Up to p. 17.

Issue of use of first names when introducing theorists.

Pedagogy—the unsaid of socio-cultural theory

Megan Watkins, Greg Noble and Catherine Driscoll

The formation of subjectivities has long been central to contemporary social and cultural theory.

There has been substantial work across the Humanities, Social Sciences, and beyond, considering

the ways in which various domains of the modern world shape minds and bodies by discursive

and material means. Yet this work tends to emphasise already formed subjects or particular social

and cultural effects which are seen to constitute classed, gendered and racialised subjects. The

processes that produce these effects—or how forms of conduct are acquired through particular

relations and practices across a range of settings—receive far less scrutiny. This book deploys the

notion of ‘cultural pedagogies’ to recast the processes of subject formation, institutional conduct,

cultural representation and human capacities as pedagogic practices of teaching and learning,

broadly understood, which produce cumulative changes in how we act, think, feel and imagine.

Existing work on critical and public pedagogies and the recent proliferation of work on

‘pedagogies of …’ (place, consumption and gender, for example) offer important starting points,

but we believe a more comprehensive approach to cultural forms of pedagogy is still needed,

building on this work and pushing it in new directions.

The imperative to better understand relations of teaching and learning across social sites has been

intensified by claims about the increasing pedagogisation of everyday life. Bernstein (2001: 364)

has famously argued that we now live in a ‘totally pedagogised society’ in which: governments,

1
media, workplaces and systems of higher education entail a socialisation characterised by endless

learning in the ‘knowledge society’, compelling a capacity for ‘lifelong learning’ whenever and

wherever. Recent interest in the ‘pedagogical state’ (Pykett 2010) has drawn further attention to

the relationship between governance, citizenship, education and the array of sites, actors and

practices through which citizen subjectivities are formed and managed. The notion of cultural

pedagogies, we argue, helps us understand pedagogy in both broader and more grounded ways,

engaging with a range of social spaces, relations, routines and discourses, and encouraging

reflection on the wider ‘educative’ functions of cultural practices, or what Williams referred to as

‘permanent education’, ‘the educational force (éducation as distinct from enseignement) of our

whole social and cultural experience’ (1966: 15). Connecting recent claims about the

pedagogisation of everyday life to older discourse on the ‘educational force’ of social

experience—before Williams we could cite writers like Simmel or Veblen, and contemporary

with him writers like Foucault and Althusser—is itself an important reply to some of the temporal

certainties underlying claims about the pedagogisation of life in general.

In this chapter we want to grapple with the idea of ‘pedagogy’ by first considering the

pedagogical imperative of contemporary theorising which attempts to foreground the pedagogic

character of social life before articulating some of the key issues at stake in the notion of ‘cultural

pedagogies’.

What is pedagogy?

There is no simple answer to this question—there never is. A dictionary will often define

pedagogy as ‘the art and science of teaching’ (Random House 2014), and this has typically been

the starting point from which educational practitioners and scholars moved on to more pragmatic

matters of models of learning, instructional design and classroom management (Gage 1978).

2
Today, while practitioner focus tends to remain on the instrumental classroom practices of

schooling (Marsh 1996), it is no longer enough for many educational theorists to just focus on

these pragmatic dimensions of teaching which beg many questions about what is taught, what is

learnt, goals and methods, their underlying principles, organisational conditions, and so on (Jarvis

2006: 3). As Lusted (1986: 2-3) pointed out years ago, despite its proliferating use, ‘pedagogy’ is

under-defined and under-theorised, often used to refer to teaching style, classroom management,

and instructional modes, but also pointing to larger issues of educational philosophy, institutional

context and the relationship between formal education and the wider social world. Indeed,

pedagogy sits within a rather muddled network of terms—education, teaching, learning,

instruction, training, curriculum, and so on—and a wide range of more ‘sociological’ notions—

socialisation, transmission, reproduction, acculturation—which together beg even more questions.

There are several reasons for broadening the idea of pedagogy. On the one hand, clearly what

goes on in schools is not just the overt or formal acquisition of specific skills. As Jackson (1968)

argued in the 1960s, schools entail a ‘hidden curriculum’ through which particular values are

covertly transmitted—an idea taken up by radical education critics who used it to analyse the

ideological dimensions of schooling. Bourdieu and Passeron (2000: 46-47) made a comparable

distinction between implicit and explicit pedagogies, and Bernstein (2003: 68) likewise

distinguishes visible from invisible pedagogies. Central to these insights is the understanding that

explicit pedagogic practices do not define all that is at stake in a pedagogic situation.

