Abstract
Across the Anglophone world, throughout the late 20th and early 21st century, learning and teaching became the go-to descriptions for teacher and learner activity. Notably, this term posited individualistic views that ‘education is an individual right’ realised through technically proficient teacher-action that engenders favourable positioning in a post-industrial, efficient world. More recently, pedagogy seems to have remerged as a flavoursome term. However, its use is still dominated by the doctrines of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) realised through education science assumptions and approaches. In turn, across much of the Anglophone world, pedagogy is mostly described as ‘the methods and practices of teaching’ often associated with delivery-type teaching and learning judged by quantitative uplift on test scores. Pedagogy, it seems, is still subservient to individualism reified by forms of technically legitimate teaching competence. In many respects, Scotland is no different: policy frames and explanations (Adams, 2016) often legitimise through technocratic and positivist Discourses (Gee, 2012). Matters such as the recent incorporation of the UNHRC into Scottish law offer hope though, for they offer ‘rupture’. The OECD might prevail over system-wide evaluation and conversations about ‘curriculum’ dominate, but ever-increasing calls to shift ‘schooling’ from ‘learning and teaching’ to ‘education, more broadly conceived’ seem to have widened discourse (Gee, 2012) and acknowledged the inherently political. While this has not magically moved pedagogy on, it is clear is that pedagogy as ‘being in and acting on the world, with and for others is finding a Scottish voice.
Highlights
In many respects, Scotland is no different: policy frames and explanations (Adams, 2016) often legitimise through technocratic and positivist Discourses (Gee, 2012)
And historically guided by the church and the workplace, education has been seen as the vehicle to turn children into socially desirable adults as quickly as possible (Montà, Carriera, & Biff, 2020); this is notable in Scotland
Both the UNCRC and associated Rights Respecting School Award (RRS) take a participatory approach to pedagogy embedded in a frame of liberal paternalism (Roose & Bouverne-De Bie, 2007) which posits that children and young people should be seen as both ‘having’ and ‘moving towards’ autonomy, only to be curtailed when autonomous acts may lead to jeopardy
Summary
I take education to be the organisation of teaching/learning/assessment/ testing moments into a coherent pattern and order, often realised through formal settings. I draw no distinction between education for different purposes or for different groups of learners; rather, I note that education is defined here systemically This systems approach may be realised in the confines of a classroom, school, group of schools, region, or country and consists of recognisable organisation for the purposes of achieving (usually predefined) outcomes and ends. In this sense, non-formal education might fit as its endeavours may have defined outcomes as an aim. Control of professional acts can, and often is P/politically motivated, policy mandate and missive inevitably centre on organisational features that orient professional work To this end, local discursive acts come to the fore for the ways in which they note moment-by-moment realisations of professional endeavours set within Big-D/Discourse. Organisational but in describing education systematically, what I am attempting to do is mark out loci of control between education (as a system) and pedagogy (as both Big-D/discourse and little-d/discourse (Gee, 2012))
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