The Levinasian Teacher

The construction of a generic or essential subject, which universalization demands, obstructs and penalises people who do not neatly correspond to the ‘natural’ norm of these constructions. Within such systems, the universal moral² vocabulary which has emerged tends to be underpinned by ‘our’ shared moral values; and ‘we’ thereby legitimate some moral discourses while rendering others illegitimate. Consequently, systems that have become established within the universal rights discourse can serve to occlude the very otherness of the Other.³ Education is one of these systems and thus needs to be problematized.

When distilled to its most basic elements, the central concern of this book is a consideration of how, within the constraints of the Irish primary school system, teachers can create spaces where the children we teach can encounter each other as Other, and respond to each other in ethically responsible ways. To this end, I put Irish primary education into conversation with Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other, using the process of writing this book to learn from Levinas’s ‘questions and his questioning’ (Biesta, 2003, p. 65) how we can think differently about ethics and primary school education in Ireland. This book takes as its starting point, then, not an understanding of ethics as a teachable subject in the traditional programmatic sense, but the idea that ethics cannot be taught in such an applied way. What is offered here is a consideration of how we can approach teaching as Levinasian teachers, which requires that we think more in terms of creating opportunities throughout the school day where both we and the children we teach can engage with and respond ethically to each other, rather than approaching ethics and morality as subjects that can be taught in a more applied way.