Pedagogical Tact
Reconnecting Theory and Practice in Education
Summary
This edited collection, the first to appear on pedagogical tact in English, includes contributions from several authors who are a part of the renaissance in this area. It also features a substantial introduction to the tradition of pedagogy from which tact emerges, and one that also traces the international development of understandings of pedagogical tact.
This rich collection of recent texts on pedagogical tact provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to the intricate relationship between theory and practice. It explores various characteristics, contexts, and applications of pedagogical tact, featuring contributions from distinguished scholars from the USA, Sweden, France, Germany, and Switzerland. As the first English-language volume dedicated solely to this topic since Max van Manen’s The Tact of Teaching (1991) and Pedagogical Tact (2015), it is an essential resource. Highly recommended.
— Evi Agostini, Director of Studies – Education Directorate of Doctoral Studies, University of Vienna
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- PART I Introduction
- Pedagogical Tact: A Historical Overview (Norm Friesen)
- Pedagogy, Theory, and Practice
- The History and Politics of Pedagogical Tact
- The First 50 Years: Voltaire to Schleiermacher
- The Nineteenth Century: Herbartianism
- The Twentieth Century: Nohl, Blochmann, Muth, van Manen
- The Twenty-first Century: Prairat; Burghardt & Zirfas
- Conclusion: “Convention No Longer Intact yet Still Present”
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Chapter Synopses (Norm Friesen)
- Three Sections
- Individual Chapters
- Note
- Bibliography
- PART II Theorizing Tact
- Reconsidering Tact (Eirick Prairat)
- Introduction
- An Ethical Disposition
- An Invisible Virtue
- Care Professions, Pioneering Professions
- A Relational Virtue
- Concern for Connection, Concern for Others
- Tact and Civility
- Good Manners or Manners of Goodness?
- The Touch of Language
- A Pedagogical Skill
- The Forgotten Lesson
- Judge and Decide
- The Art and the Method
- Tact and Pedagogical Savoir-Faire
- Notes
- Bibliography
- A Matter of “Character, Mind, and Heart”? On the Role of Ethos in Preparing the Tactful Teacher (Severin Sales Rödel)
- Introduction
- A Brief Phenomenology of Tact:
- Lines of Tradition
- “Preparation of Character, Mind and Heart” as Ethos?
- Herbart’s “Preparation” and a Theory of Ethos: Parallels and Differences
- Critical Remarks
- Beyond Bildsamkeit
- Opening new Perspectives on Ethos and Tact
- Practicing Ethos Aesthetically
- Ethos as an Embodied Phenomenon
- Ethos as a Facilitator for the Acquisition of Tact
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Tact as Pedagogical Daimon? Arendt on Tact, Exemplarity, and Judgment (Morten Korsgaard)
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- Notes
- Bibliography
- PART III Tact in Context
- Pedagogical Tact and the Limits of Community (Hans-Rüdiger Müller)
- Introduction
- “Tact” as an Element of Plessner’s Sociology
- Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology and “Excentric Positionality”
- Pedagogical Interaction: Community or Society?
