COVER SHEET

This is the author version of article published as:

McWilliam, Erica L. (2005) Unlearning Pedagogy. J ournal of Learning
Design 1(1):pp. 1-11.

Copyright 2005 QUT

Accessed from http://eprints.qut.edu.au


















Unlearning Pedagogy


Erica McWilliam





Final paper for publication in the Journal of Learning Design -
Volume 1




Erica McWilliam is Professor of Education and Assistant Dean Research in the
Faculty of Education at the Queensland University of Technology.










Correspondence to:

Professor Erica McWilliam
Faculty of Education
Queensland University of Technology
Victoria Park Rd
Kelvin Grove Queensland, 4059.
Ph. 61 + 7 + 8643412 (W)
Fax 61 + 7 + 38643986
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract:

Our teaching and learning habits are useful but they can also be deadly. They are
useful when the conditions in which they work are predictable and stable. But what
happens if and when the bottom falls out of the stable social world in and for which
we learn? Is it possible that learning itself - learning as we have come to enact it
habitually - may no longer be particularly useful? Could it be that the very habits that
have served us so well in stable times might actually become impediments to social
success, even to social survival? This paper explores reasons why we may need to
give up on some of our deeply held beliefs about teaching and learning in order to
better prepare young people for their social futures.


3
Unlearning Pedagogy

Theres an old joke about teaching that tries hard to be off colour. It is about a brothel
in which ex-professionals now ply a new trade. It soon becomes apparent that, of all
the professions represented in the brothel, the teacher is by far the most sought after
by the brothels clients. When the brothel owner decides to eavesdrop to discover the
secret of the teachers popularity, he hears a very no-nonsense instruction: I dont
care how many times we have to do this, youre going to stay until you get it right!!

Now while this is a somewhat lateral entre into matters pedagogical, it does
nevertheless get us quickly to the idea that pedagogy is characterised by well-
rehearsed habits. Success in formal teaching and learning has depended, in large
measure, on the acquisition of certain routinised patterns of thinking and behaving. As
effective teachers, whatever our technological tools, we habitually prepare and review
our curriculum documents to ensure coverage and relevance. We update our reference
lists. We organise our assessment tasks so that they evaluate overall performance by
requiring students to respond in a range of formats and even to have some degree of
choice about a preferred format. We set up assessment criteria that make the judging
of quality as transparent as possible. We provide feedback. We praise the positive.

By re-enacting such pedagogical habits, we make a culture of teaching and learning
that parallels a predictable and regular social world. When supply is linear and stable,
when labour is shaped by relatively simple patterns of time and space, when
consumption is a passive activity, then such behavioural and attitudinal habits make
sense. In fact, they are the most likely means of achieving success. Get the routines
right the routines of thinking, of engaging, of problem-solving and they will equip
you well both now and in the future. If you have a complex problem, break it down
into its component parts or into a number of simple tasks. Plan your project
systematically before you start work. Introduction-body-conclusion. Tell them what
you are going to say, say it, and then tell them what you just said. Begin with lower
order questions before moving to higher order ones. If Plan A doesnt work, move to
Plan B. Make a to-do list. Seek feedback. LHS =RHS. Quod erat demonstrandum.

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In a relatively predictable social world, pedagogy ie, teaching, learning and the
social relations that such engagement produces (Lusted, 1986) has had as its
enduring purpose, at least since the advent of Carl Rogers, the fostering of effective
learning habits. It was Rogers who, in the 1950s, insisted that formal education erred
in focusing on the skills of the teacher, when it was the learner who ought to be the
centre and focus of pedagogy. I have come to feel, said Rogers, that the only
learning that significantly influences behaviour is self-discovered, self-appropriated
learningI realise that I have lost interest in being a teacher (In ONeill, 1983,
p.257, authors emphasis). This idea, unpopular as it was at the time, has spawned a
vast body of scholarship that foregrounds the nature of learning rather than the art of
teaching. How learners might learn more effectively has become an entire discipline
in itself. Within this discipline, what counts as effective are those learning habits that
are themselves learnable, portable and lifelong. We can all now chant the mantra:
good students are lifelong learners and good teachers are facilitators of such
learning. One rhetorical effect of this post-Rogerian commitment to learning and to
its facilitation has seen the words student and teacher becoming somewhat pass.
The distinction between them has blurred. We should all be learners all the time, and
those of us who teach students should also understand ourselves to be facilitators of
learning.

