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Becoming public: public pedagogy, citizenshipand the public sphereGert Biesta aa University of Stirling , UKPublished online: 19 Oct 2012.

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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

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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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