Dirty language: reclaiming pedagogy

Janice Malcolm and Miriam Zukas, University of Leeds, UK

Paper presented at SCUTREA, 33rd annual conference, University of Wales, Bangor,

1-3 July, 2003

We have been dissatisfied for some time with the limitations of the language used to describe the activities in which teachers engage. It is our view that contemporary discourses position teaching only in relation to learning, so that teaching is constructed rather obliquely as what teachers do inside classrooms (or other learning sites) to bring about learning. This implies that teaching is a decontextualised transfer of knowledge, skills and practice to the acquisitive learner; in other words, teaching is about instruction and teaching methods. Yet, when we talk with teachers about their work, they raise issues of disciplinary and vocational practices; personal and political values and beliefs; national and institutional issues such as quality assurance; we even talk about the purposes of teaching, and about the relationships between teaching and teachers, and learning and learners. So, drawing on understandings of ‘identity’ from linguistic, sociological and psychological perspectives, we started to write about ‘pedagogic identity’ (Malcolm and Zukas, 2000) as a way of challenging the dominant and often barren discourse of teaching and learning. We have been seeking a way to acknowledge linguistically the broader cultural, institutional and historical contexts in which educational transactions and practices are situated. In this paper, we survey the use of pedagogy[i] within adult education, and consider how the use of the term in Britain in recent times has diverged from its use in other parts of Europe. Finally, we argue for a revitalised understanding and reclaiming of pedagogy.

Why pedagogy?

Although we have written using the term pedagogy for some time, we have not made a case for its use in the education of adults. Given the historical debates in our field, and the ways in which the term has been reduced to a narrower meaning of ‘instructional techniques’, this case now needs to be made. According to the ESRC-funded review of pedagogic research and practice in post-compulsory education and lifelong learning for the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (Cullen and others, 2002), pedagogy ‘is generally taken to be synonymous with ‘instruction’, covering ‘teaching methods’ and ‘teaching styles’’ (p 8). A recent review for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Gordon and others, 2003) suggests that pedagogic development and pedagogic research in higher education (PedD and PedR, as they are characterised) have a common focus on ‘the relationship between teaching, learning and the learner and subject matter, within the context of higher education’ (p6). Whilst this implies a marginally broader understanding of pedagogy, it still ignores issues such as teacher values and beliefs – the teacher as ‘person-in-the-world’, as we have described it (Malcolm and Zukas, 2001) – and broader cultural, social and historical contexts.

We have reviewed the use of pedagogy by SCUTREA conference contributors, using the SCUTREA CD (1997) as a source. This includes all conference papers from 1970 onwards, and provides a reasonably representative picture of the ways in which British (and to a lesser extent other) adult educators have employed the term. We initially sought out papers that included the word pedagogy within the text, to enable us to see at least whether we were right in thinking of pedagogy as a ‘dirty word’ within our community. To our surprise, we found that 108 papers out of approximately 700 (some 15%) included mention of pedagogy. However half of these appeared only because they cited works with pedagogy in the title: usually Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972), but also works by authors such as Bernstein (1996) and Lather (1991). The brief analysis below is based on our reading of the remaining half of the papers. We have not addressed more recent trends in usage (and our suspicion is that pedagogy is spreading as adult education researchers engage with ideas drawn from initial education, anthropology and critical and feminist theory), but this reading helps to explain the historical unpopularity of the term and to uncover the usages which have occurred.

Pedagogy and SCUTREA

Three main trends emerged in this small-scale literature review. The first is the use of the term pedagogy to stand for teaching method, or teaching approach. For example, adult pedagogy, continuing education pedagogy, group pedagogy and the pedagogy of computer assisted learning, each implies some specific approach to teaching that takes account of the setting and/or students, but of little else. A further example of pedagogy as teaching methodology can be found in the dualistic usage of curriculum and pedagogy (that is, distinguishing between what is taught and how it is taught). However, its use in this sense is still relatively uncommon; this is probably because many feel uncomfortable about using the term in relation to adults, given its etymology.