On the other hand, there has been increasing focus on the ways in which relations of teaching and

learning mark all aspects of life. Watkins and Mortimer (1999: 3) usefully attempt to move away

from the narrow focus on institutional education by defining pedagogy as ‘any conscious activity

by one person designed to enhance the learning of another’. This doesn’t, however, clarify what

3
the relationship between teaching and learning is or how conscious or intentional pedagogy needs

to be. As Watkins and Mortimer go on to argue, the complexity of pedagogy arises partly from

competing philosophical understandings of what both teaching and learning are (10-11),

contrasting understandings also apparent in the decreasing attention paid to the role of the teacher

in educational discourse (Watkins 2011). Such educational ‘perspectives’, which Pratt et al.

(1998) group as ideas about transmission, apprenticeship, development, nurturing, and social

reform, represent deep ideological investments in the ways we view education. Yet, while these

‘perspectives’ imply different kinds of practices and relations, they tell us little about the actual

practices and relations themselves.

Moreover, we are perhaps only beginning to realise how intrinsically the pedagogical relation

entails more than a singular teacher-learner coupling and to appreciate the importance of what

Bourdieu (1977: 17) calls a ‘collective enterprise of inculcation’. As Williams (1966: 15) argued,

we need to consider how ‘the whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and

profoundly teaches. … For who can doubt, looking at television or newspapers, or reading the

women's magazines, that here, centrally, is teaching …’. In this sense, we follow Bernstein’s

characterisation of pedagogy as not only a sustained process of instruction whereby people

acquire particular knowledges, skills and values, but also as a ‘cultural relay: a uniquely human

device for both the reproduction and the production of culture’, to capture this duality (2003: 61-

4). We preface ‘pedagogy’ with ‘culture’ partly to make this recognition more explicit and to

stress the cultural quality of pedagogic processes and relations. Both Williams and Bernstein

stress the impetus in socio-cultural analysis towards an engagement with the pedagogic; an

engagement grounded in the works of key socio-cultural theorists.

The pedagogical imperative

4
‘Pedagogy’ has become a key rhetorical tool in the Humanities and Social Sciences—naming a

conceptual terrain grappled with by various theoretical perspectives but rarely articulated in these

terms. This is surprising given that much socio-cultural theory emerged through critique of

simplistic models of acquisition—transmission models in media and communications, simple

models of gender socialisation, and reproduction theory in Education and the Social Sciences. It

demanded more nuanced approaches—notions of interpellation, appropriation, embodiment, and

performativity, but generally without unpacking the pedagogic dimensions of these processes,

discussing subjects as though they always already had sufficient capacity to appropriate,

recognise an address, perform, and so on. However, it is worth recognising the engagement with

pedagogy implicit in much social theory. The extent that social relations and belonging are learnt

is apparent in foundational philosophy like Rousseau and Kant, implicit in Freudian models of

psychoanalytic development, and pivotal to Marxist accounts of ideology, but rarely explicated as

pedagogical processes involving more than passive acquisition. One place in which the

importance of thinking pedagogically about society and culture is explicit is in the influential

work of the early American pragmatists, James and Dewey.

Dewey remains an important influence on the rationale and content of curricula for public

education, a set of institutional practices that he understood to always involve a set of relations

between culture and citizenship that preceded and exceeded any classroom. Together with

conscious forms of instruction, Dewey stressed the importance of ‘unconscious’ processes of

education by which individuals become the ‘inheritor of the funded capital of civilization’, a set

of processes on which ‘formal and technical education’ can only organise or specialise (Dewey

1998: 229). Dewey accounts for the pedagogic processes already powerfully acting on any

student as simultaneously psychological and social (1998: 230) and among his most influential

contributions to the history of education is his insistence that school is an extension of social life,

