- Email: [email protected]
Reclaiming pedagogy
Geoforum 34 (2003) 283–285 www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Editorial
Reclaiming pedagogy
In geography, as in so many other disciplines, teaching has been a sorely neglected subject for debate and discussion. When I say ÔteachingÕ I do not mean the nuts-and-bolts of how to give a good lecture or how to use computers in multiple-choice assessments. Instead, I am referring to two deeper issues. The first is what a university education is and should be about. The second is how that education is shaped by and influences the social formations in which it is embedded. It is a peculiar fact that the many people who spend so much time designing and delivering degree courses spend so little time reflecting on the means and ends of pedagogy. I include myself here. Since 1995, when I landed my first university post, several hundred students have encountered me, my reading lists and my assessments. Yet I have rarely paused to reflect deeply on quite what my teaching practices are designed to achieve. Instead, I have operated with a definite but (crucially) unarticulated philosophy of learning. And I have done so under institutional conditions over which I have only partial control. I am surely not alone. Geography is marked by a conspicuous non-debate over pedagogy. It is rarely discussed at conferences and professional meetings, let alone in print. Symptomatically, the few journals devoted to a formal consideration of teaching and learning––such as the Journal of Geography in Higher Education––are preoccupied with ÔtechnicalÕ matters (such as formative assessment, virtual field-classes, student-centred learning and the like). Missing is an articulate discussion of the why and wherefore of university teaching in the current conjuncture. This was recently brought home to me when I read HamnettÕs (2003) phillipic in this journal. Replete with a cliched title, his editorial bemoaned the theoreticism, superficial radicalism and relativism of the several postprefixed approaches that now dominate Anglophone human geography. For Hamnett research in human geography needs to be made more relevant to Ôreal worldÕ problems––just as it supposedly was in the early 1970s when the first Ôradical geographersÕ came on the scene. What has this got to do with teaching? Nothing. And that is precisely my point. Quite aside from its reductive and simplistic reading of that which it censures, 0016-7185/03/$ - see front matter Ó 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0016-7185(03)00028-9
HamnettÕs jeremiad equates ÔrelevanceÕ with making a difference Ôout thereÕ which, in turn, is taken to vouchsafe geographyÕs claims ‘‘to be taken seriously’’ as a discipline (p. 3). This is all too common in disciplinary debates on the ÔusesÕ of research. In recent years, a series of exchanges concerning Ôactivism and the academyÕ and Ôgeography and public policyÕ have unthinkingly assumed that when geographers fail to connect with constituencies beyond the university their raison d’etre is somehow called into question. Such an assumption makes it all too easy––as HamnettÕs dyspeptic editorial shows––for some geographers to do two wrong-headed things. The first is to dismiss research that is not potentially useful for outside parties as tendentially ÔirrelevantÕ (and thus unworthy). The second is to forget that one of the biggest constituencies to whom our research is ÔrelevantÕ is our students––a relevance that is made flesh each and every time we teach. Yet quite what ÔrelevanceÕ means in the teaching context is a desperately under-theorised matter. This is, in my view, a sorry state of affairs. The non-debate about teaching in geography and other disciplines threatens not only to limit our collective understanding of why research matters. It also perpetuates a situation where one of our most important activities is exempted from the kind of serious analysis that we devote to our research subjects. In my experience, claims about the organic link between research and teaching tend to rest upon a superficial understanding of the latter as an arena where the insights yielded by the former are ÔcommunicatedÕ to students. We surely need a more profound, open and sustained discussion about the values and aims of pedagogy at the university level (Heyman, 2001). This need was further brought home to me by two events that coincided with my reading of HamnettÕs intervention. One was the publication of a report by the UKÕs National Audit Office (NAO) entitled Getting the Evidence: Using Research in Policy. The report concludes that much of the £1.4 billion the government spends on funding university research each year is wasted. Academics, it argues, have a poor understanding of policy questions, produce research that is difficult to understand, are poor communicators and are not
284
Editorial / Geoforum 34 (2003) 283–285
attuned to short-term policy issues. As with HamnettÕs editorial, the definition of the ÔrelevanceÕ of research is taken to be self-evident and is also narrow. The difference is that the NAO report will be read by powerbrokers in the British government and the UKÕs research funding councils––the very people who, along with academics themselves, determine the rules structuring university life. One of these is education minister Charles Clarke. As I write (and this is the second event I want to mention) some off-the-cuff remarks he recently made are headline news in several British broadsheets. At a gathering of higher education policy makers, he is reported to have said that the public purse should not fund ‘‘ornamental’’ subjects such as medieval history and classics. As one of his spokespeople helpfully elaborated: ‘‘What he is basically saying [is] that universities exist to enable the British economy and society to deal with the challenges posed by. . .global change’’ (Times Higher Education Supplement, 2003, 2). ClarkeÕs comments, though they refer to state funding of research, are principally about state funding of teaching. Students remain the financial bread-and-butter of most disciplines in UK. In the near future they will contribute more of the costs of their higher education than ever before as Clarke presides over the introduction of a new £3000-a-year tuition fee. In this context, his comments can be read as clear statement that the UK government intends, in the future, to fund only ÔusefulÕ subjects that produce equally useful students. ÔOrnamentalÕ subjects will, presumably, have to prove their worth in the new market for student consumers where the hidden hand will both discipline and reward the academic community. Whether Clarke would consider geography an ornamental subject I cannot say. What is striking, though, is just how much the words of a first-generation left-wing geographer, a report by government bureaucrats and the philistinic views of an education minister have in common. On the one side, Hamnett echoes the sentiments of the NAO report on academic research, albeit in a slightly less instrumentalist register. On the other side, HamnettÕs non-discussion of teaching––so typical of geographersÕ interventions concerning the ÔrelevanceÕ of their research––leaves the door open for the likes of Clarke to equate university teaching with the delivery of a narrowly defined ÔusefulÕ education. Lest all this sound parochial, readers based outside the UK will surely acknowledge just how pervasive instrumentalist attitudes to research and learning have become in these neoliberal times. Rather than being taken for granted, these attitudes need to be squarely confronted and debated by those of us who work in universities. Equally, if they are to be challenged, then a robust, well thought-out vision of what university teaching should be about is desperately needed. Pedagogy is too important to be left to others to delimit on our behalf.
This is a particular issue for those who, like Hamnett and myself, would place themselves on the political left of geography. ‘‘Every relationship of hegemony’’, Antonio Gramsci (1971, 350) once said, ‘‘is necessarily an educational relationship’’. At all levels, the education system is hard-wired into wider economies of power and force––though not deterministically so. It is odd indeed that the geographical left have rarely taken seriously their own role––and that of the discipline as a whole––in using teaching as a transformatory practice. To be sure, there are many geographers––be they Marxist, feminist, green or what-have-you––who quietly and creatively use teaching as their most potent political intervention. They do so knowing full well that students are perhaps our key addressees, rather than those various constituencies outside universities who Hamnett and others are so anxious to Ôconnect withÕ. What is more, these geographers are often those doing precisely the kind of ÔirrelevantÕ research that Hamnett decries––irrelevant, that is, judged only by certain criteria that ought to be scrutinised. Does this mean that, both in its own right and as a resource for teaching, this research is merely ÔornamentalÕ? Or do we need to take a more sophisticated and measured approach to the ÔusefulnessÕ of this research in the classroom context? The answer to these questions, apropos my earlier comments, depends upon addressing the deeper issue of what, in the present conjuncture, one thinks a university education should be for. The kind of critical pedagogy hinted at above needs to be fleshed out philosophically so that left-leaning geographers (as both individuals and as a collective) have a coherent vision of the importance, nature and aims of teaching. Fortunately, we donÕt have to start from scratch because educational theorists like Henry Giroux have laboured long and hard to specify what is ÔcriticalÕ about a critical pedagogy. At the very minimum, such a pedagogy takes it as axiomatic that university education is not exclusively or even primarily about producing employment-ready students or teaching core transferable skills. Universities remain precious spaces where the achievements and maladies of the wider world can be openly examined. They are also, crucially, key sites where student identities and beliefs are forged. But translating philosophy into practice is never easy. As Barnett (2003) points out, there is nothing inherently critical about teaching post-colonial theory or socialist feminism. Much depends upon how teachers teach and what students expect to get out of the Ôeducational experienceÕ they are often paying for. Furthermore, even the most determined critical pedagogue has to reckon with the wider forces structuring not only their own teaching practices but those student expectations just mentioned. Both partners in the higher education process are always-already interpellated in particular ways that cannot readily be altered or sloughed off. If, as the present time, they are in-
Editorial / Geoforum 34 (2003) 283–285
creasingly positioned as sellers and buyers of degrees respectively, then it is up to leftists in geography and beyond to fight for a different vision of higher education. It needs to be a collective vision that finds expression in carefully thought-out teaching practices. In Britain, at least in its ÔoldÕ universities, it requires faculty to stop treating pedagogy as a distant second to research––a duty to be performed rather than a critically important societal role. At its broadest, this vision might be of a pedagogy that ‘‘struggles actively over how human beings should live and what our life means’’ (Berman, 2000, 31). This pedagogy would serve as a counter-force to all those other learning experiences––on television, in movies, in video-game arcades and tabloid newspapers––that colonise studentsÕ time and reduce the opportunities for deep reflection and unconventional thought. It would also not be beholden to special interests or narrow definitions of what higher education is for. It would empower students so that they can look beyond the horizon of the given––albeit under conditions only partly of their making. It would, in short, amount to much more than training the next generation of wage-workers to slot themselves into the labour
285
market. Am I simply listing a new set of pieties that are destined to be ignored? Probably. But I hope not.
References Barnett, C., 2003. Cultural turns. In: Duncan, J. et al. (Eds.), The Companion to Cultural Geography. Blackwell, Oxford. Berman, M., 2000. Blue jay way. Dissent Winter, 31. Gramsci, A., 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Press, New York. Hamnett, C., 2003. Contemporary human geography: fiddling while Rome burns? Geoforum 34 (1), 1–3. Heyman, R., 2001. Pedagogy and the cultural turn in geography. Environment and Planning D 19 (1), 1–6. Times Higher Education Supplement, 2003. Clarke lays into useless history, May 9th. pp. 2–3.
Noel Castree Department of Geography University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL, UK Tel.: +44 161 275 3627 E-mail address: [email protected]
Editorial
Reclaiming pedagogy
In geography, as in so many other disciplines, teaching has been a sorely neglected subject for debate and discussion. When I say ÔteachingÕ I do not mean the nuts-and-bolts of how to give a good lecture or how to use computers in multiple-choice assessments. Instead, I am referring to two deeper issues. The first is what a university education is and should be about. The second is how that education is shaped by and influences the social formations in which it is embedded. It is a peculiar fact that the many people who spend so much time designing and delivering degree courses spend so little time reflecting on the means and ends of pedagogy. I include myself here. Since 1995, when I landed my first university post, several hundred students have encountered me, my reading lists and my assessments. Yet I have rarely paused to reflect deeply on quite what my teaching practices are designed to achieve. Instead, I have operated with a definite but (crucially) unarticulated philosophy of learning. And I have done so under institutional conditions over which I have only partial control. I am surely not alone. Geography is marked by a conspicuous non-debate over pedagogy. It is rarely discussed at conferences and professional meetings, let alone in print. Symptomatically, the few journals devoted to a formal consideration of teaching and learning––such as the Journal of Geography in Higher Education––are preoccupied with ÔtechnicalÕ matters (such as formative assessment, virtual field-classes, student-centred learning and the like). Missing is an articulate discussion of the why and wherefore of university teaching in the current conjuncture. This was recently brought home to me when I read HamnettÕs (2003) phillipic in this journal. Replete with a cliched title, his editorial bemoaned the theoreticism, superficial radicalism and relativism of the several postprefixed approaches that now dominate Anglophone human geography. For Hamnett research in human geography needs to be made more relevant to Ôreal worldÕ problems––just as it supposedly was in the early 1970s when the first Ôradical geographersÕ came on the scene. What has this got to do with teaching? Nothing. And that is precisely my point. Quite aside from its reductive and simplistic reading of that which it censures, 0016-7185/03/$ - see front matter Ó 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0016-7185(03)00028-9
HamnettÕs jeremiad equates ÔrelevanceÕ with making a difference Ôout thereÕ which, in turn, is taken to vouchsafe geographyÕs claims ‘‘to be taken seriously’’ as a discipline (p. 3). This is all too common in disciplinary debates on the ÔusesÕ of research. In recent years, a series of exchanges concerning Ôactivism and the academyÕ and Ôgeography and public policyÕ have unthinkingly assumed that when geographers fail to connect with constituencies beyond the university their raison d’etre is somehow called into question. Such an assumption makes it all too easy––as HamnettÕs dyspeptic editorial shows––for some geographers to do two wrong-headed things. The first is to dismiss research that is not potentially useful for outside parties as tendentially ÔirrelevantÕ (and thus unworthy). The second is to forget that one of the biggest constituencies to whom our research is ÔrelevantÕ is our students––a relevance that is made flesh each and every time we teach. Yet quite what ÔrelevanceÕ means in the teaching context is a desperately under-theorised matter. This is, in my view, a sorry state of affairs. The non-debate about teaching in geography and other disciplines threatens not only to limit our collective understanding of why research matters. It also perpetuates a situation where one of our most important activities is exempted from the kind of serious analysis that we devote to our research subjects. In my experience, claims about the organic link between research and teaching tend to rest upon a superficial understanding of the latter as an arena where the insights yielded by the former are ÔcommunicatedÕ to students. We surely need a more profound, open and sustained discussion about the values and aims of pedagogy at the university level (Heyman, 2001). This need was further brought home to me by two events that coincided with my reading of HamnettÕs intervention. One was the publication of a report by the UKÕs National Audit Office (NAO) entitled Getting the Evidence: Using Research in Policy. The report concludes that much of the £1.4 billion the government spends on funding university research each year is wasted. Academics, it argues, have a poor understanding of policy questions, produce research that is difficult to understand, are poor communicators and are not
284
Editorial / Geoforum 34 (2003) 283–285
attuned to short-term policy issues. As with HamnettÕs editorial, the definition of the ÔrelevanceÕ of research is taken to be self-evident and is also narrow. The difference is that the NAO report will be read by powerbrokers in the British government and the UKÕs research funding councils––the very people who, along with academics themselves, determine the rules structuring university life. One of these is education minister Charles Clarke. As I write (and this is the second event I want to mention) some off-the-cuff remarks he recently made are headline news in several British broadsheets. At a gathering of higher education policy makers, he is reported to have said that the public purse should not fund ‘‘ornamental’’ subjects such as medieval history and classics. As one of his spokespeople helpfully elaborated: ‘‘What he is basically saying [is] that universities exist to enable the British economy and society to deal with the challenges posed by. . .global change’’ (Times Higher Education Supplement, 2003, 2). ClarkeÕs comments, though they refer to state funding of research, are principally about state funding of teaching. Students remain the financial bread-and-butter of most disciplines in UK. In the near future they will contribute more of the costs of their higher education than ever before as Clarke presides over the introduction of a new £3000-a-year tuition fee. In this context, his comments can be read as clear statement that the UK government intends, in the future, to fund only ÔusefulÕ subjects that produce equally useful students. ÔOrnamentalÕ subjects will, presumably, have to prove their worth in the new market for student consumers where the hidden hand will both discipline and reward the academic community. Whether Clarke would consider geography an ornamental subject I cannot say. What is striking, though, is just how much the words of a first-generation left-wing geographer, a report by government bureaucrats and the philistinic views of an education minister have in common. On the one side, Hamnett echoes the sentiments of the NAO report on academic research, albeit in a slightly less instrumentalist register. On the other side, HamnettÕs non-discussion of teaching––so typical of geographersÕ interventions concerning the ÔrelevanceÕ of their research––leaves the door open for the likes of Clarke to equate university teaching with the delivery of a narrowly defined ÔusefulÕ education. Lest all this sound parochial, readers based outside the UK will surely acknowledge just how pervasive instrumentalist attitudes to research and learning have become in these neoliberal times. Rather than being taken for granted, these attitudes need to be squarely confronted and debated by those of us who work in universities. Equally, if they are to be challenged, then a robust, well thought-out vision of what university teaching should be about is desperately needed. Pedagogy is too important to be left to others to delimit on our behalf.
