is, privately owned, privately
used and privately determinedthis does not
mean that any public space is automatically a
political space, which is a space that make[s]
political activities possible (Mitchell 1995: 115;
see also Mitchell 2003), or at least a space that
does not make such activities impossible. Many
commentators have pointed at the irony of the
fact that while contemporary cities are actively
increasing their stockof parks, squares, avenues,
cycling paths and public buildings such as
libraries, town halls or corporate plazas, the
activities that are being allowed in such
apparently public spaces are increasingly being
limited and controlled (see, for example Jackson
1998). This is perhaps most visible in quasi-
public spaces such as shopping malls which,
while appearing to be open and accessible, are
actually very actively policed so that only
proper activities take place within them and
only proper individuals are allowed to use such
space (Staeheli and Mitchell 2006). Quasi-
public spaces are thus a prime example of the
purification of public space (Sibley 1988), both
with regard to its function (for example a
narrowing of public space as space for
consumption or for recreation which, in its
modernguise, ismoreoften thannot itself a form
of consumption) and with regard to its users.
It is in this way that the more empirical
interest in public space links up with the more
normative perspective of public sphere, that is
with the question what kinds of actions and
relationships are actually possible in public
spacesand I put public here in quotation
marks because I will argue below that it is
actually a particular form of action that makes
spaces publicand, more specifically, whether
any such spaces can still allow for action that
might be characterised as political. This
requires a further exploration of the meaning
of political action, and for this I turn to the
work of Hannah Arendt who, in my view, is one
of the most political thinkers amongst twen-
tieth-century political theorists and philoso-
phers (Biesta 2010a).
The space where freedom can appear
Arendts philosophy centres on an under-
standing of human beings as active beings,
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that is beings whose humanity is not simply
defined by their capacity to think and reflect
but where being human has to do with what
one does. Arendt distinguishes between three
modalities of the active life (the vita activa):
labour, work and action. Labour is the activity
that corresponds to the biological processes of
the human body. It stems from the necessity to
maintain life and is exclusively focused on the
maintenance of life. It does so in endless
repetition: one must eat in order to labor and
must labor in order to eat (Arendt 1958: 143)
Labour, therefore, creates nothing of perma-
nence. Its efforts must be perpetually renewed
so as to sustain life. Work, on the other hand,
has to do with the ways in which human
beings actively transform their environments
and through this create a world characterised
by durability. Work has to do with production
and creation, and hence with instrumentality.
It is concerned with making and therefore
entirely determined by the categories of
means and end (ibid.). In this mode of activity
the human beingas homo faber rather than
as animal laboransis the builder of stable
contexts within which human life can unfold.
Although labour and work have to do with
instrumentality and necessity and with aims
and ends that are external to the activity,
action, the third mode of the vita activa, is an
end in itself and its defining quality, so Arendt
argues, is freedom. For Arendt to act first of all
means to take initiative, to begin something
new and to bring something new into the
world. Arendt characterises the human being
as an initium: a beginning and a beginner
(Arendt 1977: 170; emphasis added). She
argues that what makes each of us unique lies
in our capacity to do something that has not
been done before. Here, Arendt likens action to
the fact of birth, since with each birth some-
thing uniquely new comes into the world
(Arendt 1958: 178). But it is not only at the
moment of birth that something new comes
into the world. We continuously bring new
beginnings into the world through what we do
and say. With word and deed, Arendt writes,
we insert ourselves into the human world and
this insertion is like a second birth (Arendt
1958: 176177). It is therefore through
actionand not through labour and work
that our distinct uniqueness is revealed.
This is why action is intimately connected
with freedom.Arendt emphasises, however, that
freedom should not be understood as a
phenomenon of the will, that is as the freedom
to do whatever one chooses to do, but that we
should instead conceive of it as the freedom to
call something into being which did not exist
before (Arendt 1977: 151). The subtle differ-
ence between freedom as sovereignty and
freedom as beginning has far-reaching conse-
quences. The main implication is that freedom is
not an inner feeling or a private experience but
something that is by necessity a public and hence
a political phenomenon. The rasion detre of
politics is freedom, Arendt writes, and its field
of experience is action (Arendt 1977: 146).
Arendt stresses again and again that freedom
needs a public realm to make its appearance
(Arendt 1977: 149). Moreover, freedom only
exists in action, which means that human beings
are freeas distinguished from their possessing
the gift of freedomas long as they act, neither
before nor after (Arendt 1977: 153). How then
can freedom appear?
In order to understand Arendts answer to
this question, it is crucial to see that beginning
is only half of what action is about. Although it
is true that we reveal our distinct uniqueness
through what we do and say, we should not
think of this as a process through which we
disclose some kind of pre-existing identity.
Arendt writes that nobody knows whom he
reveals when he discloses himself in deed or
word (Arendt 1958: 180). Everything here
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depends on how others will respond to our
initiatives. This is why Arendt writes that the
agent is not an author or a producer, but a
subject in the twofold sense of the word,
namely the one who began an action and the
one who suffers from and thus is subjected to its
consequences. The basic idea of Arendts
understanding of action is therefore very
simple: we cannot act in isolation. If I were to
begin something but no one would respond,
nothing would follow from my initiative and,
as a result, my beginnings would not come into
the world. I would not appear in the world. But
if I begin something and others do take up my
beginnings, I do come into the world and in
precisely this moment I am free.
This means that our capacity for action
and hence our freedomcrucially depends on
the ways inwhichothers take upour beginnings.
The problem is, however, that others respond
to our initiatives in ways that are unpredictable.
Weare,after all, alwaysacting uponbeings who
are capable of their own actions (Arendt 1958:
190). Although this frustrates our beginnings,
Arendt emphasises that the impossibility to
remain unique masters of what [we] do is at the
very same time the conditionand the only
conditionunder which our beginnings can
come into the world (Arendt 1958: 244). The
point here is that we can of course try to control
the ways in which others respond to our
beginningsand Arendt acknowledges that it
is tempting to do so. But if we were to do so, we
would deprive other human beings of their
opportunities to begin. We would deprive them
of their opportunities to act, and hence we
would deprive them of their freedom. Arendt
even goes so far as to argue that to be isolated is
to be deprived of the capacity to act (Arendt
1958: 188). In order to be able to act we
therefore need othersothers who respond to
our initiatives and take up our beginnings. This
also means, however, that action is never
possible without plurality. As soon as we erase
plurality we deprive others of their actions and
their freedom, and as a result we deprive
ourselves of our possibility to act, and hence of
our freedom. This is why Arendt maintains that
(p)lurality is the condition of human action
(Arendt 1958: 8).
Arendt thus provides us with a highly
political understanding of freedom. This is
not only because she sees freedom in terms of
our appearance in the public realm and not, as
is the case in liberal political theory, as
something that is ultimately private. It is also,
and more importantly, because she shows that
our freedom is fundamentally interconnected
with the freedom of others; it is contingent
upon the freedom of others. The latter is not to
be understood as just an empirical fact but
rather as the normative core of Arendts
philosophy. Arendt is committed to a world in
which everyone has the opportunity to act,
appear and be free.
An important implication of this is that the
public domain, the domain in which freedom
can appear, should not be understood in
physical terms, that is as a certain location, but
denotes a particular quality of human inter-
action. As Arendt explains:
The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in
its physical location; it is the organization of the
people as it arises out of acting and speaking
together, and its true space lies between people living
together for this purpose, no matter where they
happen to be. (...) It is the space of appearance in the
widest sense of the word, namely, the space where
I appear to others as others appear to me, where men
[sic] exist not merely like other living or inanimate
things but make their appearance explicitly. (Arendt
1958: 198199; emphasis in original)
The space of appearance comes into being
when men [sic] are together in the manner of
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speech and action (Arendt 1958: 199). This
means that unlike the spaces which are the
work of our hands, i.e. the spaces created
through work, it does not survive the actuality
of the movement which brought it into being,
but disappears (...) with the disappearance or
arrest of the activities themselves (Arendt
1958: 199).
