Vidnesbyrd og erfaring

– den professionsfaglige praktikers subjektivitet

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to show how testimony, bearing witness, and the witness, as an interpretive framework and concept, can address the status, significance, and preconditions of experience within pedagogical theory and practice, with particular attention to opening new perspectives on the professional practitioner’s subjectivity. The aim is twofold: it seeks (i) to articulate certain distinctive characteristics of the meaning of testimony, and (ii) to examine the possibility of understanding the experiences of pedagogical professionals through the lens of testimony. One of the central intentions of the article is to highlight the exposure and vulnerability of the experiencing subject seen through the prism of testimony: On the one hand, the experiences express irreplaceable, singular, and unique insights into a given practice; on the other hand, they can never attain the status of evidence, let alone certainty or knowledge, but remain dependent on trust and faith. For this reason, the article describes the conditions of “a language” which enables the practitioner’s openness toward the new, the foreign, and the unique - toward that which is not already known and affirmed.