5
and should connect with fundamental forms of social experiences—including play, housework

and manual training (1998: 232). In Democracy and Education, Dewey emphasises that while

schools are the site where a community directly seeks to make use of these processes for its own

benefit they are continually in operation at the level of society in general. He takes some of his

cues in this from Rousseau in arguing that ‘men’ receive their education simultaneously from

‘Nature, men, and things’ (in Dewey 1998: 258). But Dewey’s understanding of the effectiveness

of pedagogic processes was more directly indebted to the psychological theory and pragmatic

philosophy of James, which led him to stress the degree to which human experience always

involves a set of pedagogic relations. Every human subject, in every situation, by this account, is

engaging ‘an innate disposition to draw inferences, and an inherent desire to experiment and test’

(1998: 276). For James, these pedagogic processes are the matter of social interaction, of

‘experience’ as constant ‘mutation’ (2010: 69) at the interface of what is known and what is

needed (2010: 22-24).

These pragmatists are not as influential as they might be in contemporary critical accounts of

culture and pedagogy. Foucault’s work, on the other hand, has been central to an understanding of

subjectivity associated with a ‘cultural turn’ in the Social Sciences, and his conceptualisation of

subjectivity clearly has a pedagogic dimension. In his genealogies of the subject across various

domains—the asylum, the clinic, the prison and the school—he has detailed the institutional

derivation of techniques of power, or bio-politics, constitutive of individual subjectivity. There

are references to pedagogy in his discussion of discipline as a productive force in the forms of

teaching, learning, training, transforming, and so on (1977: 203-4), but these aren’t examined in

detail as pedagogic practices given his attention is on the spatial regulation of bodies. By contrast,

his later work focused on technologies of the self, meaning practices of self-regulation that

individuals impose upon themselves (Foucault, 1988). Both these modalities of power, either

6
externally-derived or self-produced, involve subject formation, yet their points of convergence are

left under-explored. It is not that Foucault doesn’t acknowledge the connection between these

institutional and subjective modes, it is just that a sustained, empirically grounded account of the

mechanisms of this connection is not his focus. An exception to this is can be found in his broad

conceptualisation of government. In a later lecture he explains that one,

has to take into account the interaction between these two types of techniques—techniques of

domination and techniques of the self. He (sic) has to take into account the points where the

technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by

which the individual acts upon himself. And conversely, he has to take into account the points

where the technologies of the self are integrated into structures of coercion and domination.

The contact point, where the individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct

themselves, is what we can call, I think, government. Governing people, in the broad meaning

of the word, governing people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is

always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which

assure coercion and process through which the self is constructed or modified by himself.

(Foucault 1993: 203-4)

We would argue that when Foucault characterises government as ‘the contact point’ between

technologies of power and the self, this can be productively taken up as the space of pedagogy.

While Foucault may have envisaged government as a continuum extending from the rule of the

state to processes of self-regulation (Lemke 2001: 201), applications of his notion of

governmentality have tended to privilege the externally derived modes of relation between power

and the self, generally emphasising techniques by which forms of liberal government actively

shape the subject. Attention to technologies of the self, for example in accounts of the reflexivity

7
of the neoliberal subject, still leave this ‘contact point’ under-examined and rarely foreground the

importance of situations in which, and techniques by which, individuals engage with the

production and manipulation of their own transformative capacities.

In his History of Sexuality, especially volumes two and three, Foucault engages with the

pedagogic through the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Plutarch, Epictetus and others in an

account of the ethics of pleasure and the cultivation of the self as debated in Ancient Greece. Yet,

both here and in his later collections of lectures, The Hermeneutics of the Subject and The

Government of the Self and Others, these references to pedagogy typically amount to a focus on

the ways in which one acts upon one’s self in the pursuit of virtue and in one’s formation as a

moral subject. Foucault’s consideration of askesis or training is illustrative here, because he links

this to a notion of paideia or learning, separating it from instruction by another. Of course, these

constitute elements of a pedagogic process, but this demonstrates Foucault’s tendency to oscillate

between technologies of power and technologies of the self; between institutional domination and

self-regulation. The pedagogic dimensions of Foucault’s theorisation of government, therefore,

remain largely unsaid.

