Theorising Public Pedagogy

Drawing on the ideas of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, this book extends the theoretical understanding of public pedagogy and brings into sharp focus the elements that constitute the public realm; the site of public pedagogy. Karen Charman and Mary Dixon offer a new theorisation of the public, a term at the heart of debate in the field, heightened in this post-truth era by the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of fake news and the technological reconfigurations of public life. The new theorization addresses the ‘public’, ‘pedagogy’ and their confluence in ‘public pedagogy’. The book explores a deep engagement with the architecture and dynamics of pedagogy and argues for the positioning of pedagogy with the public. The authors contribute to a theorisation that re-considers the individual and their capacity for agency within the public realm. The book presents knowledge and pedagogical encounters as key elements of public pedagogy and most significantly, the educative agent as a means of critically rethinking social life and learning in public spaces. Presenting an innovative theoretical approach, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of public and critical pedagogy and postgraduate students in education, cultural studies and politics.

Theory and Methods for Public Pedagogy Research introduces promising new methods of public pedagogy research centered around transforming rather than explaining knowledge. The new methods are premised on a new theorisation of public pedagogy which recognises the educative agent. The agency of the public to speak, to be heard, to know is manifest as the educative agent speaks their knowledge and the researcher must be attentive to that speaking. This work extends the well-established intellectual projects in the field to introduce four new methods for public pedagogy research: organisation, performance, curation and researcher. A key focus of this work is attending to how the circulation of knowledge in non-formal settings can be recognised. It examines the under-published area of pedagogy and research in public spaces and engages post-qualitative approaches to inquiry to open up the field. Moreover, it explores the possibility of performances, art exhibitions and museums as public spaces of knowledge generation and pedagogy. It also shows how research can be applied in practice in public pedagogy to discover best practices for working in these spaces. Finally, it confronts and critiques the dilemmas of public pedagogy research and the limits of research methods which have previously been deployed in this field. This book will be of interest to researchers and students in the field of public education and teaching in a variety of social science and arts disciplines, and education.

Bringing together scholars, public intellectuals, and activists from across the field of education, the Handbook of Public Pedagogy explores and maps the terrain of this burgeoning field. For the first time in one comprehensive volume, readers will be able to learn about the history and scope of the concept and practices of public pedagogy. What is 'public pedagogy'? What theories, research, aims, and values inform it? What does it look like in practice? Offering a wide range of differing, even diverging, perspectives on how the 'public' might operate as a pedagogical agent, this Handbook provides new ways of understanding educational practice, both within and without schools. It implores teachers, researchers, and theorists to reconsider their foundational understanding of what counts as pedagogy and of how and where the process of education occurs. The questions it raises and the critical analyses they require provide curriculum and educational workers and scholars at large with new ways of understanding educational practice, both within and without schools.

The term ‘public pedagogy’ is given a variety of definitions and meanings by those who employ it. It is often used without adequately explicating its meaning, its context, or its location within differing and contested articulations of the construct. Problematizing Public Pedagogy brings together renowned and emerging scholars in the field of education to provide a theoretical, methodological, ethical, and practical ground from which other scholars and activists can explore these forms of education. At the same time it increases the viability of the concept of public pedagogy itself. Beyond adding a multifaceted set of critical lenses to the genre of public pedagogy inquiry and theorizing, this volume adds nuance to the broader field of education research overall.

In recent years everyone from politicians to celebrity chefs has been proselytizing about how we should grow, buy, prepare, present, cook, taste, eat and dispose of food. In light of this, contributors to this book argue that food has become the target of intensified pedagogical activity across a range of domains, including schools, supermarkets, families, advertising and TV media. Illustrated with a range of empirical studies, this edited and interdisciplinary volume - the first book on food pedagogies - develops innovative and theoretical perspectives to problematize the practices of teaching and learning about food. While many different pedagogues - policy makers, churches, activists, health educators, schools, tourist agencies, chefs - think we do not know enough about food and what to do with it, the aims, effects and politics of these pedagogies has been much less studied. Drawing on a range of international studies, diverse contexts, genres and different methods, this book provides new sites of investigation and lines of inquiry. As a result of its broad ranging critical evaluation of ’food as classroom’ and ’food as teacher’, it provides theoretical resources for opening up the concept of pedagogy, and assessing the moralities and politics of teaching and learning about food in the classroom and beyond.

This book explores important questions about the relationship between professional practice and learning, and implications of this for how we understand professional expertise. Focusing on work accomplished through partnerships between practitioners and parents with young children, the book explores how connectedness in action is a fluid, evolving accomplishment, with four essential dimensions: times, spaces, bodies, and things. Within a broader sociomaterial perspective, the analysis draws on practice theory and philosophy, bringing different schools of thought into productive contact, including the work of Schatzki, Gherardi, and recent developments in cultural historical activity theory. The book takes a bold view, suggesting practices and learning are entwined but distinctive phenomena. A clear and novel framework is developed, based on this idea. The argument goes further by demonstrating how new, coproductive relationships between professionals and clients can intensify the pedagogic nature of professional work, and showing how professionals can support others’ learning when the knowledge they are working with, and sense of what is to be learned, are uncertain, incomplete, and fragile.

In Everyday Food Practices, Tarunna Sebastian explores the teaching and learning dimensions of people’s food choices and practices as they are played out in their everyday lives and local community. Using multi-sited critical ethnographic methodology, Sebastian followed people on their journeys while planning, shopping, preparing, cooking, and eating food. These journeys reveal that supermarket corporations play a hegemonic role, creating and sustaining class-based diets and cultural dynamics which undermine individual agency. Rebuking corporate hegemony, food education at counter-cultural sites—such as farmers’ markets, food cooperatives, and community gardens—seeks to empower people with knowledge and skills derived from socially and environmentally sustainable food curricula. However, class and ethnicity-based patterns of engagement compromise learning at these sites. Sebastian argues that, by contrast, the embodied experiences of inter-generational, home-based food practices are more effective in teaching sustainable cooking skills and the production of healthy meals.

This insightful collection offers a timely contribution to the body of research on practical theorising in teacher education. Acknowledging the importance of experience and reflective practice in teaching, this book simultaneously embraces the essential need for teachers at all career stages to engage effectively and critically with evidence from research. Drawing together a range of perspectives from university-based and school-based teacher educators, this book examines the challenges and critiques advanced when practical theorising was first proposed, as well as recent tensions created by the performative culture that now pervades education. It illustrates the constant renegotiation and renewal necessary to sustain such an approach to beginners’ learning, investigating a range of tools developed by teacher educators to help beginning teachers navigate these demands. Demonstrating the value of practical theorising and therefore promoting powerful professional learning for practitioners, this book is essential for teachers at all career stages, including trainee teachers and student teachers.