It comes as no surprise, then, that lifelong learning is a much loved knowledge
object in contemporary pedagogical work. As self-regulating professional experts
(and we should all now see ourselves this way), we must not imagine an end to
learning. Professional teachers are supposed to accumulate new skills and knowledge
throughout the entire lifespan, and expect that others will want to do the same. There
are those, however, among whom I include myself, who pose the question Why
lifelong learning now? and those whose answer is less than wholehearted
endorsement. For sceptics like Chris Falk (1999), lifelong learning sentencing
learners to life works as a vehicle for selling commodities and as a profitable
commodity in itself. To Falk, life-long learning is largely a project of economic,
social and epistemological recuperation dedicated to delimiting rather than expanding
the subjectivities of learners exposed to it (p.7). He claims that life-long learning has
departed from its original intent to make learning more attractive by disassociating it
from formal educational institutions. The net effect is to make education more
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intrusive and more damning of those who choose not to engage in it (p.8). As Falk
argues it, lifelong learning is suspect for its headlong pursuit of relevance as defined
by the Market (p.1), and its complicity in the production of the malleable-but-
disciplined individual that is so necessary to enterprising culture. While I would not
be as fanatical as to spell market with a capital M, critiques like Falks do useful work
in preventing us from the habit of consuming pedagogical ideas in bird-throat
fashion.

Habits are useful but they can also be deadly. They are useful when the conditions in
which they work are predictable and stable. But what happens if and when the bottom
falls out of the stable social world in and for which we learn? Is it possible that
learning itself - learning as we have come to enact it habitually - may no longer be
particularly useful? Could it be that the very habits that have served us so well in
stable times might actually become impediments to social success, even to social
survival? According to Zigmunt Bauman (2004), this is not merely a future possibility
it is the contemporary social reality.

I want to flesh out Baumans thesis more fully in terms of its implications for
pedagogical thinking and the implications of such thinking for doing pedagogical
work. In doing so, I am not speaking of pedagogy before or after digitalisation, as
though going digital somehow marks a neat divide in the whole nature and purpose
of pedagogical activity. Certainly new computer-centred network technologies and
their capabilities have impacted powerfully on social systems and social relationships.
And it is also true that the resultant prosthetic culture (Lury, 1997) of social
engagement has radically extended limits of the pedagogical body. Thus we can no
longer speak of the social without speaking of the technological (Castells, 2001). The
point is, however, that these impacts may or may not result in a new or improved set
of social dynamics. As Saskia Sassen (2004) points out, digital technologies cannot be
depended on to produce new dynamics they may well be simply derivative or
reproduce existing social relations. So I want to consider those pedagogical habits or
routines that we retain within and despite the potential of cyberspace as a
pedagogical habitat. In this paper I will address seven of these habits what we might
call the seven deadly habits of pedagogical thinking that are ripe for unlearning. And
predominant among these is the idea that learning is the key to social success.
Comment [xx1]: Throughout
the paper, the author uses And to
begin some sentences. And, as a
coordinating conjunction, is
generally used to join words,
phrases, and clauses that are
balanced as logical equals. While
there may be spurious grammatical
foundation for not beginning a
sentence with and, it is a widely
held belief that it should not be
done in formal/scholarly writing.
However, the reviewer also
recognises that usage in this
context can reflect a particular
personal communication style (oral
and written) therefore,
modification of affected sentences
throughout the paper remains at
the discretion of the author (except
in the specific instances marked
see comments 7, 8 & 9)
6

Deadly Habit No.1: The more learning the better.

The predominant value that attaches to learning, according to Bauman (2004), has its
antecedents in the rat-in-maze experiments of half a century ago. Bauman argues that
the firmness and fixity of the maze parallelled the firmly fixed division of labour,
career tracks, class distinctions, power hierarchiesmarriages[and] social skills
the characterised a solid social world (p.21). Thus it seemed sensible to measure
the rats intelligence (and to extrapolate social intelligence) by a demonstrated
capacity for adjustment, adaptation and habituation (p.21). Bauman returns us to those
experiments to unfix the rats maze and in doing so to throw out a challenge to
learning itself:

