My time in Initial Teacher Education was spent mainly doing things most other students did. I participated in various events and gatherings, and I spent a proportion of my time engaged with study. In the four years I spent at University, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times the term 'pedagogy' was used. Indeed, I left in 1991 with no real awareness of the term or its general meaning.
It might be that such a position is deemed 'awful' or 'a damning indictment of university ITE'. I rather think my experience was a product of its time. At that time, pedagogy, never really featured in the UK as an educational term, a fact noted by Brian Simon as far back as the 80s, and Robin Alexander in 2004. I came, then, to regard the term as something elusive; something to be avoided at all costs.
I started teaching in 1991, undertook a masters between 1998 and 1999, worked as an Advisory Teacher between 1999 and 2001, and then entered higher education. Throughout that time, and until about 2008, 'learning and teaching' (L&T) was my preferred nomenclature to describe classroom organisation and activity.
The learning-teaching turn
The advent of the English National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies between 1997 and 1999 gave rise to particular forms of 'L&T' driven by two things: first, attempts to identify and laud 'best practice'; and second, a belief that teachers needed dramatic and specific support in their classroom practice. I discuss some of this in a chapter in my 2014 book 'Policy and Education'.
Regarding 'best practice': in 2008 I wrote about how this was testament to a particular form of educational theorising which desired certainty, consistency and rigour. Even then, it seemed to me that the qualifier 'best' signalled relative status not only in terms of comparison with other forms of 'L&T', but also absolute status in terms of acceptability. Such acceptability seemed redolent of a desire to de-politicise education (and by default teaching) and subsequently locate responsibility for learning squarely at the feet of the teacher. The belief that 'teachers make a difference' is a difficult one to challenge; indeed, I am sure that they do. If not, then what are we all doing? But what NLS and NNS led to were specific classroom structures and organisation, and specific views for teaching and its relationship with and to learning. There were many at the time who challenged the schemes' prescriptions and many who demonstrated successful learning outwith NLS and NNS procedures. Further, it was often missed at the time that they were non-statutory schemes of work, designed to support rather than direct. Problematically, what was more often seen than not, was a fearful response by teachers who, to meet the guidelines often deployed professionally constraining classroom practice. In 2003, Stephen Ball discusses this in his paper on the 'Terrors of Performativity'.
Of course, attached to these schemes were strict targets for National Curriculum attainment, set by government, passed through local authorities and into schools. Eventually, these targets found their way to the level of the pupil. So ensued the '3s into 4s' drive. It became difficult to challenge NLS and NNS given the targeted nature of education policy, especially given the plethora of local authority Literacy and Numeracy Consultants milling around schools at the time. More could be said about this; but that is probably to read about in publications of the time. nevertheless, the policy moments described above led to particular positions for learning and teaching.
On assessment
A quick note is necessary here. I have not, hitherto mentioned assessment. 'Inside the Black Box' was published in the late 90s and proved to be a catalyst for developing approaches to learning and teaching that readily embedded assessment as a ‘learning’ matter. Formative assessment became de-rigour, driven by research evidence that demonstrated 'problems' with the summative, and the gains to be made from learning-commentaries and feedback, rather than the conferment of simple grades. Such developments added well-reasoned discussion to the education and schooling debates and did, in the local authority in which I worked at the time, lead to questions about whether conversation should only be about learning and teaching, for assessment should be an integral part of the two. For sure, debate occurred as to whether we should, more realistically, talk about learning, teaching and testing.
Towards pedagogy
Whether this misses the point or not I do not want to get into here; rather, this trip down memory lane has served the purpose of setting out my formative years in education, replete as they were with conversations about teaching, learning, testing, targets, education and schooling, amongst other things.
It was around 2006 that I began to seriously question the use of terms that, hitherto, had been the staple of my work. At the time I was deeply taken with social constructivism as an epistemological director for educational interactions. It was here that the term pedagogy entered the fray, dredged up from the depths of possible earlier experiences. The de-political moves emanating from the elision of 'education' in favour of 'learning' (broadly conceived as an individual matter), led me to question the veracity of the latter as an effective agent in the construction of educative moments, as envisaged by political Discourse (here I am using the work of Gee (2012) on Big-D and little-d D/discourse).
