1

2 1 Pedagogy
3
4 The unsaid of socio-cultural theory
5
6
7
Megan Watkins, Greg Noble and Catherine Driscoll
8
9
10
11
12
13 The formation of subjectivities has long been central to contemporary
14 social and cultural theory. There has been substantial work across the
15 Humanities, Social Sciences, and beyond, considering the ways in which
16 various domains of the modern world shape minds and bodies by discur-
17 sive and material means. Yet this work tends to emphasise already formed
18 subjects or particular social and cultural effects which are seen to constitute
19 classed, gendered and racialised subjects. The processes that produce
20 these effects – or how forms of conduct are acquired through particular
21 relations and practices across a range of settings – receive far less scrutiny.
22 This book deploys the notion of ‘cultural pedagogies’ to recast the pro-
23 cesses of subject formation, institutional conduct, cultural representation
24 and human capacities as pedagogic practices of teaching and learning,
25 broadly understood, which produce cumulative changes in how we act,
26 think, feel and imagine. Existing work on critical and public pedagogies
27 and the recent proliferation of work on ‘pedagogies of . . .’ (place, con-
28 sumption and gender, for example) offer important starting points, but
29 we believe a more comprehensive approach to cultural forms of pedagogy
30 is still needed, building on this work and pushing it in new directions.
31 The imperative to better understand relations of teaching and learning
32 across social sites has been intensified by claims about the increasing peda-
33 gogisation of everyday life. Basil Bernstein (2001: 364) has famously
34 argued that we now live in a ‘totally pedagogised society’ in which: govern-
35 ments, media, workplaces and systems of higher education entail a sociali-
36 sation characterised by endless learning in the ‘knowledge society’,
37 compelling a capacity for ‘lifelong learning’ whenever and wherever.
38 Recent interest in the ‘pedagogical state’ (Pykett 2010) has drawn further
39 attention to the relationship between governance, citizenship, education
40 and the array of sites, actors and practices through which citizen subjectivi-
41 ties are formed and managed. The notion of cultural pedagogies, we
42 argue, helps us understand pedagogy in both broader and more grounded
43 ways, engaging with a range of social spaces, relations, routines and dis-
44 courses, and encouraging reflection on the wider ‘educative’ functions of
45 cultural practices, or what Raymond Williams referred to as ‘permanent

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 2 M. Watkins et al.
education’, ‘the educational force (éducation as distinct from enseignement) 1
of our whole social and cultural experience’ (1966: 15). Connecting 2
recent claims about the pedagogisation of everyday life to older discourse 3
on the ‘educational force’ of social experience – before Williams we could 4
cite writers like Georg Simmel or Thorstein Veblen, and contemporary 5
with him writers like Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser – is itself an 6
important reply to some of the temporal certainties underlying claims 7
about the pedagogisation of life in general. 8
In this chapter we want to grapple with the idea of ‘pedagogy’ by first 9
considering the pedagogical imperative of contemporary theorising which 10
attempts to foreground the pedagogic character of social life before articu- 11
lating some of the key issues at stake in the notion of ‘cultural 12
pedagogies’. 13
14
15
What is pedagogy?