Action is thus characterised by the fact that
it is entirely dependent upon the constant
presence of others (Arendt 1958: 23). This is
one of the ways in which Arendt makes a
distinction between the private and the public
realm, in that labour and work do not need
the presence of others (Arendt 1958: 22),
whereas action does. In this way, we could say
that Arendt allocates a proper place to each
dimension of the vita activa. The private
realm, the realm of the oikos or household, is
concerned with the satisfaction of material
need by means of labour and work carried out
under the rule of necessity. The public realm,
as Arendt puts it, signifies the world itself, in
so far as it is common to all of us (Arendt
1958: 52). It is, however, not identical with
the earth or with nature, but is related to the
human artefact, the fabrication of human
hands, as well as to affairs which go on among
those who inhabit the man-made world
together (Arendt 1958: 52). The most
elementary meaning of the two realms, the
private and the public, therefore is that there
are things that need to be hidden and others
that need to be displayed publicly if they are to
exist at all (Arendt 1958: 73).
A citizenship of strangers
Arendts explorations of the interrelationships
between action, freedom and plurality contain
a very important lesson for our understanding
of the public sphere, as she shows that it is only
under the condition of plurality that action is
possible and freedomthat is democratic
freedom-as-beginning, not liberal freedom-as-
sovereigntycan appear. She shows that as
soon as we begin to reduce plurality, as soon as
we begin to homogenise and purify public
spaces by prescribing and policing what can be
done and said in such spaces, by prescribing
and policing what is proper and what is
deviant, we begin to eradicate the very
conditions under which action is possible and
freedom can appear.
To say that plurality is the condition of
human action is not to suggest, however, that
there simply needs to be plurality. Arendt is
after something stronger, we might say, as
she is not interested in plurality as such but in
the question how collective actionacting in
concert as she puts itis possible given the
simultaneous presence of innumerable per-
spectives and aspects in which the common
world presents itself and for which no
common measurement or denominator can
ever be devised (Arendt 1958: 57). Although
she rejects the idea that common action is only
possible on the basis of identitythat is on the
basis of total agreement, total consensus or
total samenessshe also maintains that
common action is not possible on the basis
of mere plurality. Common action requires
decision and hence deliberation and judge-
ment about what is to be done.
But just as Arendt rejects pluralism-without-
judgementthe mere existence of plurality
she also rejects judgement-without-plurality.
The notion she introduces in this context is
that of understanding (Arendt 1994). Under-
standing is, however, not about correct
information and scientific knowledge but is
characterised by Arendt as an unending
activity by which, in constant change and
variation, we come to terms with, reconcile
ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in
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the world (Arendt 1994: 307308). Under-
standing, she writes, is the specifically human
way of being alive, for every single person
needs to be reconciled to a world into which he
was born a stranger and in which, to the extent
of his distinct uniqueness, he always remains a
stranger (Arendt 1994: 308). Understanding
is therefore not a bridge to the other, but has to
do with a certain distance and strangeness
reconciling oneself with the simultaneous
presence of innumerable perspectives and
aspects in which the common world presents
itself and for which no common measurement
or denominator can ever be devised (Arendt
1958: 57).
As Hansen explains: understanding results
not from a fusion of individual wills, a kind of
fraternity, but the preservation of a certain sort
of distance that yet requires and makes possible
worldly ties between people (Hansen 2005: 6;
emphasis in original). Common action under
the condition of plurality is therefore not made
possible through fraternitya common iden-
tity, or a cosmopolitan sense of samenessbut
relies on the preservation of distance and
strangeness. If we understand actors in the
public sphere as citizens, we can therefore say
that Arendts ideas about acting in concert
whilst preserving plurality is about a
citizenship of strangers. The idea of a
citizenship of strangers hints at a mode of
human togetherness in which plurality is
actively preserved and, so we might say,
actively pursued so that freedom can appear.
The citizenship of strangers is thus about a
mode of human togetherness which is not after
a common ground but rather articulates an
interest in a common world (Gordon 2001).
Although some might leave things here on
the assumption that it is up to citizens
themselves to sort out how they wish to relate
and how, through this, they might be able to
promote democratic forms of collective action,
I am interested in the question how such forms
of collective actionforms of action through
which freedom can appearmight be pro-
moted and sustained. More specifically, as an
educationalist I am interested in the potential
of education to contribute to the promotion of
those forms of human action through which
freedom can appear. I am interested, in other
words, in the ways in which educational
actions and interventions might have political
effect and impact.
