Pedagogies of time, place, and identification

Pedagogy is a thorny subject for curriculum scholars. In a 2013 special issue of Curriculum Inquiry (CI), editors invited a group of well-established authors and asked them to offer a critical reading of their contributions to the scholarship on pedagogy. In their opening essay, drawing on the work of David Hamilton (2009), the editors noted that pedagogy reveals society's orientations towards “the good life” (Thiessen et al., 2013). These orientations are expressed not only in what is taught and learned, but in the processes and relationships by which human beings are socialized, acculturated, and ostensibly channelled in particular directions. The trouble, of course, is that somebody is doing the teaching and the learning and somebody is doing the socializing, acculturating, and channelling to somebody else. All these somebodies involve complex subjectivities and desires, complicated further by the fact that the interactions between them occur within social structures and institutions that demand something of them and that shape their interactions.

Scholars and educators frequently refer to pedagogy in such terms as an art, a science, and a craft. Donna Adair Breault (2011) highlights the consciousness, intentionality, refinement, and belief that the designation of an “art” implies, highlighting that “the teacher engaged in pedagogy becomes acutely aware of the nuances, flows, and tensions within their work so they can move closer to their images of the ideal” (p. 634). Thiessen et al. (2013) suggest, however, that pedagogy is much more than classroom teaching, and consequently represents “a framework for understanding and guiding the development of a knowledgeable and professional teacher” (p. 5). Allan Luke (2006) reinforces this idea, noting the reproduction of pedagogical relationships over time as

realizations of the intergenerational reproduction of practice; points of contact of residual and emergent cultures whereby institutionally authorized and often generationally habited ways of words, ways of knowing, and ways of passing knowledge encounter new student bodies, artefacts, and knowledge. (p. 4)

One of the most vexing problems that arises in thinking about pedagogy revolves around the question of what precisely is the outcome, whether desired or actual, of pedagogical encounters. Here, the problem is not just about unpredictability, but also about unknowability. Much is imagined about what becomes of the subject following the pedagogical encounter, particularly since conceptions of what constitutes “the good life” for individuals and society are multiple, often implicit, and far from unanimous. In critical pedagogy, for example, the imagined subject becomes conscious of power dynamics and ideally able to initiate emancipation from oppressive conditions (see Holohan, in this issue). Yet as Ellsworth (1989), Weiler (1991), and others point out, without attention to the particular complexities of oppressive dynamics that shape the student–teacher relationship, critical pedagogy becomes increasingly abstract and utopian, risking the perpetuation of dominant relationships rather than their dismantling. This is frequently observed by education scholars studying elite schooling, as illustrated in the article by Rodrigo Mayorga in this issue. Mayorga's study illustrates how a purported pedagogical commitment to social justice and liberation remains deferred to an imagined future, allowing oppressive systems that benefit them to continue.

Thus, in addition to the conscious intentions behind the art, craft, and science of teaching and learning, we observe that pedagogy always exists in contexts and relationships that are positional, temporal, and spatial. Time, place, and identification imbue teaching and learning with their own frameworks, logics, and ways of knowing, which may not always conform to the deliberate practices of teachers and learners. Can these essential contexts and relationships, then, also be considered as forms of pedagogy? The articles in this issue of CI provide different illustrations of how pedagogy produces and reproduces subjects through their complex relationships with time, place, and identification. Each of the articles, in one way or another, provide insight into the ways in which time and place play a role in how pedagogies operate and how identifications are formed. While the first and fourth article focus on theorizing different aspects of pedagogy, the second and third draw on empirical analysis to highlight how time and place shape the ways in which identifications are constructed pedagogically.

In the first article, titled “Identification, Language, and Subjectivity: Reading Freire Through/Against Lacan,” Kevin Holohan offers a critical reading of Paulo Freire's (1970/1993) Pedagogy of the Oppressed through the work of French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan. Holohan contributes to an evolving tradition of scholars committed to the emancipatory project of Freire's work but who nonetheless approach it with the same kind of critical insight that Freire invited. In this article, he aims to complicate Freire's conception of the human subject through Lacan's conception of the imaginary. While acknowledging that Lacan and Freire are invested in somewhat incompatible projects, Holohan draws on Lacan to further our understanding of how affect and processes of symbolization play a central role on the pedagogical encounter.