That presented at the time through policy-missive as seemingly obvious was the causal chain between teachers doing something and learners learning something. At one level, this seems self-evident: as teachers we engage in activity and actions, and those classed as 'students' or 'pupils' or 'children' or 'young people' learn. As I said above, I do think that as teachers we effect learning. However, this causal chain was just too simplistic: Do 'A' and they will learn 'X'. They might, yes, but then again, they might not. Problematically and politically, starting around 2010, when 'they might not' happened, conversations began to circulate about how, perhaps, this meant that the pupil concerned was not 'ready' for X', or that the teacher concerned was not able to teach ‘A’. Indeed, questions were asked about the veracity of educational matters such as 'inclusion' (simplistically then seen as mainstreaming it must be said).
Pedagogy and the role for positioning
I graduated with my PhD in 2012, the title of which was 'Education, Education Policy and the Politics of Pedagogy'. By then I had shifted my concerns to matters broader than mere learning, or teaching, and instead embraced possible ways of conceptualising the intricacies of the human endeavour that is, broadly speaking, pedagogy. I was drawn to the work of Rom Harré and Luk van Langenhove, amongst others, for their work on Positioning Theory, at heart, a social constructionist endeavour.
Centring on the ways in which we are all, throughout moment-by-moment interactions, continually positioned by others and constantly position ourselves, Positioning Theory seeks to examine possible ways in which we might come to realise our-selves, not as static, objective entities, but as individuals and groups of individuals in constant flux. The relatively static representation given by 'role' might, therefore, serve well as a linguistic shorthand, but does not capture the ways in which we shift to-and-fro, back-and-forth, betwixt and between ever evolving interpretations and representations of others and ourselves.
It was this which brought me to the realisation that pedagogy, rather than a simple shorthand for the ‘methods and practices of teaching’, is, perhaps, a way of understanding our place 'in and with the world'. It serves as a reminder of the fallibility of human interactions set against a world we are constantly 'coming to know' through 'ever shifting personal and social positions'.
The ways we understand depend as much on our own sense of where we are, in the here-and-now (but a here-and-now that exists not as a single point in time, but rather an experience through time: past present and future all colliding) as they do on the positions we give and adopt for others. We know 'of' something, or 'about' something, or we can 'do' something because we judge, in part, for ourselves. Such judgement is also a comparison against the relative positions held, however fleetingly by others. We position ourselves as knowledgeable because we have others whom we so position or do not position. We 'know' partly because others position us as 'knowing'; when we derive, for example new expositions, this is 'agreed' through aspects such as peer review, or correct/incorrect on a test or exam.
To conclude
But for pedagogy, it seems that something is missing. While the previous 'in and with the world' suffices personally, teachers act with and for others; we may teach ourselves, but this does not make us a teacher. To be a teacher we are 'in and with the world' but we also are 'in and acting on the world, with and for others’. This, I think, gives a basis for moving forward with an appreciation of the ways in which, whilst we may seek to effect change, this is not always guaranteed.
I am less concerned with the 'hints and tips' we might glean from each other and more concerned with the ways that we can 'be with and for others'. This does not negate the idea that there are things we can do to better (or worsen) change and growth, for there are. Clearly, some things we do and can do as a teacher are more or less likely to have a positive effect. I do not dispute this. What does concern me, though is how pedagogy has, in some cases become defined as a vehicle to state certainty: 'this way of teaching is the best and we should all do this at all times'. There is much that defines pedagogy, if we accept its perspective that it relates to people and their being in the world. To reduce this to a series of definitive statements about the 'right way to teach', or 'the ridiculousness of that other view' seems to me to move us away from pedagogy and towards imposed technique in the (mistaken in my view) belief that it is only what we do that matters.
This, then, is the realm of certainty; the space where conversations move from 'how might we define and embrace the educative' towards 'you did not do this, therefore you were wrong'. The assumption is that 'mistakes' come from not following the script, rather than understanding the contingency of the improvisational inherent in and with pedagogy. I am not in the business of certainty; rather, I am searching for ever more notable, interesting, thought-provoking, and provocative ways to understand what it means to be human; after all, isn't that what teaching is all about?
References
Adams, P. (2008). Considering 'best practice': the social construction of teacher activity and pupil
learning as performance. Cambridge Journal of Education, 38(3), 375-392.
Adams, P. (2014). Policy and Education. London: David Fulton Press.
Ball, S.J. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228.
Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment. School of Education, London: King's College, London.
Gee, J. P. (2012). Social Linguistics and Literacies, Ideology in Discourses. London: Routledge.
Harré, R. (2004). Positioning Theory. Accessed May 16, 2006. http://www.massey.ac.nz/_alock/virtual/positioning.doc.
Van Langenhove, L., and R. Harré. 1999. Introducing Positioning Theory. In R. Harré and L. van Langenhove (Eds.) Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 14-31