Spotkanie jako element strukturacji społecznej w ujęciu A. Giddensa. Konteksty edukacyjne

Abstract

The article is an attempt at applying the ideas of A. Giddens, a British sociologist, in educational research. The core of his structuration theory is the reality of encounter, in a multidimensional approach. For Giddens, the social act of encounter is crucial in creating a social reality. People enter an interaction in order to create ideas of reality, and then are themselves created by those ideas. This mutual dependence is, according to Giddens, an attempt to combine two approaches, which – first in philosophy, and then in social sciences – opposed each other as for the individual’s or the society’s primacy in creating social reality. Education, in its broad sense, is a part of this reality. Thus the author finds it justified to resort to the structuration theory as a tool that enables a better understanding of identity of educational activities. Firstly, the structuration theory is presented, and its terminology is explained, in order to display – through showing the crucial features of a social encounter – the elements that structure social reality. They are both internal and external factors. The former belong to the very structure of an encounter, e.g. co-presence, ontological security, tact, trust, or situational awareness. The latter characterize the formal aspects of an encounter, e.g. time, space, routine, ephemerality, or systematicity. In result of the conducted analyses it appears that the model of understanding social reality, proposed by Giddens, can be helpful in recognizing the identity of educational activities. The author of the article would like to inspire and direct further investigations in this area.