Viewed through Lacan, Freire's acknowledgement that the process of becoming fully human is a practice that is never quite complete becomes crystallized through an understanding of the unconscious. For Lacan, the possibility of “freedom” – understood as a return to the Real – is impossible because the Real, as Holohan explains, “is sliced into pieces by language” (p. 454). Lacan and Freire understand the subject as somehow incomplete and both are interested in the pursuit of a more complete subjecthood. But for Lacan, it is that very pursuit, not its resolution, that constitutes human subjectivity, and it is through desire that this incompleteness is manifest. Indeed, it is the problem of desire and of the unconscious processes that drive desire that raise serious questions about Freire's understanding of pedagogy as opening up the possibility of reason and agency as manifestations of freedom. As Holohan and other scholars who have challenged Freire's assumptions about the possibilities for human interactions free of the hubris of oppression have argued, the human subject can never be “fully” anything. “Instead,” says Holohan, “subjects are characterized by a lack, a void that is sutured—but not filled in—as their lives are lived within the broader discourses circulating in a particular time and place” (p. 446). The next two articles in this issue illustrate precisely how learning takes place in particular times and places, perhaps experiencing the kinds of “suturing” that Holohan describes.

Suturing Elite Identifications in Place and Time

In the article titled, “When Kind of Citizen? Temporally Displaced Citizenship Education in a Chilean Private School,” Rodrigo Mayorga offers a corrective to extant research on different approaches to citizenship education by suggesting that a key aspect of how citizenship is taught has to do with time. Specifically, he looks at the experiences of students at an elite private school in Chile committed to social justice. He asks how it is that these students are able to, on the one hand, internalize identifications as members of the elite, while on the other, develop a commitment to transforming the social conditions of inequality that also make their social locations possible. The answer, says Mayorga, is time; the kind of citizen these students are learning to be and the kind of social transformation they develop commitments to are located in a time in the future and not in their present. As such, these commitments and experiences do not present an actual challenge to the kind of person they are becoming today. This also has a spatial dimension; their work must lead to change elsewhere, in the context of poverty in which they become change agents by contributing to the well-being of others. This displacement in time and place, Mayorga argues, is crucial for the kinds of pedagogical work that teachers do at this school. In a sense, students “become” elite subjects through the very “desires for the other” that Holohan suggests make the students subject to the conditions that make their self-understanding possible.

Mayorga draws attention to both what happens inside and outside of the school, and highlights the various contradictions or tensions that illustrate how time and place become crucial in the formation of elite identifications. These identifications are at once based on pedagogical exclusions while at the same time founded on a pedagogical commitment to social justice and transformation. As such, it is precisely through pedagogy that the apparent tension between elite status and social justice is lived. Likewise, it is also through space and time that elite identifications are rehearsed through pedagogical encounters, even before they are fully internalized, as the next article in this issue suggests.

In his article “A Summer of Distinction: Exploring the Construction of Educational Advantage Outside the Academic Year,” Burke Scarbrough focuses on the pedagogical implications of out-of-school time in the construction of educational advantage, arguing that the summer break in many countries’ school calendars is an underexamined time period in the scholarship of elite education. Scarbrough's work is situated within a US elite boarding school summer session marketed to middle and upper-middle class families – a different clientele from the full-year academic session. He examines the role that summer programmes play in helping youth envision and rehearse high-status futures and begin to identify as elites, simultaneously distancing themselves from those at home who do not have access to an elite education while rationalizing educational inequality.

Scarbrough points out that many scholarly studies of summer school are presented as either enrichment experiences for elite students who want to get ahead, or remedial programmes for underachievers who risk losing academic gains made throughout the year. By bringing together these bodies of literature, Scarbrough critiques the gain/loss binary typified in many of these studies. Through the sociological lens of the reproduction of class advantage in the summer session, Scarbrough excavates what is hidden about social class, to more fully account for distinct forms of “class warfare” taking place beyond the school walls by examining the content and context of an elite educational experience marketed to upper-middle class families. In Scarbrough's research, the temporal construct of the summer itself gives pedagogical weight to this process, bolstering patterns of class stratification in ways that are independent from what occurs in the regular school session. Thus, his emphasis on the academy's elite summer session being “like and unlike school in the ‘right’ ways for participating youth” (p. 481, emphasis in original) does not only occur in the teaching and learning experiences mediated by teachers in their classrooms, but is informed by time and space.

