Pedagogic Rights for Transformative Student Learning: What Do Lecturers Say and Do?

Abstract

This chapter presents an analysis of university pedagogic practices from the perspectives of lectures themselves, gathered during in-depth interviews about their teaching and learning practices. By combining the capabilities approach with Bernstein’s concept of pedagogic rights, the chapter presents and then applies a useful analytical framework focused on educational well-being, achieved through the realisation of three pedagogic rights, which in turn foster capability formation. The empirical data show that good university teachers are in fact already working in the direction of building just universities and are using their pedagogic practices as the tools to do so, even in the global context of increasingly instrumental approaches to higher education. Examples of pedagogical practices that enable the realisation of these pedagogic rights are shared, and the chapter reflects on the fact that while the first two pedagogical rights that centre on educational well-being are commonly fostered, that there is rather less attention to the third pedagogic right, that of participation and deliberation at a political level.