16
There is no simple answer to this question – there never is. A dictionary 17
will often define pedagogy as ‘the art and science of teaching’ (Random 18
House 2014), and this has typically been the starting point from which 19
educational practitioners and scholars moved on to more pragmatic 20
matters of models of learning, instructional design and classroom manage- 21
ment (Gage 1978). Today, while practitioner focus tends to remain on the 22
instrumental classroom practices of schooling (Marsh 1996), it is no 23
longer enough for many educational theorists to just focus on these prag- 24
matic dimensions of teaching which beg many questions about what is 25
taught, what is learnt, goals and methods, their underlying principles, 26
organisational conditions, and so on (Jarvis 2006: 3). As David Lusted 27
(1986: 2–3) pointed out years ago, despite its proliferating use, ‘pedagogy’ 28
is under-defined and under-theorised, often used to refer to teaching style, 29
classroom management, and instructional modes, but also pointing to 30
larger issues of educational philosophy, institutional context and the rela- 31
tionship between formal education and the wider social world. Indeed, 32
pedagogy sits within a rather muddled network of terms – education, 33
teaching, learning, instruction, training, curriculum, and so on – and a 34
wide range of more ‘sociological’ notions – socialisation, transmission, 35
reproduction, acculturation – which together beg even more questions. 36
There are several reasons for broadening the idea of pedagogy. On the 37
one hand, clearly what goes on in schools is not just the overt or formal 38
acquisition of specific skills. As Philip W. Jackson (1968) argued in the 39
1960s, schools entail a ‘hidden curriculum’ through which particular 40
values are covertly transmitted – an idea taken up by radical education 41
critics who used it to analyse the ideological dimensions of schooling. 42
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (2000: 46–47) made a compar- 43
able distinction between implicit and explicit pedagogies, and Bernstein 44
(2003: 68) likewise distinguishes visible from invisible pedagogies. Central 45

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 The unsaid of socio-cultural theory 3
1 to these insights is the understanding that explicit pedagogic practices do
2 not define all that is at stake in a pedagogic situation.
3 On the other hand, there has been increasing focus on the ways in
4 which relations of teaching and learning mark all aspects of life. Chris
5 Watkins and Peter Mortimore (1999: 3) usefully attempt to move away
6 from the narrow focus on institutional education by defining pedagogy as
7 ‘any conscious activity by one person designed to enhance the learning of
8 another’. This doesn’t, however, clarify what the relationship between
9 teaching and learning is or how conscious or intentional pedagogy needs
10 to be. As Watkins and Mortimore go on to argue, the complexity of peda-
11 gogy arises partly from competing philosophical understandings of what
12 both teaching and learning are (10–11), contrasting understandings also
13 apparent in the decreasing attention paid to the role of the teacher in
14 educational discourse (Watkins 2011). Such educational ‘perspectives’,
15 which Daniel Pratt et al. (1998) group as ideas about transmission, appren-
16 ticeship, development, nurturing, and social reform, represent deep ideo-
17 logical investments in the ways we view education. Yet, while these
18 ‘perspectives’ imply different kinds of practices and relations, they tell us
19 little about the actual practices and relations themselves.
20 Moreover, we are perhaps only beginning to realise how intrinsically
21 the pedagogical relation entails more than a singular teacher-learner cou-
22 pling and to appreciate the importance of what Bourdieu (1977: 17) calls
23 a ‘collective enterprise of inculcation’. As Williams (1966: 15) argued, we
24 need to consider how ‘the whole environment, its institutions and rela-
25 tionships, actively and profoundly teaches. . . . For who can doubt, looking
26 at television or newspapers, or reading the women’s magazines, that here,
27 centrally, is teaching . . .’. In this sense, we follow Bernstein’s characterisa-
28 tion of pedagogy as not only a sustained process of instruction whereby
29 people acquire particular knowledges, skills and values, but also as a ‘cul-
30 tural relay: a uniquely human device for both the reproduction and the
31 production of culture’, to capture this duality (2003: 61–64). We preface
32 ‘pedagogy’ with ‘culture’ partly to make this recognition more explicit and
33 to stress the cultural quality of pedagogic processes and relations. Both
34 Williams and Bernstein stress the impetus in socio-cultural analysis towards
35 an engagement with the pedagogic; an engagement grounded in the
36 works of key socio-cultural theorists.
37
38
The pedagogical imperative
39
40 ‘Pedagogy’ has become a key rhetorical tool in the Humanities and Social
41 Sciences – naming a conceptual terrain grappled with by various theoret-
42 ical perspectives but rarely articulated in these terms. This is surprising
43 given that much socio-cultural theory emerged through critique of simplis-
44 tic models of acquisition – transmission models in media and communica-
45 tions, simple models of gender socialisation, and reproduction theory in

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 4 M. Watkins et al.
