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WHY PEDAGOGY? AN INTRODUCTION TO THIS ISSUE BY Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/27/5/2/1613451 by National Science & Technology Library user on 30 September 2022 DAVID LUSTED There is no general pedagogy: only pedagogies, like horses, for courses. 'Education in Crisis', 1 in James Donald and - Stuart Hall Ann Marie Wolpe (eds), Is There Anyone WHY SHOULD PEDAGOGY be of interest to anyone? Few are Here from Educanon?y 2 London, Pluto, 1983, familiar with the term. Even aficionados gag on its pronunciation and p6. falter in its spelling. Where the word is familiar at all, it's most often in the shape of 1 Hard 'g', then soft 'g'. 'pedagogue', conjuring mental images of the mortar-board and cane, Bash Street Kids and Mr Chips (Michael Redgrave rather than Peter O'Toole), connoting pedantry and dogmatism. Indeed, even among elite realms of thought, pedagogy is taken as co- terminous with teaching, merely describing a central activity in an education system. The invisibility of pedagogy in education and cultural production generally is well matched by the imprecision of dictionary definitions which relate pedagogy variously to teaching as an agency, a profession or a practice. Within education and even among teachers, where the term should have greatest purchase, pedagogy is under-defined, often referring to no more than a teaching style, a matter of personality and temperament, the mechanics of securing classroom control to encourage learning, a cosmetic bandage on the hard body of classroom contact. So, is there any useful purpose in investigating a term so incoherent and unacknowledged? Why is pedagogy important? It is important since, as a concept, it draws attention to the process through which knowledge is produced. Pedagogy addresses the 'how' questions involved not only in the transmission or reproduction of knowledge but also in its production. Indeed, it enables us to question the validity of separating these activities so easily by asking under what conditions and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/27/5/2/1613451 by National Science & Technology Library user on 30 September 2022 through what means we 'come to know'. How one teaches is therefore of central interest but, through the prism of pedagogy, it becomes insepar- learns. In this per- able from what is being taught and, crucially, how one spective, to bring the issue of pedagogy in from the cold and onto the central stage of cultural production is to open up for questioning areas of enquiry generally repressed by conventional assumptions, as prevalent in critical as in dominant practices, about theory production and teach- ing, and about the nature of knowledge and learning. ; Pedagogy is desperately under-theorised. No loss, at one level; it's an ugly word in print and on the tongue. The problem is that what the con- cept addresses is crucial and the absence of its development has had material effects. One effect is a share in the failure to realise post-war aspirations towards a genuinely democratic and popular mandatory education system. Another effect is yet another failure; this time to connect radical cultural theory to popular movements whose interests that theory declares it represents. Big claims. What this issue of Screen seeks is to establish some terms for the claims and to investigate a number of related areas in which the concept of pedagogy can be deployed as part of a programme to change the sequence of failure. What this article attempts is to set the stage for new thinking in film, TV, media and cultural studies and education. Following Stuart Hall, its task is to establish the issue of 'pedagogy in general', situating the articles that follow which deal with 'pedagogies in particular'. The cen- tral question here is how adequate the theorisation of film, TV, culture in general can be without a consciousness of the conditions which produce, negotiate, transform, realise and return it in practice. What pedagogy addresses is the process of production and exchange in this cycle, the transformation of consciousness that takes place in the inter- action of three agencies - the teacher, the learner and-the knowledge they together produce. If this is to describe a model of relations set by the terms of the social relations of the classroom, it holds good too- at least in principle (and I'll even grudgingly concede metaphorically)- in the realm of theory production with the teacher rendered as theorist/ critic, the learner as reader/activist and knowledge as theory. The concept of pedagogy gives substance to the nature of the relations in these models. It refuses any tendency to instrumentalise the relations, to disconnect their interactivity or to give value to one agency over another. Hence, for instance, it denies notions of the teacher as function- 3 ary (neutral transmitter of knowledge as well as 'state functionary') , the learner as 'empty vessel' or passive respondent, knowledge as immutable As constructed by the material to impart. Instead, it foregrounds exchange between and over new sociology of the categories, it recognises the productivity of the relations, and it education. See renders the parties within them as active, changing and changeable Michael Young (ed), Knowledge and Control, agencies. London, Collier and To be sensitive to the pedagogy of teaching and of theory (just to mix Macmillan, 1972. the relations a bit) is to undermine the conventional transmission model wherein knowledge is produced, conveyed and received. Calling this act 'mediation' changes not one whit the one-way direction of the process. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/27/5/2/1613451 by National Science & Technology Library user on 30 September 2022 The transmission model is unilinear; anyone trying to turn-back in the one-way traffic is unceremoniously run over. To insist on the pedagogy of theory, as with the pedagogy of teaching, is to recognise a more trans- actional model whereby knowledge is produced not just at the researcher's desk nor at the lectern but in the consciousness, through the process of thought, discussion, writing, debate, exchange; in the social and internal, collective and isolated struggle for control of under- standing; from engagement in the unfamiliar idea, the difficult form- ulation pressed at the limit of comprehension or energy; in the meeting of the deeply held with the casually dismissed; in the dramatic moment of realisation that a scarcely regarded concern, an unarticulated desire, the barely assimilated, can come alive, make for a new sense of self, change commitments and activity. And these are also transformations which take place across all agencies in an educational process, regardless of their title as academic, critic, teacher or learner. What this somewhat flowery passion turns on is a distress at the customary division of value accorded to the academic and the teacher, on the one hand, and the teacher and the learner on the other. Indeed, one cause of the fundamental refusal to take the need for pedagogy seriously is located in just these divisions. Theorists theorise, produce; teachers teach, reproduce. Therefore, such a logic would run, if anyone need be concerned about their pedagogy it is only the teacher-with a heavy stress on only. The low cultural status accorded to teaching is not just a matter of con- temporary government policies feeding popular prejudices. It is a view shared by many in universities who give such low priority to their teach- ing duties, a view in tune with the lowest educational status accorded to those earlier sectors of the education system where teaching is seen as a merely instrumental function. Sadly, the self-image of many teachers also accords with this view, inhibiting those feelings of value and confidence which are essential prerequisites to any change in under- standing the relation between academic and teacher. Rather, what needs to be asserted is that teaching is as much knowledge production as the more obvious activities of researching, writing, publishing, lecturing. But this is only part of the story. Knowledge is not produced in the intentions of those who believe they hold it, whether in the pen or in the voice. It is produced in the process of interaction, between writer and reader at the moment of reading, and between teacher and learner at the moment of classroom engagement. Knowledge is not the matter that is offered so much as the matter that is understood. To think of fields or bodies of knowledge as if they are the property of academics and teachers is wrong. It denies an equality in the relations at moments of interaction and falsely privileges one side of the exchange, and what that side 'knows', over the other. Moreover, for critical cultural producers to hold to this view of know- ledge carries its own pedagogy, an autocratic and elite pedagogy. It's not just that it denies the value of what learners know, which it does, but that it misrecognises the conditions necessary for the kind of learning-crit- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/27/5/2/1613451 by National Science & Technology Library user on 30 September 2022 ical, engaged, personal, social-called for by the knowledge itself. There is a fundamental problem for much of the cultural and educational crit- icism that exists, which has been felt most acutely in recent years-a body of criticism which has exposed the ideological nature of dominant institutions and texts and called for alternative and oppositional act- ivities. What that history is, how its movements regularly fail in their emancipatory objectives and the extent to which that failure resides at least in some part in the form, the pedagogy, of its address is a key issue for contemporary and future practices. But first things first. If knowledge needs to be conceived as produced in exchange, so too must all agents in its active production be conceived as producers, the divisions between theorising, writing, teaching and learning be dissolved. The problem with a great deal of cultural and educational theory alike, shared even by critical/radical theory which should know better, is that it makes ritual nods in the direction of acknowledging a pedagogy of sorts in its production while, in its form, disavowing its importance entirely. This reflex practice has a politics and that politics is deeply reactionary. It is based on two unquestioned assumptions. The first is that to transmit ideas (whether impersonally, through writing, or personally, through interaction) is enough: the theorist leaves the dissemination of theory to the skills of the intermediary; the teacher leaves to chance or to the realm of the unfathomable the learner's production of knowledge. The second assumption is that the pedagogy of any address follows its production rather than being integral to it, as if there is no pedagogy in the fact of theorising or teaching itself. The first assumption is irresponsible, the second is self-deluding. What this state of affairs leads to is a system of critical knowledge- production that bellows into a void for changes in understanding with- out properly attending to the conditions necessary to maximising the opportunities to effect those changes. Those 'necessary conditions' include a mode of address which is sensitive to the actual social position- ing of its respondents and an acknowledgement of different forms of knowledge-production which take account of the different contexts in which they perform. The relation between critic and reader, teacher and learner is inevitably a power relation. To draw attention to the nature of knowledge-production in those relations and to demand consideration of the pedagogy of those relations is not to obscure their inequality. Rather, it is in order more adequately to take account of it and the factors which determine it. It is a commonplace that the relations are often based on differences in age, more obviously so in the mandatory education sector, and also in class position, educational biography, familiarity and facility with disciplines and ideas. The relations are also often characterised by distinctions in cultural expectations, social experience, linguistic struct-
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