Cultural Pedagogies and Human Conduct

Megan Watkins, Greg Noble, Catherine Driscoll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317745396
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Pedagogy is often glossed as the 'art and science of teaching' but this focus typically ties it to the instructional practices of formalised schooling. Like the emerging work on 'public pedagogies', the notion of cultural pedagogies signals the importance of the pedagogic in realms other than institutionalised education, but goes beyond the notion of public pedagogies in two ways: it includes spaces which are not so public, and it includes an emphasis on material and non-human actors.

This collection foregrounds this broader understanding of pedagogy by framing enquiry through a series of questions and across a range of settings. How, for example, are the processes of 'teaching' and 'learning' realised within and across the pedagogic processes specific to various social sites? What ensembles of people, things and practices are brought together in specific institutional and everyday settings to accomplish these processes?

This collection brings together researchers whose work across the interdisciplinary nexus of cultural studies, sociology, media studies, education and museology offers significant insights into these 'cultural pedagogies' – the practices and relations through which cumulative changes in how we act, feel and think occur. Cultural Pedagogies and Human Conduct opens up debate across disciplines, theoretical perspectives and empirical foci to explore both what is pedagogical about culture and what is cultural about pedagogy.

1 Pedagogy

The unsaid of socio-cultural theory

Megan Watkins, Greg Noble and Catherine Driscoll

The formation of subjectivities has long been central to contemporary social and cultural theory. There has been substantial work across the Humanities, Social Sciences, and beyond, considering the ways in which various domains of the modern world shape minds and bodies by discursive and material means. Yet this work tends to emphasise already formed subjects or particular social and cultural effects which are seen to constitute classed, gendered and racialised subjects. The processes that produce, for example, these effects – or how forms of conduct are acquired through particular relations and practices across a range of settings – receive far less scrutiny. This book deploys the notion of ‘cultural pedagogies’ to recast the processes of subject formation, institutional conduct, cultural representation and human capacities as pedagogic practices of teaching and learning, broadly understood, which produce cumulative changes in how we act, think, feel and imagine. Existing work on critical and public pedagogies and the recent proliferation of work on ‘pedagogies of …’ (place, consumption and gender, for example) offer important starting points, but we believe a more comprehensive approach to cultural forms of pedagogy is still needed, building on this work and pushing it in new directions.

The imperative to better understand relations of teaching and learning across social sites has been intensified by claims about the increasing pedagogisation of everyday life. Basil Bernstein (2001: 364) has famously argued that we now live in a ‘totally pedagogised society’ in which: governments, media, workplaces and systems of higher education entail a socialisation characterised by endless learning in the ‘knowledge society’, compelling a capacity for ‘lifelong learning’ whenever and wherever. Recent interest in the ‘pedagogical state’ (Pykett 2010) has drawn further attention to the relationship between governance, citizenship, education and the array of sites, actors and practices through which citizen subjectivities are formed and managed. The notion of cultural pedagogies, we argue, helps us understand pedagogy in both broader and more grounded ways, engaging with a range of social spaces, relations, routines and discourses, and encouraging reflection on the wider ‘educative’ functions of cultural practices, or what Raymond Williams referred to as ‘permanent education’, ‘the educational force (éducation as distinct from enseignement) of our whole social and cultural experience’ (1966: 15). Connecting recent claims about the pedagogisation of everyday life to older discourse on the ‘educational force’ of social experience – before Williams we could cite writers like Georg Simmel or Thorstein Veblen, and contemporary with him writers like Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser – is itself an important reply to some of the temporal certainties underlying claims about the pedagogisation of life in general.

In this chapter we want to grapple with the idea of ‘pedagogy’ by first considering the pedagogical imperative of contemporary theorising which attempts to foreground the pedagogic character of social life before articulating some of the key issues at stake in the notion of ‘cultural pedagogies’.

What is pedagogy?

There is no simple answer to this question – there never is. A dictionary will often define pedagogy as ‘the art and science of teaching’ (Random House 2014), and this has typically been the starting point from which educational practitioners and scholars moved on to more pragmatic matters of models of learning, instructional design and classroom management (Gage 1978). Today, while practitioner focus tends to remain on the instrumental classroom practices of schooling (Marsh 1996), it is no longer enough for many educational theorists to just focus on these pragmatic dimensions of teaching which beg many questions about what is taught, what is learnt, goals and methods, their underlying principles, organisational conditions, and so on (Jarvis 2006: 3). As David Lusted (1986: 2–3) pointed out years ago, despite its proliferating use, ‘pedagogy’ is under-defined and under-theorised, often used to refer to teaching style, classroom management, and instructional modes, but also pointing to larger issues of educational philosophy, institutional context and the relationship between formal education and the wider social world. Indeed, pedagogy sits within a rather muddled network of terms – education, teaching, learning, instruction, training, curriculum, and so on – and a wide range of more ‘sociological’ notions – socialisation, transmission, reproduction, acculturation – which together beg even more questions.

