Theory and Methods for Public Pedagogy Research

Karen Charman, Mary Dixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000357646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Theory and Methods for Public Pedagogy Research introduces promising new methods of public pedagogy research centered around transforming rather than explaining knowledge. The new methods are premised on a new theorisation of public pedagogy which recognises the educative agent. The agency of the public to speak, to be heard, to know is manifest as the educative agent speaks their knowledge and the researcher must be attentive to that speaking.

This work extends the well-established intellectual projects in the field to introduce four new methods for public pedagogy research: organisation, performance, curation and researcher. A key focus of this work is attending to how the circulation of knowledge in non-formal settings can be recognised. It examines the under-published area of pedagogy and research in public spaces and engages post-qualitative approaches to inquiry to open up the field. Moreover, it explores the possibility of performances, art exhibitions and museums as public spaces of knowledge generation and pedagogy. It also shows how research can be applied in practice in public pedagogy to discover best practices for working in these spaces. Finally, it confronts and critiques the dilemmas of public pedagogy research and the limits of research methods which have previously been deployed in this field.

This book will be of interest to researchers and students in the field of public education and teaching in a variety of social science and arts disciplines, and education.

1New Theorisation of Public Pedagogy

In this chapter, we offer a new theorisation of public pedagogy as a basis for our methods of research. We begin with a brief overview of the field of Public Pedagogy. Our concern is not so much to argue the merits, or lack thereof, of articles and practices that constitute the field nor to provide a comprehensive or detailed literature review but instead to move the theorisation toward an understanding of a nexus of public, pedagogy, knowledge and authority.

In order to forward this theorisation and establish methods, we address the question of what is the public through the work of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. We note the inconclusiveness of how the word public is defined. To this end we agree with Arendt's (1958) demarcation of public as a realm that is enacted when people come together. Further, we draw on Foucault's (2010) understanding of what constitutes a sense of public valorisation meaning how does the circulation of knowledge become recognised as having authority. We then move on to critically examine the term pedagogy. We argue the term pedagogy itself has become narrowly defined to denote a teaching strategy. We examine its uses within the existing field of public pedagogy. We then argue an understanding of the pedagogical encounter, which can be productively rendered through a relational reading. Critical to our theorisation of public pedagogy is the term authority and the mistaken conflation of this term with power. In order to address this conflation of power and authority we return to Arendt to interrogate how authority can be re-thought beyond power. We draw on Sigmund Freud and Nancy Luxon to consider how internalised authority can be re-constituted as a form of self-authorisation alongside Foucault's concept of parrhesia—truth teller. We introduce the educative agent as pedagogue and as an instance of parrhesia. Our explication of method then comes from this theorisation of public pedagogy. This work renders the actualisation of the concept of educative agent through the confluence of three aspects that enable who speaks knowledge—public, pedagogue and authority. Our readings of the ‘methods’ explicated in this work have given us access to the educative agent.

Major threads of public pedagogy writing

Public Pedagogy as a term and field signals that education and learning can occur anywhere. The study of informal learning supports this (Hooper-Greenhill 2007) as do studies on the effect of socialisation that is inclusive of but exceeding formal schooling, alongside the myriad of cultural apparatuses that we engage with. Theories of subject formation and the possibilities of expression expand this educative process within and beyond the field of sociology and cultural studies through the broad tropes of philosophy and politics. Mapping what can be termed public pedagogy can run the gauntlet from so called high culture such as social history and art museum spaces through to popular culture such as Disney or the proliferation of Marvel and DC universes. To date the field has been largely concerned with power and ideology circulated through public tropes. A large part of the public pedagogy literature is actually focused on curriculum. We argue this in part arises from concern with knowledge that works at the intersection of curriculum and pedagogy to form ideology. The idea of curriculum and pedagogy being outside of formal educational sites has been present in discussion for a number of years now. Schubert (2010, p. 71), for example, has been describing ‘outside curriculum’ since 1981 as occurring in ‘families, homes, peer groups, non-school organizations, communities, and mass media’. In his earliest work in this area Schubert (1981, p. 186) asserts that to be effective, school curricula ‘must relate to perspectives students acquire from other curricula’. This thinking around ‘other’ or non-school curriculum challenges the notion that there is a ready split between knowledge acquired outside of formal schooling and knowledge within. This collapse of so called ‘authorised’ knowledge is a critical aspect of the way in which we theorise public pedagogy.

The most sustained contribution to the field of public pedagogy has come from Jennifer A. Sandlin, Jake Burdick and Brian Schultz (2010) in the Handbook of Public Pedagogy, which provides an extensive mapping of public pedagogy as a field. This book was followed by an edited collection Problematizing Public Pedagogy (2014, (ed) Burdick, Sandlin and O'Malley). The breadth of this edited collection on public pedagogy is testimony to the richness of the field. As the title suggests, one of the appeals of this book is the very problematisation of the term public and pedagogy. The editors begin in ‘Breaking without Fixing’ by signalling the intent of the collection as inhabiting an aporia, ‘a moment to ask new questions, ones that open the disquieting, yet productive, space of aporia—the intersection between meaning and unmeaning’ (Charman 2015, p. 3). Signalling public pedagogy as such, the editors evoke radical possibility. Burdick and Sandlin continue to make interesting and nuanced engagements within the field in numerous journal articles (2010; 2011; 2013; 2014; 2020).

In a recent publication (O'Malley, Sandlin and Burdick 2020) they add to this work with attention to the influences of the post-human readings of public pedagogy together with the place of the digital and of youth. They identify two issues in going forward. Firstly, the colonialist and humanist origins of public pedagogy must be addressed and secondly attention must be given to ‘haunting visible spaces to preserve the fading ethical vocation of the public sphere’ (Burdick 2018, p. 17). The ‘methods’ offered in this book go some way to speak to that haunting of the actual lived of the public.

Critical pedagogy is at times written as synonymous with public pedagogy. Power has been the object of challenge for Critical Pedagogy. Critical pedagogy associated with Henry A. Giroux provides a sustained critical analysis of the formations of neo-liberal power specifically in the United States of America but applicable to other western countries. According to Dale and Hyslop-Margison (2010, p. 130), critical pedagogy entails ‘Pedagogical practices associated with…the needs of the individual learner ahead of corporate political agendas, and encourage social reconstruction to achieve social justice’. The point of critical pedagogy is the importance of transforming consciousness with a view to improving disadvantaged lives (Dale and Hyslop-Margison 2010). Patrick A. Roberts and David J. Steiner (2010, p. 21) describe Giroux's work as Critical Public Pedagogy, explaining that ‘Critical public pedagogy broadens the pedagogical field to include the public terrain of culture, and thereby promotes autonomous political agency by expanding possibilities for critique, self-definition, and praxis’. Despite its uptake in the area of Public Pedagogy literature, there has been significant criticism of Critical Pedagogy. In 1989 Elizabeth Ellsworth, drawing on an analysis of a curriculum she developed, argued that critical pedagogy in education was reinforcing the very oppressions it sought to overcome. It did this by hiding the political agendas of the critical pedagogue. Glenn Savage describes a process of glamorisation of the critical pedagogue:

There appears an implicit assumption that harmful, dominating and so-called public forms of cultural knowledge require ‘fixing’ by critical pedagogues, whose raison d’être is to essentially revolutionize social life by tackling the ‘wrong kinds’ of educative influence and installing the ‘right kinds’. (Savage 2010, p. 111)

Public pedagogy literature draws on a traditional use of the term pedagogue. Plato spoke about pedagogues as ‘men who by age and experience are qualified to serve as both leaders (hëgemonas) and custodians (paidagögous)’ of children (Longenecker 1982, p. 53). In this way the pedagogue is seen in the role of teacher. The public pedagogue has intention to teach the public. This intent to teach the public is explicitly addressed in the work of Gert Biesta. Biesta has made a significant contribution to the field of public pedagogy particularly in his distinctions of the educational work of public pedagogy. He describes three iterations of public pedagogy work (2012). In describing these iterations, he refers to the pedagogue/teacher as educational agent (2012, p. 691). The pedagogue's work here is intentional. This public pedagogue is critical in the distinctions of the three types of his pedagogy. In pedagogy for the public he distinguishes a pedagogy aimed at the public. The pedagogical form here is that of instruction. Here Biesta writes that:

