Blogging as public pedagogy: creating alternative educational futures

Abstract

In this study, I explore ‘blogging’, the use of a regularly updated website or web page, authored and curated by an individual or small group, written in a conversational style, as a form of public pedagogy. I analyse blogs as pre-figurative spaces where people go to learn with/in a public sphere, through collaboration with interested others. However, my intention is not to conceptualize blogging spaces as such, but rather—having framed them in a particular way—to explore the extent to which they globalise dissent. My argument is that the blogs I explore, understood as public pedagogic spaces, cultivate voices of educational dissent. Positioning itself within the global research imagination, the study draws extensively on data generated by two blogging communities with a combined international readership in excess of 40,000 people; one of the blogs is based in the UK, written by a group of adult educators. The other is based in Canada written by a group of adult literacy practitioners. Whilst both blogs are authored, curated and carried by a named individual, as public pedagogic spaces, they are implicated in the creation of a dialogic self: a self which is developed collaboratively with/in the interests of and through a public that coalesces around them. The pedagogies associated with these spaces are argued as explicit and intentioned. The public that coalesces around them learns how to survive a global neoliberal policy nexus that is unsympathetic towards the ideals they pre-figuratively embody. In so doing, they call into being the creation of alternative educational understandings of themselves and each other in relation to policy, pedagogy and the purposes of education.

Keywords:

• public pedagogy
• blogging
• adult literacy
• policy
• Workers' Education Association

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my warm appreciation to Kate Nonesuch and Ann Walker for their permission to base this research on their work. Whilst I take full responsibility for the analysis of the blogs, both have kindly participated in this work by agreeing for me to write about their blog and provided valuable data regarding the profile of its readership.

Notes

1. http://en.wordpress.com/stats/; accessed 26 April 2014, WordPress is one of several freely available blog hosting sites available.

2. www.technorati.com: accessed 3 June 2014.

3. Both blogs have been analysed with the approval of the University of Hull ethics committee and the kind permission of the bloggers themselves. The blogs are in the public domain and may be located here: http://katenonesuch.com/about-kate-nonesuch/ and here: http://annwalkerwea.wordpress.com.

4. I have analysed the 20 most popular posts from each blogging space. (The ‘most popular posts’ is based on my counting of discernable traces left by readers of their presence in terms of likes, comments or re-postings through other social networks.) My reference then relates these particular blog posts, counted and coded. The popularity of these posts might change as a radically open and unfinished text means that other traces might have appeared since conducting this research and certainly other blog posts will have been written after February 2014.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carol Azumah Dennis

Carol Azumah Dennis is currently employed as a lecturer in Education, Centre for Educational Studies, University of Hull. Her research interests include Post-16 Education, Policy, Pedagogy, Critical Literacy and Professionalism. Her key Publications include: Locating post-16 professionalism: Public spaces as dissenting spaces, Research in Post Compulsory Education (2015); Positioning further education and community colleges: Text, teachers and students as global discourse, Studies in the Education of Adults (2014); Quality: An ongoing conversation over time, Journal of Vocational Education & Training (2014); Measuring quality: framing what we know, Literacy (2011); Is the professionalisation of adult basic skills teaching possible, desirable or inevitable? Literacy and Numeracy Studies: An International Journal (2010); Quality and Worthwhile Professional Knowledge, Journal of Research and Practice in Adult Literacy Issue: 70 (2010).