It remains important that Foucault’s notion of government nevertheless accounts for the extended

reach of politics to the self. This is not simply a matter of the ways in which government ties the

individual to the state or, in Lemke’s terms (2001: 191), that they ‘co-determine each other’s

emergence’. It is also a matter of how politics, as the art and science of government, allows for

the exercise of power upon one’s self—even when that power is mediated by another as in

traditional notions of pedagogy. Such an understanding does not retreat from a focus on power—

although this was often a critique of Foucault’s work as he himself acknowledged—it simply

affords a reimagining of the dynamics of the ‘contact point’, inserting pedagogy as the

mechanism by which this is realised.

8
Bourdieu is another theorist whose work is concerned with the formation of the self and the

nature of human conduct. In comparison to Foucault, he makes far more explicit reference to the

role of pedagogy as a driver in relation to both, especially in his earlier work. Bourdieu uses the

notion of habitus as a mechanism for accounting for the ways in which past practice, shaped by

the various fields that individuals inhabit, determines action. Pedagogy is integral to this, as

Bourdieu explains: ‘The pedagogic work of inculcation … is one of the major occasions for

formulating and converting practical schemes into explicit norms’ (1990: 102-103), with

pedagogies of home and school having the most impact. Yet, despite the significance Bourdieu

attaches to pedagogy and its role in the formation of the habitus, the way in which this is

conceived and applied within his work has several limitations. For Bourdieu, pedagogy is a form

of symbolic violence, a cultural arbitrary imposed by an arbitrary power (Bourdieu 1977: 5).

Defined as such, pedagogy primarily explains the reproductive function of the habitus and class

inequalities. There is, of course, a common criticism of Bourdieu’s view of the habitus as overly

deterministic (Jenkins 2002: 110). This was a view Bourdieu rejected, but with the possibility for

transformation predicated on either structural change within a field or a ‘strategic calculation’

prompted by a mismatch between habitus and field, the degree of agency the habitus affords any

individual is constrained. Pedagogy here could provide a circuit-breaker in relation to

reproduction, allowing a stronger link between the habitus and processes of habituation and a

more dynamic basis for examining social action and cultural change (Noble and Watkins 2003).

A key aspect of Bourdieu’s treatment of habitus that limits the theoretical potential of pedagogy is

his emphasis on forms of habitus that are already fully formed. The pedagogy involved in their

formation is largely presumed; read off a resultant set of dispositions. The pedagogic processes

and relations involved in their formation receive minimal scrutiny. The processual nature of the

9
habitus, much of which is a function of pedagogy, is sacrificed in his analysis for its reified

instantiation. This can partly be attributed to the methodological issues posed by the problem of

analysing the formation of habitus. As a set of practices framed by particular temporalities and

spatialities it is perhaps best examined ethnographically. Although such methodologies are the

‘bread and butter’ of much analysis of everyday life in cultural studies, anthropology, sociology

and cultural geography, they have rarely been directed towards an empirical explication of the

relation between everyday pedagogies and human conduct. Bourdieu does venture into this

territory in his early work on the Kabyle, but the survey and interview data that inform his later

accounts of habitus are methodologies less suited to capturing the processual dimensions of

pedagogy.

The body of work often referred to as Actor Network Theory also points to an implicit

pedagogical imperative in social and cultural theory. Its emphasis on the heterogeneity of

networks, the forces at stake therein, and processes of enrolment, inscription, assemblage and

affordance all suggest the need to explore the ways actors exist in a dynamic network in which

they not only exert force upon one another, but transform each other (Fenwick and Edwards 2010:

3). This is illustrated in Latour’s analysis of the door as a technology which entails a ‘distribution

of competences’ between humans and nonhumans (1992: 233). While he focuses on the

delegation of actions, each change in the design of the door requires a redistribution of

competences and a reshaping of the actions in which humans have to be disciplined (231). Latour

uses the term ‘prescription’ to describe ‘the behavior imposed back onto the human by nonhuman

delegates’, ‘the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms’ which may also be realised in

instruction booklets and training sessions (232-3). This amounts to a form of pedagogy, but the

pedagogical imperative is only implicit in Latour’s work because he is interested in things other

than the question of how people acquire the competences required in a network. There is no room

10
in this account for attention to the ways in which the competences required by the door are

learned, or taught.

