Strickland, "Pedagogy and Public Accountability"

Strickland urges progressive teachers to “move beyond the limited understanding of pedagogy and of the public accountability of higher education we have inherited from the modernist and civic humanist traditions,” and move toward a “reunderstanding of the public responsibilities of teachers and students (164-65). He suggests that we begin by changing our understanding of the classroom as a private space, arguing that pedagogy and knowledge should be deprivatized. To deprivatize our classrooms, we need to help students in “identifying the enabling conditions, the regimes of truth that support our taken-for-granted institutional structures and practices (166). This means helping our students situate themselves, their departments, and their institutions in relation to other students, other departments, and other institutions. It also means helping students understand what role the public plays (and pays) in their education, particularly through subsidizing with tax dollars the cost of their college education.

Strickland warns that other teachers may be threatened by the concept of deprivatization of the classroom. He suggests two specific ways to deprivatize: assign pedagogy critiques to students (very threatening to some); and use technology, such as listservs (or blogs, which Strickland doesn’t mention—blogs didn’t exist in 1997—but that I think would accomplish what he’s aiming for), to make classroom discussions public (and through linking, they can be made “participatory” to the public), and to revise “traditional power relations between student and teacher” (174).

links: del.icio.us    technorati