Abstract not found

Ancient rhetorics tried to balance patos, logos and ethos. Classical and romantic education searched in the 18th and 19th century for beauty, truth and goodness. Pestalozzi pinpointed his pedagogy in the three metaphorical h'es heart, head and hand. However in the evermore differentiated curricula of the 20th century these basic triadic understandings got lost in increased specificity and complexity. Especially teacher education became fragmented and non-coherent by prioritising the restricted and shifting goals of school subjects facing modernity. This theoretical paper argues that researchers in education should understand their 'object ' and their research as communication. By departuring from the communicative utterance, communication can be seen as balancing syntax, semantics and pragmatics of discourse both in narrow (micro) and a broad sense (macro). This theoretical positioning can help teacher educators to trace how the educational goals of the school subjects and knowledge in general have to relate to and balance aesthetics, epistemology and ethics simultaneously. The paper exemplifies, by applying a framework based on theories of triadic communication (Bakhtin, 1986 and Habermas, 1984), how major curricular aspects and textbook ideologies for teacher education can be seen as educational and communicational trilemmas. In addition it is claimed that research methodologies have to take the implication of a triadic approach into consideration when validating.