Recontextualising employability in the Active Learning Classroom

ABSTRACT

Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs) are distinguishable by their inclusion of dedicated media technologies, shared tables and wheeled chairs, organised to promote small-group interaction in larger classes. While discursively presented as a panacea to presumed problems of ‘effective’ pedagogy, a multimodal discourse analysis of the ALC highlights how, in the context of discourses of employability and entrepreneurialism, it functions as an apparatus for normalising precarious forms of labour. The ALC should be properly understood as what Bernstein calls a pedagogic device in which knowledge, as the product of social relations, is recontextualised as educational knowledge and in turn becomes the basis for a new set of evaluative criteria. Accordingly, the ALC recontextualises ‘the real world’ and its prioritisation of so-called employable skills in the classroom and in doing so, further legitimises what can be termed, the proceduralisation of pedagogy into a simple repertoire of techniques that can be applied to deliver information to an albeit ‘active’ audience.

KEYWORDS:

• Active learning classroom
• employability
• entrepreneurialism
• neoliberalism
• pedagogy
• pedagogic device
• multimodality

Acknowledgements

I must express my appreciation for the generous constructive criticism provided by the anonymous referees of this paper. Their detailed comments were invaluable in the development of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This is particularly pertinent when, for example, in the UK 49% of recent university graduates work in non-graduate roles (Office of National Statistics (ONS), 2017) and 28% of young people ‘feel trapped in a cycle of jobs they don’t want’ (Prince’s Trust, 2018). Similarly, in Canada, almost 1/3 of young workers are employed in temporary jobs (Canadian Labour Congress, 2016) and in Australia 25% of all jobs are now considered ‘casual’ with young workers most likely to occupy those positions (Parliament of Australia, 2018). Furthermore, such employment insecurity disproportionately affects women and racialized workers.

2 Formerly known as Joint Information Systems Committee.