Teaching as an autopoietic process

written wanderings around teacher training

Abstract

This article analyses criticism of the traditional schooling model, highlighting Ivan Illich's reflections on the institutionalisation of education and its contribution to maintaining social inequalities. It also explores the ideas of Gert Biesta, who criticises the instrumentalisation of market-oriented education and advocates a pedagogy focused on subjectivation, autonomy and democratic participation. The text recovers the etymological meaning of the word ‘school’ as a space for free time and proposes a reconceptualisation of teacher training based on autopoiesis, where teaching and learning are co-creative and continuous processes. Authors such as Virginia Kastrup and Rosimeri Dias reinforce the importance of training critical and autonomous subjects, using Deleuze and Guattari's notion of rhizome to describe learning as a collaborative and unpredictable process. The cartographic research method is used both in the writing of the article and in the relationships created around the concepts of teaching, training, and autopoiesis. Teaching should thus be an exercise in autopoetics, facilitating co-creation and promoting interactions that challenge traditional educational paradigms. Finally, teaching, as an autopoietic exercise, is understood to be closely linked to cartographic research, as the latter relinquishes the place of knowledge, inherently of power, in favor of a place of experience, inherently of potential.