VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY

Abstract

The active learning reform promised to replace the lecture with dialogue. Drawing on Freire, reformers framed the lecture as oppressive. But Freire’s pedagogy was built under specific material conditions, teaching literacy to oppressed rural Brazilians, and when transplanted into university classrooms, the material foundation fell away. What survived was the form, stripped of the situation that gave it meaning. What arrived was managed activity, outcomes-aligned pedagogy governed by rubrics and assessed not for what students think but for how visibly they appear to be thinking. This paper argues that managed activity forecloses the genuine encounter it claims to produce. Drawing on Ball and Macfarlane, we show it compels the display of engagement without producing it. The bad lecture failed, but in failing left open a gap between what the structure could prohibit and what it could compel. We call this the daydreaming student, a figure for what happens when the structure cannot compel the affects it demands. That gap was the condition under which genuine encounter remained possible. Managed activity closes it. Using Ahmed, we argue that what is displayed and what circulates come apart. The institution reads the performed surface as evidence of learning while what moves through the room is anxiety and the fatigue of display. The question is what students are being formed into when display becomes compulsory. The reform has no framework for recognizing as a loss what it was designed to eliminate.