Not Only What or How,but Who? Subjectivity,Obligation,and the Call to Teach

Abstract

THIS PAPER ARGUES that the call to teach ought to be conceptualized not so much in terms of subject matter (‘what’) or teaching method (‘how’) but with respect to the subjectivity of the people involved – that is, of the one who teaches and of the one who is taught. Building explicitly on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the essay develops the idea of a responsible subject as the condition that makes visible the distinctiveness about the call to teach, suggesting that God's call to teach manifests itself through the face of the student, in the asymmetric relation between the teacher and the student as the other. In doing so, the teacher becomes a responsible subject for and to the student, instead of merely for the subject matter and the methods of teaching. Familiar tensions in teaching illustrate this call to responsibility.