What Is Pedagogy?
And, why it’s important for teachers to consider.
Recently, a student asked me what my definition of the word “pedagogy” is, and in that moment, I decided that I could not adequately define such a word on the spot. I told her I would get back to her, and now — this is my reply.
More frequently used than pedagogy, the word pedagogue is used today to describe a strict, pedantic, and demanding instructor. The ancient Greek word, παιδαγωγός or paidagōgos, etymologically had a very different connotation. The “paidagog” of Plato’s time was an adult who — in servitude — and with great care, literally walked children to school each day. In ancient times, the word was taken to mean, the one who guides, protects, or leads. That pedagog seems gentler than those associations the word conjures up nowadays.
However, the idea of pedagogy is much more complex than either of these. In contemporary discourse, the word pedagogy is used sometimes to describe learning theory and other times used to describe the practice of such theory. It has become an example of academic language, referring to the exploration of how knowledge and skill grow as facilitated within the context of another person or other people (i.e. students and teachers). When curriculum structuralists explain the meaning of this pedagogy, they use the word transfer instead of the word, grow. But, since I’m no curriculum structuralist, I use the word grow.
There are various pedagogies described throughout the history of educational thought. For example, the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates, believed that his students ought to think for themselves and interacted with them, asking them questions, debating points, and literally arguing with them to inspire independent thought in them.
His pedagogy stands in stark contrast to that of the founder of Teachers College at Columbia, Edward Thorndike, who was an early 20th-century behaviorist who described teaching as an act that requires the conditioning of student behavior through punishments and rewards. The Belarusian developmental psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, believed that the role of the teacher is to mediate students’ ability to cognitively construct their own conceptions of the world rather than adopting the ideas of other people. This is just a small sample of the many different pedagogies that have been described throughout the history of modern thought.
At the heart of these and any other pedagogy is a theory of interaction. Such a theory describes the behaviors that individuals encounter during the learning process. Often pedagogy is understood as a set of such behaviors that can be replicated, imitated, or repeated for the purposes of institutional or social normative objectives; however, this particular understanding is better described by the word curriculum.
Many distinct pedagogies have evolved over millennia, each reflecting historical, philosophical, political, biological, social, psychological, scientific or personal stances. Many pedagogical theories include a paradigm of agency, where the roles of the learner and the teachers are defined and explained. For example, the role of teacher could be associated with coaching, or the role could be associated with modeling.
There are, of course, many variations of the learner/teacher relationship, none of which is absolutely individualized, meaning most teachers use a blend of pedagogies when they interact with their students.
Professional educators are guided by their own unique pedagogies whether they are conscious of them or not. These theoretical frameworks of how learning works, shape their instructional decisions and therefore their actions as they relate to how they interact with their students.
Many teachers are actually only vaguely aware of the pedagogies they enact, partially because the lines between various pedagogies are rarely clear, other times because teacher education rarely addresses learning theory and pedagogy but mostly because nearly all of us lack awareness of how deeply socialized we have become regarding our beliefs about how people learn.
In addition, a teacher’s personal pedagogy is rarely fixed. Dynamic and constantly shaped by experience, like our learning theories, our pedagogies are constantly evolving and such evolutions are not linear.
Scholars, Henry Giroux and Philip W. Jackson, used the term “hidden curriculum” to describe the unconscious consequences of socialization and the domestication of young people, through their families, religion, schools, and other cultural institutions that reinforce social norms.
The hidden curriculum is a powerful concept and for our purposes, I want to think aloud here about the hidden pedagogy. I am describing the phenomena where “teachers” unquestioningly, and without reflection, often unintentionally subsume the pedagogical belief system or systems that were used to educate them when they were students — from a very early age through adulthood. We adopt these means easily and naturally through repetition, during the years of our lives when we are dependent and impressionable children.
The decision-making processes of teachers always influence the strategies, activities, expectations, and assignments that we employ in our teaching, whether we are unconscious of or even fully aware of them. And often, we are unaware of what learning theories we follow, despite any declarations we might make about learning theories we “believe in.”
Unfortunately, since colleges of education and professional development prioritize teaching methodology over learning theory, many teachers lack a basic understanding of the various ideas about how people learn.
This is why pedagogy is important for teachers to consider. Without terminology that we can use to identify the various aspects of teaching and learning and how they relate to the events that occur in our teaching, we cannot reflect, analyze and discuss what we understand and believe about our behavior and the behavior of others.
