Essays on Pedagogy

225 Pages·2008·1.461 MB·English

by  Robin Alexander

Essays on Pedagogy
Pedagogy is at last gaining the attention in English-speaking countries that it has
long enjoyed elsewhere. But is it the right kind of attention? Do we still tend to
equate pedagogy with teaching technique and little more? Now that governments,
too, have become interested in it, is pedagogy a proper matter for public policy
and official prescription?
In Essays on Pedagogy, Robin Alexander brings together some of his most
powerful recent writing, drawing on research undertaken in Britain and other
countries, to illustrate his view that to engage properly with pedagogy we need to
apply cultural, historical and international perspectives, as well as evidence on how
children most effectively learn and teachers most productively teach.
The book includes chapters on a number of themes, expertly woven together:
• the politicisation of school and classroom life and the trend towards a
pedagogy of compliance;
• the benefits and hazards of international comparison;
• pedagogical dichotomies old and new, and how to avoid them;
• the centrality of talk to development, learning and teaching and the
empowering potential of classroom dialogue;
• how education and pedagogy might respond to a world in peril;
• the rare and special chemistry of the personal and the professional which
produces outstanding teaching;
• the scope and character of pedagogy itself, as a field of enquiry and action.
For those who see teachers as thinking professionals, rather than as technicians who
merely comply with received views of ‘best practice’, this book will open minds
while maintaining a practical focus. For student teachers it will provide a
framework for their development. Its strong and consistent international
perspective will be of interest to educational comparativists, but is also an essential
response to globalisation and the predicaments now facing humanity as a whole.
Robin Alexander is Fellow of Wolfson College at Cambridge University, UK,
Professor of Education Emeritus at Warwick University, UK, and Director of the
Primary Review. His Culture and Pedagogy (2001) won the Outstanding Book
Award of the American Educational Research Association.

Essays on Pedagogy
Robin Alexander
First published 2008
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2008 Robin Alexander
Typeset in Palatino by
Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known
or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Alexander, Robin J.
Essays on pedagogy/Robin Alexander.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Teaching. 2. Learning. I. Title.
LB1028.A417 2008
371.102 – dc22 2008003199
ISBN10: 0–415–45482–4 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–45483–2 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–45482–7 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–45483–4 (pbk)
For Karen

Contents
Acknowledgements ix
List of abbreviations x
1 Introduction 1
2 Pedagogy goes East 9
3 Principle, pragmatism and compliance 43
4 Beyond dichotomous pedagogies 72
5 Talking, teaching, learning 92
6 Pedagogy for a runaway world 121
7 Words and music 154
8 Conclusion 173
Appendix: dialogic teaching 184
References 192
Index 208

Acknowledgements
It is not possible to list all those to whom debts of gratitude are owed for
their contributions to the various projects on which this book draws; and,
as always, the ethics of educational research prevent one from naming the
children and teachers to whom in a sense one owes most – for without
engaging directly with them and their worlds there is little on the subject
of pedagogy that one can say. However, I must acknowledge those
institutions and organisations that provided platforms for what started as
lectures or conference papers: Warwick University Institute of Education,
Cambridge University Faculty of Education, the Hong Kong Institute of
Education, the American Educational Research Association and the
International Association for Cognitive Education and Psychology. I also
thank the bodies that awarded grants for the work on which the papers
draw: the Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust,
the British Council and the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fund. Thanks
for permission to reproduce copyright material are due to Routledge
(Chapter 3), Oxford University Press (Chapter 4) and the Governors of the
Perse School (Chapter 7).
My debt to fellow-toilers in the fields of education and pedagogy is
apparent in the References, and I trust that they will take their appearance
there as a mark of thanks rather than mere convention. I could try to single
out those of the many cited there to whom I owe most, but instead I would
rather name two people who have influenced and inspired me over several
decades: not just in the undertaking of particular pieces of research or
writing, but by setting standards of scholarship and insight that the rest
of us rarely, if ever, achieve, and by imbuing these with wisdom and
humanity of a kind which the current politico-educational ascendancy
seems unable to comprehend, let alone value. They are Jerome Bruner and
the late and much-missed Brian Simon.
Finally, for her companionship and collaboration on journeys to distant
parts armed with cameras, audio recorder, video recorder, film, tape,
notebooks, schedules and other apparatus of ethnographic research, for
assistance in making sense of the resulting data, for support during the
lengthy and difficult process of writing and much more besides, I thank,
above all, this book’s dedicatee, my wife Karen.