Dorothy Heathcote: From ‘Learning About’ to ‘Learning From and For’ the Other
David Allen and Agata Handley
DOI: 10.64741/809632ecojtg
Abstract
Dorothy Heathcote is best known today for Mantle of the Expert, a cross-curricular system of teaching that invites students to imagine themselves as a fictional enterprise or team. The aim is to activate student agency and responsibility through collaborative inquiry. While Heathcote’s approach is often understood within a social constructivist framework—emphasising shared meaning-making through group processes—this interpretation overlooks a central dimension of her pedagogy: learning from and for the Other.
This article proposes a re-reading of Heathcote’s work through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, often described as the philosopher of the Other. Heathcote’s praxis is more accurately aligned with Levinas’s notion of education as an encounter with alterity and exteriority, than with models of co-constructed knowledge. For both Heathcote and Levinas, the classroom can be conceived as a kind of laboratory, not for consensus or shared meaning, but for responsibility, interruption, and ethical relation.
Levinas’s ideas cannot be straightforwardly translated into a teaching programme; nevertheless, they offer ethical principles that can reorient our understanding of educational space and purpose. As Simon Critchley suggests, Levinas’s work is best read not as traditional philosophy, but as drama, in the face-to-face encounter with the Other. Heathcote’s pedagogy offers a compelling model for how this Levinasian teaching event might be experienced in practice.
Keywords
Levinas, education, ethics, the Other, social constructionism, Vygotsky, drama, teaching
Dorothy Heathcote: From ‘Learning About’ to ‘Learning From and For’ the Other
In the ‘Gardeners of Grantley’ project which Dorothy Heathcote led in 1982, a class of Year 8 children were in role as students at a horticultural college. They visited a fictional ‘museum’ dedicated to ‘Lady Maria,’ a former (19th century) inhabitant of Grantley Hall, ostensibly to learn more about the Italian Garden she commissioned. A teacher-in-role represented Lady Maria; she was introduced at first as if she was a ‘portrait’ on display in the ‘museum.’ She was dressed in clothes that suggested the Victorian period. The children first observed the ‘portrait,’ before examining some objects to do with her life: pages from her diary; gardening utensils; photographs of her with her children, etc. The materials were in a fragmentary form. The diary extracts, for example, were incomplete; they contained passing hints of a tragedy in Lady Maria’s life (the death of her children by drowning in the river).[1]
As part of the preparation for the drama, Heathcote’s M.Ed. students created pages of a diary, supposedly written by Lady Maria. Heathcote said she wanted objects and documents that would breed significance (Edynbry 1984: 74). The diary reflected Lady Maria’s love of nature and gardening—for example, ‘In autumn, nature’s dying display is just as beautiful as its coming to life’ (Edynbry 1984 Appendix 2: no pagination); and also hinted at the tragedy in her life. (In one entry, for example, she reports on the death of her dog and writes: ‘Sometimes I wonder if I’m only meant to deal with death’ (Edynbry 1984 Appendix 2: no pagination).
Subsequently, the children encountered Lady Maria herself, and some of the gardeners who worked on her estate (represented by M.Ed. students in role). This enabled them to add more fragments to what they already knew about Lady Maria’s story. At one point, they came together as a group, and in hushed voices, shared what they had managed to piece together:
GIRL 1: When we started talking [to her] about her children, and how they went in the garden, she asked us to talk about something else. She looked a bit this distressed over it.
DH: Did you get any impression there were parts of the garden she never went into?
GIRL 2: One near the river. She didn’t go anywhere near the river to pick flowers.
DH: So she sort of made a forbidden area for herself.
GIRL 2: And they wanted her to have … a pond in the garden itself, and she wouldn’t have one. She didn’t want one in the garden. (Heathcote 1984b)
In the girls’ hushed tones might be detected the early glimmerings of, not only knowing Lady Maria’s secret, but taking on the burden of being what Jame Hatley termed the ‘suffering witness’, who does not simply observe, but responds to the irreparable suffering of the Other (2000: 4-5).
‘The human face’
In a note written c.2002, Heathcote observed that three things ‘dominate in using dramatic elements’ in the classroom:
- Concept of changing frame, the window thro’ which we decide to view.
- The deliberate infusion of ‘the other’
- Conventions to keep the human face i.e. feeling/thinking balance (n.d. [a]; original emphasis)
The reference here to the ‘human face’ may be seen in Levinasian terms, as an encounter with the ‘face’ of the Other. Emmanuel Levinas has been called the philosopher of the Other. This article will trace connections between his work and Heathcote’s, to build a new model of her pedagogy—one based in the ethical relationship to the Other. There is no evidence that Heathcote knew Levinas’s work; nevertheless, there are a number of connections and affinities between their ideas. Crucially, both of them saw education as a form of ‘laboratory,’ dedicated, not to shared meaning-making, but to exteriority: to ‘the “elsewhere” and the “otherwise” and the “other”’ (Levinas 1979: 33).
Heathcote is probably best known today for a system of teaching across the curriculum called Mantle of the Expert. The key elements of the system are: the students are asked to agree to think of themselves as a fictional enterprise, or team of some kind. There is a fictional ‘client,’ and a fictional ‘commission.’ (For example, the students might take on the frame or point-of-view of a team of archaeologists, museum curators, doctors, etc.) The aim is to make students active in their own learning; there is a stress on agency and empowerment, but also on responsibility: ‘I want to empower; which means helping them slowly to take the responsibility of power’ (Heathcote 1996).
There is an emphasis, in Mantle, on working together as a team, reflecting Heathcote’s belief that people ‘have a disposition towards socialisation: to learning together, to working together, to collaboration’ (1994a). This is also how education was described by Dewey: ‘The principle that development of experience comes about through interaction means that education is essentially a social process’ (1997: 58). Heathcote’s work has been interpreted in this way, by, for example, Edmiston and Towler Evans, who claim that it is based in ‘creating shared meaning and personal sense’ through a process of socialisation (2022: xxii). This is a social constructivist model of education, where knowledge is co-constructed through dialogue and collaboration with others. This stress on shared meaning-making in Heathcote’s pedagogy, however, is misplaced. It misses the centre of her work, which lies, not in learning through the group process, but in the focus on exteriority, and on learning from, and for, the Other.
Heathcote observed that the term‘Mantle’ did not mean a form of ‘cloak,’ but referred rather to the notion of a ‘vocation’ or ‘calling’:
MANTLE—meaning: ‘I declare that I will uphold the lifestyle and standard of my calling.’