The second trend provides some insight into why pedagogy might be relatively unpopular in the language of adult education. The most common use of pedagogy is opposition to andragogy. In the late 1960s, Knowles borrowed the word andragogy from Europe and developed a theory of what he called the ‘science and art of helping adults learn’, which he contrasted with pedagogy, or ‘the art and science of helping children learn’ (Knowles, 1980). He made five assumptions about adult learners which supposedly distinguished them from children (e.g. adults accumulate a growing reservoir of experience, which is a rich resource for learning); these assumptions then formed the basis for Knowles’ recommendations on the design, delivery and evaluation of adult learning (the ‘andragogy’ of adult learning). Knowles’ work was quickly criticised on several counts. His claim to a ‘theory’ of adult learning was strongly disputed (e.g. Brookfield, 1986), and his distinctions between adults’ and children’s learning did not really withstand scrutiny (see, for example, Hanson, 1996). Nevertheless, his arguments were widely welcomed, offering as they did an argument for the uniqueness of adult learning, and thus for the existence of a specific, bounded field of professional expertise which could be claimed by adult educators. Although many did not accept Knowles’ individualistic focus, nor his lack of attention to the sociohistorical context of learning, for a period between the 1970s and 1990s, pedagogy was discursively constructed as that which was not andragogy, and remained therefore outside many adult educators’ professional discourse.

The third trend in the literature is rather more recent; papers using the terms ‘critical pedagogy’ and ‘feminist pedagogy’ (often together) began to appear in the SCUTREA collection from 1988, when Colin Griffin wrote his now classic paper, ‘Critical thinking and critical theory in adult education’. His central argument does not concern us here, but Griffin, like many others, associated critical pedagogy with Freire, and particularly with his notion of conscientisation. This engagement with questions of power, culture and oppression in relation to schooling opened up new possibilities for understandings of pedagogy. In the USA, Giroux (1983) and others also drew on Freire’s work, together with eclectic ideas from critical theory, progressive education, Gramsci and Foucault, to popularise the notion of ‘critical pedagogy’. Darder and others (2003) suggest that this idea ‘constituted a significant attempt to bring an array of divergent views and perspectives to the table, in order to invigorate the capacity of radical educators to engage critically with the impact of capitalism and gendered, racialized relations upon the lives of students from historically disenfranchised populations’ (p 2). The utilisation of particular concepts within critical pedagogy, such as hegemony, praxis, resistance and ideology critique, helped to delineate the connections between education, democracy and transformative social action.

Simultaneously, the notion of feminist pedagogy emerged both separately from and in response to critical theory. Jennifer Gore (1990) distinguished between two ‘strands’: one, associated with essentially instructional understandings of pedagogy emerging from Women’s Studies departments, and the other, emphasising feminism(s) from schools of education. In adult education, many of those writing about feminist pedagogy have tended to draw on the former strand, once more aligning pedagogy with ‘method’, although there are exceptions (e.g. Tisdell, 1995) where pedagogy is more explicitly understood as socially and historically situated.

An emergent trend can also be detected in the association of pedagogy with location, which is commented upon extensively by Edwards and Usher (1997). Here, pedagogy takes on new meanings, disrupting essentialised notions of the teacher, the learner and the classroom: ‘Pedagogy therefore becomes a process of constant negotiation where what is central is not the fixed position (a state of being) but the active state of becoming that is an integral feature of the process of positioning – ‘the experience of the movement between positions’’ (pp 138-139). In this sense, pedagogy is no longer bounded by the classroom, or by anything else.

Pedagogy in English?

There is a further debate to be had about pedagogy in relation to its uses in other parts of Europe, in other languages and at other points in history. Hamilton (1999) dates the re-emergence of pedagogy in Britain from the 1970s, specifically from the appearance of work by Freire (1972) and Bernstein (1971), reflecting our own observations from the SCUTREA papers. It is worth noting that some SCUTREA contributions at this time and later also draw on much broader European (particularly Dutch) understandings of ‘agology’, ‘the science of guiding or leading, mostly guiding a person or a group of persons from somewhere or to somewhere’ (ten Have, 1973 p1); this seems to have been an attempt to reconcile some of the conceptual differences implicit in the development of andragogy as a response to pedagogy. It was however eclipsed by the surprising success of andragogy as both explanation of, and prescriptive framework for, the work of adult educators and the learning of their students. However the dominance of andragogy has now diminished in British adult education writing, and pedagogy has started to appear much more frequently. But what does it mean?