Three forms of public pedagogy
The interest in the political role of education
is neither new nor original. There is, on the
one hand, a long and important tradition of
scholarly work that operates at the intersection
of education, citizenship and democratic
politics and that sees the question of education
as one that is intrinsically connected to wider
political struggles (see, for example Coare
and Johnston 2005; Crowther, Martin and
Shaw 1999; Lovett 1988; Rattansi and Reeder
1992; Wildemeersch, Finger and Jansen
1998). Some of this work is strongly rooted in
a view which aims to build a society of
enlightened responsible and rational citizens
and sees education as the privileged tool in
this process (Finger and Asun 2001: 97). Our
postmodern times are characterised by a more
hesitant attitude towards what education can
achieve and what kind of image of society
should be the reference point for such
endeavours (Edwards 1997; Johnston 2005).
In addition, there is also a long tradition of
practical work that operates at the intersection
of education, citizenship and democracy
educational work that takes place in adult
education, centres, community halls, libraries,
the workplace, the Internet and even just on
the street.
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From the perspective of policy makers, there
is often a strong expectation that such
educational work can and should radically
change existing conditions and practices. There
are older traditions in which such expectations
are formulated in terms of transformation,
liberation and emancipation. And there are
more recent views in which the expectations
are formulated in terms such as social capital,
community cohesion or good citizenship.
Educators who are involved in this workfor
example as adult educators or as community
educatorsnot only encounter such expec-
tations from the side of policy makers who
want their agendas to be delivered, but are
also faced with strong expectations from the
audiences they work with and for. Yet,
community education is a fragile and unpre-
dictable art, particularly when compared with
school education which always operates in and
through strong institutional infrastructures.
But if pedagogy goes public, so to speak,
what would be an appropriate way to under-
stand such public pedagogical work? Within
the growing body of literature on public
pedagogy (see, for example Sandlin, Schultz
and Burdick 2010), the idea of public pedagogy
is predominantly used as an analytical concept
aimed at theorising and investigating the
educative force of media, popular culture
and society at large. Henry Girouxbranded
by William Pinar as the father of public
pedagogy (Pinar 2010: xviii)describes his
interest in public pedagogy as being concerned
with the diverse ways in which culture
functions as a contested sphere over the
production, distribution and regulation of
power and how and where it operates both
symbolically and institutionally as an edu-
cational, political and economic force (Giroux
2004: 77). Although there is recognition within
the North-American discourse on public
pedagogy of more activist and more explicitly
political strands of education and learning
beyond schooling (the subtitle of the Hand-
book of public pedagogy; Sandlin, Schultz and
Burdick 2010), there is little acknowledgement
of the rich history of educational work in
adult, community and popular education
and of the Continental tradition of what, with
a rather limited translation of the German
word Sozialpadagogik, might be referred
to as social pedagogy, that is pedagogy that
operates outside of the confines of educational
institutions such as the school or college. The
idea that society may not only be an educative
force but also has an educational responsibility
(Perquin 1966) hints at a more programmatic
interpretation of the idea of public pedagogy,
where the notion of public pedagogy is not
simply a way to analyse the socialising force of
society, but where pedagogy becomes an active
and deliberate intervention in the public
domain. The critical question is how we
might conceive of such a pedagogy and, more
specifically, how we might do so in relation to
questions about citizenship, democracy and the
public sphere. I can see three different
interpretations of such a more active and
programmatic understanding of the idea of
public pedagogy, and wish to make a case for
the third of these.
One way to think of public pedagogy is as a
pedagogy for the public. The main pedagogical
mode in this interpretation is that of instruc-
tion. In this conception of public pedagogy, the
world is seen as a giant school and the main role
of educational agents is to instruct the citizenry.
This involves telling them what to think, how
to act and, perhaps most importantly, what to
be. Such a form of public pedagogy is therefore
basically orientated towards the erasure of
plurality and difference. We can see such a form
of public pedagogy enacted whenever the state
instructs its citizens to be, for example law-
abiding, tolerant, respectful or active (and the
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state can either do this explicitly by telling its
citizens how they should behave, or more
implicitly through the range of systems of
reward and punishment that the state can bring
into operation to channel the behaviour of its
citizens). But we can also find it in those
situations where citizens are being mobilised or
feel inclined to teach each other a lesson, thus
revealing the moralistic undertone of this
interpretation of public pedagogy. The main
problem with this interpretation lies in the
fundamental difference between the logic of
schooling and the logic of democracy. From a
democratic angle it is therefore important to
remind ourselves that the world is not a school
and also should not become a school (Bingham
and Biesta 2010).
