Pulled Up Short: Challenging Self-Understanding as a Focus of Teaching and Learning

Much light has been shed on important features of teaching and learning by Alasdair MacIntyre's writings. Yet there are experiences that are crucial to teaching and learning that are unaddressed in MacIntyre's arguments; experiences that reveal education as a distinctive kind of practice. This paper examines one kind of such experience: an experience I call ‘being pulled up short’. Drawing on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gerald L. Bruns, I analyse an example of teaching King Lear to argue that being pulled up short is a unique experience of disorientation that cannot be taught merely by pedagogical skill, including the modern tools and approaches provided by constructivist learning theory and meta-cognition. The paper concludes by identifying challenges that being pulled up short poses for the education of disposition, and for the aims and activities of teaching.