Nous in the Classroom

In Gastro, an extraterritorial French café, H. and I talk about teaching. What is it that goes on in the classroom on a good day, on a day when teaching feels most worthwhile. It’s not about the successful transmission of some content – which is often the kind of model used. ‘something happens’ H. suggests, ‘it’s not an event but something happens’. ‘How to define this something?’ I say that what happens, in this situation that we both recognise, is that the class is thinking. I don’t mean merely that individuals in the class are doing some thinking. The thinking is not the sum of such individual contributions but the thinking of the class as a composite, including us.’ H: ‘exactly, and in such conditions, it is possible to speak of a ‘we’.. a ‘we’ transpires. It may not be a ‘we’ that is there next time, but for the duration of the class, there is this ‘we’'. This is why, although the ‘something happens’ is not an ‘event’ necessarily, it has this in common with the event – a ‘we’ emerges as the subject of a thinking, and one tries, or hopes, in subsequent classes, to bear fidelity to this We.