- Conclusion
- Note
- Bibliography
- Pedagogical Tact and Education in the Family (Dominik Krinninger and Kaja Kesselhut)
- Introduction
- On the Need for a Positive, Systematic Look at Education in the Family
- Education in the Family as Practical Reflexivity
- Registers of Pedagogical Tact in Families
- Connoisseurship and Fingerzeige
- Drawing and Dissolving Boundaries
- Is and Ought
- Interpellation and Translation
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- PART IV Embodiment and Tact
- Antinomies and Aporias: The Reciprocal Ambivalence of Tact and the Body (Norm Friesen)
- The Antinomies of Pedagogy
- The Mediating Potential of Pedagogical Tact
- The Aporias of Embodiment
- Embodied Tact and the Pedagogical Paradox
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Tactful Views: On Forms of Educational Measure and Precaution (Jörg Zirfas and Daniel Burghardt)
- Pedagogical Tact
- Pedagogical Perception as Ethical Competence
- On the Ethics of the Tactful Gaze
- Summary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Creating Contact, Making Things Sound: Resonance and the Expression of Tact in the Classroom—Respect and Timing as Mediators of Self-World Relations (Jens Beljan)
- Introduction: Tactfulness and the Pedagogy of Resonance
- The Vibrating Wire to the World: Experiences of Resonance
- Pedagogical Tact: Creating Contact in the Social Axis
- Pedagogical Tone: Making Things Sound in the Material Axis
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Postscript
- Pedagogical Tact and Teacher Professionalization: A Conceptualization (Thomas Senkbeil and Norm Friesen)
- Conditions and Challenges Facing All Teachers
- Conditions and Challenges Facing Primary Teachers
- Pedagogical Tact
- Pedagogical Tact and Professional Teacher Competencies
- Tact as a Heuristic and a Principle of Mediation in the Professionalization Process
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
Pedagogical Tact: A Historical Overview
At a time when education is becoming ever more standardized and technocratic, there is renewed interest in the interpersonal, even intimate phenomenon of pedagogical tact. Some speak of a “renaissance” (e.g., Fageth, 2021, p. 14).1 But what exactly is pedagogical tact? Like tact in general, it is “a ready and delicate sense of what is fitting and proper in dealing with others” (Oxford English Dictionary). In pedagogy, these “others” are typically children, youth, or students. More broadly, and in keeping with its origin in the Latin tangere, meaning touch, tact refers to “a keen faculty of perception or discrimination likened to the sense of touch” (Oxford English Dictionary). Pedagogy, meanwhile, is understood here not as various techniques of teaching, but as a way of being with children and the young, a way of being oriented to their maturation and eventual autonomy. In this context, pedagogical tact refers to attuned ways of being, acting, and speaking that are most appropriate for the child or student. In social relations generally, tact often serves the interests of the one exercising it. To be pedagogical, however, tact must be attuned above all to the needs of the Other. Pedagogical tact thus begins to reconnect theory and practice not by imposing prescriptions on everyday activity, but by putting the relationship of theory and practice into question. Indeed, it sometimes inverts this relationship, seeing practice as defining aspects of theory.
This introduction begins by revisiting the origin of the notion of pedagogical tact and the beginnings of the pedagogical tradition with which it originated. Then, it traces some of the ways that pedagogical tact has been interpreted and conceptualized more recently. Significantly, concern with tact and pedagogical tact is closely tied with social and political change and upheaval. The concepts of tact and pedagogical tact emerge around the time of the French and American revolutions, and they are subsequently preserved—without being significantly changed or developed—for over 100 years. Only by the twentieth century, partially as a response to the two World Wars, were tact and pedagogical tact substantially renewed and revised2—a renewal necessitated by still further changes in the social order. The final phase in the story of pedagogical tact is its contemporary renaissance, marked by the publication of books in German, English, and French. Indeed, three of these volumes are by authors or editors whose contributions are included in this collection. The historical overview provided here forms the background for short summaries of the content and themes of the various chapters of this book. (Relevant aspects of these chapters are also highlighted parenthetically when they arise in this overview.)
Pedagogy, Theory, and Practice
Ways of understanding pedagogy that are integral to pedagogical tact emerged about 200 years ago.3 They were developed by the founders of pedagogy as a “science”—as a rigorous way of reflecting and theorizing. However, these figures have since been forgotten or simply ignored. The first is Johann Friedrich Herbart, who was translated and widely read in English in the late nineteenth century (Beiser, 2022), but who was forgotten and even suppressed in the decades that followed. Herbart’s discussion of pedagogical tact is found in a lecture he gave to student-teachers in 1802, a lecture that focuses on pedagogical theory and practice as well as on their interrelationship.