Scarbrough's analysis points out how the spatial materiality of the academy is encoded with pedagogical effects – from the serene, lavishly resourced campus in which summer students have free reign, to the fraternal dormitory culture, to purchasing and sporting academy-branded regalia. These oft-mentioned experiences may be regarded as secondary to the impressive “sampler plate” of course offerings and “top-notch” faculty instructors at the academy's summer session. Yet, they play no less of a role in producing students’ identifications by contributing to a sense of “belonging” in elite environments and peer groups. Simultaneously, Scarbrough identifies students’ rationales of self-exclusion from the places and peer groups that they leave at home in order to justify their access to elite schooling while deflecting awareness of educational inequality. The summer session's temporal and spatial contexts thus play decisive roles in facilitating students’ identifications as future elites, reinforcing the academy's pedagogical programme.

The articles by Mayorga and Scarbrough provide examples of how place, time, and identifications imbue pedagogical encounters. They underscore that place and time are not separable from pedagogical frameworks for understanding and guiding the work and development of teachers and learners (Thiessen et al., 2013). Place and time cannot be relegated to the background of pedagogy, as they play active roles in shaping the actions and positions that subjects take and how they relate to each other. While Henri Lefebvre (1991) famously examined the production of space through social processes, these two authors demonstrate how place and space produce and shape subjects. Place engages teachers and learners, interrupts their intentions, informs conversations, and transforms outcomes. The students in Mayorga's and Scarbrough's research have a vested interest in their future selves: for Mayorga, a future that is more equitably and socially just, without sacrificing their privileged positions in the present; and for Scarbrough, a future that provides access to high-status positions that are only imagined in their present positions. Thus, in each instance, temporal distance is a pedagogical mechanism that shapes present identifications, and the discourses associated with specific times and spaces are sutured together to inform a subject's identification, as Holohan posits, illustrating their relational power in pedagogy.

There and Back Again: Why Pedagogy Matters

While Mayorga and Scarbrough offer an analysis of how both place and time shape pedagogical encounters, the last article in this issue of CI focuses on theorizing how place itself teaches; that is, how place is pedagogical. More specifically, Neil Harrison, Aunty Frances Bodkin, Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews, and Elizabeth Mackinlay provide accounts of the pedagogy of Country. In their article, “Sensational Pedagogies: Learning to be Affected by Country,” the authors return us to some of the themes in Holohan's essay, building on affect theories to describe the ways in which Country teaches. They draw on Aboriginal knowledge systems in order to express what Country means beyond notions of place and building on Aboriginal understandings of Land. Here, the issue is not simply that pedagogies are emplaced, but rather, that Country is pedagogical, and they provide three vivid examples of how Country teaches through affect and what the authors frame as “sensational pedagogies.”

Each written by different authors, the three case studies are compelling illustrations of how Country affects the subject and brings about a shift in awareness. In the first case study, Neil Harrison describes the challenge of teaching about Aboriginal art to non-Aboriginal students and the role that Country plays in interrupting stereotypes and dynamics of appropriation. Observing how the wind and the dust surrounding a mural project affected the interactions between students and artists, Harrison shows how “learning to be affected by Country is to be engaged by more and more elements, such as wind, light and smell. It is learning to be affected by the differences and multiplicities of the Country around us” (p. 511).

In the second case study, Elizabeth Mackinlay describes a two-week workshop on music and dance provided by Yanyuma Elders to university students. Exploring the concept of ngalki, “a complex ordering principle for placing people on Country and in clan groupings,” through song and dance and by decorating their bodies with a-makirra. This a-makira, Mackinlay explains is “quite literally, a small piece of Yanyuwa Country finely ground with stone on stone, mixed with lukewarm water, and then painted slowly and gently onto our bodies with a small brush” (p. 513). This experience of literally putting Country on their bodies, on the one hand, leads some students into an awareness of their status as white settlers, and on the other, brings the history of Yanyuma into the space and time of the performative space confronting students with the histories of colonization that shape their identifications.