What, however, if the maze were made of partitions on castors, if the walls
changed their position fast, perhaps faster yet than the rats could scurry in search
of food, and if the tasty rewards were moved as well, and quickly, and if the
targets of the search tended to lose their attraction well before the rats could
reach them, while other similarly short-lived allurements diverted their attention
and drew away their desire? (p.21)

For Bauman, this unfixed maze is a metaphor for the new set of social conditions
that he terms the liquid-modern setting of the social (p.21). In this setting, he
argues, adjustment, adaptation and habituation the capacity to learn and reproduce
appropriate social behaviours is no longer the key to success. Instead of opening up
possibilities, such learning may be unhelpful because it assumes a fixed or predictable
social world. Bauman elaborates:

J ust as long-term commitments threaten to mortgage the future, habits too
tightly embraced burden the present; learning may in the long run disempower
as it empowers in the short. Your skills and know-how are as good as their
last application. (p.22)

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In this liquid social setting, forgetting (or what Bauman calls de-learning), becomes
as important as learning. For Bauman, it is the interplay of learning and de-learning
(p.22) that is crucial here.

Many contemporary learning theorists, would I suspect, want to express concerns
about the limitations of Baumans definition of learning. If to de-learn is to forget,
then learning is, by implication, remembering. Indeed, Bauman makes this explicit
when he goes on to define learning and de-learning as synonymous with memory
and forgetting (p22). There is much more to learning than memory, we would want
to insist, and we have known that for a long time. Behaviourism learning theory
born from rats in mazes is old hat, and certainly the bete noir of any self-respecting
constructivist.

Baumans thesis remains nevertheless an interesting one that, in a liquid-modern
social world, the work of assembling and structuring new social relations is no more
important than the work of keeping them eminently dismantlable (p.22). His focus
moves beyond the individual and the cognitive to incorporate the moral and the
aesthetic, and the interplay among these various social elements. So Baumans
remembering and forgetting have more profound significance than one
individuals mind or brain. They connote a cultural and ethical disposition to
knowledge that is relational, unfinished and revocable, and an imperative to
processing that serves the purpose of assembling and dissembling social relations.
Having opened up the space of pedagogy as an interplay between the cognitive, the
moral-ethical and the aesthetic, Bauman is less clear about the principles for getting
the right mix of learning and de-learning as interplay. For him, how to mix them
in the right proportions is anyones guess (p.22).

If we are to entertain Baumans thesis about the value of de-learning for the context of
liquid modernity, we begin to de-stabilise what is the apparent Truth of our time-
honoured pedagogical mantra that learning is all that matters. Instead we have to
come to grips with the idea that some learning is unhelpful, and thus that in certain
circumstances ignorance might be better than knowledge.

Deadly Habit No.2: Teachers should know more than students.
8

One of the most difficult issues for contemporary teachers is the deeply embedded
notion that teachers ought to know more about their subject matter than their students.
It is not just that those outside the profession have this expectation; teachers
themselves expect to know enough to provide considered answers to student
questions. Since the days of Peter Abelard, there has been a heavy social investment
in the idea that teachers deliver wisdom to students who sit either physically or
metaphorically at the feet of the wise one. While we have removed most of the
platforms that literally raised the teachers body above the student body in
classrooms, the ghosts of pedagogues past return from time to time in the urge to
stand and deliver.

So whether or not we view teachers as the sage on the stage or the guide on the side
(or a bit of both), teachers are still generally expected and expect themselves to
earn their keep by being ahead of their students in terms of their overall knowledge
base. It is interesting to see what happens when this expectation falls over, as it tends
to do more frequently. At a recent forum in my university, one student commented
that he was getting sick of having to go down to the front of the lecture theatre and get
the technology working for hapless lecturers demonstrating their ignorance when it
came to operating from their pedagogical cockpit. Whatever theyre earning, he
said, I deserve at least half of it!

Now I am not about to advocate that its okay for teachers to be ignorant; I do think it
is reasonable that university lecturers be familiar with their technological tools, ghosts
in the machine notwithstanding. To put it in Charlie Leadbeaters ( 2000)
terminology, I dont think teachers should be uselessly ignorant. But I do think
Leadbeater is right to make a distinction between this sort of ignorance and the useful
ignorance that can add pedagogical value. I want to look more closely at what
Leadbeater has to say about knowledge and ignorance in order to challenge the habit
of thinking that teachers should know more.

