The Power of Pedagogy

Jenny Leach, Bob Moon

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781446245767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

?[This book] is readable, engaging, informative and provoking? - Tony Rae, ESCalate

?The book is encompassing all my own passions as a holistic practitioner; I feel it is multi-cultural, offering powerfully diverse and inclusive ideas of pedagogy. In particular, the concepts of this book are like a breath of fresh air for the ?disabled? student, talking about alternative assessment etc.? - Helene McArthur, ESCalate

`Every now and again you come across a really important book that shifts and clarifies your thinking. The Power of Pedagogy is one of those books. Here you?ll find a fascinating analysis of the myriad of issues and ideas surrounding teaching and learning today. Drawing on history, theory and vignettes form today?s classrooms, these two experienced and active thinkers and practitioners have managed to provide new perspectives on the pedagogic mission. A remarkable piece of scholarship, it?s a ?must? for all those setting out to teach and for those already teaching with the sort of intellectual curiosity that is the hallmark of the outstanding teacher? - Tim Brighouse, formerly Adviser for London Schools, is Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education

?This important book manages to combine an illuminating breadth of global reference with real insight into the practice of teaching and learning. Its highly readable investigative narrative integrates theory and practice with a quality of analysis that is both rare and entirely convincing? - Sir David Winkley, former Headteacher Grove School, Handsworth and government education advisor

The concept of ?pedagogy? has become increasingly important as a frame of reference for debate about teaching and learning. In this book the authors analyse and explore contemporary ideas of pedagogy through the work of key figures including Freire, Montessori and Vygotsky, and explain how a new conception of pedagogy could transform educational institutions, particularly schools.

In locating pedagogy as central to the process of education the authors:

-explore the historical and cultural antecedents of our understanding of pedagogy

-analyse the way understanding of the working of the human mind influences teaching and learning

-review and critique ideas about learning and the construction of knowledge

-examine the way new forms of communication are impacting on the processes and purposes of pedagogic activity.

Highly relevant for masters and doctoral students of education, this book will also be of interest to educational practitioners undertaking research on issues related to pedagogy, both in the UK and internationally.

Bob Moon and the late Jenny Leach have written extensively on pedagogy, teacher education and international developments in the field, including Learners and Pedagogies (1999). They lead the Research Group on Teacher Education across Societies and Cultures (RITES) at the Open University, UK.

Bob Moon is Professor of Education at the Open University and Director of the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) Programme.

Jenny Leach was Professor of Teacher Learning and Development at the Open University.

1

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Pedagogy

We start with the premise that good teachers are intellectually curious about pedagogy.

You can reach Reggio Emilia from Bologna in less than an hour. The road traverses the fertile river valley of the Po, following the line of the ancient Via Emilia, the Roman road that crossed the region from east to west. This is the route that Bruno Ciari and others would have taken when he returned from the Second World War with a mission to revolutionise the schooling of their home district.

Half a century on, Reggio Emilia has one of the world’s most renowned early years systems. Educationalists from all over the world have followed the Via Emilia to seek out and wonder at the opportunities provided for the children of that region.

In 1991 Newsweek stated that if you had to choose anywhere in the world for your children to begin their schooling then Reggio Emilia would be the best choice. Jerome Bruner, following a visit, wrote:

I was not prepared for what I found. It was not just that they were better than anything I’d ever seen … What struck me about the Reggio pre-schools was how they cultivated imagination and, in the process, how they empowered the children’s sense of what is possible. But the more I observed, the more I realised that this was not coming out of some abstract theory or inspiration about pedagogy. Rather it exposed something deep about Reggio itself, something ‘molto reggiano’.¹

The journalist Furio Colombo provided a further perspective:

There is a place in the world where the talent, imagination, and professional skill dedicated to industry or science are dedicated instead to young children. A place in which the same people have worked together for years to refine their experience, and the children are stimulated to express every aspect of their unimaginable resource.²

Pedagogy, or pedagogia in Italian, was at the heart of the reform movement that Bruno Ciari set in train. It therefore seems a good starting point for our exploration of contemporary ideas about learning and teaching, and the relevance of these ideas to teachers in the twenty-first century.

Ciari’s first pedagogical experimentation was in the village school at Certaldo, but rapid promotion to becoming Director of the local school district gave him the opportunity to rethink the concept of early years education. An holistic concept of pedagogy was at the core of his thinking. Parents, as well as teachers and children, were seen as central to the educational process. Pedagogy, therefore, went beyond the particular skills of individual teachers. Children were viewed as strong and rich personalities with a natural curiosity to be exploited in the varied settings of school and community life. Co-operation and communication were seen as crucial and buildings and classrooms were built to exploit this. Teachers worked in pedagogic teams with the support of a pedagogical coordinator or pedagogista. Observation and research and the need for children to engage in a continuous process of discussion, interpretation and presentation of their work were together seen as key to pedagogical success.

Ciari’s ideas were sufficiently powerful for Reggio Emilia, subsequently led by Loris Malaguzzi, to set up a network of schools and centres for 0–6 years with the aim ‘to promote children’s education through the development of all their languages: expressive, communicative, symbolic, cognitive, ethical, metaphorical, logical, imaginative and educational’.³

Ciari’s vision was strongly rooted in a wider history of ideas about pedagogy and schooling. He had previously met Maria Montessori, who in the early years of the twentieth century had formulated a pedagogy that embraced the total learning environment of the child and classroom. For Montessori the worlds inside and outside the classroom needed to be brought together and understood when nurturing children. Again, pedagogy had to be understood in the total setting of each learner and school. Montessori railed against the classifications and gradings of children that were such a feature of newly emergent,‘free and compulsory’, basic education systems. She became convinced that many children who were labelled as ‘low ability’, or even ‘unteachable’, could, given the right pedagogic setting, achieve much more than societal expectations suggested. Thus Maria Montessori found practical ways of demonstrating what could be done. As Director of a school for children with perceived learning disabilities, attached to the University of Rome, she showed how those formerly labelled as ‘deficient’ could compete successfully with their peers in the main school system.

Reggio Emilia represents one starting point for exploring pedagogy, but there are others. In North America, quite some time before Ciari’s reforms were taking root, John Dewey was beginning revolutionary work that was a reaction against the traditional US educational framework of memorisation and recitation. Education is not the preparation for life, it is life itself, he argued. Like Ciari and Montessori he also challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that saw little educational future, not as in the context of a largely peasant population, but for students living in a newly industrial age. Using radically new approaches Dewey, with his wife, Alice Chipman Dewey, launched the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools where he was able to actualise his pedagogical beliefs in a series of educational programmes founded on the principles of hands-on learning and exploration. By 1904, after eight years of intense and creative pedagogical work, the Laboratory School had become, many argued, the most interesting experimental venture in American education. It had also become a centre for other scholars of various fields to meet together to analyse and discuss solutions to the most pressing intellectual and social problems of the time.

Photo: Courtesy Phyllis Wallbank, Principal, The Gatehouse School

Montessori with pupils at the Gatehouse School in London on her last visit to England, in 1951, the year before her death.

For Dewey, the role of the teacher was not to impose on children irrelevant tasks that would be potentially useful a decade later, but instead to identify each child’s interest, organise learning activities around its immediate and proximate use, and then step by step move the process in the desired direction. All so-called ‘traditional’ subjects such as reading, writing, history, spelling, arithmetic and science, were connected with one another. Dewey saw value in the methods of subjects and disciplines, but he also saw motivational energy coming from a cross-disciplinary approach to curriculum design. Dewey himself promoted the idea that intelligence was an instrument for overcoming obstacles in one’s life, and so the focus of the Chicago Laboratory School zeroed in on how to close the gap between thought and action. By having such a focus, the school became the centre for Dewey’s educational philosophy, set out in works such as The School and Society (1899), The Child and the Curriculum (1902) and Democracy and Education (1916). The teachers of the Laboratory School, Dewey argued, started with question marks rather than fixed answers.

Both Reggio Emilia’s example and the work of John Dewey caught the imagination of the world. It is no coincidence that Ciari, Montessori and Dewey all faced controversy and experienced political pressure.⁴ Each saw a new approach to pedagogy as representing something much greater than a more effective approach to teaching.

With their vision of teaching came a new view of learners and learning and a new framework within which to conceive the relationship between teacher and learner. In this way they saw pedagogy as going beyond the specific skills of the teacher to embrace the wider purposes and beliefs that surround and impact upon all pedagogic settings. It is this broader vision that we seek to explore.

We start with the premise that good teachers are intellectually curious about pedagogy. Such curiosity requires an examination of values and beliefs as well as the strategies and techniques the teacher deploys. It is this that makes pedagogy inevitably contested, although the forms and strength of such contestation vary over time and in respect of place. In most education systems there are endemic clashes between the perceived polarities of ‘traditionalists’ and ‘progressives’ in thinking about pedagogic theories and practices. At times this can generate all the intensity of an ethnic, sectarian clash and such debates can go way beyond the professional world of formal educators. The media in turn recognise that an increasingly literate and knowing populace has an interest in such affairs that were unknown a generation or two earlier. We recognise the validity of the debate here but we would want to question some of the ways in which the terms of reference are set.

A distinction is often made between pedagogy and education.⁵This is more than mere semantics, although the words do have different Greek and Latin derivations. Pedagogy comes from the Greek paidagogos (the leading of the child/slave), whereas education comes from the Latin educare (to bring up or nourish).The discourse of education, we want to argue, is more likely to be descriptive and normative, whereas pedagogy invites us to recognise the multiple and various dynamics of scenes of learning and teaching. Henry Giroux⁶ has pointed up such differences. Highly pragmatic and behaviouristic in both its assumptions and practice, the field of education has historically always viewed theory as something of an unnecessary intrusion. In distinction pedagogy is a mode of engagement with the social process – or rather with social processes. This in part helps explain its relevance to literacy and cultural studies, feminism, philosophy and political theory, where the notion of pedagogy has invited attack particularly from conservative quarters.

This distinction between education and pedagogy has also informed the debate about the place of pedagogy in preparing teachers. More than twenty years ago Brian Simon, the educational historian, wrote a highly influential article under the title ‘Why No Pedagogy in England?’⁷Although specifically addressing the English context, his analysis was also highly relevant to North America.⁸ In this article he argued that the social class-related reverence for the ‘amateur’ infiltrated the school system through the public schools in forms that effectively closed out intellectual curiosity around the concept of pedagogy. Simon’s critique then explored the wider social and political context in which pedagogy operates. The demise of pedagogy in England – in his terms ‘the end of the systematic study of the teaching process’ – was signalled, he contends, as early as the 1920s. Its cause he puts down to an increasing emphasis on categorisation and selection and particularly the then ascendancy of psychometric theory and convictions about the measurement of ability. Simon argued for a science of teaching, creating a body of general principles that would inform all the settings in which learning and teaching take place. Here Simon was greatly influenced by Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist whose work only became internationally known in the middle of the last century. For Vygotsky pedagogy had to be oriented not towards the yesterday of development but towards its tomorrow. What the child can do today with adult help, he said, he will be able to do independently tomorrow. And, for Vygotsky, the only good teaching is that which outpaces development.⁹

This resonates with Montessori’s or Ciari’s idea of refusing to make predictive judgements about children’s potential abilities. Brian Simon was a lifelong campaigner against the categorisations of children promoted by many education systems. He was against streaming or tracking and in the English context he was one of the earliest critics of the system of selective secondary schools introduced in 1944.¹⁰

But Simon also had a rigorous view about the need for structure in learning and he was critical of some progressives who had argued for a pedagogy of individualisation. For Simon, if teaching is based on the idea that each child requires a specific pedagogical approach, then the construction of an all embracing pedagogy, or general principles of teaching, becomes an impossibility.¹¹We share this view, not only because of the constraints imposed in many pedagogic contexts by resources, buildings, classrooms and learner numbers, but also because learning and teaching, we believe, are in essence social processes. One learner needs other learners and while individualisation may have a place in building pedagogic settings, it cannot in its own terms provide an effective pedagogy.

We began this chapter with Reggio Emilia. Recently one of our students posed the question,‘If Reggio Emilia is so outstanding, why has it not been replicated, at least across the western world?’This is a good question and, after some thought, we gave two related answers. First, there are other parts of the world that are trying to emulate the world that Ciari and his colleagues created. Individual groups have created schools that have adopted the Reggio Emilia approach.¹²And aspects of the Reggio Emilia approach have been incorporated into the ideas of some school districts.¹³ However, the formal structures of schooling are not easy to change. A few years ago Herbert Kliebard looked at the teaching in one mid-western state of the USA.¹⁴ He analysed the curriculum and organisation of the one teacher school that had existed in the early years of that community and he showed how the project-centred model of curriculum and pedagogy, idiosyncratic at times but inspirational in the memories of the children, had given way to an almost industrial approach as numbers boomed and legislation was passed about compulsory schooling. What he demonstrated was that a form of regimentation had come to dominate schooling as the size of provision and its associated bureaucracy had grown. Large-scale school provision seems to militate against considering, let alone incorporating, the central tenets of the Reggio Emilia provision.¹⁵

We would argue, however, that as school systems grow and expand¹⁶ the need for a humanistic, not mechanistic, pedagogy is becoming even more critical. This may take many forms, as the title of our last chapter,‘Pedagogies’, illustrates. However, at its core pedagogy must have the purpose of power for allowing children and others to forge their own ways and identities in our complex, knowledge-rich society.

We are wary of expressing from the outset a hard and fast definition of pedagogy, since we intend this book to unfold some of the debates and practices that over tim...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements and notes from the authors
• Introduction
• 1 Pedagogy
• 2 Settings
• 3 Minds
• 4 Learning
• 5 Knowledge
• 6 Toolkits
• 7 Identities
• 8 Pedagogies
• Endnotes
• Index