Without a dialogue about interactions that are healthy, positive, and effective as well as those that are destructive, corrosive, and misaligned with our values, any thoughts, feelings, or reflections we have about our roles as teachers, or as students will be consumed in the vacuum created by expediency, tradition, and inertia.
If there seems to be no difference between learning theory and pedagogical thinking, that is because learning theory plays a central role in every teacher’s role identification within the student-teacher relationship, but learning theory is distinct from pedagogical thinking. Our pedagogies are more complex than our learning theories because although they subsume our beliefs about how people learn, they also include our personal understandings about authority, identity, personality, our personal histories as students and teachers, and behavior patterns, that are governed by our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions.
Here are some examples of modes of pedagogical thinking:
The scientific pedagogy, also called standards-based instruction is the most conventional pedagogy at this time in the history of education policy and theory. It is primarily outcome-based, focusing on the defined and pre-ordained subject matter and standardized basic skills that adult decision-makers (not learners) want teachers to transfer to learners, employing instructional models that include the use of conditioning through incentives, coercion, manipulation, and other more forceful means used to achieve goals that were selected for the learner instead of by or with the learner.
Thorndike’s theories are at the center of most outcome-based approaches to teaching. His “law of effect,” his behaviorist paradigms, and his strong belief in human conditioning, similar to Ivan Pavlov’s, John Watson’s and B.F. Skinner’s, provided a framework for what seems like an orderly connection between curriculum and instruction. In 1949, a man named, Ralph Tyler, who was developing a new organization for school curricula, began honing his scientific pedagogical approach to teaching into a framework and published a book about it titled, Principles of Curriculum and Instruction.
Known as the Tyler Rationale, this book laid out a deceptively simple structure for delivering and measuring the effectiveness of instruction. Tyler believed that teachers should ask these questions before starting:
•What educational purposes do we (the adults in the room) seek to attain? (i.e. learning objectives).
•What learning experiences are most useful in attaining these objectives?
•How can we organize these learning experiences to have the maximum effect possible?
•How will we evaluate the level of effectiveness of the chosen learning experiences to make sure we get to accomplish the objectives we want?
Although some curriculum experts, like UBD originators, Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins, may describe the pedagogies that accompany this brand of the curriculum as “student-centered,” the fact that in their taxonomies, they employ terms like “transfer goals” demonstrates that the concepts they base their frameworks on are reliant on the teacher acting as an agent of the dominant culture, placing “the teacher-as-agent” at the center of the instructional interaction, not the student. After all, who chooses the objectives?
Well, it’s not the students. That’s for sure. And, nowadays, even the teachers may be boxed out of that decision. Tyler went on to work for the federal government as an advisor during the writing of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Tyler also led the group that created the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). His legacy, which we still see all around us in schools today has shaped academic schooling into a rather technical/scientific endeavor.
The humanist pedagogy focuses on students’ needs, backgrounds, interests and holds individual human freedoms as preeminent. This pedagogy is based on various developmental models from psychology, sociology and neurology. Teachers who are faithful to the humanist school, prioritize the use of a holistic approach to instruction. Teachers who ascribe to the humanist approach rely heavily on a diversity of developmental theories, of which Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Albert Bandura’s theories of Self-Efficacy and Triadic Reciprocal Determinism top the list. And, although John Dewey is most notably associated with pragmatist pedagogies, his strong belief in the autonomy of the learner influenced humanist psychologists like Carl Rogers, who unlike Thorndike and Skinner, concerned himself with individual human potential, originating from within instead of conditioning that is controlled externally, not by the learner.
Jean-Paul Piaget’s theory of development was based on assimilation and accommodation, which influenced the humanist school, but extended beyond and into the constructivist framework. Piaget’s pedagogy required the student to be an active learner, because his understanding of an individual’s construction of mental models was that the process was internal, though fueled by interactions with external experiences with the world. Vygotsky took Piaget’s learning theories to a whole new level when he introduced the role of language and sociocultural influences on the learning process. His understanding about what learning is is now understood as a process that goes far beyond a transfer of knowledge. Vygotsky’s idea about what happens when we learn is that we construct our own meaning of the world through our relationships with other people.
Those pedagogies known as “liberal pedagogies” place the development of individual human potential at the center of the learning process, focusing on experiential, social and holistic educational experiences. Like the humanist school, the sources of this pedagogy are varied and concerned with human freedom and the potential for individual, optimal human performance over the coverage of generalized knowledge and skills.