If the idea of public pedagogy as a form of
teaching or instruction runs the risk of erasing
the very plurality that is the condition for forms
of human togetherness in which freedom can
appear, then perhaps we need to approach the
idea of public pedagogy in terms of learning.
This is indeed the second interpretation of the
idea of public pedagogy, which can be charac-
terised as a pedagogy of the public. Here, the
pedagogical work is not done from the outside,
so to speak, but is located within democratic
processes and practices, thus leading to an
interest in the learning opportunities provided
by such practices (van der Veen, Wildemeersch,
Youngblood and Marsick 2007). The pedago-
gical mode in this interpretation is that of
learning or, in more political terms, that of what
PauloFreirehas referred toas conscientization,
a process aimed at the generation of critical
awareness and critical consciousness (Freire
1970). Here, we might think of the world as a
giant adult education class in which educational
agents perform the role of facilitator. Unlike in
the first interpretation of public pedagogy, the
direction in which such processes move is not
determined from the outset, but ispart of what is
at stake in such processes of collective political
learning. Although this interpretation of public
pedagogy therefore connects much better to the
idea of plurality, one limitation of this view is
that it brings democracy under a regime of
learningand in the Freirean version this is a
very particular kind of learning aimed at
overcoming alienation from the world (Freire
1972; Galloway 2012). This, in turn, suggests
that public pedagogy asa pedagogy of the public
comes with a particular conception of political
agency in which (political) action follows from
(political) understandingand perhaps we can
add that agency here follows from the right,
correct or true understanding (for a critical
discussion of this idea see Biesta 2010b).
Whether the identity of educational agents can
therefore entirely be understood in terms of
facilitation, or whether it is the case that they
need to facilitate a particular kind of learning
aimed at a particular kind of understanding,
depends to a large extent on ones views about
the kind of knowledge and understanding that
political learning should generate, and that
political action requires. It is, however, in the
more general demand that individuals learn
i.e. that they need to learn and must learn in
order to become (better) political actorsthat
some of the limitations of this interpretation of
public pedagogy become visible.
It is precisely for these reasons that the
conception of public pedagogy that I will
outline below differs from the direction that can
be found in Ellsworth (2004). Although Ells-
worth moves away from the idea of instruction
or teaching in her exploration of places of
learning which are located outside of edu-
cational institutions such as the school, and in
this shift identifies what she refers to as
anomalous places of learning, she remains
strongly focused on processes and practices of
learning. Yet unlike what is often assumed,
learning is not some kind of open and natural
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process that can go in any direction, but is
actually a very particular and specific
regimeto use a Foucauldian phrase; a
regime, moreover, that demands a particular
relation of the self to the self, that is a relation of
awareness, reflection and conclusion. In this
sense, one might say that the learning regime
remains an educational regime, even if it occurs
in anomalous places or under anomalous
forms. The main motivation for the reading of
public pedagogy that I offer below is to move
beyond such a regime so that public pedagogy
can work at the intersection of education and
politics, and is not drawn back into an
educational logic that, even under the guise of
learning, tends to remain a logic of schooling.
I am responding, in other words, to what I have
discussed elsewhere (Biesta 2012) as the
politics of learning, that is the tendency to
turn social and political problems into learning
problems, so that, through this, they become
the responsibility of individuals rather than that
they are seen as the concern of the collective.