Time and space are also implicated in the third and last case study, in which Frances Bodkin and Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews describe the power of story as a key aspect of the pedagogies of Country. Through an Ancestral Law Story of the D'harawal peoples, the authors illustrate how Country manifests through story in ways that are, at once, both hinged and unhinged from place and time. Through the story of the Migadan (river-spirit), the past and the present, the here and the there, become implicated and connected to Country, which in the process becomes the “driver for a more positive cognitive and affective sense of empathy” (p. 516). While carefully detailing the ways in which the elements of the story come together pedagogically, they also caution the readers who may eagerly imagine that simply borrowing the story in another place and time will have the same impact. Rather, they underscore that the pedagogical work of such stories is always grounded in relationality, not just to the people, but to the Country – the place and time – to which the story belongs.

Through Country, Harrison, Bodkin, Bodkin-Andrews, and Mackinlay return us, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, to Lacan, pointing out that we are not always aware of why we feel what we feel because the emotional life of learning is driven by desires that often cannot be grasped or known. They point out that while mainstream learning is usually aimed at minimizing the dangers of the unknown, it is precisely within the unknowability of emotions and desires that Country teaches best and where relationalities can expand and multiply. It is this understanding of pedagogy that underscores its importance for curriculum studies and that warn against arguments for either conflating or subsuming pedagogy within curriculum. Indeed, the final article points to the ways in which an understanding of pedagogy informed by experiences of marginalization and, in this particular case, colonization provides a path through the thorny questions of pedagogy. After all, scholars from the Global South have never been discomforted by the complexities of pedagogy.

Tracing a historical narrative of curriculum studies in Colombia, for instance, Juny Montoya-Vargas (2013) describes how the relationship between curriculum and pedagogy plays out in Colombia and other Latin American contexts. She notes that curriculum is a relatively recent import into Colombian education discourses over the past five decades, and that it was not particularly welcome initially, due to its association with “curriculum planning and management” under US-led international development agendas towards externalized and centralized control of schools. This “troubled history” of curriculum, she argues, represented a threat to the autonomy of pedagogy, which played a much more important role in Latin American education traditions. The perceived tensions between curriculum and pedagogy, then, are deeply informed by matters of place, time, and identification. Terminologies and definitions have been privileged not only because of what they offer but also because of where and from whom they have come; if pedagogy seems vexing and destabilizing, perhaps it is not because of what it is or is not, but because of the unknown affects and desires that link those who speak of pedagogy from the margins and those who defend curriculum from the centre of the page.

Speaking through and from Country, the authors of the final article position sensational pedagogies as forms of resistance to colonization, where curriculum figures prominently as a white supremacist force. The authors unapologetically draw equally from Lacan and Judith Butler, as they draw from Elders and Aboriginal scholars to articulate and understand the pedagogy of Country. They show that while Freire may have very well been enamoured by the reasoning subject, as Holohan shows, his understanding of pedagogy as the relational moment when new possibilities emerge remains crucial for projects of emancipation. Lacan may have been satisfied with the idea that the subject cannot escape its imaginaries; but to those whose lives the curriculum undermines, this conclusion is inadequate. Subjects do not just exist within imaginaries and social structures, they also exist in relationship to time and space, and Country helps us to see that time and space teach and pedagogically open doors of possibility, not back to Lacan's Real, but back to the truth that is emplaced in Country.

Pedagogy, then, translates the political and ontological deliberations about what constitutes the good life into experiences that are lived and felt, articulated, and contested. Pedagogy's frameworks are mediated by states and institutions vested in perpetuating regimes of truth and power at one moment, and challenged by the epistemic exigencies of emancipation in the next. Pedagogy is wielded and honed through the conscious intentions of educators, yet even the most experienced instructor encounters surprises in the ever-evolving dynamics of relationships, subjectivities, and the broader social landscapes across time and place. We are organic to pedagogy, shaping its diverse effects and manifestations, as it in turn shapes us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.