Realities and Identities. Multiple Realities in the Classroom and the Non-affirmative Bildung-Theory
摘要
The contribution takes as its point of departure the practical challenge that teachers often face today in a multicultural school: in-group bias, conspiracy theories, and alleged alternative facts and realities. This challenge is discussed in relation to the non-affirmative Bildung or formation theory, as articulated by Dietrich Benner. The theory basically says that teachers and schools must preserve their general liberal theories and values while at the same time letting students form their own identities, but with an expressed hierarchy of values as their basis for school activities, values such as freedom of speech, truth seeking, equality, and tolerance. The theory seems to have its shortcomings in encounters with perceived other attitudes with stationary and completely different valuational sets. The phenomenologically based theories of Alfred Schütz may come to help. He analysed an everyday life-world structure called “multiple realities”, a structure reflecting the situation that each and every one of us lives in and co-constitutes constantly. Each reality has its own “logic” and things taken for granted, which are characterised by particular abstractions or epochés. A solution is presented based on the idea of these epochés and the way in-group bias may be encountered in classrooms (school didactics): The non-affirmative teacher strategy comes in degrees, but cannot be totally abandoned in order to educate for autonomy and responsibility.