Recently, the LSE Media & Communications department approached CLT to offer a 15 minute perspective on the keyword “Pedagogy” for a small seminar group & without much thinking (or indeed time to think!) I volunteered. I don’t do it often enough, such spontaneous pontificating on what pedagogy means to us (me), and it turned out to be great discipline and a great opportunity to collect my thoughts on what arguably plays a great part in my daily practice. In the end, the thoughts remained jumbled, but the seminar itself turned out very interesting. This had a lot to do with an attentive and articulate audience, and of course with the first contributor, Julian Sefton-Green, a Principal Research Fellow in the Media & Comms, who spoke very intelligibly about pedagogy as a progressive theory and the creep of pedagogisation. Ellen Helsper, lecturer in Media & Comms, acted as respondent, pulling both approaches to the keyword together, calling attention to the undoubtedly normative elements of (current) education/ pedagogy discourse. In light of both Julian’s and Ellen’s more properly academic discussions, my contribution remains a cobbled together stream of consciousness/ thought piece, but I uploaded the presentation onto slideshare anyway, including the script. I don’t stand by all that can be read there, but I stand by one thing: there’s lots to learn about lecturing from Martin Heidegger. Unfortunately I never got to make that point very clearly… clearly I have to return to this at some future point. 🙂
Slideshare link: http://www.slideshare.net/SonjaGrussendorf/pedagogy-as-an-undisputed-social-good
I love the quote at the end “it would be so much better if our education taught us common sense”!
Yes, yes, good old Seneca (though of course we must define what we mean by ‘common sense’) 🙂