We can’t do justice here to all those whose work articulates the pedagogical imperative, and who

provide productive tools for examining relations of teaching and learning as broad cultural

processes. The exploration of mimesis developed by Tarde, Girard and Taussig invoke the Comment [TB1]: Please give first names when
introducing authorities – here and throughout. This
assumes too much familiarity.
pedagogic, as do theories of embodiment that gauge how particular capacities of the body are

acquired. The phenomenological perspectives of de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Mauss, Leder and

Young are particularly attuned to processes of bodily capacitation which might be reconsidered

through a pedagogic lens. In the wake of de Beauvoir a range of feminist social theory—including

the work of Butler, McRobbie, Skeggs and Walkerdine—has furthered our understanding of how

gendered subjectivity is formed through an implicit sense of the pedagogic. Ingold’s work on

processes of learning through embodied movement, Pink’s work on sensory learning, and

Ellsworth’s use of Winnicott’s notion of transitional space to explore the materiality of pedagogy

in places of learning also suggest fruitful paths for development. Although we cannot discuss any

of these examples at length in this context it can be said that they typically repeat a ‘problem’ we

have already articulated: that pedagogy as a particular set of situated practices and relations is not

elaborated in as much detail as it needs.

The black box of pedagogy

Few have done as much as Giroux—often associated with the concept of critical pedagogy—in

giving fresh currency to discussions of pedagogy. He has particularly emphasised putting the

language of pedagogy back into cultural studies (1994: 128). Giroux is rightly critical of the

absence of sustained discussion of pedagogy and argues that in cultural studies, as in the

Humanities generally, ‘Pedagogy is often deemed unworthy of being taken up as a serious

11
project’ (Giroux 1995:6) despite, as Grossberg (1994: 376) has pointed out, the importance of

teaching and learning to the formation of cultural studies.

Giroux focuses our attention on the pervasive pedagogic qualities of popular culture, which he

sees as largely negative. His recognition that pedagogy is not confined to the classroom is

important. The key problem with Giroux’s position, however, is the lack of discrimination and

clarification in his proliferation of the term: he talks about a ‘pedagogy of representation’, a

‘postmodern pedagogy of mass advertising’, a ‘pedagogy of difference’, a ‘pedagogy of

innocence’, a ‘pedagogy of power’, a ‘pedagogy of commercialisation’, a ‘pedagogy of place and

struggle’, a ‘pedagogy of identity formation’, a pedagogy of theorising’, a ‘pedagogy of

enablement’ (1994:6,22, 23, 29, 44, 56, 61, 62, 110, 117, 119), a ‘pedagogy of whiteness’, of

‘diversion’, of ‘bafflement’, and so on (1997: 89, 119, 129). While we sympathise with Giroux’s

attention to pedagogy everywhere, this overuse renders the term meaningless. Pedagogy becomes

less a tool to analyse particular practices and more of a ‘black box’ through which something is

done, without explaining how it is done.

Giroux (2004:61-3) criticises conventional definitions of pedagogy as too narrow, arguing that

learning takes place across a range of social settings. He suggests that pedagogy refers to ‘the

production of and complex relationships among knowledge, texts, desire, and identity [that] work

to construct particular relations between teachers and students, institutions and society, and

classrooms and communities’ (1994: 30), but specific practices are rarely, if ever, spelt out. He

makes an impassioned argument against seeing pedagogy as a set of strategies, and argues for a

broader conception which licences discussion of the pedagogies of popular culture, on the one

hand, and a ‘critical pedagogy’ on the other. When discussing teaching he aligns a focus on

technique with a ‘pedagogical terrorism’ that stifles students’ opinions and produces a ‘fear of

12
intimidation’ (1994: 137). Even cultural studies, he argues, finds in ‘pedagogy’ ‘an unproblematic

vehicle for transmitting knowledge’ (1995:6). As an alternative, Giroux’s ‘critical pedagogy’

focuses on creating a space of ‘political activism’ where power relations can be questioned and

where students feel able to voice their experiences (1994: x, 30). Despite having moved pedagogy

beyond the classroom, in one sense Giroux thus presumes that pedagogy must always be

‘deliberate’ and frames this as a political process through which people are ‘incited’ to acquire a

particular ‘moral character’ (Giroux and Simon 1988: 12). For Giroux, in comparison to the more

nuanced accounts of the pragmatists, Foucault, or Bourdieu, pedagogy is primarily about

unpacking relations of power understood as repressive rather than productive, and as something

with which we can only either be complicit, or consciously resist.

Giroux’s substitution of a ‘narrow’ definition of pedagogy with this broader emphasis on power

relations is replicated in Trend’s (1994) Cultural Pedagogy. Trend’s book uses a critical

pedagogy framework to analyse arts education and cultural work, giving centre stage to

arguments about participation and democracy. Once again this emphasis on power as a general

social condition shifts the focus away from the material specificity of pedagogical practices. As

with Giroux’s work on popular culture, the emphasis is on issues of representation and much of

the analysis presented is ideology critique. But this further obscures the pedagogic practices

themselves. The pedagogy Giroux desires is a radical curriculum with transformed content

(transformed by post-colonialism, for example). It relies on textual analysis and is framed by

explicitly progressive values like giving voice to the oppressed. This approach has been criticised

for ignoring its own positioning as a new ‘truth regime’ (Kramer-Dahl 1996), and certainly

Giroux rarely unpacks the material processes which structure the temporality and space of either

the classroom or popular culture. While he makes much of the critical skills fostered by his

pedagogy, Giroux never explains how they are acquired. If this is the most overt discussion of

13
pedagogy in cultural studies it nevertheless includes no practical account of pedagogy. Because

Giroux’s emphasis is on critiquing the politics of representation and consumption it presumes

subjects that are already formed. In other words, the temporal and spatial processes of subject

formation are not explored.

This ‘blackboxing’ of pedagogy, through which the actual ensemble of situated practices and

relations drop out or become effects read off a broader context or social force, is typical in critical

pedagogy. Such ‘blackboxing’ occurs, of course, because a phenomenon is so complex we can

only talk about it in terms of inputs and outputs (Latour 1987: 2-3), but we would like to return

that complexity to the discussion. This blackboxing is replicated in related work under the rubric

of public pedagogies. This literature makes some key points: Giroux argues, for example, that

public pedagogy is central because ‘culture now plays a central role in producing narratives,

metaphors, and images that exercise a powerful pedagogical force over how people think of

themselves and their relationship to others’ (2004: 62). He sees this work as centrally

understanding ‘how the political becomes pedagogical’, ‘how private issues are connected to

larger social conditions,’ and ‘how the very processes of learning constitute the political

mechanisms through which identities are shaped and desires mobilized’ (2004: 62). Giroux’s

approach thus represents a broader shift. The preface to the Handbook on Public Pedagogies

defines its aims in terms reminiscent of critical pedagogy, announcing that:

this collection asks teachers, researchers, scholars, activists, artists, and theorists to decentre

taken-for-granted notions of education, teaching, and learning and raise important questions

regarding how, where, and when we know education and learning; about the relationship

between dominant, oppressive public pedagogies and a reconsidered perspective that integrates

14
 public sites of resistance; and about the species of pedagogy occurring in public spaces that

might still elude our vision (Sandlin et al. 2010: xxi).

As influential as ‘the critical pedagogy’ approach has become, it tends to focus on particular

institutional structures, displacing the multi-dimensional nature of belonging and reproducing a

focus on the reproduction of power distilled into ideological effects. Despite its desire for critique

this approach rarely grapples with pedagogic processes and relations themselves, or their enabling

and transformative potential. Pykett (2009) and Savage (2010: 103-6) have also critiqued the hazy

notion of pedagogy in public pedagogies scholarship along these lines, focusing on its lack of

nuance in thinking about power, its tendency to focus on negative ideological forces and its

discounting of the situated nature of pedagogy. Our intention with this collection is not to dismiss

the rich body of work in critical and public pedagogies, but rather to suggest that it doesn’t do the

kinds of empirical and theoretical work needed to explore the pedagogic qualities of social life.

To initiate this shift we want to reorient the field by using the notion of ‘cultural pedagogies’.

Why cultural pedagogies?

Any understanding of the ‘pedagogic’ needs both a stronger empirical grounding and an

adventurous conceptualisation attentive to the ways in which it operates as a broader cultural

process extending beyond formal sites of learning. With the full spectrum of social and cultural

practices as its palette, how pedagogy mediates the ways in which individuals acquire the cultural

resources that enable or constrain their participation within particular sites requires more careful

consideration. Both these orientations, the theoretical and empirical, are given emphasis in this

collection, with different contributors varying their attention depending on their focus. In all

cases, however, they use cultural pedagogy as a key reframing device to examine the shaping of

human conduct within various domains of the lifeworld.

15
As well as emphasising the pedagogic processes of culture, this collection uses the notion of

cultural pedagogies to mark out a space slightly at odds with existing work. While we consider

many insights drawn from educational analysis, we also want to recognise the pedagogic beyond

this domain. As influential as this work has been, we don’t want to reduce the exploration of the

pedagogic qualities of social life to power relations framed only by public institutions but to

examine the wider pedagogic qualities of other realms of life. Drawing on diverse theoretical and

empirical literatures, the book approaches this understanding of pedagogy across a range of

settings, through its organisation via four themes: on Pedagogical Processes and Relations,

Shaping Conduct/Forming Citizens, Institutional Pedagogies, and Habituation, Affect and

Materialities. These sections do not indicate hard distinctions between the essays they organise,

but indicate shifts in focus and emphasis.

Also, this book does not aim to provide a definitive account of cultural pedagogy, as though this

is a thing which could be discretely defined, but to articulate a space in which the pedagogic

dimensions of culture can be more fruitfully examined. Given the breadth of situation, experience

and practice to which it must be relevant, ‘cultural pedagogy’ must be an open and exploratory

concept (Savage and Hickey-Moody 2010). In many ways this echoes the original project of

cultural studies, and the ‘cultural turn’ more widely, by refusing to see culture in conventionally

institutional terms. We emphasise the constitutive role of cultural processes in social life and,

recognising the limitations of structuralist and positivist approaches, emphasise a view of culture

as complex and dynamic, inviting diverse questions of social phenomena and encompassing the

semiotic and material practices and subjectivities of everyday life as well as socio-structural

categories (Frow and Morris, 1993).

16
Nevertheless, this idea of cultural pedagogies cannot be entirely open. The fact that we identify

this term as uniting the various approaches in this book necessarily stakes a claim for its saying

something new. As the pragmatists we discussed earlier would expect (James 2010: 61-72), we

need to make a case for why this concept is needed, and it is not merely as an opportunity to

critique the work done under other names, like critical pedagogy, for trying to stretch thinking

about pedagogy beyond the relations between teachers and students in a classroom. We think

cultural pedagogies is the best name at present for thinking about the diverse pedagogical

processes of the lifeworld because it brings with it, after many decades of work in cultural studies,

a recognition that social structures and institutions can never be separated from the ordinary lives

that surround them, inform them, and bring people to act in them. When Williams stressed that

‘culture is ordinary’ he did so in order to think about everyday life and cultural institutions and

social structures together, considering also ‘the significance of their conjunction’ (Williams 1989:

6). It is too often forgotten that the ‘special processes of discovery and creative effort’ that

Williams juxtaposed with ‘a whole way of life’ and its ‘common meanings’ involved not only art

but also education. This conjunction has always been of special interest to cultural studies, and

it’s from such foundations that we think cultural studies has something particular to contribute to

thinking about pedagogy. Willis’ iconic Learning to Labour (1977), for example, shows that

what happens in the classroom is only a part of a much more complex ensemble of pedagogic

processes where social relations and cultural meanings around labour, gender and race are made

and remade. Thus, while we want to press the point that pedagogical processes proliferate through

all domains of the lifeworld, from the most ordinary to the most specialised, this means that

institutions of many types, including classrooms, appear in this book.

If cultural pedagogy allows us to articulate the ‘unsaid’ of subject formation and human conduct

by operating as a space in which to consider a range of questions around pedagogic relations,

17
modes, sites, temporalities and scales, a number of key issues need to be elaborated. Firstly, under

the name of cultural pedagogy we wish to foreground dialogue between competing accounts and

formations of pedagogy and encourage the blurring of definitional boundaries. The space opened

up here does not dramatically distinguish between formal and informal, institutional and everyday

learning: Lea’s essay, for example, explores this distinction in her examination of Indigenous

education. And while we have linked our concept of cultural pedagogy to the project of cultural

studies this space is not a disciplinary demarcation—certainly it is not a critique of education

studies—but shaped by a logic of interdisciplinary engagement. The essays collected here do not

radically distinguish between critical, public and cultural pedagogies: Hickey, for example, moves

between these bodies of work to explore what he sees as the operation of cultural logics in public

space.

