What is teaching?

The following chapter attempts to engage with the question of teaching or the art of teaching. This question (or, rather, these questions) is of a didactical nature, and thus, we move here from the level of pedagogy to the level of didactics. ¹ The question of (how to perform the art of) teaching is, of course, a question that is much too rich in history and scope to be ‘answered’ in the present context. The reason it is phrased in this way as a question is that it is a necessary (follow-up) question to be asked as an extension of the previous chapters. And just like the previous questions, this one is answered only in a tentative way, not as the way or the answer to the questions at hand but as a way of engaging with these quintessential educational questions. The way I have gone about this, and will continue to go about it, is to try to shed light on concepts and metaphors that can illuminate the way we speak about and conceptualise the activity of schooling. As such, they can be seen more as starting points than finished answers to the questions and determinations of the concepts employed. Suspension is but one element of teaching, albeit a central one, and the same can be said of the concept of exemplarity. Many other concepts could have been incorporated here, but it is both beyond the scope and beyond the topic of my reflections to attempt to create a full picture of teaching. After all, I must, as promised, leave space to return to the question of inclusion. Rather, I wish, on one hand, to indicate a possible way forward in the attempt to unfold the more practical consequences of approaching the activity of schooling as presented previously. On the other hand, I wish to contribute to the growing literature on new conceptions of teaching and the role of the teacher in light of the present predicament of education, even if only in a limited and tentative way. In the following sections, I engage with the question of teaching through the concepts of suspension and exemplarity as a way of conceptualising teaching and in order to argue that they work together in a productive way when one attempts to grapple with the question of what kind of an activity teaching is. In some of his recent work, Gert Biesta has alerted us to the possible death of the teacher and the demise of teaching as a consequence of the rise of the concept of learning (2013a, p. 451, note 1). So perhaps a word or two on why I focus on teaching and not learning as the quintessential educational question is in order here.