The educational fiction of agential control: Some preliminary notes on a pedagogy of ‘as if’

Educational Philosophy and Theory (1):100-110 (2023)
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Abstract

This paper addresses the rift between the teacher’s sense of self as a causal agent and the experience of being in lack of control in the classroom, by way of Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of ‘as if.’ It is argued that understanding agential control in terms of a valuable educational fiction—a practical (ethical) fiction in Vaihinger’s vocabulary—can offer a way of bridging this rift and can help teachers make sense of the tension between their felt need to strive for control and their experience of suffering from lack of control. A fiction, it is argued, is different from an illusion in that fictions can be affirmed without being believed. Unlike illusions, valuable fictions can be recognized as fictions and still retain some of their affective power over us, thereby allowing us to act ‘as if.’ In education, this is helpful as it means that we can make use of valuable fictions without assuming that these have to be protected from the critical gaze of non-believers. In fact, we can openly acknowledge that we rely on fictions as this is part and parcel of being a human being with a limited cognitive ability.

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Johan Dahlbeck
Malmö University

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References found in this work

Pedagogy of the oppressed.Paulo Freire - 1986 - In David J. Flinders & Stephen J. Thornton (eds.), The Curriculum Studies Reader. Routledge.
Free Will and Illusion.Saul Smilansky - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
As If: Idealization and Ideals.Kwame Anthony Appiah - 2017 - Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press.
Free Will and Illusion.Saul Smilansky - 2001 - Mind 110 (437):271-274.

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