WHY PEDAGOGY?
                                        AN INTRODUCTION TO THIS ISSUE BY                                                                                       Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/27/5/2/1613451 by National Science & Technology Library user on 30 September 2022
                                                                     DAVID LUSTED
                                                   There is no general pedagogy: only pedagogies, like horses, for courses.
                        'Education in Crisis',                                                                                                        1
                        in James Donald and                                                                                        - Stuart Hall
                        Ann Marie Wolpe
                        (eds), Is There Anyone     WHY SHOULD PEDAGOGY be of interest to anyone? Few are
                        Here from Educanon?y                                                                                                    2
                        London, Pluto, 1983,       familiar with the term. Even aficionados gag on its pronunciation  and
                        p6.                        falter in its spelling.
                                                      Where the word is familiar at all, it's most often in the shape of
                      1 Hard 'g', then soft 'g'.   'pedagogue', conjuring mental images of the mortar-board and cane,
                                                   Bash Street Kids and Mr Chips (Michael Redgrave rather than Peter
                                                   O'Toole), connoting pedantry and dogmatism.
                                                      Indeed, even among elite realms of thought, pedagogy is taken as co-
                                                   terminous with teaching, merely describing a central activity in an
                                                   education system. The invisibility of pedagogy in education and cultural
                                                   production generally is well matched by the imprecision of dictionary
                                                   definitions which relate pedagogy variously to teaching as an agency, a
                                                   profession or a practice.
                                                      Within education and even among teachers, where the term should
                                                   have greatest purchase, pedagogy is under-defined, often referring to no
                                                   more than a teaching style, a matter of personality and temperament, the
                                                   mechanics of securing classroom control to encourage learning, a
                                                   cosmetic bandage on the hard body of classroom contact.
                                                      So, is there any useful purpose in investigating a term so incoherent
                                                   and unacknowledged? Why is pedagogy important? It is important
                                                   since, as a concept, it draws attention to the process through which
                                                   knowledge is produced. Pedagogy addresses the 'how' questions
           involved not only in the transmission or reproduction of knowledge but
           also in its production. Indeed, it enables us to question the validity of
           separating these activities so easily by asking under what conditions and                                Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/27/5/2/1613451 by National Science & Technology Library user on 30 September 2022
           through what means we 'come to know'. How one teaches is therefore of
           central interest but, through the prism of pedagogy, it becomes insepar-
                                                                  learns. In this per-
           able from what is being taught and, crucially, how one
           spective, to bring the issue of pedagogy in from the cold and onto the
           central stage of cultural production is to open up for questioning areas of
           enquiry generally repressed by conventional assumptions, as prevalent
           in critical as in dominant practices, about theory production and teach-
           ing, and about the nature of knowledge and learning. ;
             Pedagogy is desperately under-theorised. No loss, at one level; it's an
          ugly word in print and on the tongue. The problem is that what the con-
           cept addresses is crucial and the absence of its development has had
           material effects. One effect is a share in the failure to realise post-war
           aspirations towards a genuinely democratic and popular mandatory
           education system. Another effect is yet another failure; this time to
           connect radical cultural theory to popular movements whose interests
           that theory declares it represents. Big claims. What this issue of Screen
           seeks is to establish some terms for the claims and to investigate a
           number of related areas in which the concept of pedagogy can be
           deployed as part of a programme to change the sequence of failure.
             What this article attempts is to set the stage for new thinking in film,
           TV, media and cultural studies and education. Following Stuart Hall, its
           task is to establish the issue of 'pedagogy in general', situating the
           articles that follow which deal with 'pedagogies in particular'. The cen-
           tral question here is how adequate the theorisation of film, TV, culture
           in general can be without a consciousness of the conditions which
           produce, negotiate, transform, realise and return it in practice. What
           pedagogy addresses is the process of production and exchange in this
           cycle, the transformation of consciousness that takes place in the inter-
           action of three agencies - the teacher, the learner and-the knowledge they
           together produce. If this is to describe a model of relations set by the
           terms of the social relations of the classroom, it holds good too-
           at least in principle (and I'll even grudgingly concede metaphorically)-
           in the realm of theory production with the teacher rendered as theorist/
           critic, the learner as reader/activist and knowledge as theory.
             The concept of pedagogy gives substance to the nature of the relations
           in these models. It refuses any tendency to instrumentalise the relations,
           to disconnect their interactivity or to give value to one agency over
           another. Hence, for instance, it denies notions of the teacher as function-
                                                                               3
           ary (neutral transmitter of knowledge as well as 'state functionary') , the
           learner as 'empty vessel' or passive respondent, knowledge as immutable       As constructed by the
           material to impart. Instead, it foregrounds exchange between and over         new sociology of
           the categories, it recognises the productivity of the relations, and it       education. See
           renders the parties within them as active, changing and changeable            Michael Young (ed),
                                                                                         Knowledge and Control,
           agencies.                                                                     London, Collier and
             To be sensitive to the pedagogy of teaching and of theory (just to mix      Macmillan, 1972.
                                   the relations a bit) is to undermine the conventional transmission model
                                   wherein knowledge is produced, conveyed and received. Calling this act
                                   'mediation' changes not one whit the one-way direction of the process.      Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/27/5/2/1613451 by National Science & Technology Library user on 30 September 2022
                                   The transmission model is unilinear; anyone trying to turn-back in the
                                   one-way traffic is unceremoniously run over. To insist on the pedagogy
                                   of theory, as with the pedagogy of teaching, is to recognise a more trans-
                                   actional model whereby knowledge is produced not just at the
                                   researcher's desk nor at the lectern but in the consciousness, through the
                                   process of thought, discussion, writing, debate, exchange; in the social
                                   and internal, collective and isolated struggle for control of under-
                                   standing; from engagement in the unfamiliar idea, the difficult form-
                                   ulation pressed at the limit of comprehension or energy; in the meeting
                                   of the deeply held with the casually dismissed; in the dramatic moment
                                   of realisation that a scarcely regarded concern, an unarticulated desire,
                                   the barely assimilated, can come alive, make for a new sense of self,
                                   change commitments and activity. And these are also transformations
                                   which take place across all agencies in an educational process, regardless
                                   of their title as academic, critic, teacher or learner.
                                     What this somewhat flowery passion turns on is a distress at the
                                   customary division of value accorded to the academic and the teacher, on
                                   the one hand, and the teacher and the learner on the other. Indeed, one
                                   cause of the fundamental refusal to take the need for pedagogy seriously
                                   is located in just these divisions. Theorists theorise, produce; teachers
                                   teach, reproduce. Therefore, such a logic would run, if anyone need be
                                   concerned about their pedagogy it is only the teacher-with a heavy
                                   stress on only.
                                     The low cultural status accorded to teaching is not just a matter of con-
                                   temporary government policies feeding popular prejudices. It is a view
                                   shared by many in universities who give such low priority to their teach-
                                   ing duties, a view in tune with the lowest educational status accorded to
                                   those earlier sectors of the education system where teaching is seen as a
                                   merely instrumental function. Sadly, the self-image of many teachers
                                   also accords with this view, inhibiting those feelings of value and
                                   confidence which are essential prerequisites to any change in under-
                                   standing the relation between academic and teacher. Rather, what needs
                                   to be asserted is that teaching is as much knowledge production as the
                                   more obvious activities of researching, writing, publishing, lecturing.
                                     But this is only part of the story. Knowledge is not produced in the
                                   intentions of those who believe they hold it, whether in the pen or in the
                                   voice. It is produced in the process of interaction, between writer and
                                   reader at the moment of reading, and between teacher and learner at the
                                   moment of classroom engagement. Knowledge is not the matter that is
                                   offered so much as the matter that is understood. To think of fields or
                                   bodies of knowledge as if they are the property of academics and teachers
                                   is wrong. It denies an equality in the relations at moments of interaction
                                   and falsely privileges one side of the exchange, and what that side
                                   'knows', over the other.
                                     Moreover, for critical cultural producers to hold to this view of know-
          ledge carries its own pedagogy, an autocratic and elite pedagogy. It's not
          just that it denies the value of what learners know, which it does, but that
          it misrecognises the conditions necessary for the kind of learning-crit-                                Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/27/5/2/1613451 by National Science & Technology Library user on 30 September 2022
          ical, engaged, personal, social-called for by the knowledge itself. There
          is a fundamental problem for much of the cultural and educational crit-
          icism that exists, which has been felt most acutely in recent years-a
          body of criticism which has exposed the ideological nature of dominant
          institutions and texts and called for alternative and oppositional act-
          ivities. What that history is, how its movements regularly fail in their
          emancipatory objectives and the extent to which that failure resides at
          least in some part in the form, the pedagogy, of its address is a key issue
          for contemporary and future practices.
            But first things first. If knowledge needs to be conceived as produced
          in exchange, so too must all agents in its active production be conceived
          as producers, the divisions between theorising, writing, teaching and
          learning be dissolved. The problem with a great deal of cultural and
          educational theory alike, shared even by critical/radical theory which
          should know better, is that it makes ritual nods in the direction of
          acknowledging a pedagogy of sorts in its production while, in its form,
          disavowing its importance entirely. This reflex practice has a politics
          and that politics is deeply reactionary. It is based on two unquestioned
          assumptions.
            The first is that to transmit ideas (whether impersonally, through
          writing, or personally, through interaction) is enough: the theorist leaves
          the dissemination of theory to the skills of the intermediary; the teacher
          leaves to chance or to the realm of the unfathomable the learner's
          production of knowledge. The second assumption is that the pedagogy
          of any address follows its production rather than being integral to it, as if
          there is no pedagogy in the fact of theorising or teaching itself. The first
          assumption is irresponsible, the second is self-deluding.
            What this state of affairs leads to is a system of critical knowledge-
          production that bellows into a void for changes in understanding with-
          out properly attending to the conditions necessary to maximising the
          opportunities to effect those changes. Those 'necessary conditions'
          include a mode of address which is sensitive to the actual social position-
          ing of its respondents and an acknowledgement of different forms of
          knowledge-production which take account of the different contexts in
          which they perform.
            The relation between critic and reader, teacher and learner is
          inevitably a power relation. To draw attention to the nature of
          knowledge-production in those relations and to demand consideration of
          the pedagogy of those relations is not to obscure their inequality. Rather,
          it is in order more adequately to take account of it and the factors which
          determine it. It is a commonplace that the relations are often based on
          differences in age, more obviously so in the mandatory education sector,
          and also in class position, educational biography, familiarity and facility
          with disciplines and ideas. The relations are also often characterised by
          distinctions in cultural expectations, social experience, linguistic struct-