In The Weightless Society (2000), Leadbeater challenges the myth that lurks behind
habitual thinking about the teacher as knower, ie, the myth that we are becoming a
more and more knowledgeable society with each new generation. If knowing means
Comment [xx2]: Suggest using
a comma to bracket the phrase to
put it in.terminology
Comment [xx3]: Spelling error
replaced is with in
Deleted: is
Comment [xx4]: Suggest using
that is in the published paper, or
abbreviation punctuated >i.e.,
(however, it is acknowledged that
this latter format would disrupt the
flow of the sentence)

9
being intimately familiar with the workings of the technologies we use in our daily
lives, then, Leadbeater asserts, we have never been more ignorant. He reminds us that
our great grandparents had an intimate knowledge of the technologies around them,
and had no problem with getting the butter-churn to work or preventing the lamp from
smoking. I expect that few readers of this paper would know what to do if their
mobile phone stopped functioning and I certainly have no idea what is underneath or
behind the keys on which I am typing. Nor, I confess, do I want to know. But that
means that we are all very quickly reduced to the quill and the lamp if we lose our
power sources or our machines break down. Thus we are much more vulnerable as
well as much more ignorant in relative terms than our predecessors.

But Leadbeater makes a further important point which turns our assumptions about
the usefulness of knowledge itself on its head. It is not simply that we are ignorant
about the knowledge embedded in the technologies we use we need to put this
ignorance to work to make it useful to provide opportunities for ourselves and
others to live innovative and creative lives, because, as Leadbeater puts it, [w]hat
holds people back from taking risks is often as not their knowledge, not their
ignorance (p.4). Useful ignorance, then, becomes a space of pedagogical possibility
rather than a lacuna. Not knowing can be put to work without shame or bluster. This
sort of thinking has its parallels in Guy Claxons (2004) notion of resilient learning as
knowing what to do when you dont know what to do. Claxton makes the valid
point that our highest educational achievers may well be aligned with their teachers in
knowing what to do if and when they have the script. But as indicated earlier, this sort
of certain and tidy knowing is out of alignment with a script-less and fluid social
world. Out best learners will be those who can make not knowing useful, who do
not need the blueprint, the template, the map, to make a new kind of sense. This is the
new habit that teachers need to acquire the habit of being usefully ignorant.

Deadly Habit No3: Teachers lead, students follow

A corollary of the idea that teachers ought to know more than students is the idea that
teachers should provide the starting point for learning activities, and that students
should engage in the tasks set by the teacher ie, that students should follow where
teachers lead. There is some interesting work currently being done about the
10
knowledge economy itself which can help us re-evaluate this potentially deadly
thinking habit. I refer in particular to public policy analyst Gregory Hearns (2005)
work on the shift to value ecology thinking. Hearn maps an emerging fundamental
shift in the way that value creation is thought about in business (p.1), and the
conceptual architecture he provides in his analysis is very helpful for re-thinking the
idea of a teacher as the starting point and the student as following.

Central to Hearns thesis are a number of specific shifts that he describes as
characteristic of value ecology thinking (p.1). Among these shifts he includes the
shift from consumers to co-creators of value, and the related shift from value chain to
network. Hearn makes the point that consumption is no longer essentially passive in
character that after a generation or more of couch potato inactivity at the end of a
supply chain where the product to be consumed arrives as a final product, we are now
seeing patterns of distribution and consumption being developed that allow consumers
to add value or finalise and so value-add to the product.

As a cultural phenomenon, IKEA represents an example of this shift. Together IKEA
and IKEA clients co-create value, the former producing packages of materials, the
latter assembling materials in cardboard boxes into trendy furnishings for funky pads.
Scion.com is another good exemplar of an invitation to engage in this new sort of
consumption. The message on the website we relinquish all power to you is an
invitation not simply to buy a Scion car but to create one, to edit it, to assemble it
according to your specific requirement and desires. This moves way beyond colour
preference and extras to numerous design features that count as standard
elsewhere. Moreover, the scion.com website is a multi-platform that hooks users up
with a host of services not traditionally connected with the car industry music, art,
clothing, films, wet parties and the like. Users of scion dont just buy, they co-create
in order to manufacture a product and a self. In Lawrence Lessigs (2001) terms, the
user becomes the producer.

