Researching pedagogy: a sociocultural agenda

Abstract

Pedagogy is currently receiving attention from producers of education policy in England. It is, however, a version of pedagogy that remains located in a history of schooling as social control, of curricular knowledge as a commodity to be transmitted and of teachers as paraprofessionals. Those who resist recent attempts to shape pedagogy, and attempt to enhance both pedagogy and professionalism in order to prepare learners and teachers for informed participation in the new knowledge economy, are constrained by the impoverished understandings of pedagogy available in the United Kingdom. The author argues that understandings of pedagogy that are grounded in the hermeneutic psychology offered by Vygotskian theory can enhance teachers' professionalism and inform a pedagogy for the new knowledge age, ‘Vygotsky is concerned to study how people, through the use of their own social activities, by changing their own conditions of existence can change themselves’ (Shotter, 1993, p. 111).