Pedagogy A-Go-Go

Yesterday I went to a meeting of some fellow educators, these others are actually working in the field, and we discussed pedagogy. Pedagogy is best thought of as the dogma of teaching; the research, practices, philosophies and studies designed to make the classroom a better place for learning. It can be quite fun, but it can be, and is often, pedantic and very idealistic. Anyway, it’s really fun to talk about if you’re a young teacher, and the one who invited you to the discussion is hot.
We discussed Maxine Greene’s “The Dialectic of Freedom,” a book that I won’t bore you with the details. Just know that Greene is very smart, loves to name drop, and has some great ideas that she doesn’t always follow through on. I guess that’s on purpose, because then it leads you to decide how to follow through. Or maybe she’s just lazy.
But there we were, in a classroom discussing the literature of the field. A real, honest-to-God discussion, like I imagined them to be in college. It was like Lisa’s trip to the local college campus in that one “Simpsons.” I love my other classes, in that I have great professors. But there have been times when the discussion between students was sorely lacking. It’s like we wanted to distract ourselves. Sometimes this was out of the boredom, ennui if you will, that we suffered in the class. Mostly it’s because nobody did the reading except for the pedagogy geeks in the class (all right, me and a few others), and everyone else was just saying whatever they thought teaching should be, and then they just said whatever.
But this was real college talk. References made to the classics; holes that we found in the arguments; points made, rebutted, remade, redefined; jargon everywhere. It was so much fun that I haven’t stopped smiling. It was the best two hours I spent in a classroom after school. Except for that one time when Sharon and I snuck into the Chem Tech lab at night. Well, let’s just say that they were both the best for very different reasons.