ith one simple statement of wonder, a nine-year old girl once put my role as her teacher into innocent perspective. She turned to me and said, “The trees are history. Everything tells a story.”
The story Adrienne was hearing was something outside of speech, something between the lines—the forest for the trees. She’d grasped that infinite pause in which our hearts, minds and spirits nourish themselves, and her impulse was to share it. In eight short words, timely placed and richly evocative, a 4th-grader had given me the key of how to teach her. In her ingenuous way, young Adrienne reached out to show me that the content we teach is much less important than a connection to the world itself.
The task of education is and ought to be humblingHumility of this type is not false modesty, but rather the recognition and acceptance of the role one must fill at any given moment. Humility is to be present. This is how it relates to the Latin humilis, “on the ground.” for the teacher. How can we, charged with unfolding the vast, unknowable universe—nothing short of what a phenomenal mind once called, “a great, eternal riddle”?“Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation…”– Albert Einstein—convey to the student something that cannot be tangibly had? Such is the task of pedagogy. For grand though the task may seem, and as important as it is, its achievement is greatly facilitated by our consistency. A pedagogy is simply that which helps us—learned and learner, alike—gaze into the mystery in a didactic, productive manner.
Approach
edagogy is the practical matter in which we harmonize the needs of any learning environment:
Curriculum – What will we present, and when? By what route will we realize our vision?
Instruction – How will the material be explored by the student and ourselves?
Management – How do we structure and maintain the internal and external learning environments?
Feedback – What are the environment and student telling us? What are we telling them? How can we ensure that the student is engaged? How is the student’s progress recognized and communicated? How do we ascertain the interests of the students as they arise?
Agency – How do we ensure the development of these pedagogical faculties within the student him or herself?
The approach to and relative weighting of these elements differentiates various pedagogies from one another. For instance, public schools follow a standardized curriculum set and governed at the level of the state. And while there is some flexibility in how and when exactly teachers meet the specific outcomes outlined therein, this effectively keeps curriculum separate from the other pedagogical elements. The Reggio Emilia approach, however, follows an “emergent curriculum” that follows the needs, interests and curiosities of the student as they arise. In this way, curriculum can be interlaced within management and feedback, helping to guide instruction and thus induce agency. The center of education having emerged from within the student from the very beginning, the five elements of pedagogy are rendered somewhat indistinguishable from one another.
A good pedagogy will address these five methodological aspects in the way that best suits both student and teacher, alike. Thus pedagogy is alive in each of us who instruct. Every one of us has something to bring that is new. Pedagogy is no mysterious, far-off concept existing solely in the brazen towers of bygone academia; each of us will have, strictly speaking, our own philosophy, our own particular way of connect the student to our world. It is this that we must learn to share. Yet we never forget the debt of gratitude we owe to the pedagogical methods that have brought us here, individually and as a society alike. We need not strive to be “original”, only instead simply conduct ourselves in the fashion that compels us forward.
Though far from a comprehensive list, this website will investigate the Forest School, International Baccalaureate, Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and Steiner/Waldorf pedagogies. These models effectively span the entirety of education’s wide promise, and the value of what they have given us is incalculable. Yet we must be clear that pedagogy does not belong to the giants of history; pedagogy does not start and stop with autochthonousWhat a great word! It means indigenous, aboriginal, or native to—in the sense of originating in—a place peoples, Plato and the classicists, Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Loris Malaguzzi, John HoltHomeschoolingUnschooling, the school system, the government, etc. (well, it kind of does start with the indigenous peoples, but…). Pedagogy is carried forward by you in each and every interaction you have with a learning opportunity.
Beyond the Definition
xpounding on the definition by Merriam-Webster?pedagogy (noun)
pe-də-ˌgō-jēThe art, science, or profession of teachingmerriam-webster.com, a pedagogy is nothing more that the personal philosophy adopted by an educator or establishment that balances our art with the science of teaching, instruction or guidance. For so long as we have been sharing our knowledge with one another, being the entirety of Human history, we have done so according to the principles of one pedagogy or another.
The root *ag-, “drive, draw out or forth, move”?*ag-, Proto-Indo-European root…It forms all or part of: act …
agency …
ambassador …
cogitation …
interact …
navigate …
transaction …
variegate …It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Greek agein “to lead, guide…” etymonline.com, literal center of the word pedagogy, determines the term’s great imperative. This should inform our hearts, too. We build bridges. Every student must create their unique connection to his or her world, and this is something that we, in our pedagogical bent, have the honor of helping them draw forth. Though perhaps not all students will be interested in the same things (at the same time or otherwise), and though certainly not all will process information in the same way, every person without exception is intrinsically wired for learning. It is the primary objective of school-age education to identify this spark and fan it into a flame, a blaze, a towering inferno.
And so we come back to pedagogy.
Why Do We Need Pedagogy?
pedagogy is the standard frame of reference to which we continually refer, the philosophy that guides all of our investigations, student and teacher alike. Ensuring that we are consistent in our approach provides an internal geometry to the learning spaces we create, external and internal. In this manner, we help point the student to meaningful personal experience that can connect them to the learning they undertake.
Education is something that must be flexible because education is something universal. This is a process so ingrained in human latency that Socrates considered it the term “learning” a misnomer:
“[N]othing prevents a man, after recalling one thing only—a process men call learning—discovering everything else for himself, if he is brave and does not tire of the search, for searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection.”⋆Complete Works
Plato, Cooper, & Hutchinson, 1997,
p. 880
By recognizing the internal order which guides our learning spaces, invisible to the students though it will be, our pedagogy defines the structure in which our flexibility will make sense. Equally, it also provides the children a model of regularity in how to conduct the learning they have forever undertaken. Yet a pedagogy itself is not something we should labor over, it will arise naturally. The one principle is that we must know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. As with learning any art, we start by imitating the masters; and in time, our own style will emerge.
Pedagogy is to education as soul is to Man.