Education and the Social Sciences. It demanded more nuanced 1
approaches – notions of interpellation, appropriation, embodiment and 2
performativity, but generally without unpacking the pedagogic dimensions 3
of these processes, discussing subjects as though they always already had 4
sufficient capacity to appropriate, recognise an address, perform, and so 5
on. However, it is worth recognising the engagement with pedagogy 6
implicit in much social theory. The extent that social relations and belong- 7
ing are learnt is apparent in foundational philosophy like Jean-Jacques 8
Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, implicit in Freudian models of psychoana- 9
lytic development, and pivotal to Marxist accounts of ideology, but rarely 10
explicated as pedagogical processes involving more than passive acquisi- 11
tion. One place in which the importance of thinking pedagogically about 12
society and culture is explicit is in the influential work of the early Ameri- 13
can pragmatists, William James and John Dewey. 14
Dewey remains an important influence on the rationale and content of 15
curricula for public education, a set of institutional practices that he 16
understood to always involve a set of relations between culture and citizen- 17
ship that preceded and exceeded any classroom. Together with conscious 18
forms of instruction, Dewey stressed the importance of ‘unconscious’ pro- 19
cesses of education by which individuals become the ‘inheritor of the 20
funded capital of civilization’, a set of processes on which ‘formal and 21
technical education’ can only organise or specialise (Dewey 1998: 229). 22
Dewey accounts for the pedagogic processes already powerfully acting on 23
any student as simultaneously psychological and social (1998: 230) and 24
among his most influential contributions to the history of education is his 25
insistence that school is an extension of social life, and should connect 26
with fundamental forms of social experiences – including play, housework 27
and manual training (1998: 232). In Democracy and Education, Dewey 28
emphasises that while schools are the site where a community directly 29
seeks to make use of these processes for its own benefit they are continu- 30
ally in operation at the level of society in general. He takes some of his 31
cues in this from Rousseau in arguing that ‘men’ receive their education 32
simultaneously from ‘Nature, men, and things’ (in Dewey 1998: 258). But 33
Dewey’s understanding of the effectiveness of pedagogic processes was 34
more directly indebted to the psychological theory and pragmatic philo- 35
sophy of James, which led him to stress the degree to which human experi- 36
ence always involves a set of pedagogic relations. Every human subject, in 37
every situation, by this account, is engaging ‘an innate disposition to draw 38
inferences, and an inherent desire to experiment and test’ (1998: 276). 39
For James, these pedagogic processes are the matter of social interaction, 40
of ‘experience’ as constant ‘mutation’ (2010: 69) at the interface of what 41
is known and what is needed (2010: 22–24). 42
These pragmatists are not as influential as they might be in contemporary 43
critical accounts of culture and pedagogy. Foucault’s work, on the other 44
hand, has been central to an understanding of subjectivity associated with a 45

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 The unsaid of socio-cultural theory 5
1 ‘cultural turn’ in the Social Sciences, and his conceptualisation of subject-
2 ivity clearly has a pedagogic dimension. In his genealogies of the subject
3 across various domains – the asylum, the clinic, the prison and the school –
4 he has detailed the institutional derivation of techniques of power, or bio-
5 politics, constitutive of individual subjectivity. There are references to
6 pedagogy in his discussion of discipline as a productive force in the forms of
7 teaching, learning, training, transforming, and so on (1977: 203–204), but
8 these aren’t examined in detail as pedagogic practices given his attention is
9 on the spatial regulation of bodies. By contrast, his later work focused on
10 technologies of the self, meaning practices of self-regulation that individuals
11 impose upon themselves (Foucault, 1988). Both these modalities of power,
12 either externally-derived or self-produced, involve subject formation, yet
13 their points of convergence are left under-explored. It is not that Foucault
14 doesn’t acknowledge the connection between these institutional and sub-
15 jective modes, it is just that a sustained, empirically grounded account of the
16 mechanisms of this connection is not his focus. An exception to this is can
17 be found in his broad conceptualisation of government. In a later lecture
18 he explains that one,
19
20 has to take into account the interaction between these two types of
21 techniques – techniques of domination and techniques of the self. He
22 [sic] has to take into account the points where the technologies of
23 domination of individuals over one another have recourse to pro-
24 cesses by which the individual acts upon himself. And conversely, he
25 has to take into account the points where the technologies of the self
26 are integrated into structures of coercion and domination. The
27 contact point, where the individuals are driven by others is tied to the
28 way they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think, government.
