Latest Research News on Pedagogy : Feb 2022

On pedagogy

Humans are adapted to spontaneously transfer relevant cultural knowledge to conspecifics and to fast-learn the contents of such teaching through a human-specific social learning system called ‘pedagogy’ (Csibra & Gergely, 2006). Pedagogical knowledge transfer is triggered by specific communicative cues (such as eye-contact, contingent reactivity, the prosodic pattern of ‘motherese’, and being addressed by one’s own name). Infants show special sensitivity to such ‘ostensive’ cues that signal the teacher’s communicative intention to manifest new and relevant knowledge about a referent object. Pedagogy offers a novel functional perspective to interpret a variety of early emerging triadic communicative interactions between adults and infants about novel objects they are jointly attending to. The currently dominant interpretation of such triadic communications (mindreading) holds that infants interpret others’ object-directed manifestations in terms of subjective mental states (such as emotions, dispositions, or intentions) that they attribute to the other person’s mind. We contrast the pedagogical versus the mindreading account in a new study testing 14-month-olds’ interpretation of others’ object-directed emotion expressions observed in a communicative cueing context. We end by discussing the far-reaching implications of the pedagogical perspective for a wide range of early social-cognitive competences, and for providing new directions for future research on child development.[1]

Appropriate pedagogy

The notion of ‘authentic’ language becomes problematic within a framework of English as an international language: whose words and whose culture comprise authentic language? Native-speaker practices do not apply across multiple contexts of use. A more acceptable notion is ‘appropriate language’, but even this term needs to be examined, for what is appropriate in an international context may not be appropriate in a local context. We take the metaphor of the market-place to conceptualize appropriate pedagogy as serving both the global and local needs of learners of English. A market-place is not only a place of business and international idioms, but also a place of local communication and culturally-specific forms of discourse. We argue that the notion of appropriate pedagogy should be a pedagogy of both global appropriacy and local appropriation.[2]

Defining Pedagogy

Pedagogy is a term widely used in educational writing but all too often its meaning is assumed to be self evident. An examination of how the term is used and the implicit assumptions about teaching and education that underlie its use is a valuable way of understanding how the education process is perceived. Many of the strategies that have been developed to redress inequity in schooling have targeted classroom practice and teaching as an important site for change. For this reason, attention has been paid to pedagogy, its meaning and relationship to curriculum. Feminist research has revealed how particular relations are reflected and reproduced in schooling at a number of levels. At the ideological level, ideologies of ‘race’, ‘ethnicism’ and ‘gender’ act to socialize students for their future roles. At the structural and organizational level of institutions, both in their overt and covert practices, messages are relayed to students about the relative power positions of different groups and individuals; and about the subjects and aspects of those subjects which are deemed appropriate for them to study. These subject divisions typically reflect the occupational structures in societies and the sources and selection of knowledge represented in curriculum subjects.[3]

The BlueJ System and its Pedagogy

Many teachers experience serious problems when teaching object-orientation to beginners or professionals. Many of these problems could be overcome or reduced through the use of more appropriate tools. In this paper, we introduce BlueJ, an integrated development environment designed for teaching object-orientation, and discuss how the use of this tool can change the approach to teaching.[4]

Design and Studio Pedagogy

Utilizing an educational concept known as the hidden curriculum to analyze the design studio, the author argues that there is a rough correspondence between schooling and larger societal practices, where the selection of knowledge and the ways in which school social relations are structured to distribute such knowledge, are influenced by forms and practices of power in society. Asymmetrical relations of power are reproduced in schools and classrooms, including the design studio. In response, the author has been experimenting with a transformative pedagogy for the design studio, attempting to set up the conditions to investigate not only the many issues of design, but the nature of design education itself, especially with regard to how knowledge is produced and disseminated, how social relations are structured, and how students and the professor come to see their roles in these activities.[5]

Reference

[1] Gergely, G., Egyed, K. and Király, I., 2007. On pedagogy. Developmental science, 10(1), pp.139-146.

[2] Kramsch, C. and Sullivan, P., 1996. Appropriate pedagogy.

[3] Murphy, P., 2003. Defining pedagogy. In Equity in the classroom (pp. 17-30). Routledge.

[4] Kölling, M., Quig, B., Patterson, A. and Rosenberg, J., 2003. The BlueJ system and its pedagogy. Computer Science Education, 13(4), pp.249-268.

[5] Dutton, T.A., 1987. Design and studio pedagogy. Journal of architectural education, 41(1), pp.16-25.