The world is seen as a giant school and the main role of educational agents is to instruct the citizenry. This involves telling them what to think, how to act and, perhaps most importantly, what to be. (Biesta 2012, p. 691)

The second distinction involves a pedagogy of the public wherein ‘a giant educational class in which educational agents take the role of facilitator’ (2012, p. 692). The third distinction is an enactment of a concern for publicness:

Becoming public is not about a physical relocation from the house to the street or from the oikos to the polis, but about the achievement of a form of human togetherness in which, to put it in the language of Hannah Arendt, action is possible and freedom can appear. (Biesta 2012, p. 693)

Here the educational agent/the public pedagogue interrupts. Like Biesta we draw on the work of Arendt but locate the educative work across the pedagogical realm that is beyond the teacher/pedagogue. We also argue that entering the pedagogical encounter may not be intentional although often it is. We break open this category of pedagogue in a dynamic and fluid pedagogical reading.

The public

In this section, we look at what constitutes this word public in order to understand the elements that render possible the actualisation of participation in the public realm. We argue there is no actualisation of the public without people. How this public is actualised differs according to different theorists. Primarily we draw on the ideas of Hannah Arendt from her book the Human Condition (1958). In this section, we initially outline Arendt's conceptualisation of the public and what she argues has been the erasure of the public realm. In order to understand how Arendt engages with and conceptualises the public realm it is necessary to extrapolate the circulation of modes of being Arendt identifies as occurring within society. We then briefly look at Jurgen Habermas’ concept of the public sphere and a counter argument to this concept through the word of Michael Warner (2002). We give attention then to a range of publics—multiple, counter and little and our new theorisation of migrating publics.

Arendt and the public realm

Arendt's work in the Human Condition (1958) is an interrogation on what constitutes being human. Both a political and a philosophical expose, this work traverses antiquity through to the modern era. In Arendt's writing on ‘The Public and the Private Realm’, she identifies two elements of the public. Firstly, Arendt notes (1958, p. 50), ‘…everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity’. Secondly, Arendt writes (1958, p. 52), ‘…the term public signifies the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us’. Arendt describes the split between the public and the private realm as being demarcated by economics that has increasingly moved from what constituted only the affairs of the household in Athenian times into the social in modern times. Arendt notes the public and private realms have been in existence since the rise of the city state (1958). This is in contrast to the social realm that Arendt argues is neither private or public and is a relatively new phenomenon (1958). The social is often conflated with the public realm but for Arendt the social is a reflection of private interests. Arendt (1958, p. 33) writes that ‘…private interests assume a public significance that we call society’. Arendt argues in this shift from public to social with the simultaneous rise of economics as no longer merely a private concern, the public realm has become diminished.

Arendt outlines three spheres of being that circulate in society: Labour, Work and Action. Labour is an activity that is undertaken to preserve ourselves and is biologically driven. Work is the activity that moves human existence outside of the so-called natural world to one where human existence is bounded by that which is not the natural. Action is an order of being whereby a new beginning occurs. This distinction of action is central to our reading of public pedagogy. In the following discussion, we elaborate this notion of action, its nature and its role in the world. If the public realm has receded and has been replaced by the social the possibility of action is diminished. This is because if the social is determined by private interests it consists of elements that cannot be free from those determinants that occur in work. Work is the production of objects beyond the labour of biological survival. Both labour and work are necessary for existence. Action, however is the space where freedom can appear. Arendt writes:

Of all the activities necessary and present in human communities, only two were deemed to be political and to constitute what Aristotle called the bio politikos, namely action and speech. (Arendt 1958, p. 25)

In contemporary times the blurred boundaries between public and private through the advent of the social make it difficult to recognise what might constitute a distinct public realm. However, the public realm is where the possibility of realising the third sphere, that of action and speech, can occur.

In Arendt's philosophical framework each individual is born unique and as such their birth constitutes a new beginning. Through speech and action this uniqueness is revealed. This uniqueness is referred to as who a person is as opposed to what a person is. As Arendt writes:

With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world… This...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Moving Beyond the Educational Institution and Traditional Methods
• Introduction
• 1 New theorisation of public pedagogy
• 2 Organisation as method
• 3 The performance as research method
• 4 Public curation as research method
• 5 Citizen researcher as research method
• 6 Method and theory
• Index