Toward a post-constructivist ethics in/of teaching and learning

Abstract

Constructivist epistemologies focus on ethics as a system of values in the mind - even when previously co-constructed in a social context - against which social agents compare the actions that they mentally plan before performing them. This approach is problematic, as it forces a wedge between thought and action, body and mind, universal and practical ethics and thought and affect. Drawing on a fragment of a concrete classroom episode as an exemplary case, I develop and exemplify a post-constructivist discourse on ethics that centres on the dialogical relation of participants in conversation and that overcomes the problems of the constructivist approach. This practical ethics is consistent with the dialectical (dialogical) conception of the world-as-event. I conclude by suggesting that the Saying constitutes a dialectical/dialogical paradigm of a post-constructivist ethics.