EXPERT—meaning: ‘and furthermore, I will undertake to take seriously the acquisition of, and using of, those skills deemed necessary for and in, that lifestyle I have entered because of my calling.’ (Heathcote cited in Hesten 1994: 216)
There is an element here of a form of dedication or pledge—both individual and collective. In Mantle, there is, crucially, a dedication to the Other: the ‘client.’ This is not a business relationship with a ‘customer’; rather, the ‘client’ is: ‘Somebody to be responsible to, and for’ (Heathcote 2009). There is a ‘human face’ at the centre of the work (n.d. [b]), and a relationship of concern and care. This, Heathcote argued, ‘is why you get ethics, responsibility and morality’ (2009). The ‘client’ creates a relationship to an exteriority—to an Other outside the group (albeit a fictional Other). The ‘client’ becomes the ‘authority,’ rather than the teacher. This is paradoxically the case, even though the ‘client’ is invented by the teacher, to serve his/her teaching aims. Both teacher and students are turned towards this exteriority, and share in seeking to fulfil the responsibility of the ‘commission.’ Agency and empowerment involve, then, an assumption of responsibility to the Other.
‘Learning about’ and ‘learning for’
Levinas posited an encounter with the ‘face’ of the Other, as a disturbance, an irruption, that leads to a shift from the self-centred ego—the ‘for-itself’—to the ‘for-the-other’ (2006: 174). The idea of the ‘face’ here is not the literal, physical face, but rather, the ‘living presence’ (Levinas 1979: 66) of the Other. The encounter with alterity involves an interruption of the self, that catches the individual ‘off-guard,’ and demands a response: the subject is ‘called’ to respond, and to take responsibility for the Other, in their humanity, vulnerability, and need. This is also a shift in time. Levinas sees the time of the ‘self’ as ‘synchronic’: the individual tends to subject the Other to its own time, making it part of its own story. The Other, however, is always in another time to the time of the self; it is ‘diachronic’ in this sense. In the encounter with the ‘face’ of the Other, the subject/ego finds itself ‘caught up in the time of the other’, and part of ‘a story not its own’ (Severson 2013: 240-41).
In recent years, there has been a turn to Levinas among educational theorists. This is partly in response to the neoliberal agenda in education, with its focus on the mastery of knowledge (‘learning about’), where attainment and ‘success’ are measured in the amount of knowledge that can be stored and retrieved, and measured through forms of ‘rigorous monitoring, auditing and evaluation’ (Ward 2012: 6).[2] Levinas has been seen as an ally in the development of alternative models of teaching and learning, with a different philosophical basis (Todd 2003; Egéa-Kuehne 2008; Biesta 2008; Strhan 2012; Joldersma 2014; Zhao 2018). In her book Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and Ethical Possibilities in Education (2003),Sharon Todd draws a distinction between ‘learning about’ and ‘learning for’. This marks a shift from the conventional focus in teaching, on the mastery and control of knowledge—i.e., making things known—to openness to alterity and the unknown (Todd 2003: 8-10). Learning becomes an encounter with something outside the self; to ‘learn from’ is, as Levinas stated, ‘to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I’; it ‘brings me more than I contain’ (Levinas 1979: 51; original emphasis).
This, then, is a radical shift, to an Other-centred rather than ego-centred paradigm of learning and knowledge. Indeed, as Paul Standish observes,
to any contemporary economy of teaching and learning this is surely scandalous because a condition of this Levinasian teaching … is the escape from comprehension and mastery, precisely from the accumulated competence and autonomy that contemporary education so prizes’ (2017: 139).
Gert Biesta suggests that Levinas ‘opens up a dialogical space where pedagogy becomes—or can remain—an event rather than being a pre-programmed process’; creating opportunities for students to respond as ‘the Levinasian responsible and “response-able” subject’ (2003: 67). Roger Simon recognises, however, that it is not possible to simply ‘broker’ Levinas’s work into ‘the programmatic regularities of a pedagogical methodology’ (2003: 45-6). Similarly, Todd has seen that Levinas’s ideas cannot be applied in a direct way in education: he is resistant in his writings to any systematic effort to describe an ethics, and so practical ends cannot be deduced from them, without distorting them (2008: 170-1). Nevertheless, a Levinasian approach can establish certain (ethical) principles for the classroom; and it is possible to explore alternative models of education that are in line with those principles.
Simon Critchley has suggested that we should ‘think of Levinas’ work, not as philosophy in the usual sense, but as drama’ (2015: 11). Indeed, Levinas himself stated that the events he is describing ‘are conjunctures in being for which perhaps the term ‘‘drama’’ would be most suitable’ (1979: 28). Bettino Bergo has described this is a ‘dramatique des phénomènes’ rather than a phenomenology of actions (2025: 29); i.e., this is a drama in which the self is not the main agent or protagonist, but is ‘thrown’ into the scene of the encounter with the Other. The Levinasian event may be seen, then, as a drama of Otherness; arguably, one way it may be experienced in the classroom is through the fictional context and ‘frame’ of a drama. Heathcote’s work can provide a model of the classroom as a space for the Levinasian teaching event.
As we have seen, Heathcote stressed learning as a social process (1994a). Levinas, however, insisted that the ‘call’ of the Other is addressed to the individual, who is elected or called upon to respond (‘I am then called upon in my uniqueness as someone for whom no one else can substitute himself’ [1981: 59]). It is a personal responsibility, not a social event, or a group response. For Levinas, the ‘side-by-side’ community, based in ‘mitsein’ and ‘miteinandersein’,[3] signifies a form of ‘fusion’ which erases ‘the very alterity of the other, by forming a totality’ (Rat 2016: 90). The encounter with the ‘face’ of the Other, however, breaks up the side-by-side relation, interrupting ‘community from forming a totality’ based in communion or fusion (Rat 2016: 218).
Can the Levinasian event take place in the classroom, given that learning in most schools is necessarily a group process? Can there be some form of shared response to the Other? In his article ‘The Work of Service: Levinas’s Eventual Philosophy of Culture’, Steven Smith asks if a ‘culture of responsibility’ might be consciously embraced by a group, ‘as a collective response to the Other’ (2009: 161-2). There are clear indications that Levinas saw this as a possibility. For example, he stated: ‘Everyone in Israel is answerable for everyone else’; i.e., ‘Not only are we responsible for everyone else, but we are also responsible for everyone else’s responsibility’ (1994: 85). (He was referring to Israel as a potential, ideal community, rather than commenting on the actual country.[4]) Here is a model, then, of a community based in the infinite responsibility of each person to an infinite number of others. This does not imply a form of miteinandersein, however—i.e., a ‘collectivity which says “we” that feels the other to be alongside of oneself’ (Levinas 1978: 94). Levinas was fond of quoting Dostoevsky: ‘We are all responsible for everyone else—but I am more responsible than all the others’ (2011b: 37). In other words, the individual call to responsibility is not diminished by the potential for some kind of ‘collective response to the Other’ (Smith 2009: 161-2). This is, to use Ramona Rat’s term, an ‘un-common sociality’, which does not ‘congeal itself in a community’; the Other ‘gives sense, orientation to community’, but it is through ‘an interruptive movement’ that disrupts the symmetry of miteinandersein (2016: 289).
