2018 #littlepublics

Today we live in what Basil Bernstein (2001) describes as a “totally pedagogised society” (TPS), one in which we are trained, primarily through our technological interactions, to be lifelong “learners,” that is to say, flexible “prosumers” (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010). This process of what might be called “learnification” (after Biesta, 2004) cannot but affect pedagogy in the classroom and beyond, namely, in those “public pedagogies – spaces, sites, and languages of education and learning [–] that exist outside of the walls of the institution of schools” (Sandlin et al., 2010, p. 1). For the most part, public pedagogy has been conceived in this critical vein: as “a powerful ensemble of ideological and institutional forces whose aim is to produce competitive, self-interested individuals vying for their own material and ideological gain” (Giroux, 2004, p. 497; for a review of the literature, see Hickey-Moody et al., 2010).

But it can be conceived otherwise, as not only critical but also constructive. Two examples suggest themselves. In “Becoming Public,” Gert Biesta (2012, p. 693) argues that pedagogy becomes genuinely public – and political – when it involves the “interruption” of our ways of living together “as a ‘test’ of the public quality of particular forms of togetherness and of the extent to which actual spaces and places make such forms of human togetherness possible.” In “Little Public Spheres,” Anna Hickey-Moody (2014, p. 7) describes the performing arts as a mode of public pedagogy that “allows for the articulation of discrete forms of citizenship … through belonging to, and participating in, youth arts subcultures, which effectively constitute little publics when they create a work or text that calls an audience to attention.”