Herbart begins by emphasizing how, on the one hand, “theory claims to be universal, and in this sense stretches over a vast expanse” (2022, p. 31). Theory “passes over all details, over all circumstances that surround the practical teacher at any given moment” (p. 31). Surrounded by these innumerable circumstances, the teacher must be able to translate theory (for example, principles of justice or equality) into practice. According to Herbart, this cannot happen quickly or directly; only a “supernatural being,” he says, could undertake an immediate and “complete application of scientific propositions” in this way. This means that “a link intermediate between theory and practice” (p. 32) is required (or “involuntarily inserts itself” as Herbart also puts it): “By this [link,] I mean a certain tact, a quick judgment and decision that is not habitual and eternally uniform… [but that] answer[s] the true requirements of the individual case” (p. 32). For Herbart, then, tact can help the educator be responsive to the child or student by enabling a type of action that is speedy or quick. It does this by overcoming habit (Schlendrian), by being improvisational (or not “eternally uniform”). Tact is related to theory or “science” but at the same time, it is involuntary and intuitive (suited to what Herbart calls “art”). Finally, tact informs action addressed to the individual student and their uniqueness. In this way, the innumerable concrete circumstances of pedagogical practice can be reconciled with the generality and abstraction of theory.
The second founding figure of the modern “science” of pedagogy is Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). In the decade or two that followed Herbart’s remarks, Schleiermacher lectured both on tact and pedagogy as well as on theory and practice in education. Schleiermacher defined education in the most general terms: as a kind of influence4 exercised by those already established in the world on those entering it. Accordingly, pedagogy is not simply what takes place in educational institutions; it is instead what unfolds between generations more broadly, in terms of the “relationship between the older and the younger, and the obligations of the one to the other” (1826/2023, p. 24). Schleiermacher believed that the more self-aware and informed the older, the educating, generation could become, the more “complete and perfect” its educational influence would be. As a result, he worked to develop a theory, that at least in part, is intended to help the older generation in this task.
Like Herbart, though, Schleiermacher knew that the help that theory could provide is limited. But while Herbart (1802/2022) took the “fundamental correctness” of theory “on faith” (p. 32), Schleiermacher actually regarded practice as more important than theory. Schleiermacher emphasized that practice necessarily takes on a certain primacy and dignity in relation to theory: “it would be incorrect to say that practice gains its character and specificity only through theory. The dignity of practice exists independently from theory. Theory only makes practice more conscious” (1826/2023, p. 26). Schleiermacher briefly mentions tact several times in his lectures in the 1813–1814 and 1820–1821 academic years on education. He defines it specifically as a “general mediator of order and measure”—a capability that “must operate unconsciously” (1814/2000, p. 255) and that “stand[s] in the safest balance between the two extremes” (p. 214). In keeping with Schleiermacher’s insistence on the primacy of practice, these two balanced extremes or opposites are different from Herbart’s. Tact does not appear as the singular interconnection of theory and practice, but as the dialectical unification or equalization of multiple opposites, extremes, or antinomies in educational practice—such as the general and particular, protection and exposure, or proximity and distance. For example: A teacher must reconcile the special treatment of any one student (e.g., who is struggling) with the need to treat all students alike; they must also support the child’s good behavior while counteracting what is not so good; educators, finally, must be ready to help (i.e., be proximate), but without being intrusive. In each of these cases, tactful or sensitive pedagogy is a matter of balance between the individual versus collectivity, support versus counteraction, distance versus proximity.
Schleiermacher’s general perspective on education can be updated for the present through Hannah Arendt, who studied Schleiermacher’s work. In a 1958 lecture on education, Arendt appears to effectively put Schleiermacher’s definition into her own words: “what concerns us all,” she says, “is the relation between grown-ups and children in general.” “In even more general and exact terms” she continues, this is a question of “our attitude toward the fact of natality: the fact that we have all come into the world by being born and that this world is constantly renewed through birth” (p. 196). At the heart of our being with children, in other words, is an orientation that sees the future as open—as being realized precisely through the unique and precious novelty that the child, youth or younger generation bring with them into the world.5 And although Arendt did not speak explicitly about tact and pedagogical tact (see Chapter 5 in this volume), she did see education as being both an intergenerational matter and a question above all of adult concern or attitude: an issue of care, regard, and consideration. As already suggested, pedagogy is a matter of what one could call a way of being or an orientation in relation to another.