Instead of seeing public pedagogy as a
pedagogy for the public or of the public, there
is therefore a different interpretation possible,
one where public pedagogy appears as an
enactment of a concern for publicness or
publicity, that is a concern for the public
quality of human togetherness and thus for the
possibility of actors and events to become
public. Becoming public is not about a physical
relocation from the home to the street or from
the oikos to the polis, but about the achieve-
ment of a form of human togetherness in
which, to put it in the language of Hannah
Arendt, action is possible and freedom can
appear. It is a form of human togetherness
characterised by plurality. If we understand
public sphere as a quality of human together-
ness, then we might say that becoming public is
the creation of public sphere. In this interpret-
ation the educational agentthe public peda-
gogueis neither an instructor nor a facilitator
but rather someone who interrupts (Biesta
2006b). Such interruptions take the form of
what, after Rancie`re, we might think of as
dissensus. Dissensus is not to be understood as
the opposition of interests or opinions [but is]
the production, within a determined, sensible
world, of a given that is heterogeneous to it
(Rancie`re 2003: 226). To stage dissensus is to
introduce an incommensurable elementan
event, an experience and an objectthat can
act both as a test and as a reminder of
publicness. It is an element that can act as a
test of the public quality of particular forms of
togetherness and of the extent to which actual
spaces and places make such forms of human
togetherness possible. The aim of such inter-
ruptions is not to teach actors what they should
be, nor to demand a particular kind of learning,
but to keep open the opportunities for
becoming public or, in Arendtian terms, to
keep open the possibility of a space where
freedom can appear.
Whereas the first two interpretations of
public pedagogy run the risk of replacing
politics with educationthe first interpret-
ation takes politics out by teaching citizens
how to act and be, whereas the second takes
politics out by bringing it under a regime of
learningthe third interpretation hints at both
a different educational dynamic and a different
political dynamic. And this brings me back to
the very start of this paper and the example of
permanent breakfast.
Discussion
I started this paper with a brief vignette about
permanent breakfasts. The permanent break-
fast movement, as mentioned, is but one
example of a much wider trend to stage artistic
interventions in public spaces. What is
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interesting about such interventions, and that
is why the example of permanent breakfast is
helpful for my discussion about public
pedagogy, is that such interventions often do
very little. Permanent breakfast is not set up as
a form of instruction that tells citizens what
they should do and be, nor does it present an
exemplary form or mode of citizenship and
civic action that would deserve repetition.
At most those organising a breakfast have the
intention to invite others to join in, but those
joining in are there to have breakfastand the
rules indeed stipulate that the breakfast has to
be real. Just as permanent breakfasts do not
operate as a form of instructionthey are, in
that sense, not a pedagogy for the public
they also do not function as a pedagogy of the
public. They are not study circles, discussion
groups or political awareness meetings; again,
they are breakfasts.
They are, however, breakfasts that are
explicitly out of place and this makes them
potentially important, both politically and
educationally.3 Politically such interventions
are important because they can act as a testa
litmus test as the initiators of permanent
breakfast call itof the public quality of a
particular location. They can function as a test,
in other words, of what is possible in that
location and in this way they can reveal
whether particular spaces are determined,
controlled and policed, or are open to a
plurality of being and doing. Educationally
such interventions are important because they
enact a form of pedagogy that is neither based
on superior knowledge of an educatorso that
the educator would be in a position to tell
others how to act and how to benor about
putting the educator in the role of a facilitator
of learningthus putting the whole process
under a learning regime. Permanent break-
fasts rather are an example of an enactment of a
concern for the publicness or public quality of
particular spaces and places, an enactment of a
concern for the possibility of forms of human
togetherness in which freedom can appear
forms of human togetherness through which
such spaces and places can become public.
It is important to see that this does not make
such interventions themselves into political
acts.4 What they can do at most is prepare the
terrain for political action, so to speak. Political
demands are, after all, not simply about any
interruption or any experience of being out of
place, but need to be connected with core
democratic values of equality and freedom
even if such values are always in (paradoxical)
tension with each other (Mouffe 2000). This is
particularly relevant for those interventions in
the public domain that can in some way or form
be characterised as artistic, as it takes away
the problem of a certain instrumentalisation of
art, one where art, if it has to be politically
significant, has to become political itself and
thus would lose its artistic quality, so to speak.
It also shows, in conclusion, how one might
understand the political significance of
public pedagogy in the particular interpreta-
tion that I have suggested in this paper, in that it
can help to see that public pedagogy as
an enactment of a concern for publicness, a
concern for the possibility of the appearance of
freedom, does not turn pedagogy into politics
but rather reveals how pedagogy can be
politically significant.
Notes
1. From January 2013 onwards: Faculty of Language and
Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education, University
of Luxembourg, Campus Walferdange, Route de
Diekirch, BP2 L-7220 Walferdange, Luxembourg.
2. The fact that the same topic is being discussed in a wide
range of different disciplines and fields inevitably leads
to a degree of concept proliferation and conceptual
confusion. Thus, we find partly overlapping use of such
notions as public sphere, public realm, public domain,
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public space and public place. This is partly the result of
different discourses and traditions although there are
also distinctions that do matter (particularly that
between public sphere and public space). I will highlight
some of these in this section without aiming at complete
transparency or conceptual closure.
3. It is important to bear in mind that such effects are
never guaranteed and that we should even be aware of
the possibility of saturation, that is that what starts out
as being out of place can, over time, become
domesticated and thus lose its potential to interrupt
and test what is possible in a particular location. This is
a particular risk with artistic interventions that,
although out of place in one respect, can quickly lose
their capacity to interrupt simply by calling them
artistic. This is why the idea of permanent breakfast is
perhaps more interesting than forms of interruption
which are more easily recognisable as artistic.
4. The recognition that interventions such as permanent
breakfast are not in themselves political acts is
important in order to prevent a potential misreading
of my argument. The issue here has to do with Arendts
distinction between the social and the political. Read in
those terms, it is clear that the activity of having
breakfast would fall under Arendts definition of the
social as it has to do with an activity that belongs to the
private sphere, the sphere of the household or oikos.
Arendts critique of modernity is precisely aimed at the
way in which activities from the private sphere have
colonised the public sphere, so that the public sphere
has become entirely orientated towards the preser-
vation of life (a biological process). For Arendt this rise
of the social (Arendt 1958) thus forms a very serious
threat to the possibility action, politics and freedom.
My point with using the example of permanent
breakfast is, however, not to present it as a political
act or intervention, but as a form of public pedagogy
that expresses a concern for the public quality of spaces
and places of human togetherness. In this regard such
forms of public pedagogy are precisely meant to push
back the colonisation of the public realm by the social.
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Abstract translations
Rendre public: Pedagogie publique, citoyennete,et le domaine public
Cet article examine les possibilites de reclamer ourevigorer le domaine public a` partir de leducation.Il prend comme point de depart luvre de HannahArendt pour entamer une discussion de lintersec-tion du domaine public et lespace public et exposerbrie`vement ainsi une conception du domaine publiccomme espace pour action civique entreprise a` labase de la distance sociale et de la retention dunecertaine etrangete plutot que la communauteet lidentite commune. Cette discussion present untravail educatif qui puisse soutenir la qualitepublique des espaces et des lieux communs qui serepose sur trois interpretations de lidee de lapedagogie publique: la pedagogie publique commepedagogie destinee au public; la pedagogie publiquecomme pedagogie concue par le public; et lapedagogie publique comme la realisation dun soucide la qualite publique de lintimite humaine. Cettedernie`re interpretation nenseigne ni efface tout cequi est politique mais ouvre plutot la possibilite decreer les formes dintimite humaine dans lesquellesla liberte peut exister, cest-a`-dire, des formesdintimite humaine qui contribuent a` la trans-formation publique des espaces et des lieux.
Mots-clefs: pedagogie publique, domaine public,citoyennete, Arendt, identite, education.
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Llegando a ser publico: pedagoga publica, ciuda-dana y la esfera publica
Este artculo se explora la cuestion de que tipo detrabajo educativo se puede hacer para recuperar orevigorizar la esfera publica. Atraves una discusion dela interseccion de la esfera publica y el espacio publicose involucra el trabajo de Hannah Arendt paraconstruir una concepcion de la esfera publica comoun espacio para accion cvico basado en distancia y laconservacion de lo extrano en vez de estar basado enuna identidad en comun. La discusion de trabajoeducativo que puede apoyar la cualidad publica deespacios y lugares en comun se enfoca en tresinterpretaciones del idea de una pedagoga publica: lo
de pedagoga publica como una pedagoga por el
publico, lo de pedagoga publica como una pedagoga
del publico, y lo de pedagoga publica como la
representacion de una preocupacion por la cualidad
publica del union humano. La ultima forma de
pedagoga publica ni ensena ni borra la poltica por
llevarlo abajo de un regimen de aprender, mas bien se
abre la posibilidad para formas del union humano del
cual la libertad pueden aparecer, es decir, formas del
union humano que contribuyen a la llegada a ser
publico de espacios y lugares.
Palabras claves: pedagoga publica, esfera publica,
ciudadana, Arendt, identidad, educacion.
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