This approach, though more student-centered, than the scientific approach in its application, is at its core, neither student nor teacher-oriented exclusively. The liberal pedagog values the spontaneity of experience as a catalyzing force in the learning process. Economist and philosopher, Friedrich Hayek conceptualized the generation of new knowledge as a spontaneous occurrence, and he placed “learning” itself at the center of instructional interaction as opposed to placing the teacher, the student, the culture or a grouping schema, a taxonomy of externally defined standards or academic content at the center of its pedagogy.
The classroom teacher whose pedagogy focuses on the spontaneous emergence of intellectual order is a liberal pedagogue using a multi-centric, diffusion of instructional and curricular methodologies. Those who ascribe to the liberal approach hold that freely associated conversation, disequilibration, reflection and the destigmatization of failure and the explicit modeling of continual inquiry as well as the regular questioning of otherwise culturally accepted knowledge claims or truths, laws or facts is for students and teachers, essential and ought not be mitigated by preordained goals, objectives or idealized outcomes.
Liberal pedagogies are equally personal and impersonal. The tradition of the liberal approach extends back to Socrates and Confucius, Locke, Rousseau and Kant, as well as Americans, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Today, Parker Palmer, noted author and proponent of liberal education exposes a semi-democratic/Quaker-esque community approach to teaching, understanding that the knowledge of truth has both an inner dimension as well as an interpersonal one and that learning is the a journey of discovery through a personal past, a focus on the present and focused attention to the future.
Vocational pedagogy is oriented toward the pragmatic training of specific technical skills through modeling, demonstration and other experiential methods. Vocational education often pairs experts (teacher) with novices (students) who through dialogue, experiential practice, failure, reflection and other experiences, generate new understandings of specific technical procedures together as mentor and protege navigating the field of technical knowledge and skill.
American education philosopher and thinker, John Dewey, is well-known as one of the most emphatic proponents of learning by doing, hands-on instruction or experiential education. Dewey believed that technical knowledge comes from our experiences with the objects we encounter in life, especially while working. He said that it is “impossible to procure knowledge without the use of objects which impress the mind.”
In vocational education today there is an emphasis upon teaching practical, technical skills oriented toward specific careers. However, the idea of “career” always has been a socially constructed concept, and that concept is being reconstructed radically today. This trend of reconstructing the concept of a career will only accelerate in years to come, causing a pressing need for reconceptualizing the definition of vocational education.
In 1916, Dewey warned that grounding vocational education too deeply in the practical application of technical skills in the pursuit of monetary rewards at the expense of understanding meaning that one may extract from a vocation would erode the very concept of vocationalism. Vocationalism is and always has been about having a specific creative purpose for one’s work and the talents, skills and mastery needed to fulfill that specific purpose by performing the work. Dewey equated vocational activity with art in this way.
Monetary rewards, hyper-utilitarianism and external validation are, after all, are only externally affirming, and extrinsically fulfilling and cannot and are not enough to sustain vocationalism today. Even as policymakers have made recent and desperate attempts to reinvest in vocational education, they continue to miss how necessary intrinsic and intellectual validation is in vocational education, because policymakers have since Dewey’s time framed vocational education in a dualism, where vocational education is more closely associated with technical training than liberal education, which always has been closely associated with ideas, philosophies, and epistemologies.
That mistake aside, vocational education is not the same thing as vocational pedagogy and never has been. Vocational pedagogy is the pure concept where the teacher is a mentor, and the student is an apprentice. Vocational pedagogy is the father of experiential education. It is distinct from liberal, traditional, and scientific pedagogies because vocation is the exercise of intelligence within an activity, not apart from it. Vocationalism is framed by craftsmanship, and vocational pedagogy is not exclusive to technical training. It is methodologically useful as a means of teaching and learning in many fields, professions and intellectual paradigms, not just in the teaching of trades.
Critical pedagogy was originated by Brazilian educator and philosopher, Paolo Freire, who rejected the idea that knowledge can be politically neutral and that access to and the exchange of knowledge are restricted by those in power in order to maintain that power.
Freire argued that whether teachers are aware of the politics inherent in their teaching or not, the dynamic of their instruction is informed by and perpetuates a distinct power dynamic, sometimes one that even robs them of their own power.
He believed that traditional Western methods of instruction reinforce many forms of societal oppression (political, economic, spiritual, psychological and others) by conditioning people at the earliest age (before they are developmentally able to enter into inquiry) to exchange their freedom for assimilation. Critical pedagogy seeks to expose the insidiousness of colonial thinking in teaching and auto-domestication of teachers and students.