Pedagogical tact, then, is not a type of pedagogical flair, an inexpressible je ne sais quoi. It is instead inseparable from ways of understanding pedagogical theory and practice. It is also embedded in the intrinsically ethical, relational, intergenerational enterprise that is pedagogy. This approach to pedagogy has been labeled “the European pedagogical tradition” or simply “continental pedagogy” (e.g., Friesen & Kenklies, 2023). Tact is an ongoing concern in this tradition, introduced as a constitutive element of this way of thinking and acting near the beginning of the nineteenth century, and then undergoing substantial development and revision only later in the twentieth and early in the twenty-first centuries. Some of these changes and developments are reflected in the individual chapters in this volume. Again, before introducing these chapters and the volume as a whole, this introduction provides a historical overview of the concept of tact. This overview begins in prerevolutionary France and extends to its “renaissance” today.6 This discussion then concludes by suggesting some reasons why pedagogical tact (and tact more broadly) is now of renewed relevance. It also outlines what this collection offers in the context of the current renaissance of pedagogical tact.
The History and Politics of Pedagogical Tact
The First 50 Years: Voltaire to Schleiermacher
As a name for a social sensitivity or virtue, tact first appeared at the end of the age of absolutism, well into the European Enlightenment. Based on a dinner-time suggestion from Prince Frederick II of Prussia, Enlightenment thinker Voltaire began work on his famous Dictionnaire philosophique in the 1750s. Under the entry for taste (goût), Voltaire declared that “the man of taste,” the connoisseur of arts, “has other eyes, other ears, and another tact from the uncultivated man” (1776/1879, p. 172; emphasis added). This is the first known use of the term. Not long after, the word appeared in a volume on moral philosophy by Dugald Stewart, a representative of the Scottish Enlightenment. Stewart refers in passing to “the use made in the French tongue” of the word “tact” to describe how one “feels” one’s “way in the difficult intercourse of polished society” (Stewart, 1793/1864, p. 25). Retaining its philosophical pedigree, tact was also adopted by Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant to designate what he called “logical tact,” a notion introduced in his 1789 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (2007). Like Herbart, Kant also defines tact not as a matter of taste or feeling, but as a capacity or power of judgment. It is one that is exercised, Kant explains, without reference to “academic and artificially drawn-up principles,” but instead relies on “general and innate rules of understanding” which remain “in the obscurity of the mind” (p. 250). However, it is only later, in a popular press article from 1793, where Kant produces a formulation that is echoed in later accounts, above all by Herbart:
A set of rules, even practical rules, is called a theory if the rules are conceived as principles of a certain generality and are abstracted from a multitude of conditions which necessarily influence their application… However complete… [a] theory may be, it is obvious that between theory and practice there must be a link [Mittelglied], a connection and transition from one to the other. To the intellectual concept that contains the rule, an act of judgment must be added whereby the practitioner distinguishes whether or not something is an instance of the rule. (Kant, 1793/1974, p. 39)
Details
- Pages
- VI, 218
- Publication Year
- 2026
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783034358668
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783034358675
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783034357401
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9783034358651
- DOI
- 10.3726/b22911
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2026 (February)
- Keywords
- Education pedagogy teaching tact pedagogical tact pedagogical relation history ethics community teacher professionalization teacher education embodiment virtues politics exemplification practice Bildung Bildsamkeit/perfectibility Reconnecting Theory and Practice in Education Thomas Senkbeil Norm Friesen theory
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- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2026. VI, 218 pp., 1 b/w ill.
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