Do We Still Need to Be Concerned About the Disappearance of the Teacher?

In this paper, Gert Biesta and Tone Saevi have a conversation about Biesta’s 2012 paper Giving Teaching Back to Education: Responding to the Disappearance of the Teacher. They revisit the ideas and insights from the original paper, discuss to what extent these still speak to today’s situation, and raise further important questions about the uniquely pedagogical nature of the work of teachers. They look at the significance of the idea of ‘intervention’ and ‘interruption’ in relation to teaching, explore the discourse about ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ tendencies in education, and reflect education’s status in relation to phenomenology and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften).