Pedagogical Encounters demonstrates how learning spaces that are ethical, responsive, and transformable can enable students and teachers to open toward new ways of being in the world. Through collective biography, ethnography, and arts-based research, the authors - educators with experience in diverse settings - generate rich descriptions of classroom practices, and elaborate and clarify new theoretical concepts through their discussion in relation to specific sites of teaching and learning.
What is the role of politics in the classroom? How does the desire of the teacher shape the pedagogical process? Is teaching possible? Is learning possible? Pedagogy as Encounter engages with such larger issues. The majority of discussions, workshops, conference panels, articles, and books avoid meta-pedagogical issues by focusing on technique. Such “technique talk” examines schemes, methods, and procedures that do and do not work in the classroom. It answers the “how” question at the cost of ignoring these bigger queries. Pedagogy as Encounter consists of 120 vignettes arranged in eight chapters. Most of these are first person autobiographical stories that describe encounters with students and colleagues. They portray a teacher whose classroom disappointments lead him to radical experimentation. But there are also a few theoretical sections, as well as segments that are epigrammatic in nature. All of it is grounded in a Lacanian political psychology and in a critical global political economy. The theory, however, remains largely implicit and is confined to the footnotes. The body of the text is free of jargon and presented in a conversational voice.
The authors have spent their lives in South Africa, are writing this book from and within a very particular context of compounded oppression, marginalisation and otherness. In many ways, apartheid has both damaged and provided us with the emotions and language through which to speak from and about harmful speech. That apartheid managed to succeed in its depravity for as long as it did, begins to provide some hint to the often-underestimated power and debilitation of speech and language. This book, therefore, is not only an interpretation and analysis of what a philosophy of education might have to offer in relation to the debate on free speech. Rather, it is also an attempt to make meaning of lived experiences – its encounters, it conflicts and its harms – so that this debate is extended beyond conceptual deliberations and into a realm of human and humane dialogue for the sake of seeing and knowing one another. The authors are intent upon understanding the arguments—both for and against freedom of speech—for the purpose of what makes educational sense. In short, the book questions whether constraining any form of speech would create conditions for control and manipulation that affect pedagogical encounters adversely. If encounters were to remain justifiable, ways should be found to undermine a restriction on free speech rather than encouraging the advocacy of constrained free speech within pedagogical encounters. The authors raise questions about whether an argument for free speech can ensure more durable and justifiable pedagogical encounters in which the rights of teachers and students to exercise their rights to uncensored free speech should and would never be violated.
Qualitative analyses of young children’s learning in natural settings are rare, so this new book will make educators sit up and pay attention. It lays out a Nordic, or continental European teaching and learning paradigm whose didactic framework is distinct from the Anglo-American system. This analysis, which features contributions and case studies from researchers in a range of subjects, is built on principles such as the learner’s perspective, establishing sufficient intersubjectivity, ‘pointing out’, and informing experience linguistically. After clarifying some historical background, the book discusses the contemporary emphasis in early childhood education on pedagogy/learning. What should ‘didactics’ mean in educating young children? The book examines the opportunities for learning that teachers provide for children in early childhood education, as well as how children respond to these opportunities. It presents empirical studies from a variety of naturalistic settings, including mathematics, making visual art, ecology, music, dance, literacy and story-telling, as well as learning about gender, morality and democracy. The authors seek to answer key questions about the processes involved in both teaching and learning. What challenges do teachers face as they try to expand children’s knowledge in various fields of learning? How do they respond to these challenges, and what can we learn about children’s corresponding uptake? What now requires further research? One key distinction in researching children’s learning is between studies that look at ‘process’ and those that analyze ‘product’. In the tradition of Piaget, Vygotsky and Werner, as well as Mercer and Valsiner’s more recent work, this book advocates the importance and relative rareness of the former type of study.
This book explores the idea that mathematics educators and teachers are also problem solvers and learners, and as such they constantly experience mathematical and pedagogical disturbances. Accordingly, many original tasks and learning activities are results of personal mathematical and pedagogical disturbances of their designers, who then transpose these disturbances into learning opportunities for their students. This learning-transposition process is a cornerstone of mathematics teacher education as a lived, developing enterprise. Mathematical Encounters and Pedagogical Detours unfold the process and illustrate it by various examples. The book engages readers in original tasks, shares the results of task implementation and describes how these results inform the development of new tasks, which often intertwine mathematics and pedagogy. Most importantly, the book includes a dialogue between the authors based on the stories of their own learning, which triggers continuous exploration of learning opportunities for their students.
This book reflects a range of pedagogical responses to increasingly complex educational contexts. It finds this complexity in the interplay of a number of factors, including the diverse histories and identities of educational actors; institutional and systemic demands and constraints; competing conceptions of valued knowledge; and technological change. The chapters show the demand for pedagogical response to unexpected and unprecedented events (like COVID-19) and the importance of addressing barriers to access that become sedimented into institutional cultures. The authors, mostly from Global South contexts, are concerned with enabling educational access and inclusion in the face of competing global and local demands. They present new knowledge about pedagogical approaches that are relevant and effective in uncertain times and challenging places. Together, the contributors offer accounts of hope-full and innovative practice and conceptually rigorous engagement with fundamental issues of learning and teaching.
This book extends liberal understandings in and about democratic citizenship education in relation to university pedagogy, more specifically higher teaching and learning. The authors’ argument is in defence of cultivating humanity through (higher) educational encounters on the basis of virtues that connect with the idea of love. Unlike romantic and erotic love, the book examines love in relation to educational encounters whereby humans or citizens can engage autonomously, deliberatively andresponsibly, yet lovingly. The rationale for focussing on the notion of philia (love) in educational encounters, the authors argue, is that doing so allows our current understandings of such encounters to be expanded beyond mere talk of reasonable engagements—autonomous action, deliberative iterations, and simple action—toward emotive enactments that could enhance human relations in educational encounters.
This book advances a re-imagined view of caring in higher education. The author proposes an argument of rhythmic caring, whereby teachers hold back or release their judgments in such a way that students’ judgments are influenced accordingly. In doing so, the author argues that rhythmic caring encourages students to become more willing and confident in articulating their understandings, judgments and opinions, rather than being prematurely judged and prevented from re-articulating themselves. Thus, rhythmic caring can engender a different understanding of higher education: one that is connected to the cultivation of values such as autonomy, justice, empathy, mutual respect and Ubuntu (human dignity and interdependence). This book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of caring within education, as well as Ubuntu caring through the African context.