There is also an indication in Levinas that, beyond the singular encounter with the Other, lies an obligation to others ‘beyond anticipation’ (Severson 2013: 302). In ‘Meaning and Sense’, Levinas cites a story about Léon Blum, who was in prison during German occupation, and who said: ‘We are working [travaillons] in the present, not for the present’ (cited in Levinas 1993: 93). For Levinas, this commitment to work for another, future time—i.e., for others ‘beyond anticipation’ (Severson 2013: 302)—was ‘the summit of nobility’ (Levinas 1993: 93). There is also, here, a sense of diachrony: of responsibility to absent (and unknown) Others in the past and future, rather than the present time of the self which is, ‘in the last analysis, for our life’ (Levinas 1993: 93). There is no promise of return for the work undertaken; the agent renounces ‘being the contemporary of its outcome’ (Levinas 1993: 92). The ‘triumph’ will come in a ‘time without me … at a time beyond the horizon of my time, in an eschatology without hope for oneself or in a liberation from my time’ (Levinas 1993: 92; original emphasis).
Smith sees the potential for achieving a ‘culture of responsibility’ in Levinas’s use, in this context, of the term work, or oeuvre, as an ‘orientation which goes freely from the Same to the Other’ (Levinas 1993: 91; original emphasis). As Smith observes: ‘Work so conceived is a radically generous service of the Other. So generous that the agent is able “to renounce being the contemporary of its outcome, to act without entering into the Promised Land”’ (2009: 184). This holds out the possibility, then, of a community dedicated to the Other, or Others, through work; a collective with a ‘culture of responsibility’ (Smith 2009: 162).
This responsibility extends, moreover, not only to the people of the future, but also, what Levinas terms a ‘debt for a past too old for my remembrance’ (Severson 2013: 302). This is evident in Levinas’s analysis of the work of the writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon. As Norman Ravvin notes:
In his reading of Agnon’s story collection The Fire and the Wood, Levinas points to the writer’s use of faces and expressions to depict not only relationships among the living, but the possibility of a reciprocity “between the dead and the living”’ (1999: 66);
a dialogue with ‘buried voices, dead forms’ which supports a ‘community of those human beings who are dedicated to the other’ (Levinas cited in Ravvin 1999: 66). In this way, the ‘work’ of responsibility is always/already diachronic.
The ‘laboratory’: ‘learning for’
We may find another model of a community dedicated to the Other, or Others—this time, a learning community—in Levinas’s recognition of the science laboratory as ‘the place of morality’ in modern life; it is where the individual is most ‘pure’ (Levinas 2011a: 5). This may seem paradoxical, given the widespread view that science is about mastery and subjection of the world. Heidegger, for example, argued that science entails ‘a kind of imperialistic thinking’ in which the world is ‘conquered’ by the subject who, ‘in representing the world to himself rationally, becomes the “relational centre” of all that is’ (Carlson 2005: 54). Levinas recognised that the rationalism underpinning science is driven by an ‘all-encompassing will’. However, he also insisted on the possibility of a relationship with ‘something other’ that is grounded in responsibility, rather than domination, involving subjection to the Other, but not servitude (2011a: 5). He connected this relationship with the phrase, ‘All Israel is responsible for one another’: ‘What this means, in terms of a veritable humanity, is that every man is responsible for the other man’ (2011a: 6). In other words: he explicitly linked the concept of the scientist’s work in the laboratory, to responsibility for the Other and for ‘all the others’ (2011b: 37). In the laboratory, he stated, there is a ‘special intimacy’ between ‘the scientist and matter’, a dedication to exteriority (matter) outside the self; and a form of ‘calling’ or vocation in the ‘rigorous exercise of science’ (Levinas 2011a: 5). The work of the scientist is based in movement ‘outside-of-oneself [hors-de-soi], toward a yonder’; a turn ‘toward the “elsewhere” and the “otherwise” and the “other”’ (Levinas 1979: 33). This implies, then, an asymmetrical relationship to the ‘elsewhere’ and ‘other’. The emphasis is not on the ‘social process’ of the laboratory, but always already on the dedication to exteriority, as the focus of ‘service’ and ‘work’. This dedication leaves the group open and the people within it vulnerable to alterity. The ‘elsewhere’ and ‘otherwise’ cannot be fully grasped, but remain elsewhere and other, beyond complete comprehension. This also means that there cannot be a final, consensus view of the matter; there cannot be a fusion of the community on the basis of a shared understanding.
In the laboratory, then, the scientist seeks knowledge, not for mastery, but in order to fulfil responsibility to others beyond apprehension. This may be seen as—to use Ronald Arnett’s phrase—a ‘performative’ ethics (2017: 10). Arnett argues that, for Levinas, ‘the doing of ethics necessitates constant learning’, to fulfil ‘the obligatory acts of responsibility’ (2017: 6). This involves the ‘challenge, ambiguity, and necessity of learning in the performative enactment of responsibility’ (Arnett 2017: 2). The ‘call’ of the Other demands that ‘[w]e ascertain knowledge in order to respond in our distinct manner of helpfulness and inadequacy’ (Arnett 2017: 2). Learning, in this sense, implies the acquisition of knowledge, not for mastery of the world or assimilation into the self, but rather, ‘learning for’ the Other.
‘Working for’ and ‘learning for’ may also be seen in terms of Levinas’s concept of ‘substitution’—to identify with the needs of the Other, and seek to fill their needs, to the point of substituting for them. Substitution, then, is not ‘care for the other’[5], concern or solidarity, but the ‘substitution of one for the other’. It is ‘one degree of responsibility more, the responsibility for the responsibility of the other’ (Levinas 1981: 117), i.e., substituting for the other, to the point of assuming what is most their own—their responsibility.
The ‘moment’ of teaching
How can the Levinasian event be achieved in teaching? What is the role of the teacher in the event? Levinas sees the encounter with the Other as a moment of teaching. He states: ‘Teaching is a discourse in which the master can bring to the student what the student does not yet know’ (1979: 180). The image should not be taken literally, however; he is using the master-student relationship as a metaphor for the asymmetry in the encounter between self and Other. The subject learns from the encounter, and in that sense, the Other is a teacher; but this does not mean that every teacher is an Other. However, some scholars have attempted to apply the image directly to the classroom situation. For example, Clarence Joldersma has stated that, from the perspective of the student, ‘the teacher is in the position of other’ (2018: 71). The teacher is ‘transcendent’; for the student, ‘what comes from the other—the teacher—is something beyond one’s own capacity’ (Joldersma 2018: 72). Sharon Todd shows some discomfort, however, in the idea of a teacher as a ‘master’, especially within an ethical framework: ‘In mastering, do not masters master over someone? Who and what does the master teach?’ (2008: 172). If, indeed, we see the teacher as a ‘master’, then this maintains the conventional power-relations between student and teacher. It is not ‘empowering.’ In a knowledge-based system of education, in particular, the teacher is positioned as ‘the one who knows,’ who has mastered the curriculum knowledge, and the student is in the position of the one who does not know, and needs to learn. This perpetuates the idea of education as the acquisition of knowledge and mastery over world. Moreover, the conventional teacher-student relationship is based in subjection: the teacher has the authority to command and control. It is a relationship which is institutionally determined. The student does not respond to the classroom teacher as to a ‘call’ from the Other. There can be no sudden irruption here, no catching ‘off-guard,’ especially as the teacher is not in a position of vulnerability or need. (As Judith Butler observes, the vulnerability of the Other ‘must be perceived and recognised’ in the moment of the ‘ethical encounter’ [2006: 43].) Nevertheless, Joldersma attempts to make the Levinasian event fit within the classroom situation. He states that learning from a teacher requires listening, ‘a kind of passive receptivity’ and the ‘risk of being open to the teacher’ and their influence (2018: 52). As such, it is ‘necessary for the subject to listen, as an expression of the learner’s very subjectivity’ (Joldersma 2018: 53). This places the onus for the openness to learning on the student. When the student responds to the teacher, Joldersma suggests, the subtext is: ‘please say I’m right!’ He sees this as a sign of a ‘primordial responsibility to the teacher as other’ (2018: 53); but it is based, rather, in the vulnerability of the student, as the one who does not know the answers, and needs the teacher to confirm that he/she has succeeded in passing the ‘test.’
The conventional classroom encounter between teacher and student, then, cannot be the basis of the Levinasian ‘ethical encounter.’ Rather, the teacher needs to be the facilitator of the event: the encounter with Otherness.
Text as ‘Other’
Scholars such as Claire Katz have turned to Levinas’s own work as a teacher, especially his approach to the study of the Talmud, as a model of educational practice. The act of textual exegesis is an encounter with the Other, not simply—or even primarily—with the ‘author.’ As Robert Gibbs argues, exegesis does not draw some ‘essential’ meaning from a text, such as the author’s supposed original intent. Instead, while the text is ‘fixed’, it can carry a plurality of meanings. Interpretation, in this view, opens the text outward, rather than narrowing it down (2010: 40–41).
Katz suggests that Levinas asks us ‘to think not only about the human other but the text as other’ (2013: 88); and Severson observes that the text is Other ‘because it positions the reader as responsible, as already summoned, as indebted’ (2013: 209). The text ‘speaks’ to the reader, Levinas stated, as if it is ‘saying over and over: “Interpret me”’ (Levinas cited in Robbins 2001: 240). This is akin to the call of the Other that demands a response. The text ‘lays itself open to exegesis, calls for it’ (Levinas 1994: 110). The ‘call’ demands a rigorous attention; ‘an exertion, a battle, a tearing or wrestling of meaning’ (Aronowicz 1994: xvii).
The text, then, is the ‘teacher’: it is exterior to both the group, and to the classroom teacher. It is the external authority. At the same time—in the case of the Talmud—there are layers of exegesis that have accrued over the centuries. The text has been understood ‘as constantly accompanied by a layer of symbolic meaning, apologues, new interpretations to be discovered: in short, always lined with midrash’ (Levinas cited in Robbins 2001: 240). The encounter with the text, then, is also a form of dialogue with other readers, both now and in the past, who have also ‘wrestled’ with the text ‘in a quest for meaning to be renewed’ (Levinas cited in Robbins 2001: 240). This involves ‘a demythologizing of the text, but also the search for a pretext for thought, down to the very letter of the text’ (Levinas cited in Robbins 2001: 240). In other words, the reading goes ‘beyond the verse’ (Levinas 1994: x), to seek the meanings that are only hinted at, and even hidden or secret meanings.
The act of exegesis, then, is not merely to set the text in its historical context (e.g., ‘This is how they thought about justice in the second or sixth century’ [Aronowicz 1994: 41]). It is ‘not merely to find patterns in the text, binary oppositions, contradictions, or whatever’ (Aronowicz 1994: 41). In other words: it is not to ‘thematize’ the text, to turn it into an object or theme, as an exercise in meaning-giving by the subject (or the group). Rather, the responsibility of the reader is to respond; to remake the meanings anew, so that the words ‘mean now and for us, urgently’ (Aronowicz 2003: 41). The personal response to the call ‘Interpret me’, however, is not simply subjective. As Susan Handelman claims, Levinas’s model of exegesis as ‘the self-exposure of the text’ negates the idea of a sealed vessel containing a fixed meaning, a passive screen for subjective projections, or merely a battleground for competing ideological readings (1991: 286).
The Talmud records the commentary of others through time. The texts, as Shira Wolosky notes, ‘become alive through the responses of multiple interpreters who then also address and respond to each other’ (2023: 83). This, in itself, creates an ‘open’ text: there is no stable or fixed meaning. The text cannot be fully assimilated; it always remains ‘other.’ It bears a ‘surplus’ of meaning: it cannot be exhausted; any single reading is ‘a way of creating more possibilities for other readings to follow. The chain of responsibility never stops’ (Aronowicz 2003: 46). There have been other readers, who belong to another time, outside our reach or knowing. Their commentaries are traces of their presence; they are always already absent. Diachronic time is thus built into the study of the Talmud. The multiple ‘voices’ are in dialogue, with each other, and across time. They reveal the possibility of multiple ways of responding, and highlight the fact that there cannot be a consensus view, or a final mastery over alterity; arguably throwing the challenge back to the individual reader: how will you respond to the demand, ‘Interpret me’?
Levinas called the study of the Talmud a ‘laboratory’ (2011a: 5). As in a laboratory, there is a ‘relationship with something other’ (Levinas 2011a: 5), through the work of deciphering the text, and ‘dialoguing’ with it. It also involves working in the service of others unknown, both in the past, and future (i.e., other readers through time). This provides a model, then, for groups in the present, to continue the task, and assume responsibility for this work of service to the text, but also to others to come. This also applies to the study of other texts by Shakespeare, Molière, Dante, etc., which, ‘beyond their plain meaning’, invite the exegesis ‘that is spiritual life’ (Levinas 1994: xi).
In textual exegesis, then, we may again see a dedication to exteriority outside the self; and a form of ‘calling’ or vocation in the ‘rigorous exercise of science’ (Levinas 2011a: 5). This is the clearest model we have, then, in Levinas’s work and in his own practice as a teacher, of a Levinasian approach to teaching. As Katz argues, this model stresses the process of learning, without undermining the importance of content. Teaching becomes a shared, transformative journey, in which the teacher maintains the responsibility to teach, while remaining open to uncertainty, and the student also contributes as a participant in knowledge (2008: 88–9).
Vygotsky
The aim of textual exegesis, Katz suggests, ‘is to engage the mind and to join the learners in a community of education’ (2008: 89). In this way, she argues, it reinforces ‘the social dimension of education’ (2013: 139). This emphasis on the ‘social’ in her analysis, however, is problematic, in Levinasian terms, because it displaces Levinas’s emphasis on exteriority (of the Other, and the text as Other), and puts the focus, instead, on shared meaning-making within the group. This is evident in the parallel Katz draws with the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, known for his social constructivist theory of learning (Katz 2013: 139). Vygotsky claimed that ‘the individual response emerges from the forms of collective life’ (Vygotsky cited in Wertsch 1988: 59). There is an emphasis on the social formation of mind: learning occurs through social interaction, with input and guidance from more skilled or knowledgeable partners, both teachers and peers. Thus, knowledge is generated within the group itself, on an interpsychic level, and interiorised by the individual on an intrapsychic level:
Through engaging with others in complex thinking that makes use of cultural tools of thought, children become able to carry out such thinking independently, transforming the cultural tools of thought to their own purposes (Rogoff 2003: 50).
The social constructivist modelemphasises meaning made within the closed circle of the community or group. There is an assumption that knowledge can be mastered:
Underpinning all constructive epistemologies is the belief that what is other to me can be grasped by me, after which it no longer lies beyond my knowledge but has been brought within the fold of my understanding’ (Bailey 2023: 17).
As we have seen, in Levinas’s model, meaning comes from the encounter with what is radically other. The scientist’s dedication in the laboratory is a responsibility to the ‘elsewhere’ and the ‘otherwise’ (Levinas 1979: 33), which resists being fully known, controlled, or ‘constructed.
Katz draws an analogy with Martin Buber’s ideas on education (2013: 204). In Buber’s approach, learning is a dialogical process between teacher and students. Again, then, this may be seen as social learning, based in reciprocity and ‘mitsein’; in learning from each other, rather than learning from the Other. Bartholo, Tunes and Tacca also draw on Vygotsky and Buber, to claim that the primary aim in teaching should be ‘promoting relational possibilities’, in ‘a process of continuous inter-subjective creation of meanings’ (2010: 867). This is very different, however, from a model of education based in the relationship to exteriority and the Other. The issue here is not simply a question of defining the philosophical basis of education, but the whole approach to teaching in the classroom.
As we have seen, Levinas challenged the symmetry of the social relationship (mitsein / miteindandersein), as leading to fusion and ‘totality’. Indeed, he criticised Buber’s philosophy, precisely because it was based in ‘reciprocity’ as opposed to the asymmetry of the face-to-face encounter with the Other (Levinas 2008: 15). The act of exegesis is not simply a collective response, or ‘interpersonal engagement around jointly understood problems’ (Kress & Lehman 2003: 61). The Levinasian laboratory is a social space, but the orientation of the work is towards exteriority over the ‘inter-subjective creation of meanings’ (Bartholo, Tunes & Tacca 2010: 867).
Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as ‘laboratory’
Heathcote’s work offers a possible model for an education based in the encounter with Otherness, and in learning from and for the Other. It meets a number of the conditions and principles outlined above, for the Levinasian teaching event. She stated that her aim in drama work was to create a form of ‘laboratory’, in which the students and teacher collaborate:
… in the laboratory, we care about what we do, we get the information we require, and we share it all the time. That means we process it: we process it in talk, we process it in action, just like a laboratory outside school works. (1991a)
There is an emphasis here on social process, which may seem to imply that knowledge is socially constructed. Heathcote stated that, in the drama ‘laboratory,’ we ‘explain the world to each other’ (1985). Moreover, the usual teacher-student hierarchy can be displaced; the teacher
can actually, fictionally [in the drama], create the common endeavour; and get rid of the teacher power, without getting rid of the teacher underpinning that helps things happen (1991c).
The stress here on ‘common endeavour’ may appear to imply a form of ‘miteinandersein’. The Heathcote ‘lab,’ however, is based on ‘scientific’ engagement with exteriority, on the ‘elsewhere’ and ‘otherwise’, as always already beyond reach. Her aim was that students would ‘recognize that the task is bigger than me or them, that we get interested in the task, not in ourselves, in the task. That we are all at the service of the material we’ve chosen to work in’ (Heathcote, n.d. [c]). This is linked to her concept of ‘stewardship’. She observed:
For me stewardship is acknowledging that everything else around you is not you, you acknowledge the other but not yourself. Everything that is not you, has to be attended to. Stewardship is actually engaging with what there is around you and attending to it. (Heathcote cited in Matusiak-Varley 2016: 239)
Stewardship, for Heathcote, is ‘always dedicated to service by self and not to self-service’; it demands ‘the capacity to de-centre: to stand aside from merely personal interest and examine without self-interest. This has been the hallmark of the scientist in ideal circumstances’ (1992: 22-23). This recalls Levinas’s view of the laboratory as ‘the place of morality’ in modern life, where the individual is most ‘pure’ (2011a: 5). This de-centring marks a decisive shift, from mastery and self-possession, towards a stance of responsibility, where the self is defined, not by what it commands, but by its openness to what lies beyond it.
Mantle of the Expert incorporates a ‘performative’ ethics (Arnett 2017: 10); it ‘necessitates constant learning’, to fulfil ‘the obligatory acts of responsibility’ (Arnett 2017: 6). The ‘collective endeavour’, then, is dedicated to tasks, to oeuvre (in Levinas’s sense of the term). In Mantle, the fictional context generates a sense of purpose and need for the work. The focus is on the ‘call’ of the Other, the ‘client,’ which generates the need to respond, and take responsibility ‘toward the other-than-oneself’ (Levinas 2008: 18). This also shifts the relationship to knowledge: ‘learning about’ gives way to ‘learning from,’ but also ‘learning for’ the Other, and even, ultimately, to substituting for them. The term ‘expert’ implies an active agency, in learning, but also in assuming the ‘mantle’ of responsibility. The participants do not ‘own’ knowledge, however; it is always already ‘for the other.’
The focus on exteriority over the ‘social construction’ of meaning may be seen in the following example of the ‘drama laboratory’ in practice. In 1994, Heathcote was asked to teach a session with a primary school class, where the curriculum area was the science of pulleys and levers. She set the drama in a fictional context, which invited a ‘shared interpersonal engagement’ in a ‘jointly understood’ problem. The participants were in the frame ofengineers at a fictitious ironworks factory in the year 1860. They were set a challenge: following a boiler explosion in a brewery, which has caused multiple deaths, a new boiler has been built, and it now has to be delivered and put in place. The ‘engineers’ had to plan the route, navigating numerous obstacles on the way such as narrow roads with tight bends. The team worked at different solutions, and eventually, there was a breakthrough, when one boy came up with the answer:
and they’d done it. They hadn’t solved the other problems; but they’d got it round Coppitt Corner. And I hadn’t thought of it. It’s the result of an hour-and-a-half, looking at a map, talking to one another about it’ (Heathcote 1994b).
This may seem as if it is based on a social constructivist model of learning: there was an interactive process to find solutions, demanding a knowledge of pulleys and levers. The process was facilitated by members of the group who had a more advanced understanding of the factors involved (in other words, the work serviced the Vygotskian ‘zone of proximal development’). The teacher and students were interrogating the material together, suggesting a collaborative process in which the teacher shared power, to enable the social process of learning. However, it is notable that Heathcote emphasised the ‘real world’ demands of the problem throughout: she spoke to the children as if they were real engineers, making a real (not fictional) boiler, and stressed that the task would require accuracy and precision, as it would, indeed, if they were doing it for real. Moreover, there was an external ‘need’ for the work, which came in part from the ‘client’; but it was also, Heathcote stressed,
based in a human problem: nobody can work in this place [i.e., the brewery], until that boiler gets put back. … And there’s no social security, in 1860. So, there’s a lot of people, not only grieving for dead kids, but they’ve got no bread (1994b).
In this way, there was a sense of others ‘beyond anticipation’ that the team were working for. It was a task based in stewardship; it was not simply a problem to be solved by the team’s ‘interpersonal engagement around jointly understood problems’ (Kress & Lehman 2003: 61). Neither could there be a simple final outcome, when the problem was solved, and the team and individuals had ‘mastered’ the knowledge of pulleys and levers; the responsibility for the Other, and others, would remain.
Drama conventions
In Mantle, the ‘client’ might never be represented physically in the drama. Rather, the stress is on building the ‘client in the head’ (Heathcote, 2007a) (for example, through the fictitious letter from the ‘client’ that is used to introduce the ‘commission’). This entails making them feel ‘real’ to the participants, even though they know he/she is a fiction; so they recognise that ‘all tasks done, and forms selected for the doing, exist to service that client’ (Heathcote 1999). The ‘client’ becomes, in effect, an absent presence. This creates a paradox: the students are aware that the frame, the ‘client,’ and the ‘commission,’ are all fictional; and yet, there is a ‘real’ encounter with the Other, in the sense of a ‘call’ to responsibility. The ‘client’ exists, then, primarily ‘in the head’, as a ‘living presence’ (Levinas 1979: 66) of the Other. Arguably, this means that each member of the group experiences the encounter with the Other on a personal level, i.e., in their own ‘head’. The self is ‘called,’ not simply the group.
Heathcote’s work can be seen as, to a significant extent, text-based, in the wider (Barthesian) understanding of ‘text’ as any form of discourse or communication that can be interpreted, analysed, and reinterpreted. She produced a list of some thirty-three conventions for use in drama; these may be seen as ‘texts’ which engender the encounter with the Other in the classroom. She stated: ‘Now, what the conventions do is make an “other” present. It brings to the notice an “other”’ (2009). They are a way to ‘make human presences come into the room; so that what we are considering and who we are considering loom large in all the work’ (Heathcote 2007b), so that the Other becomes increasingly ‘present.’ Indeed, ‘that person can become as real as if they were one of the group’ (Heathcote 2009).
The conventions include the use of letters and objects, as well as different ways of working with teacher-in-role (such as ‘portrait’, ‘effigy’ or ‘film’). The conventions, then, keep the ‘human face’ at the centre of the work (n.d. [b]); they create, less the human presence, than the absent human presence. As we will see, they draw the participants into the time of the Other, and into the Other’s story. Nevertheless, as the Other is (largely) ‘absent,’ this means that their story is always already in another time (diachronic), and ultimately out-of-reach.
The conventions point, then, towards an absent human presence or ‘face’; and they can be seen in terms of Levinas’s concept of the ‘trace.’ This is the presence or trace of something which ‘is always past’ (Levinas 1993: 105). The Other is never fully present, but instead, only leaves ‘marks of its passing in the present’ (Coe 2018: xi). Trace is a form or sign of the ‘face’ of the Other, but it does not enable us to know the Other.It is enigmatic and incomplete: it ‘reminds us of what we have not witnessed and have to approach via conjecture’ (Gross & Ostovich 2016: 3).
Heathcote herself described drama as a shift into diachronic time (n.d. [d]). To return to the example of the ‘Gardeners of Grantley’ project: as we have seen, ‘Lady Maria’ was introduced at first as if she was a ‘portrait’ on display in the ‘museum.’ This is an example of Convention No. 5: ‘The role as portrait of person’ (Heathcote & Whitelaw 1985). Other conventions / texts (documents, photographs, etc.) evoked the ‘absent presence’ of the Other. The diary, as we have seen, suggested her vulnerability, inviting a response. The lacunae in these ‘texts,’ moreover, required interpretation. These were enigmatic remnants of a life; they were open, then, to multiple meanings and readings. This was not a ‘puzzle’ that could ever, finally, be solved: Lady Maria would always, finally, remain an ‘enigma,’ beyond any attempt to ‘know’ her; her story would always remain in another time. This was in line with Levinas’s observation: ‘To meet a man is to be kept awake by an enigma’ (1998: 111).
As Lady Maria was initially represented as a ‘portrait,’ she was, at once, physically present for participants, in their time, and yet also, ‘absent.’ She appeared to exist in another time (indicated by her clothes)—i.e., the time of her own story. Her ‘portrait’ was evidence of the ‘passing’ of the Other; she was ‘present’ but in ‘a different time than the present of the self’ (Severson 2013: 187). Levinas suggested that portraiture risks turning the Other into an object of knowledge, thereby displacing the ethical immediacy of the face-to-face encounter (1981: 90). In Heathcote’s ‘portrait’ convention, however, there is an ever-present ambiguity between presence and absence. As the ‘portrait’ is represented by a real person (usually a teacher-in-role), this means that the actual person is forever out of reach. The enigma is maintained: a gap is opened between the image and the referent, and the actual (or imagined) person that is being represented cannot be thematized, or fully known. Moreover, because the role is represented by a living person, this means that the potential is always present that he or she could be ‘brought to life’ at some point. In this way, the convention can prepare and anticipate a direct encounter with the Other, which will bring together the ‘now’ time of the participants (in the actual present of the classroom), the ‘now time’ of the drama, and the time of the Other. In the case of Lady Maria, after the documents and objects in the ‘museum’ were studied, the teacher-in-role was activated to speak. Heathcote told the children: ‘In drama, of course, I can make a portrait “speak,” can’t I—because in drama, you change, according to what you need.’ She approached the ‘portrait’ and said: ‘Maria, will you bring your century into our century?’ (Heathcote 1984b). The drama shifted into diachronic time; it was a moment when the Other was, to use Levinas’s phrase, ‘making an entry’; this was a ‘visitation’ (1993: 95; original emphasis), an irruption of the past into the present.
‘The Treatment of Dr. Lister’
There is a similar example of the shift into diachronic time, in The Treatment of Dr. Lister (1980). In this drama, Heathcote worked over several days with a class of primary school children, who were put in the frame of student doctors undergoing an examination in the history of medicine. Arguably, the ‘expert’ frame of ‘doctors’ contained within it an inherent sense of a ‘calling.’ (Michelle Clifton-Soderstrom, indeed, has discussed the medical professional’s responsibility to patients, as an example of Levinasian obligation to the Other, that comes from an ‘immemorial past’—i.e., the medical professional is always already committed to respond, before actually meeting with a patient in person [2003].) The children ‘were addressed as potential doctors, and endowed immediately with the responsibilities of would-be doctors’ (Heathcote 1984a: 134); they were told that they were going to undergo an examination in the history of medicine. At first, Lister (who pioneered antiseptic surgery) was ‘present’ or represented by a teacher-in-role, as a ‘portrait’ or ‘effigy’; he was introduced to the children as if he was an exhibit in a museum (Heathcote 1980). He was seated at a desk, in clothes that suggested the 19th century, and with a microscope, a monaural stethoscope, and other surgeon’s tools on the desk.
As in the case of Lady Maria, because Lister was initially represented as a ‘portrait,’ this meant he was, at once, physically present for participants, in their time, and yet also, ‘absent.’ He appeared to exist in another time (indicated by his clothes, and the medical instruments on his desk). The children were not given any direct information about him at this stage. Instead, they had to reach for their own, existing knowledge and understanding, together with their powers of speculation, and bring them to bear on the problem. They began by examining the instruments on Lister’s desk. At one point, as part of the ‘examination,’ they were asked to take any object, and ‘consider its use, and design the operation, as they thought it might have happened’ (Heathcote 1985). The apparent purpose, then, was to gather information about Lister; the ‘portrait’ and ‘objects’ were a ‘text’ which the children had to interpret. This phase of the work could be seen as Vygotskian, in the sense that there was a sharing of knowledge; a social construction of meaning through agreement and consensus; and an element of peer teaching, where more skilled or knowledgeable pupils supported the others. Moreover, this phase of the drama was set as if in the linear, ‘clock’ time of exams (‘You have two hours to complete the paper’ [Heathcote 1980]). The drama shifted decisively into diachronic time, however, when the portrait was ‘brought to life.’ On the second day of the project, Heathcote told the children:
Your task today, ladies and gentlemen, is to engage Sir Joseph Lister in conversation about the things that worry him in his life’ (Heathcote 1980).
When the role came into the present of the drama, this was again a form of ‘visitation’ (Levinas 1993: 95; original emphasis), an irruption of the past into the present.
It is significant that, when Lister’s portrait was brought to life, the children were not asked to obtain information from him about the history of medicine, but rather, to find out about ‘the things that worry him in his life’ (Heathcote 1980); in other words, to focus on his needs. Indeed, this Lister was an agitated, unsettled ‘spirit.’ The drama event, as it evolved, was about the encounter with Lister, and the need to listen and respond to him. Any information that the children obtained from him about his work, was filtered, in this way, through the encounter with the role. We might even say that the children’s concern to ‘learn about’ something—to gather knowledge about the ‘history of medicine’—was disrupted by the ‘intrusion’ of Lister into their world. The teacher-in-role as Lister expressed his regret at not being able, in his work, to save more people, and his irritation when people would not listen to his ideas, or refused his treatment. For example, he stated: ‘If only I could have perfected my method, and if only those others had listened to me, I could have saved them. I felt that people died, and they shouldn’t have died’ (Heathcote 1980).
At one point, he explained his experiments with blood, but his account remained personal and emotional: for example, he recalled showing his experiments to people ‘time after time after time’, but ‘they just wouldn’t believe it’. He offered an example of a child with an open leg fracture,[6] whose father refused him permission to operate, but whose mother wanted him to do it. The choice of this story in the drama is significant: it carries within it the idea of responsibility to an Other (the child); as if, for Lister, the unique ‘call’ of the Other to response-ability was heard, but also (to quote Levinas):
In his face, it is not just this one other person who obsesses me, but all the other Others, too. This is more than an empirical complication: in the human face, I am commanded by all the Others at once. (1981: 160)
The children had to respond to Lister, and find ways to calm him down and reassure him (for example, they asked him: ‘When you’re upset, do you get knotted inside? You look very knotted inside’ [Heathcote 1985]). In this way, in the encounter with Lister, the children were reaching beyond historical knowledge about the man and his innovations, to the drive that compelled him to make these innovations: his desire to serve his ‘calling,’ to save lives, and ameliorate suffering.
The Lister drama began as an enquiry into the history of medicine; but it evolved into an encounter with Lister himself. It was as if he was a restless ghost, with unresolved feelings about his life and work; with a demand placed on the children, to listen and respond. Levinas uses the term ‘substitution’ to suggest the way in which the self takes upon itself the burden that the Other would otherwise have to bear; to not simply be ‘for-the-other’, but to take the place of the Other in some degree (1996). As we will see, the children in the Lister drama did not simply seek to assuage his feelings; they moved to the point of substituting for him to some degree, taking on his responsibility, and continuing his struggle to save lives. His ‘calling’ became their calling.
On the third day of the drama, their task was to create ‘waxworks,’ to demonstrate to Lister some of the typical health hazards for working people in his day. On the fourth day, they made plans to equip a van as a sterile ambulance, to go to India. They later explained their ideas to Lister; and finally, on the fifth day, they ‘taught Lister what contribution he made to medicine’, and presented lectures on subsequent medical developments such as dialysis (Heathcote 2007c). The children were acquiring knowledge (about health hazards, antisepsis, etc.); and in so doing, they learned themselves, but always in this context of response-ability and responsibility, of learning for-the-other. This was not only to help Lister (to respond to his ‘call’), but future others, here represented by the people that would, for example, be served by the sterilised ambulances. In part, at least, Lister’s ‘calling’ had become their ‘calling.’
On the final day, the children told him: ‘If it wasn’t for you, inventing sterilisation … thousands of people would have died, because of diseases on instruments’; and he said: ‘It’s wonderful to think that people in the twentieth century would carry on the work that I’ve started’ (Heathcote 1980). They reassured him, then, that his work had indeed served people ‘beyond anticipation’ (Severson 2013: 302). This was a partial resolution of the ‘problem,’ at least. However, as Levinas saw, the obligation to the Other can never be completely fulfilled, it is ‘infinite.’ The feelings of this ‘ghost’ had, in part, been appeased. He was also led to see that in his lifetime, he had, in effect, been working, like Blum, ‘in the present, not for the present’ (cited in Levinas 1987: 91). The children had accepted responsibility for the work he had started; a responsibility which was both individual, and collective, a ‘community of those human beings who are dedicated to the other’ (Levinas cited in Ravvin 1999: 66). There was a chain of responsibility: taking on Lister’s burden meant continuing and extending it to unknown others in the future.
