Qualifying pedagogy: observations on a pedagogical encounter

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces researchers and scholars to psychosocial qualitative methods when researching affective aspects of classroom pedagogy. It theorises affect as felt processes that defy representation circulating in teaching and learning. Turning to the psychoanalytic field of infant observation, the author outlines the immense potential of deeply qualifying the relational dynamics of pedagogy for the field of education. The paper offers a case of a child’s literacy to generate insight into the critical importance of documenting pedagogical interactions when teaching young children. The author finds that in-depth qualification of and on pedagogical encounter can instantiate a new course in pedagogical research, one that takes seriously what is unknown about learning taking place inside and between learners and teachers. Studying pedagogical encounters contributes new knowledge of the significance of the teaching relation in supporting children and students to learn.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• casework
• observation
• pedagogical encounter
• pedagogy
• pedagogical research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In the UK and France infant and enfant refers both to babies and children. Infant observation is conducted most with this population, although I engage it with patients with late-stage dementia rendered to an infantile state, following Waddell (2007) and Ng (2009).

2. It is interesting that women see observations in terms of ‘keeping diaries’ while men characterise their observations as ‘scientific.’ In reality all observation is scientific when documented and/or formalised. Part of our paradigmatic difficulty then lies in the ways in which our work is characterised in and by discourses of the human and social sciences. This is Foucault’s point in Discipline and Punish.

3. As this research was conducted twenty years ago, my formal write-up of the data has been destroyed, as per ethical protocols. At that time very little was required in terms of ethical protocols which are now much stricter. All that remains is my research journal of ‘jotted down’ observations which proves to be an in-depth rather than thick source of data for this paper. This paper attempts to give a case of the potential for this kind of research in education which I literally stumbled into during grad school. That project continues to ground my work in the field and so this is also my way to show my indebtedness to it and the professor, Dr. –, and my colleagues in our graduate seminar, for always encouraging me to pursue my ideas, despite holding some reservations on my affective take of qualitative and action-research data. The project shows the profound and lasting effect of researching training and other types of unfunded research that are under-valued in scholarly domains. In my current research projects, I use in-depth qualification to engage children’s testimony in classrooms, literature, and the expressions of adults with late-stage dementia (Ng 2009; Mishra Tarc 2020).