Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

“There are no madmen except those who insist on inequality and domination, those who want to be right.” (Rancière, 1991: 72) This paper reflects the ongoing (and principally good-natured) struggle I have been having as both teacher and writer doing what my PhD described as “a hardly intended deconstruction of the dominant educational paradigm”. This ‘paradigm’ I might describe as involving a number of elements which I personally find problematic to the project of education (aka ‘learning’), namely ‘assessment’, curriculum, programmed learning and especially learning outcomes. My focus on these matters has principally been speculatively theoretical but also embodied practically in a Foundation Year module that progressively has turned over these dubious principles, promising co-creation, an assignment which is an open-ended writing opportunity and a promise that nothing explicitly taught on the module will be assessed. This has evolved over a number of years and has been informed in its development by Rancière’s notion of “universal teaching”, an approach that puts aside explanation in favour of interaction and experience. It also abandons the notion of two-tier intelligence, which he dubs the pedagogical myth. But Rancière realises, as I do that “The social circle, the order of things, prevents it from being recognized for what it is”(op. cit. : 16) It is this established order of things that my work and this paper challenge, not least because the emancipatory education that most of us want can only be ‘produced’ by emancipated teachers. Only by emancipating teachers can we be true to the universal teaching ideal.