Concomitant with this shift in consumer-supplier relations is the changing
configuration of supply itself. In a supply or value chain, according to Hearn, traffic
throughoutis one-way, with a fixed path with choice points (p.8). The shift to a
value network is consumer-centric rather than linear, and does not respect industry
11
boundaries in search of value, being enabled instead to co-create valueat multiple
points of exchange (p.9). Crucially, the value network can quickly disconnect from
nodes where value is not added, and connect up just as quickly with new nodes that
promise added value. Put another way, networks can go round or elude a point of
exchange where supply chains do not.

If we consider pedagogical exchange as a form of value exchange and value creation,
then what Hearn opens up are new possibilities for thinking about pedagogical supply
and demand. First, the idea of teacher and student as co-creators of value is
compelling. Rather than teachers delivering an information product to be consumed
by the student, co-creating value would see the teacher and student mutually involved
in assembling and dissembling cultural products. In colloquial terms, this would
frame the teacher as neither sage on the stage nor guide on the side but meddler in the
middle. The teacher is in there doing and failing alongside students, rather than
moving like Florence Nightingale from desk to desk or chat room to chat room,
watching over her flock, encouraging and monitoring.

Second, the new value ecology raises the possibility that the teacher who does not add
value to a learning network can - and will - be by-passed. The rhizomatic capacity of
networks to flow around a point in a chain means that teachers may be located in a
linear supply chain of pedagogical services but excluded from their students learning
networks. That would be an effect of being perceived to be delivering content but not
adding value. Once again, this is not a matter of how much take-up of technology is
evident in the pedagogical work, but whether or not pedagogical processes bring
student and teacher together in their shared ignorance and mutual desire to make new
sense of their world.


Deadly Habit No.4 Teachers assess, students are assessed.

If the rethinking of pedagogy as co-creation of value re-positions teacher and student
as project partners, as co-directors and co-editors of their social world, who then is
the rightful assessor of the value of that cultural assemblage? The work is no longer
clean of fingerprints, but is tainted by co-direction and co-editorship at every level. So
12
what does it mean to make judgements to credential individuals on the basis of the
quality of the co-creation? And what new dilemmas does this set up around
objectivity and assessment?

It has been fashionable since the crisis of legitimacy that began with the 1960s, to
advocate a more democratic relationship between teacher and student. Feminists in
particular have questioned every eye on me as both patriarchal and unhelpful in the
quest to experience learning as personal and political empowerment. But tension
remains between the democratic classroom as an ideological ideal, and the role
formal educational institutions continue to play as credentialers and reporters to
industry and the professions. Experiments that involve students deciding their own
curriculum and evaluating their own work have in general remained just that; Neills
Summerhill was never likely to become every future employers dream.

But apart from the desire of external agencies to know what a particular set of
credentials guarantee, there exists within pedagogical relationships a strong resistance
to the idea of self or peer assessment. Students especially high achievers are very
likely to resist any apparent move to downgrade the quality assurance that
objective assessment purports to afford. Such students are likely to share with many
in the community a belief that, in its purest form, democratic assessment is
oxymoronic. Don Lebler, a lecturer in popular music at the Queensland
Conservatorium of Music, is one university teacher who has worked extremely hard
to overcome the barriers to peer assessment that students and management continue to
set up. Youre the experts, he tells his students, this is your music so youre better
placed to assess its quality than your teachers are. But the business of working with
students to help them share responsibility for assessment has not been easy (Lebler,
2005). In the words of G.B. Shaw, power is responsibility; that is why most men
dread it.

While speaking of student reluctance to take peer assessment seriously, it would be
remiss of me not to acknowledge the reluctance of many teachers to advocate peer
assessment. The reasons for this are not only driven by the imperatives to objectivity
and transparency at the level of policy. As J ane Gallop (1982) cryptically puts it: I
13
suppose not all teachers experience as I do a diffuse yet unmistakeable pleasure when
calculating grades at the end of the term (p.128).

The imperative to co-create value may be empathic, but not synonymous, with the call
for more democratic relations in pedagogical work. Indeed, many of the writers who
challenged the authority of the Master Pedagogue would be disquieted by the
language of value-adding as an undesirable import from the tainted world of
business. As Marilyn Strathern (1997) points out, we are quick to forget that many of
the practices of business, including the passion for audit, are imports from education
rather than the other way round. It was educators who first developed the technologies
of audit that were then taken up the business sector, rather than the reverse. What we
now have, as Strathern puts it, is a nice example of cultural replication, rather than an
inappropriate colonising of one pure sector by a tarnished one.