This is a particular issue for those who, like Hamnett and myself, would place themselves on the political left of geography. ‘‘Every relationship of hegemony’’, Antonio Gramsci (1971, 350) once said, ‘‘is necessarily an educational relationship’’. At all levels, the education system is hard-wired into wider economies of power and force––though not deterministically so. It is odd indeed that the geographical left have rarely taken seriously their own role––and that of the discipline as a whole––in using teaching as a transformatory practice. To be sure, there are many geographers––be they Marxist, feminist, green or what-have-you––who quietly and creatively use teaching as their most potent political intervention. They do so knowing full well that students are perhaps our key addressees, rather than those various constituencies outside universities who Hamnett and others are so anxious to Ôconnect withÕ. What is more, these geographers are often those doing precisely the kind of ÔirrelevantÕ research that Hamnett decries––irrelevant, that is, judged only by certain criteria that ought to be scrutinised. Does this mean that, both in its own right and as a resource for teaching, this research is merely ÔornamentalÕ? Or do we need to take a more sophisticated and measured approach to the ÔusefulnessÕ of this research in the classroom context? The answer to these questions, apropos my earlier comments, depends upon addressing the deeper issue of what, in the present conjuncture, one thinks a university education should be for. The kind of critical pedagogy hinted at above needs to be fleshed out philosophically so that left-leaning geographers (as both individuals and as a collective) have a coherent vision of the importance, nature and aims of teaching. Fortunately, we donÕt have to start from scratch because educational theorists like Henry Giroux have laboured long and hard to specify what is ÔcriticalÕ about a critical pedagogy. At the very minimum, such a pedagogy takes it as axiomatic that university education is not exclusively or even primarily about producing employment-ready students or teaching core transferable skills. Universities remain precious spaces where the achievements and maladies of the wider world can be openly examined. They are also, crucially, key sites where student identities and beliefs are forged. But translating philosophy into practice is never easy. As Barnett (2003) points out, there is nothing inherently critical about teaching post-colonial theory or socialist feminism. Much depends upon how teachers teach and what students expect to get out of the Ôeducational experienceÕ they are often paying for. Furthermore, even the most determined critical pedagogue has to reckon with the wider forces structuring not only their own teaching practices but those student expectations just mentioned. Both partners in the higher education process are always-already interpellated in particular ways that cannot readily be altered or sloughed off. If, as the present time, they are in-
Editorial / Geoforum 34 (2003) 283–285
creasingly positioned as sellers and buyers of degrees respectively, then it is up to leftists in geography and beyond to fight for a different vision of higher education. It needs to be a collective vision that finds expression in carefully thought-out teaching practices. In Britain, at least in its ÔoldÕ universities, it requires faculty to stop treating pedagogy as a distant second to research––a duty to be performed rather than a critically important societal role. At its broadest, this vision might be of a pedagogy that ‘‘struggles actively over how human beings should live and what our life means’’ (Berman, 2000, 31). This pedagogy would serve as a counter-force to all those other learning experiences––on television, in movies, in video-game arcades and tabloid newspapers––that colonise studentsÕ time and reduce the opportunities for deep reflection and unconventional thought. It would also not be beholden to special interests or narrow definitions of what higher education is for. It would empower students so that they can look beyond the horizon of the given––albeit under conditions only partly of their making. It would, in short, amount to much more than training the next generation of wage-workers to slot themselves into the labour
285
market. Am I simply listing a new set of pieties that are destined to be ignored? Probably. But I hope not.
References Barnett, C., 2003. Cultural turns. In: Duncan, J. et al. (Eds.), The Companion to Cultural Geography. Blackwell, Oxford. Berman, M., 2000. Blue jay way. Dissent Winter, 31. Gramsci, A., 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Press, New York. Hamnett, C., 2003. Contemporary human geography: fiddling while Rome burns? Geoforum 34 (1), 1–3. Heyman, R., 2001. Pedagogy and the cultural turn in geography. Environment and Planning D 19 (1), 1–6. Times Higher Education Supplement, 2003. Clarke lays into useless history, May 9th. pp. 2–3.
Noel Castree Department of Geography University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL, UK Tel.: +44 161 275 3627 E-mail address: [email protected]