PEDAGOGY DEVELOPED AS A RESULT OF OBSERVING TEACHING AND LEARNING

Pedagogy Developed as a Result of Observing Teaching and Learning

Pedagogy Developed as a Result of Observing Teaching and Learning

Introduction

This paper is a reflection upon, and theorisation of a possible cause for, the difficulty that was encountered trying to talk with teachers explicitly about their pedagogies during the first phase of a three year ARC funded research project, Redesigning Pedagogies in the North1 (RPiN). The RPiN project is focussing upon the redesign of middle years pedagogies in ten state High Schools located in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, which include significant areas of poverty and social disadvantage. During the first year of the RPiN project there were numerous activities designed to engage the middle school teacher-researchers from the schools in explicit conversations about their work as teachers in the 'north'. These conversations, in the form of written reflections, artefact display, group discussions and interviews, generated rich descriptions of the 'particularities' of daily life in these schools. Teacher-researchers spoke about the myriad challenges they face teaching in Adelaide's northern 'rust belt' communities, including classroom and behaviour management issues, dealing with a lack of funding and resources and trying to engage students in achieving educational outcomes which enable them to make real choices about their life trajectories. In these early discussions among the teacher researchers and with the university researchers involved in the project, there were ongoing difficulties in finding an adequate language to define and describe what was pedagogical about the ways that teachers responded to these challenges. For example, the teacher-researchers continually returned to the issue of 'relationships' with the young people in their classrooms as the key to teaching and learning which raised the question for us of whether, or how, 'relationships' could be seen as an aspect of pedagogy. We were faced with the challenge of both 'hearing' what the teachers had to say as being about pedagogy, and in relating what they said to conceptions of pedagogy being used in contemporary middle school literature. It became clear that being able to develop a shared concept of pedagogy that helped to mediate between teachers' reports and theoretical accounts was important if the teacher and university researchers were going to be able to describe, experiment with, and redesign the work of teaching and learning in the classrooms of the RPiN schools.

While acknowledging the importance of the productive pedagogies framework as an attempt to provide this common set of pedagogical categories, we have been struck by the emphasis in this conceptual frame upon the products of teaching with comparatively little attention to the actual practices of teachers that might lead to these observable outcomes. As such, it does act as a useful tool for critically reflecting upon the outcomes of classroom practice, but we have found it less useful for engaging deeply in the difficult task of defining what practices count as pedagogies - what do pedagogies look like during their actual practice? This is understandable considering the framework was initially conceived as ...