Simon’s (1981) question ‘Why no pedagogy in England?’ drew on an idea of the ‘science of teaching’, and is sometimes credited as having helped to re-establish pedagogy as an educational concept in the British discourse of school education (Davies, 1994; Murphy, 1996). He criticised British educational institutions for having ‘no concern with theory, its relation to practice, with pedagogy’ (Simon, 1981, p82), and sparked a debate about the different usages of the terms pedagogy and didactics in other European contexts, in which adult educators have had relatively little involvement. Hamilton (1999) provides a historical account of the ways in which specific understandings of both pedagogy and didactics have developed and dominated at different points in European history. He argues that earlier understandings of the art or science of teaching (drawing for example on Latin and Greek terminologies, and on the work of Comenius and Kant, among others) distinguished between the overall purposes of education, the scope and categorisation of knowledge, curricular design, and the methods of instruction; that is, they drew a clear distinction between the questions ‘What should they know?’ and ‘What should they become?’ (Hamilton, p136). Didactics can be seen as a specific element or branch of pedagogy concerned with questions of method and technique. Whilst in many other European languages these distinctions persist and have developed through use, in English the meanings attributed to these powerful terms are fluid and indistinct, and consequently difficult to analyse. Briefly, whilst pedagogy has re-emerged as a common term in British educational discourse, its meaning often appears to be limited to what might elsewhere be termed didactics.

Questions of method (‘how?’) have come to dominate British understandings of pedagogy in the last few years, at the expense of questions of purpose (‘why?’). Increasingly, the literature of both policy and practice has assumed ‘individualism as explanatory mode both for learners and teachers’ (Davies, p27), and that ‘learning and teaching’ – that is, an understanding of pedagogy as merely didactics – is a more fruitful concept than the broader and inevitably more complex notion of pedagogy. As we have argued elsewhere (Malcolm and Zukas, 2001) this is linked with the dominance of psychologistic explanations of learning, and encourages a technicist view of the processes of ‘effective’ teaching. However it also renders teachers, power, purposes and educational contexts invisible and, in effect, beyond analysis.

The discourse of ‘learning and teaching’ – with the words placed very deliberately in that order – has become more firmly rooted in post-compulsory education than in school education. Even where teachers are the ostensible focus, for example in teaching standards documentation (FENTO, 1999, ILT, 2000) we find that the primacy of individual ‘learners’ and their ‘learning’ eclipses any notion of teaching as a situated, complex activity. This is a particularly disconcerting linguistic sleight-of-hand in a context where teachers are routinely judged on their teaching ‘performance’, thoroughly monitored through quality assurance systems, and burdened with the responsibility of solving, through their teaching, any number of social and economic problems. We have ourselves been criticised (often by educational managers or policy makers) for focusing our research on teaching, when what really matters is learning – by implication, a separate and rather more important subject. ‘Learning’ thus becomes a highly effective perlocutionary device for implying that any discussion of the purposes and social relations of educational practice (rather than its facilitative techniques) is so much teacherly self-indulgence, akin to spending too much time in front of the mirror.

Reclaiming pedagogy

In the face of the success of the simplistic ‘learning and teaching’ discourse it is probably insufficient to wave a defiant flag for teaching, which has become merely the other side of learning – the didactic strategies employed to ensure that learning is acquired, and the bureaucratic gathering of the evidence of acquisition. We want rather to seize the linguistic initiative by reclaiming the word pedagogy from the narrow meaning to which it has been reduced in English, as a rich and appropriately multi-layered term for educational social practice. The teachers we have interviewed in the course of our research often struggle to express the dislocation which they experience when they try to (or are required to) separate themselves and their communities out from their teaching, or to think of their students as decontextualised individual learners. They clearly understand pedagogy as something both broader and more fundamental than the classroom techniques, recording practices, assessment strategies, etc. which they employ, willingly or otherwise. Their experience of complying with, and resisting, the practices which shape their work, implicates both institutions and wider social and political contexts in their understanding of pedagogy. This understanding, far from focusing on only one polarised aspect of learning and teaching, instead conceives educational practice as a situated, multifaceted and complex process, involving multiple relationships and, crucially, driven by specific and often conflicting purposes, power relations and interests. It allows us to ask ‘what should they/we become?’ as well as ‘what should they know?’ and ‘how can we make sure they know it?’. We would argue that pedagogy can be understood as encompassing all of this complexity, and thus allows us to do analytical justice to the work of both teachers and students.

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