Whatever about the ideological struggles that persist in educational scholarship, the
matter of assessing a co-edited and co-authored work remains an ethical challenge.
While the rhetoric of team building is ubiquitous in universities as it is in other
corporate organisations, assessment remains stubbornly individualistic. We assess and
promote individuals and then we ask them to be effective members of teams. Many
students resist being asked to work in teams at all, and especially if they have had the
experience of a sleeping partner in their team project in the past. Academics have
tinkered on the edge of this issue, and have noted one of two brave innovations as
though these point to a radical change in the pedagogical culture of schools and
universities, but there seems to be little wiggle room around this issue at present.
Indeed, space seems to have been lost in relation to experimentation with assessment
in a post-welfare climate dedicated to the quantification of quality, and any space for
engaging in non-assessable learning has all but disappeared. Whats counted counts,
and in this logic, the counters and the countees must be seen to be constantly
measuring performance, and always at a safe distance from each other.

Of course, students have always subverted out best plans for objective assessment and
continue to do so. I note Simon Kittos (2003) compelling work on a new ethics of
cheating being developed in teams of students completing individual on-line tests. By
taking it in turns to guess answers to on-line multiple choice tests, four or five
Comment [xx5]: Suggest
removing duplication of first word
with and alter punctuation to
improve pausing and sentence flow
(in total, remove with it is and
a comma fromsentence)
sentence now reads as highlighted.
14
students can balance out their results over a semester, and ensure that they all pass.
Somewhat confounded by this practice, their universitys Dean of Learning
commented in this case (not ironically) that it was a demonstration of the value of
peer learning. It is at least heartening to know that, while students continue to cheat
as they always have, on-line environments are assisting them to do so more
collaboratively!

Deadly Habit No.5: Curriculum must be set in advance.

If pedagogy might be rethought as the co-creation of value, then curriculum cannot be
fully formed and set in place in advance of pedagogical activity. This of course flies
directly in the face of the heavy investment in National Curriculum frameworks for
schools in both the UK and Australia. While this does not imply that teachers have a
new licence to be unprepared for pedagogical activity, the nature and purposes of
what counts as preparation must change. From fixed and immutable, curriculum
needs to be conceptualised as content for meddling with. And this means a significant
shift in what many teachers prioritise in their teaching. While the written text remains
important, the remixable curriculum demands that the contribution of other non-text
media visuals, animation, sound be elevated from their currently marginal status
in an overwhelmingly text-dependent curriculum. In Lawrence Lessigs (2005) terms,
we need to come to see redaction as central to education, not lesser than education.

If the curriculum is to meet Baumans (2004) criterion of eminently dismantlable
(p.22), the capacity to edit reality to organise it and re-organise it by mixing form
and content, to juxtapose through display, to compare texts to understand difference
must be valued as a genuine skill. Yet according to Lessig, far from understanding the
usefulness and cultural importance of remix, we have criminalised it as breach of
copyright where popular copyrighted materials are involved. The new terrorists are
not only Islamic extremists but kids who mix four seconds of The Simpsons into their
home movie. Of course, schools and universities can neither teach nor be seen to
endorse criminal behaviour, so it is currently prudent to steer clear of some of the
dangers that the re-mixable curriculum represents. What this condemns us to is a tired
set of habitual cultural practices and a narrow form of cultural writing. Thus, while
digital technologies have enormous potential in terms of a newly subversive politics
Comment [xx6]: Word
missing reviewer suggests be
Comment [xx7]: Unnecessary
use of and. Suggest removing
And and commence sentence:
This

15
and a new flowering of cultural life, that potential remains locked up within the
context of Law-meets-Technology; this in turn increases the likelihood that formal
education will be excluded from the learning network of many young people.

With changes being mooted to copyright laws
1
, it seems appropriate that parallel
shifts can and ought to be made in teacher education. If the curriculum is always
unfinished business, then time-honoured practices of curriculum design and
implementation must be challenged. In mainstream teacher education, teacher trainees
are made aware from the outset that they need to demonstrate evidence of curriculum
design and implementation in the form of lesson preparation - and lesson preparation
must look like something, usually a pile of notes and a plan for the development of the
activities in logic sequence. (Gone are the days when a teacher could lower his head
to the headmasters table when a headmaster demanded your preparation on my
desk I am aware of this occurring in the sixties!)

