Recently, the LSE Media & Communications department approached CLT to offer a 15 minute perspective on the keyword “Pedagogy” for a small seminar group & without much thinking (or indeed time to think!) I volunteered. I don’t do it often enough, such spontaneous pontificating on what pedagogy means to us (me), and it turned out to be great discipline and a great opportunity to collect my thoughts on what arguably plays a great part in my daily practice. In the end, the thoughts remained jumbled, but the seminar itself turned out very interesting. This had a lot to do with an attentive and articulate audience, and of course with the first contributor, Julian Sefton-Green, a Principal Research Fellow in the Media & Comms, who spoke very intelligibly about pedagogy as a progressive theory and the creep of pedagogisation. Ellen Helsper, lecturer in Media & Comms, acted as respondent, pulling both approaches to the keyword together, calling attention to the undoubtedly normative elements of (current) education/ pedagogy discourse. In light of both Julian’s and Ellen’s more properly academic discussions, my contribution remains a cobbled together stream of consciousness/ thought piece, but I uploaded the presentation onto slideshare anyway, including the script. I don’t stand by all that can be read there, but I stand by one thing: there’s lots to learn about lecturing from Martin Heidegger. Unfortunately I never got to make that point very clearly… clearly I have to return to this at some future point. 🙂

Slideshare link: http://www.slideshare.net/SonjaGrussendorf/pedagogy-as-an-undisputed-social-good