ABSTRACT
When education is conceived as a form of intentional action, it puts the work of teachers at the centre, and is less or actually hardly at all interested in students and their learning. This approach to education goes against the recent “common sense” in education that rather sees teaching as outdated and positions students and their learning at the centre of attention. One important argument for this positioning is the idea that human beings ultimately need to make their own sense of the situations they encounter, generate their own interpretations and, according to constructivist theories, also construct their own knowledge. While all this is not without reason, what is largely – and in some cases entirely – absent in this way of thinking is the very possibility that not everything is constructed by us but that things, in the widest sense of the word, may also be given to us. In this chapter I explore in detail how we can make sense of “givenness,” which is particularly difficult because what is given to us is precisely beyond and before our sense-making. I provide a reconstruction of ideas from Jean-Luc Marion and show, through a discussion of three “gifts” of teaching where and how the idea of givenness appears in education.
