Pedagogical Rhythm – A Concept for Reflection on Contradictory Actions
This paper will introduce the concept of pedagogical rhythm, which might be seen as a preliminary answer to my question of how to develop, in pre-service teacher education, a morally responsible teaching. I will argue for the need to give opportunities to reflect upon teachers’ work in what I claim to be a more appropriate way for good teaching than towards the kind of standards developed in a neoliberal policy paradigm. Instead of reflecting upon teachers’ work in relation to certain pre-defined outcomes, as well as in relation to a non-defined complexity, the paper will give arguments for the need of reflection processes that are able to take into consideration teachers’ contradictory acting, without necessarily regarding this to be a problem.
Theoretically the concept of pedagogical rhythm is developed out of Dewey’s line of reasoning, which says that our habits of acting develop in interaction, together with Lefebvre’s work on rhythm analysis, where differences and repetition in our everyday life are crucial units of analysis. Hereby the concept of habit is given a wider meaning as every habit is related to several and among them contradictory habits that all together create a rhythm.
The concept of pedagogical rhythm refers to professional responsibility and the need for teachers to act in multiple ways with temporally different intentions, when interacting with pupils. It deals with different and occasionally contradictory ways of acting, which cannot be totally planned in advance but understood as actions emerging as a consequence of intentions predominantly grown out of teachers’ and pupils shared experiences, in a range of prior pedagogical situations.
Hence instead of mainly giving attention to goal achievement, as become the focus in a neoliberal paradigm, the perspective presented through the concept of pedagogical rhythm, will give opportunities to pay attention to a variety of different ways to interact with pupils. The accentuation of certain habits in relation to others evolved from all kind of actions should over time be able to describe in terms of a specific pedagogical rhythm.
The concept of pedagogical rhythm presented in the paper is a draft to later be evolved and used as a theoretical framework within an upcoming doctoral thesis in Education in Sweden. The concept will play a central role for analysing pre-service teacher students’ interaction in net-based seminars, when they deal with questions related to moral issues in teachers’ work.
2014.
Teachers Matter – but how? 2014, October 23-24 Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden