Teaching facts or teaching thinking? The potential of hooks’ ‘engaged pedagogy’ for teaching politics in a ‘post-truth’ moment

ABSTRACT

The rise of populism has sparked a debate about the role of facts in public discourse. How should higher education teachers respond? This article reviews the literature on approaches to teaching and identifies and problematises a tension between emphases on facts and thinking. It then outlines the current ‘post-truth’ challenge, which suggests reasserting the importance of facts. The institutional, disciplinary and personal context of the article are considered before it proposes hooks’ (1994) ‘engaged pedagogy’ as a prescient response to the current post-truth moment. That approach provides an anti-authoritarianism that has the potential to break down barriers between teachers (experts) and students (trainee experts), accommodate different ways of knowing, and promote collective science. This is illustrated with an example of teaching practice from a first-year undergraduate seminar on politics in ethnically divided societies, which highlights how, despite its limitations, engaged pedagogy can facilitate the incorporation of facts within thinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching and learning
• facts
• critical thinking
• post-truth
• engaged pedagogy

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the opportunity to write this article that was afforded by the Enquiry into pedagogic practice module offered as part of the LSE Eden Centre PGCertHE course. In particular, this article would not have been possible without the reassuring support and insightful comments of Dr Colleen McKenna. I am also grateful to Anna Wolmuth and Philip Rauber for their enthusiastic and supportive comments on an earlier version of the article, which instilled in me the enthusiasm to continue working on it. Finally, I am especially grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments and suggestions, which prompted considerable improvements and shaped the final argument of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This was more important in the preceding year, when the second essential reading had focused on the factors that facilitate cooperation within and across ethnic groups, using experiments that took place in Kampala, Uganda (Habyarimana et al. 2007).

2 Reflecting the poststructuralist challenge to the delineation of the canon within a discipline from other sources (Alan 2018).

3 ‘Strange Fruit’ by Billie Holiday, ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ by Sam Cooke, ‘The Backlash Blues’ by Nina Simone, ‘Mississippi Goddam’ by Nina Simone, ‘Why (The King of Love Is Dead)’ by Nina Simone, ‘Is it Because I’m Black’ by Syl Johnson, ‘Across 110th Street’ by Bobby Womack, ‘Can’t Truss It’ by Public Enemy, and ‘Conspiracy’ by Gang Starr.

Additional information

Funding

This article was written during the author’s employment as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. It was revised during the author's employment as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (award number: PF20/100039) in the School of Government & Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde.