The possibility of mutual recognition: What we can learn from the tragedy of Achilles

Abstract

I first began seriously thinking about the term “mutual recognition” after reading bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress when I was a doctoral student in 2007. Since then, it has been central to my pedagogical practice at the City University of New York where I teach beginning and pre-service teachers as well as doctoral candidates. The writings of hooks, alongside those of Paulo Freire and Lisa Delpit, and with a tradition that extends back as far as Socrates, embrace dialogical engagement to guide students to know themselves and each other. With that awareness, as Freire writes, they have the potential to “intervene in their reality” and “emerge from submersion.” Mutual recognition also, vitally, requires teachers, who are in a position of official power in the classroom, and who often come from radically different backgrounds and life experiences than their students, to purge themselves of their beliefs and biases, at least temporarily, so that they can guide their students and themselves in this process of acknowledgment and empathy. This is very difficult to do well. Though much has been written about mutual recognition within educational scholarship, my recent reading of Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad, and the current state of the world which the Iliad well reflects though it was composed over 3000 years ago, impressed upon me the urgency of practicing mutual recognition in the wider world that we share