Prof. Dr. Jan Christoph Störtländer

Stillness, Questioning, Seeing Otherwise
My work is driven by a question that is at once simple and complex: what happens when people are formed and transformed through education, in the sense of what German calls Bildung?

I do not understand Bildung primarily as the acquisition of knowledge or competencies. People are formed when their certainties become questionable, when they begin to see things otherwise, and when their relationship to themselves, to others and to the world changes as a result. This also carries a quiet force of resistance. It does not mean simply opposing things. It means not yielding to the first impulse: refusing to be pinned down too quickly, interrupting what seems self-evident, and allowing one's own convictions to become questions once more.

I condense this movement into three characters: 学・問・抗, meaning learning, questioning, resisting. At its centre is questioning (問). A genuine question interrupts the immediate passage from experience to answer. It opens an in-between space, called 間 (ma) in Japanese. This is a moment of stillness in which it remains open what something means, who someone is, or how one ought to act. I regard this in-between space as an important site of Bildung.

Bildung in Relationships
My research focuses on theories that do not conceive of the self as a closed, autonomous unit. As a scholar of education, I draw in particular on the Kyoto School, above all on the thought of Nishida Kitarō. Concepts such as pure experience (純粋経験, junsui keiken), place (場所, basho) and absolute nothingness (絶対無, zettai mu) open up a perspective in which experience does not proceed from a pre-given subject. Rather, the self takes shape in relationships, situations and practices.

I bring this perspective into dialogue with John Dewey's theory of experience and with Bildung theory, phenomenology, research on teacher professionalism, and general didactics. Among the questions that concern me are these: what changes when we no longer see students primarily as bearers of traits, deficits or competencies? What does professionalism mean when educational situations remain inherently ambiguous? Increasingly, I am also interested in embodiment, presence and stillness. At times, professional action consists precisely in staying with a situation, attending to it closely, and withholding the quick answer. Not-knowing, then, is not merely a deficit. It may also be a point of departure.

Teacher Education
These questions also shape my teaching. I cannot offer recipes for "good teaching"; educational situations are far too complex for that. Professional action requires knowledge and skill. It also requires the ability to perceive situations, to justify judgements, to recognise the limits of one's own knowledge, and to revise decisions. I like to call this responsible openness: making research-informed judgements while remaining open to the possibility that a situation might be understood otherwise.

Topics include heterogeneity, didactic models, competence orientation, the school as an institution, the antinomies of pedagogical action, and education and inequality. Throughout, the question of one's own involvement is at stake. Who is observing, and through which concepts? Which differences do these concepts make visible, and which might they in fact produce?

Teaching as a Coherent Arc
Wherever possible, I design seminars as a coherent arc rather than a sequence of separate sessions, often in larger thematic blocks. Such a block might begin with personal experience. Theory can then unsettle that experience, empirical and case material can probe it further, and in the end we return to the initial question. One example is an arc that leads from students' own school biographies to the school as an institution and on to the tensions inherent in pedagogical practice. Theory and experience are not to be played off against each other. Literature, film and art can also become material for educational reflection when they reveal something that is difficult to grasp through concepts alone.

At the end, not everyone needs to arrive at the same answers. I hope that students leave able to ask questions differently, and a little more precisely, than before.

Beginner's Mind
One attitude that matters to me here comes from Zen: 初心 (shoshin), beginner's mind. It does not mean knowing nothing. Scholarship demands thorough knowledge, careful reading and well-founded argument. Beginner's mind is the capacity to remain open to surprise despite that knowledge. It means possessing knowledge without letting it decide the concrete situation in advance, and making judgements while remaining open to revision.

This applies to my own positions as well. Students need not adopt them. Reasoned disagreement is expressly welcome in my courses.