Secondly, the reframing offered by the idea of cultural pedagogies requires that we think of

pedagogy as potentially operating everywhere, at any time. Grossberg (1994:384) has argued that

we need to consider ‘not only pedagogy as a cultural practice, but the pedagogy of cultural

practices’. He doesn’t offer much detail on what is meant by cultural practices in this context,

moving instead to a discussion of progressive teaching practices, but we take him to mean that we

need not reduce pedagogy to an argument about the reproduction of power but should see

everyday practices as always entailing a pedagogic element. The notion of cultural pedagogies

signals the importance of the pedagogic in institutional realms other than education, but it goes

beyond the notion of public pedagogies by including many spaces and practices which could not

be considered public. While critical and public pedagogies emphasise the deconstruction of power

and Foucauldian analyses emphasise governmentality, the reframing offered by the idea of

cultural pedagogies foregrounds the relations between teaching and learning themselves,

wherever they appear. How processes of teaching and learning are realised within and across the

18
pedagogic processes specific to various social sites is thus a core concern for this book. Several

chapters undertake this task by a reframing of media representation (Hay), media classification

(Grealy and Driscoll), and ‘little publics’ (Hickey-Moody) as pedagogic processes.

Thirdly, the relations between teaching and learning are understood here not as an ideological

apparatus nor as a simple dyadic relation, but through a complex entanglement of spatial and

temporal relations (Ellsworth 2004). By this we mean several things. The pedagogical process is

cumulative, a continuous but uneven set of routines and recalibrations. What one learns cannot be

read off a moment, a text, or an image, but must be considered in terms of a sequence of actions

and experiences. Thus learning cannot be divorced from teaching even if they are not co-present,

an issue explored by Watkins in her discussion of didactics and paideia. The pedagogic process is

also dispersed across social settings as well as times, posing problems of alignment that Sefton-

Green considers in his discussion of relations between home and school. These pedagogic

processes also involve diverse pedagogic modes (instruction, imitation, discussion, doing). Even

within a given setting, pedagogic relations entail an ensemble of ‘actors’, human and non-human,

material and semiotic, as Lally’s chapter aptly demonstrates. Ensembles of people, things and

practices are brought together in specific institutional and everyday settings to manifest pedagogic

processes, and technologies, architectures and objects as well as people and curricula ‘teach’ us to

shape our various capacities, direct behaviour and encourage the formation of habits within

individuals and across populations.

Fourthly, what is learnt is never reducible to particular content, but rather entails technical and

cultural capacities, ideas, affects and practices. This book asks how specific pedagogic relations

and practices generate the capacities not just for different forms of conduct but for a wider

understanding of embodied capacities. In this collection, Witcomb’s analysis of ‘pedagogies of

19
feeling’ in museum spaces and Highmore’s examination of habits of mood characterising home

front morale require that we think of the affective and sensory dimensions of pedagogic processes

as well as their role in constituting social practice. Noble similarly takes up the role of bodily

movement in learning to belong. What is learnt in this sense operates at various ‘scales’ so that

instructional techniques involve acquiring a ‘social vision’ (Gore 1993:4) which can involve

reproducing categories of class, race and gender. On the one hand, this can be framed as the

distinction between explicit and implicit pedagogies, an issue taken up by Barcan in her

discussion of academic formation. On the other, this involves linking specific forms of conduct

and broader characterisations of subjectivity. McInnes’ discussion of yoga as both embodied

technique and an ethics foregrounds these links as questions of pedagogy, and Watkins and Noble

also discuss this as an issue of scale through their focus on the ‘deeply’ cultural nature of writing

as habituated, embodied capacity.

The essays collected here bring together researchers whose work across the interdisciplinary

nexus of cultural studies, sociology, media studies, education and museology offers significant

insights into what we have called ‘cultural pedagogies’. We hope this book will open up debate

across disciplines, theoretical perspectives and empirical foci to explore both what is pedagogical

about culture and what is cultural about pedagogy.

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