Jake Burdick – författare

Bringing together scholars, public intellectuals, and activists from across the field of education, the Handbook of Public Pedagogy explores and maps the terrain of this burgeoning field. For the first time in one comprehensive volume, readers will be able to learn about the history and scope of the concept and practices of public pedagogy.

Offering a wide range of differing, even diverging, perspectives on how the ''public'' might operate as a pedagogical agent, this Handbook provides new ways of understanding educational practice, both within and without schools. It implores teachers, researchers, and theorists to reconsider their foundational understanding of what counts as pedagogy and of how and where the process of education occurs. The questions it raises and the critical analyses they require provide curriculum and educational workers and scholars at large with new ways of understanding educational practice, both within and without schools.

Bringing together scholars, public intellectuals, and activists from across the field of education, the Handbook of Public Pedagogy explores and maps the terrain of this burgeoning field. For the first time in one comprehensive volume, readers will be able to learn about the history and scope of the concept and practices of public pedagogy.

Offering a wide range of differing, even diverging, perspectives on how the ''public'' might operate as a pedagogical agent, this Handbook provides new ways of understanding educational practice, both within and without schools. It implores teachers, researchers, and theorists to reconsider their foundational understanding of what counts as pedagogy and of how and where the process of education occurs. The questions it raises and the critical analyses they require provide curriculum and educational workers and scholars at large with new ways of understanding educational practice, both within and without schools.

The term ‘public pedagogy’ is given a variety of definitions and meanings by those who employ it. It is often used without adequately explicating its meaning, its context, or its location within differing and contested articulations of the construct. Problematizing Public Pedagogy brings together renowned and emerging scholars in the field of education to provide a theoretical, methodological, ethical, and practical ground from which other scholars and activists can explore these forms of education. At the same time it increases the viability of the concept of public pedagogy itself. Beyond adding a multifaceted set of critical lenses to the genre of public pedagogy inquiry and theorizing, this volume adds nuance to the broader field of education research overall.

The term ‘public pedagogy’ is given a variety of definitions and meanings by those who employ it. It is often used without adequately explicating its meaning, its context, or its location within differing and contested articulations of the construct. Problematizing Public Pedagogy brings together renowned and emerging scholars in the field of education to provide a theoretical, methodological, ethical, and practical ground from which other scholars and activists can explore these forms of education. At the same time it increases the viability of the concept of public pedagogy itself. Beyond adding a multifaceted set of critical lenses to the genre of public pedagogy inquiry and theorizing, this volume adds nuance to the broader field of education research overall.

We began the call for this book by asking authors to ideate on activism -to take up and seek to extend- the interbraided values from the Curriculum and Pedagogy group’s espoused mission and vision, collocating activist ideologies, theoretical traditions, and practical orientations as a means of creatively, reflectively, and productively responding to the increasingly dire social moment. This moment is framed by a landscape denigrated beyond even Pinar’s (2004) original declaration of the present-as-nightmare. The current, catastrophic political climate provides challenges and (albeit scant) opportunities for curriculum scholars and workers as we reflect on past and future directions of our field, and grapple with our locations and roles as educators, researchers, practitioners, and beings in the world. These troubled times force us to think critically about our scholarship and pedagogy, our influence on educational practices in multiple registers, and the surrounding communities we claim to serve. This is where the call began: from a desire to think through modern conceptions regarding what counts as activism in the fields of education, curriculum, and pedagogy, and to consider how activist voices and enactments might emerge differently through curriculum and pedagogy writ large.

A guiding source of inspiration for this book, weaving among the emerging themes between the collected manuscripts, reflections, and poems, was a passage in Sara Ahmed’s (2013) book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. In this passage, Ahmed works through the complicated relationship between the testimonies of pain that injustice causes, the recognition of this pain, and the potential of these wounds to move us into a different relationship with healing (p. 200). The chapters, reflections, and poems within this volume, thus, effect a collective ideation on how specific cultural politics and deleterious ideological formations – racism, colonialism, homophobia, ableism, to name only a few – persist and mobilize. The authors seek to expose and name some of these injustices, asking readers not only see and hear these experiences, but to inhabit our complicities in their promulgation.

It is important to acknowledge that these named social troubles do not exist in isolation, and will enmesh, weave, wind, and entangle with one another. The section headings parallel Ahmed’s (2013) own ideations: testimony, recognition, and wounds, not as a formula to follow as an activist call, or as a model for a means to a more just end, but as a way to engage in these issues as a trope of activist confrontation of readers who are, as many of our authors suggest, complicit in maintaining many of these social troubles. The chapters do not need to be read in any particular order, though the ordering of the chapters moves from the naming of social troubles, to showing how teaching, research, and theory ask us to take a more active role in recognizing and acknowledging the prevalence of these issues, and then theorizing ways to engage the wounds.