There are several reasons for broadening the idea of pedagogy. On the one hand, clearly what goes on in schools is not just the overt or formal acquisition of specific skills. As Philip W. Jackson (1968) argued in the 1960s, schools entail a ‘hidden curriculum’ through which particular values are covertly transmitted – an idea taken up by radical education critics who used it to analyse the ideological dimensions of schooling. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (2000: 46–47) made a comparable distinction between implicit and explicit pedagogies, and Bernstein (2003: 68) likewise distinguishes visible from invisible pedagogies. Central to these insights is the understanding that explicit pedagogic practices do not define all that is at stake in a pedagogic situation.

On the other hand, there has been increasing focus on the ways in which relations of teaching and learning mark all aspects of life. Chris Watkins and Peter Mortimore (1999: 3) usefully attempt to move away from the narrow focus on institutional education by defining pedagogy as ‘any conscious activity by one person designed to enhance the learning of another’. This doesn’t, however, clarify what the relationship between teaching and learning is or how conscious or intentional pedagogy needs to be. As Watkins and Mortimore go on to argue, the complexity of pedagogy arises partly from competing philosophical understandings of what both teaching and learning are (10–11), contrasting understandings also apparent in the decreasing attention paid to the role of the teacher in educational discourse (Watkins 2011). Such educational ‘perspectives’, which Daniel Pratt et al. (1998) group as ideas about transmission, apprenticeship, development, nurturing, and social reform, represent deep ideological investments in the ways we view education. Yet, while these ‘perspectives’ imply different kinds of practices and relations, they tell us little about the actual practices and relations themselves.

Moreover, we are perhaps only beginning to realise how intrinsically the pedagogical relation entails more than a singular teacher-learner coupling and to appreciate the importance of what Bourdieu (1977: 17) calls a ‘collective enterprise of inculcation’. As Williams (1966: 15) argued, we need to consider how ‘the whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and profoundly teaches.… For who can doubt, looking at television or newspapers, or reading the women’s magazines, that here, centrally, is teaching…’. In this sense, we follow Bernstein’s characterisation of pedagogy as not only a sustained process of instruction whereby people acquire particular knowledges, skills and values, but also as a ‘cultural relay: a uniquely human device for both the reproduction and the production of culture’, to capture this duality (2003: 61–64). We preface ‘pedagogy’ with ‘culture’ partly to make this recognition more explicit and to stress the cultural quality of pedagogic processes and relations. Both Williams and Bernstein stress the impetus in socio-cultural analysis towards an engagement with the pedagogic; an engagement grounded in the works of key socio-cultural theorists.

The pedagogical imperative

‘Pedagogy’ has become a key rhetorical tool in the Humanities and Social Sciences – naming a conceptual terrain grappled with by various theoretical perspectives but rarely articulated in these terms. This is surprising given that much socio-cultural theory emerged through critique of simplistic models of acquisition – transmission models in media and communications, simple models of gender socialisation, and reproduction theory in Education and the Social Sciences. It demanded more nuanced approaches – notions of interpellation, appropriation, embodiment and performativity – but generally without unpacking the pedagogic dimensions of these processes, discussing subjects as though they always already had sufficient capacity to appropriate, recognise an address, perform, and so on. However, it is worth recognising the engagement with pedagogy implicit in much social theory. The extent that social relations and belonging are learnt is apparent in foundational philosophy like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, implicit in Freudian models of psychoanalytic development, and pivotal to Marxist accounts of ideology, but rarely explicated as pedagogical processes involving more than passive acquisition. One place in which the importance of thinking pedagogically about society and culture is explicit is in the influential work of the early American pragmatists, William James and John Dewey.

Dewey remains an important influence on the rationale and content of curricula for public education, a set of institutional practices that he understood to always involve a set of relations between culture and citizenship that preceded and exceeded any classroom. Together with conscious forms of instruction, Dewey stressed the importance of ‘unconscious’ processes of education by which individuals become the ‘inheritor of the funded capital of civilization’, a set of processes on which ‘formal and technical education’ can only organise or specialise (Dewey 1998: 229). Dewey accounts for the pedagogic processes already powerfully acting on any student as simultaneously psychological and social (1998: 230) and among his most influential contributions to the history of education is his insistence that school is an extension of social life, and should connect with fundamental forms of social experiences – including play, housework and manual training (1998: 232). In Democracy and Education, Dewey emphasises that while schools are the site where a community directly seeks to make use of these processes for its own benefit they are continually in operation at the level of society in general. He takes some of his cues in this from Rousseau in arguing that ‘men’ receive their education simultaneously from ‘Nature, men, and things’ (in Dewey 1998: 258). But Dewey’s understanding of the effectiveness of pedagogic processes was more directly indebted to the psychological theory and pragmatic philosophy of James, which led him to stress the degree to which human experience always involves a set of pedagogic relations. Every human subject, in every situation, by this account, is engaging ‘an innate disposition to draw inferences, and an inherent desire to experiment and test’ (1998: 276). For James, these pedagogic processes are the matter of social interaction, of ‘experience’ as constant ‘mutation’ (2010: 69) at the interface of what is known and what is needed (2010: 22–24).