Once the plan is written, care is usually taken not to stray too far from it or to be
distracted by students with other agendas. This logic, in large measure, runs counter to
the requirements of a remixable curriculum. The predictable or planned experience
gives way to genuine experimentation, with outcomes neither known nor guaranteed.
As a co-creator of value, the teacher shares with students experimental tasks in which
failure is both likely and anticipated, where students and teachers fail without shame
or disappointment. Baumans dictum that: [y]our guess and know-how are as good
as their last application (p.22) applies equally to teachers and students. Put bluntly,
where the stability of the plan is the hallmark of good pedagogy, then the
experimental culture that is a corollary of the remixable curriculum is virtually
impossible to achieve.

If our higher education institutions have a deadening effect on experimentation, the
same cannot be said about the excitement of university managers around technology
uptake. As Strathern (1997) points out, technology comes with the friendliest of
epithets (p.317) in the university culture the more of it used in ways that the
university management approves, the better. Thus the self-managing academic

1
I note the importance of the idea of a Creative Commons in pushing for legislative and cultural
change in this area see www.creativecommons.org/learnmore
Comment [xx8]: Suggest
joining sentences with a semi-
colon to avoid starting the sentence
with And
Comment [xx9]: See
Comment p7 join two sentences
with hyphen
16
demonstrates improved teaching performance by pointing to the use of more and
newer ICTs. (The converse is also true a teacher is unlikely to make a satisfactory
case for demonstrating enhanced performance without this claim.) The number of
hits on website can thus come to count as a measure of teaching effectiveness, just
as the offering of subject content in multiple modes comes to count as a measure of
the academics capacity to be responsive to student diversity. The problem here lies in
the nave hope that more and newer ICTs will mean a more exciting set of learning
possibilities. Where curriculum remains fixed and immutable, however, these good
intentions remain just that. There is no doubt that new information and
communication technologies offer all sorts of new possibilities for remix but, as
Sassen reminds us, they cannot of themselves be relied on to change anything.

Deadly Habit No. 6: The more we know our students, the better

If failure is to become an integral part of our pedagogical processes, then there is
work to be done to uncouple the snug relationship that currently exists between
education and personal therapy. I have written at length on this topic (See Chapter 3
of Pedagogical Pleasures) and I do not intend to reiterate that entire argument here.
However, because this paper imagines a newly emergent pedagogical process, the
relationships and identities that such processes produce call for comment. There is a
unique dilemma when pedagogy is confused with and then conflated with
therapeutic work. (Evidence of this conflation, I would argue, is rampant at all levels
of education, from childcare to doctoral studies.) The central dilemma is between the
imperative to take risks in order to learn and unlearn, and the imperative to minimise
psychological harm by refusing to subject individuals to negative personal
experiences.

As I have indicated above, failure is crucial to the culture of experimentation that the
right mix of learning and unlearning demands. What we have seen, however is the
unintended effect of an ethos of learning focused on a personal psychology of growth
and development. The more success that is experienced, the higher will be the self-
esteem and the student will thereby be a better learner and a happier person. To
endorse confusion, failure and unresolvedness as central elements of the pedagogical
process is to put the personal well-being of students at risk. This might not only
17
reduce student satisfaction levels, but militate against the trend to shorten timelines
for successfully completing formal qualifications.

There are a number of difficulties with this set of propositions, not the least of which
is the inflation of marking that goes together with fear of causing students anxiety or
psychological stress. Student opinion and students effort must always be approved
indeed, revered - regardless of usefulness. I note with interest Frank Furedis new
book, Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone: Confronting 21
st
Century Philistinism
in which he sets out the thesis that educators have turned schools and universities into
all inclusive theme parks where the customer is always right, where no-one is
allowed to fail where no distinction is made between the good, the bad or the
indifferent (Dillon, 2005: 11). Stretching the intellectual and imagination becomes
risky when student self-esteem is sacrosanct.

The fact that most Western universities now offer free therapy sessions to both
teachers and students to help them cope with the stresses of performing their teaching
and learning roles is one effect of the extent to which pedagogy has been successfully
rewritten as emotional labour (Adkins and Lury, 1999). As counsellor, the teacher
loses the authority to punish, but wins the opportunity gently to require a much
greater level of personal disclosure from the student. So the confessional work of the
getting to know you session has become one the more predictable start-up moments
for progressive tutorials. Resistance to such disclosure marks the defensive or
inhibited student. Guessing at students inner life has indeed become an art form in
some quarters, with early childhood teachers now on red alert for the tell-tale signs of
suicide ideation in children who have an apparently excessive passion for using black
crayons.