After the Lister drama, the same class of children looked at the story of Louis Pasteur. They undertook science experiments, including growing germs in a Petri dish. Heathcote recalled that, at the end of the week, they had over fifty Petri dishes, all on the school windowsills; and they said:
We can’t leave these on these windowsills. They’re growing germs. And somebody might break into the school, and they might get a terrible disease (1991c).
Heathcote saw this incident as ‘the classic example of responsibility’. She observed:
I hadn’t even thought of it. It was they who thought of it, because they’d been [dealing] in germs for a fortnight, you see. I really admired that; and until I see that kind of rigour, I won’t believe there’s education really happening. (1991c)
They were demonstrating, not only an awareness of germs; they were taking responsibility independently (‘I hadn’t even thought of it’). They were considering others ‘beyond anticipation’ (Severson 2013: 302) (even including a thief who might break into the school). Through the course of the Lister/Pasteur dramas, concern with ‘germs’ had become a kind of concrete metaphor for the responsibility for the Other’s suffering, even unto ‘the death of the Other’ (Levinas 2006: 167). Arguably, the ‘spectre’ of Lister was still present on some level, for the group; and they were continuing to ‘substitute’ for him. The ‘call’ from Lister was not simply to respond to his needs; rather, the participants could recognise, through him, his struggle to meet the needs of an infinite number of others. In this way, the work was based in ethics as the ‘first philosophy’ (Levinas 1989), and the creation of ‘a culture of responsibility’ (Smith 2009: 162), in which everyone ‘is answerable for everyone else’ (Levinas 1994a: 85).
Levinas saw that the ethical appears in daily acts of responsibility and kindness such as giving bread to the other (Levinas 1981: 56), or in a simple phrase such as ‘after you sir’ (Levinas 1996: 91). In the example of the petri dishes, there was an ethical act in daily life. In the Lister drama, the ethical encounter had begun with Lister himself, but extended to others—a movement, in Levinas’s terms, towards justice and ethical responsibility in the world; from singular relation, to sociality, and a recognition of the interconnectedness of all others. In Heathcote’s terms, in this small act, there was a glimpse of a ‘vision of the possible’ (Heathcote & Bolton 1995: 170); a movement towards being ‘stewards of the world’ (Heathcote 1992: 8), and embracing ‘conscious stewardship as a way of life’ (Heathcote 1992: 26).[7]
Conclusion: Drama Education as Ethical Encounter
Levinas’s philosophy of alterity opens a radically different horizon for educational practice—one in which the aim is not the transfer or co-construction of knowledge, but the creation of conditions for ethical encounter; ‘a dialogical space where pedagogy becomes—or can remain—an event rather than being a pre-programmed process’ (Biesta 2003: 67). The Levinasian educator is not the custodian of knowledge but the facilitator of an event—what Bergo has called a dramatique des phénomènes (2025: 29). This refigures the classroom as a site of exposure and responsiveness rather than control. To teach, in this sense, is to work toward the encounter with exteriority that drama makes possible.
Heathcote’s praxis can be seen as a continual effort to generate such events—moments in which students and teachers alike are summoned into relation by a third term: a fictional figure or ‘text’ that demands response. This third is not an object of analysis or mastery, but a presence to which all participants are exposed. The classroom becomes a ‘laboratory’ in which teacher and students engage not in the accumulation of knowledge, but in a shared investigation, driven by responsibility. The teacher’s role is not to direct from a position of knowing, but to adopt a stance of inquiry—decentred, exposed, and oriented toward Otherness. This reframes the aim of teaching: it is not learning about, but learning for; not working on, but working toward. What is at stake is not method, but ethos. For those involved in drama education, Levinas’s philosophy offers more than an abstract ethics—it provides a guiding orientation that can fundamentally reshape pedagogical practice.
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[1] The original ‘diary pages’ were created by Heathcote’s M.Ed. students. They have been recreated by John Bell, based on Edynbury’s thesis (1984).
[2] Steven Ward observes that, under the neoliberal agenda for education, reforms have been introduced which draw on managerial theories and practices, ‘to redefine, realign and rehierarchialize the relationship between administrators and knowledge making and disseminating individuals’. Under this new managerial regime, teachers ‘were to be treated more as employees rather than partners’, and were expected ‘to follow the dictates as set from “above” by rational, unbiased managerial authority rather than professionally controlling and monitoring their own performance, curriculum and expertise’ (Ward 2012: 8). There is an emphasis on a regime of ‘high stakes’ testing of students and teachers alike. For a detailed analysis of the development and implementation of measures employed to achieve these aims, see Ward 2012.
[3] These are terms used by Heidegger: mitsein is the ontological structure of Dasein as essentially being with others; miteinandersein is the intentional engagements or relations that take place between individuals. See Heidegger 1962: 158.
[4] In his article ‘Place and Utopia’ (1990), Levinas distinguished between ‘making Israel’ as an ideal, and the State of Israel itself. In ‘From the Sacred to the Holy,’ he stated that ‘Israel’ can be understood simply as ‘a particular ethnic group’, but in the Talmud, it stands rather for ‘a human nature which is arrived at the fullness of its responsibilities and of its self-consciousness’ (1994). A fuller discussion of Levinas’s views on Israel, which are widely seen as problematic, is outside the scope of this article. See Caygill 2002: 85ff and 159ff.
[5] A reference to Heidegger’s concept of Fürsorge.
[6] This is the case of Joseph Greenlees, which Lister wrote about in a series of articles for The Lancet (1867), and which marked the first examples of antisepsis in practice.
[7] One of the authors of this article, David Allen, has recently undertaken a project for schools inspired by Heathcote’s ‘Lister’ project. See Kipling 2025. See also Allen & Handley 2022 and 2023.
Notes on Authors
David Allen is Artistic Director of Midland Actors Theatre (UK). The company was lead partner on three Erasmus Plus projects on the work of Dorothy Heathcote. David runs the Facebook group, ‘The Commission Model of Teaching,’ and the website www.mantlenetwork.com. He is the convenor of the annual Dorothy Heathcote Now conference. He is the author of numerous books and articles on drama including Performing Chekhov (1999) and Stanislavski for Beginners (1999/2015), and co-author (with Agata Handley) of ‘The Commission Model of Teaching’ (Saber & Educar, 31 (1), 2022) and ‘Encounters with Otherness in the Work of Dorothy Heathcote’ (Artspraxis, 10 (1), 2023).
Email: david@mantlenetwork.com
Agata Handley is Assistant Professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture, University of Łódź, Poland. Her main areas of interest are: contemporary British poetry; the culture of the English North; memory studies, and intermedial issues. She is the author of Constructing Identity in the Poetry of Tony Harrison (2016/2021). She is Editor-in-Chief of Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture. Her current research includes ekphrasis in anglophone literature and culture, and intertextuality in music videos.
Email: agata.handley@uni.lodz.pl
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