These pragmatists are not as influential as they might be in contemporary critical accounts of culture and pedagogy. Foucault’s work, on the other hand, has been central to an understanding of subjectivity associated with a ‘cultural turn’ in the Social Sciences, and his conceptualisation of subjectivity clearly has a pedagogic dimension. In his genealogies of the subject across various domains – the asylum, the clinic, the prison and the school – he has detailed the institutional derivation of techniques of power, or bio-politics, constitutive of individual subjectivity. There are references to pedagogy in his discussion of discipline as a productive force in the forms of teaching, learning, training, transforming, and so on (1977: 203–204), but these aren’t examined in detail as pedagogic practices given his attention is on the spatial regulation of bodies. By contrast, his later work focused on technologies of the self, meaning practices of self-regulation that individuals impose upon themselves (Foucault, 1988). Both these modalities of power, either externally-derived or self-produced, involve subject formation, yet their points of convergence are left under-explored. It is not that Foucault doesn’t acknowledge the connection between these institutional and subjective modes, it is just that a sustained, empirically grounded account of the mechanisms of this connection is not his focus. An exception to this can be found in his broad conceptualisation of government. In a later lecture he explains that one,

has to take into account the interaction between these two types of techniques – techniques of domination and techniques of the self. He [sic] has to take into account the points where the technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon himself. And conversely, he has to take into account the points where the technologies of the self are integrated into structures of coercion and domination. The contact point, where the individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think, government. Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word, governing people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and process through which the self is constructed or modified by himself.

(Foucault 1993: 203–204)

We would argue that when Foucault characterises government as ‘the contact point’ between technologies of power and the self, this can be productively taken up as the space of pedagogy. While Foucault may have envisaged government as a continuum extending from the rule of the state to processes of self-regulation (Lemke 2001: 201), applications of his notion of governmentality have tended to privilege the externally derived modes of relation between power and the self, generally emphasising techniques by which forms of liberal government actively shape the subject. Attention to technologies of the self, for example in accounts of the reflexivity of the neoliberal subject, still leave this ‘contact point’ under-examined and rarely foreground the importance of situations in which, and techniques by which, individuals engage with the production and manipulation of their own transformative capacities.

In his History of Sexuality, especially volumes two and three, Foucault engages with the pedagogic through the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Plutarch, Epictetus and others in an account of the ethics of pleasure and the cultivation of the self as debated in Ancient Greece. Yet, both here and in his later collections of lectures, The Hermeneutics of the Subject and The Government of the Self and Others, these references to pedagogy typically amount to a focus on the ways in which one acts upon one’s self in the pursuit of virtue and in one’s formation as a moral subject. Foucault’s consideration of askesis or training is illustrative here, because he links this to a notion of paideia or learning, separating it from instruction by another. Of course, these constitute elements of a pedagogic process, but this demonstrates Foucault’s tendency to oscillate between technologies of power and technologies of the self; between institutional domination and self-regulation. The pedagogic dimensions of Foucault’s theorisation of government, therefore, remain largely unsaid.

It remains important that Foucault’s notion of government nevertheless accounts for the extended reach of politics to the self. This is not simply a matter of the ways in which government ties the individual to the state or, in Thomas Lemke’s terms (2001: 191), that they ‘co-determine each other’s emergence’. It is also a matter of how politics, as the art and science of government, allows for the exercise of power upon one’s self – even when that power is mediated by another as in traditional notions of pedagogy. Such an understanding does not retreat from a focus on power – although this was often a critique of Foucault’s work as he himself acknowledged – it simply affords a reimagining of the dynamics of the ‘contact point’, inserting pedagogy as the mechanism by which this is realised.

Bourdieu is another theorist whose work is concerned with the formation of the self and the nature of human conduct. In comparison to Foucault, he makes far more explicit reference to the role of pedagogy as a driver in relation to both, especially in his earlier work. Bourdieu uses the notion of habitus as a mechanism for accounting for the ways in which past practice, shaped by the various fields that individuals inhabit, determines action. Pedagogy is integral to this, as Bourdieu explains: ‘The pedagogic work of inculcation … is one of the major occasions for formulating and converting practical schemes into explicit norms’ (1990: 102–103), with pedagogies of home and school having the most impact. Yet, despite the significance Bourdieu attaches to pedagogy and its role in the formation of the habitus, the way in which this is conceived and applied within his work has several limitations. For Bourdieu, pedagogy is a form of symbolic violence, a cultural arbitrary imposed by an arbitrary power (Bourdieu 1977: 5). Defined as such, pedagogy primarily explains the reproductive function of the habitus and class inequalities. There is, of course, a common criticism of Bourdieu’s view of the habitus as overly deterministic (Jenkins 2002: 110). This was a view Bourdieu rejected, but with the possibility for transformation predicated on either structural change within a field or a ‘strategic calculation’ prompted by a mismatch between habitus and field, the degree of agency the habitus affords any individual is constrained. Pedagogy here could provide a circuit-breaker in relation to reproduction, allowing a stronger link between the habitus and processes of habitu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Meaghan Morris
• 1 Pedagogy: the unsaid of socio-cultural theory
• PART I Pedagogical processes and relations
• PART II Shaping conduct/forming citizens
• PART III Institutional pedagogies
• PART IV Habituation, affect and materialities
• Index