In Governing the Soul: The shaping of the private self (1990), Nikolas Rose provides
some background to help us understand how pedagogy and psychology have become
inextricably intertwined. He explains how, since World War Two, psychologically
inspired techniques of self-inspection and self-examination have come to be utilised
in every area in which human action was to be shaped up, with the result that we
now see the problems of defining and living a good lifetransposed from an ethical
to a psychological register (p.viii, his emphasis). This has meant, among other
18
things, a growing fascination on the part of teachers and organisational leaders with
the inner workings of the self, and a growing commitment to personal psychology as
the key to education and social success.

Among all the knowledge objects that Rose draws our attention to in the post-war
period, the rise of self-esteem is among the most powerful in terms of its
pedagogical effects. Steven Wards Filling the World with Self-Esteem: A social
history of truth-making (1996) explains how self-esteem has been able to plug into
social and political agendas once it had been discovered, well after it had been
invented by Maslow in the 1940s. Evidence of its importance to education became
clear to me when I asked a group of Masters and Doctoral students in my faculty
about the nature and purposes of education. Raising self-esteem proved to be an
almost universally agreed purpose, ranking alongside helping people reach their full
potential. What flows from this logic is a heavy investment by these teachers in the
development of a positive and friendly teacher-student relationship. And this is
achieved in turn, by getting to know the students as individuals. Such determination is
not to be thought of as prying but as seeking appropriately to teach the whole
person.

How much do we need to know about a person in order to teach them? I have a
colleague who asks teacher trainee students this question to be told pretty much the
same story. Everything, they tell her. The birth history may be important (not
enough oxygen to the brain), a history of alcoholism in the family, sibling rivalry,
whether they have ever been sexually abused, had remedial reading and so on. So
what do I need to know about you? she then asks. They are usually more circumspect
in their response to this question, less willing to give permission to pry. But the point
is nevertheless made. The good teacher builds and maintains a close warm
relationship with students and this means knowing the whole person, whether or not
we want to be known as a psychological subject. In this rationality, openness is a
marker of the good student and interest in the person a marker of the good teacher.

My point is not that we should be looking to return to a culture defined by the lofty
arrogance and elitism of academics, but that one that respects students enough to
challenge them by messing things up with and for them. The role, as Geoff Garrett,
19
Head of Australias CSIRO put it at a recent senior management forum, is to become
chief disorganiser. I have heard Lyndon Crosby, spin-doctor for the British
Conservative Party make this same point somewhat differently to those who seek out
his advice: I can please you or I can help you your choice! Where pleasing and
helping can only be thought as synonymous, important opportunities for
disorganisation, disruption and disappointment are lost.


Deadly habit No.7: Our disciplines can save the world.

It is my hope that I have demonstrated the problem with Deadly Habit Number Seven
in my treatment of Deadly Habits One to Six. The approach I have taken to my own
unlearning has been to range across academic disciplines and outside them in search
of bright and shiny objects that can be used to generate different pedagogical thinking.
Unfortunately, I have for some time now found relatively few compelling ideas about
pedagogy coming out of mainstream education research, or professional development
or leadership and management literature broadly defined.

So rather than relying on one field or even one scholar, I have deliberately mirrored
the cut-and-paste strategy of the creative assembler, and I acknowledge the
drawbacks inherent in this sort of work: it rarely gets into one set of disciplinary-
specific ideas in any depth, and it runs the risk of epistemological chaos as ideas get
moved around, set beside and against each other. I share with Nikolas Rose (2004) a
guilty sense of myself as creeping up on peoples work in order to steal a few
concepts and then run off and use them in whatever way seems productive
(p.176). I am, however, heartened to find such an eminent scholar as Rose admitting
to this very bad practice (p.176) it gives me licence to continue in this vein
without the necessity of donning a hair-shirt as I assemble my scholarly fragments.

Finally, I intend to save myself from another deadly habit of academic authorship
the deadly habit of summarising main points at the end of a paper. This will allow the
reader to dispense with the deadly habit of needing to be reminded about them. In
Baumans terms, the invitation is both to remember and to forget.

20
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