Teaching that begins with questions is both a moral and a pedagogical choice. A teacher teaches with questions because she or he believes that it is a better way to teach, and a better way to be a teacher. Yet to succeed at this, the questions must be real questions: questions that puzzle, confuse, and interest. Socratesâ questions, in the Meno and throughout the Platonic dialogues, are rarely authentic questions, felt questions by Socrates; they always indicate a purpose, the development of a line of elenchus, and Socratesâ professions of ignorance usually appear to the reader as quite disingenuous. This authoritarian and rather manipulative style of teaching, as illustrated in the Meno and elsewhere, can be called the "conversion" model: inducing the learner to abandon a corrupt set of beliefs, to experience the crisis of aporia, and then, with the force of revelatory discovery, to be moved into the light of truth (we see this point quite literally illustrated in Platoâs famous metaphor of the cave in the Republic). Socratesâ dialectic leads the learner into a state of aporia and undertakes to lead the learner out again.
This narrow view of teaching provides only the thinnest understanding of where questions come from, of the kinds of confusion students typically feel, and of the nature of aporia itself. By itself, it cannot support an inquiry-oriented pedagogy; it may even interfere with it.
Some general things can be said about questions:
âą There are questions one knows how to answer.
âą There are questions one does not know how to answer.
âą There are questions one does not know how to ask.
âą There are questions that cannot be answered.
Different kinds of questions imply different kinds of aporias. A question is the mediator between what we know and what we do not know; we need to know enough to know how to ask a question, but not know enough that the answer is interesting and important to us. A question resides in the space between knowledge and ignorance.
But how does one teach in the situation where questions do not have correct answers, where difficulty is intrinsic, where the learner is, in the deeper sense of the word, lost? Leading learners does not help them learn how to go on: it may solve the immediate problem of moving them to a particular outcome, but does not by itself provide them with the ability, or the confidence, to find their way on their own. Teachers can do more for learners, not by giving them maps, but by helping them to learn how to create maps, to draw lines and make connections themselves. This is a matter of recognizing where you are (and who you are) and how you got there. Teaching in this latter sense is not a process of conversion, but of translation: of making sufficient associations between the familiar and the foreign to allow the learner to make further associations, to find other paths, and eventually to become a translator, a path-maker, on their own.
Here we return to Wittgensteinâs point that the way in which one arrives at a point of aporia itself influences whether and how one can pass through it. This, I think, represents a crucial insight about teaching â one that Wittgenstein himself tried to heed in his university teaching and writing, so much of which was about trying to frame the right sorts of questions. Learning how to ask a good question is in one sense the central educational task, yet one that is almost never taught explicitly, and rarely taught at all. The typical sorts of questions teachers ask are questions to which the teacher already knows the answer. Learning how to ask questions is a skill of both learning and of teaching; hence this approach involves the teacher joining the learner in a process of exploration, one in which the teacherâs own questions, own doubts, will be exposed also. In order to help someone get out of an aporia, a teacher will need to understand (and help them to understand) how they got into it; this will require, in part, the teacher taking on the learnerâs questions, the learnerâs aporia, as her or his own. In this context, the roles of teacher and learner blur: aporia becomes a potentially shared state â "What question do I ask?" is an aporia of learning and teaching. The teacherâs task, on this view, is not simply to elicit a state of aporia in others, but to be prepared to endure that state also. Aporia in this sense is not a brief interstitial moment, but an ongoing condition that generates the questions and problems that move us to seek new understandings.
This is not to minimize the frustration and discouragement that such experiences of aporia entail. They are not simply psychological states, but bodily experiences as well; which is why we use words like discomfort and disorientation to describe them. They involve a moral as well as an epistemic element; they involve difficult choices about what to do and not only what to think â of where to move, and how to go on. They affect our senses of identity, of competence and purpose; hence teaching also requires sensitivity to the multiple ways in which people respond to the state of aporia. Sometimes these responses will not be educationally productive. But this approach to teaching also opens the possibility of learners feeling the full joy of recognition, the satisfaction of knowing how to go on without being led â and I do not see any way to experience the latter joy and satisfaction without having experienced (and moved through) the former frustration and discouragement. We need, I think, a more courageous, risky approach to teaching â a way of teaching and not a method â one that respects the educational importance of both doubt and confidence, both strangeness and familiarity, both being lost and finding a way. The teaching dialectic here is not a process of syllogistic argument leading to higher and higher truths, but an ongoing engagement with difficulty â and, in this, to embark on a path with an unknown, unknowable destination.*
Nicholas Burbules
