Abstract
Being a university educator means to exist as conversation. This chapter develops this interpretive finding, revealing how educators are constantly immersed in an unpredictable interplay of conversing with others. In light of Heidegger’s ideas and Gadamer’s phenomenology of conversation, stories in this chapter show possible modes of conversing that can happen to educators. The emerging analysis reclaims conversation as something more than a mere instrument at the educator’s disposal. Also coming to light is an essential yet elusive mattering of genuine conversation, a mattering which is often announced by an experience of its absence, and which is discernable in the educator’s phronesis (practical wisdom) of creating the conditions for authentic conversation to emerge in their own pedagogical encounters with students.
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Notes
- 1.
In one of his writings in the 1940s, Heidegger (2010, pp. 36–37) repeats this idea when pondering the elusive essential nature of conversation (Gespräch), which is still thought to presuppose language.
- 2.
On this point, Gadamer argues that how fruitful a conversation is depends on ‘how’ we converse with one another (see Gadamer, 2007, p. 416).
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Spier, J. (2018). Being as Conversation. In: Heidegger and the Lived Experience of Being a University Educator . Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71516-2_3
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