Northern Rocks 2018 - Reclaiming Pedagogy

  • by Benjamin Doxtdator

    • While I was preparing to give my workshop on Media Literacy in a Time of Polarization and Propaganda, I saw this poster in the hallway, featuring Harold Offeh, of the School of Art, Architecture and Design, who says “Instagram is as valid an exploration of culture as sculpture or painting.”

     

     

    The vision that Michael Young puts forth in Knowledge and the Future School guards the curriculum against Instagram artists since “
if education is to be emancipatory 
 it has to be based on a break with experience.” Because Instagram doesn’t have a secure place among the subjects, it has no easy avenue into Young’s emancipatory vision based on ‘powerful knowledge’, which “stands in sharp contrast to the idea that the school curriculum should start with the interests and experiences of the children, their parents, and the locality
”. “Subject knowledge provides teachers with the basis of their authority over pupils. For pupils, moving from their everyday world where concepts are developed experientially in relation to problems that arise in specific contexts, to the world of school, which treats the world as an object for thinking about, can be a threatening and even alien experience
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    I hate to say it, but maybe schools should work to be less alienating places? As part of her argument for a liberatory pedagogy, bell hooks argues that simply changing curriculum materials does not go far enough unless pedagogical practices also change. She argues that working class students “come to college assuming that professors see them as having nothing valuable to say, no valuable contribution to make to a dialectical exchange of ideas.” That’s the real importance of making room for student experience in the classroom, and as Ron Scapp says in the interview with hooks, bringing in student experience “allows students to claim a knowledge base from which they can speak.”

     

     

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