The goal of critical pedagogy is an emancipation from that oppression through awareness of how these power dynamics are embedded in our curriculum, teaching philosophy and culture. Critical theorists hold that true liberation can only come from education systems devoid of oppression.
Critical pedagogy is an especially philosophic set of ideas combined through intersectionality with the practical application of theory through political and artistic and intellectual means. A main concentration of its energy is on examining how the structure of social classism manifests in both dominant intellectual and popular cultures perpetrated through traditional education institutions via conditioning and narrative. Critical pedagogy is constantly extending anew into the political, cultural and academic consciousness. Henry Giroux, a professor of history and English at McMaster University, and Peter McLaren, a professor of Critical Studies at Chapman University, have since the 1980s represented, redefined and applied the ideas of critical pedagogy in their teaching and writing, exposing authoritarian tendencies in American education systems and cultures, that connect knowledge with power.
Other leading academics who have represented the ideas of critical pedagogy and have been associated with of critical pedagogy are: bell hooks, Joe Kincholoe, Howard Zinn, Michael Apple, Johnathan Kozol, John Holt and Parker Palmer. Whereas other pedagogies do not take political stands, critical pedagogues are aggressively anti-racist, ardently feminist, staunchly pro-queer and openly post-colonial. Theirs is theory of discourse, engaging in the purposeful disruption of traditional power structures that are embedded in the American education tradition. This pedagogy is characterized by an epistemological cynicism that decenters structuralist notions of teaching, while promoting pure freedom and democracy.
There are many other pedagogies.
The threshold between curriculum and pedagogy has been historically vague. And, the persistent idea that pedagogy is about teaching methods and strategies as if they are the same as various approaches to instruction also confounds anyone trying to conceptualize the basic essence of the term.
Ultimately, this strange word refers to the academic examination of processes used in the acquisition or assimilation of new knowledge by an individual in an educational context. This epistemology considers the various types of interactions that take place during learning. Those interactions are governed by our beliefs about how people learn. They become methodologies, practices and our curriculum.
Today in Greek, the word, paidagōgos, is a verb that means “to tutor.” But, in the literature of Plato’s time, the word had a particular connotation. It meant “to serve.” Herodotus used the word in his The Histories, meaning “an attendant to the young.” When Socrates used the word, he was referring to a “protector of children.” Pedagog is used in both The New Testament and Old. When The King James Bible was translated into English from the ancient Greek texts, the word was written to mean: one who leads, one who serves, one who guides and one who brings forth.
Our pedagogies essentially mediate how we consciously and more importantly how we unconsciously guide our students through their learning processes. This occurs more through our idiosyncratic behaviors than we are aware and often supersedes our intentionally explicit directions, instructions or demonstrations.
Pedagogy is not the same as instruction or curriculum. It is more than style or approach. It lies just deeply enough underneath theses to govern our decisions without our full appreciation of its power.
I’m glad she asked me what pedagogy is, because, as much as I know about education, I have a lot to learn, and like so many of my students over the years, she is teaching me with her curiosity.
As I consider what this word means to me, “personally,” as I consider what “my own pedagogy” might be, I ask myself questions like: Why am I drawn to teaching as my life’s work? What do I think teaching is? How do people learn? What is more important the what (curriculum), the how (instruction) or the why (pedagogy)?
Again and again, I am drawn to the image of an Ancient Greek servant walking children to school.
I imagine walking along a dirt road in Athens or Sparta serving as a humble master, a calm and composed guide, protecting my precious and vulnerable charges. Do I crave simplicity?
Teaching is a complex and sophisticated profession, forever expanding vocation. Exhausting and even overwhelming, I find it impossible to do the job even adaquately well. Am I yearning for a role that, though not necessarily easier, might be less all-consuming?
Or, is it the idea of “guiding as teaching” that attracts me? I have over the course of my career, moved away from “telling and showing” as teaching, gravitating toward the role of a Sherpa, who helps climbers up the mountain but doesn’t show them how to climb it or tell them how beautiful the view is. I have become less hands-on as a teacher and more present, conscious of the example I might be.
When I was a young child, in school, I was a sensitive and fragile boy, who was often frightened of the teachers and the other students. Sadly, my vulnerability was easy for the bullies to see. Ultimately, it’s not the ideas, thoughts, and facts of the image of being a servant who walks children to a school that had appeal, it more the FEELINGS that imagining that scene evokes. Although it’s too late to protect a much younger me from the abuse from his peers and the neglect of his teachers, it’s not too late to watch over, protect and to be the quiet guardian of children (and adults) today from their peers, their teachers and even from themselves.
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