29 Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word, governing
30 people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is
31 always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts
32 between techniques which assure coercion and process through which
33 the self is constructed or modified by himself.
34 (Foucault 1993: 203–204)
35
36 We would argue that when Foucault characterises government as ‘the
37 contact point’ between technologies of power and the self, this can be pro-
38 ductively taken up as the space of pedagogy. While Foucault may have envis-
39 aged government as a continuum extending from the rule of the state to
40 processes of self-regulation (Lemke 2001: 201), applications of his notion of
41 governmentality have tended to privilege the externally derived modes of
42 relation between power and the self, generally emphasising techniques by
43 which forms of liberal government actively shape the subject. Attention to
44 technologies of the self, for example in accounts of the reflexivity of the
45 neoliberal subject, still leave this ‘contact point’ under-examined and rarely

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 6 M. Watkins et al.
foreground the importance of situations in which, and techniques by which, 1
individuals engage with the production and manipulation of their own 2
transformative capacities. 3
In his History of Sexuality, especially volumes two and three, Foucault 4
engages with the pedagogic through the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Xeno- 5
phon, Plutarch, Epictetus and others in an account of the ethics of 6
pleasure and the cultivation of the self as debated in Ancient Greece. Yet, 7
both here and in his later collections of lectures, The Hermeneutics of the 8
Subject and The Government of the Self and Others, these references to peda- 9
gogy typically amount to a focus on the ways in which one acts upon one’s 10
self in the pursuit of virtue and in one’s formation as a moral subject. 11
Foucault’s consideration of askesis or training is illustrative here, because 12
he links this to a notion of paideia or learning, separating it from instruc- 13
tion by another. Of course, these constitute elements of a pedagogic 14
process, but this demonstrates Foucault’s tendency to oscillate between 15
technologies of power and technologies of the self; between institutional 16
domination and self-regulation. The pedagogic dimensions of Foucault’s 17
theorisation of government, therefore, remain largely unsaid. 18
It remains important that Foucault’s notion of government nevertheless 19
accounts for the extended reach of politics to the self. This is not simply a 20
matter of the ways in which government ties the individual to the state or, 21
in Thomas Lemke’s terms (2001: 191), that they ‘co-determine each 22
other’s emergence’. It is also a matter of how politics, as the art and 23
science of government, allows for the exercise of power upon one’s self – 24
even when that power is mediated by another as in traditional notions of 25
pedagogy. Such an understanding does not retreat from a focus on power 26
– although this was often a critique of Foucault’s work as he himself 27
acknowledged – it simply affords a reimagining of the dynamics of the 28
‘contact point’, inserting pedagogy as the mechanism by which this is 29
realised. 30
Bourdieu is another theorist whose work is concerned with the forma- 31
tion of the self and the nature of human conduct. In comparison to 32
Foucault, he makes far more explicit reference to the role of pedagogy as 33
a driver in relation to both, especially in his earlier work. Bourdieu uses 34
the notion of habitus as a mechanism for accounting for the ways in which 35
past practice, shaped by the various fields that individuals inhabit, deter- 36
mines action. Pedagogy is integral to this, as Bourdieu explains: ‘The ped- 37
agogic work of inculcation . . . is one of the major occasions for formulating 38
and converting practical schemes into explicit norms’ (1990: 102–103), 39
with pedagogies of home and school having the most impact. Yet, despite 40
the significance Bourdieu attaches to pedagogy and its role in the forma- 41
tion of the habitus, the way in which this is conceived and applied within 42
his work has several limitations. For Bourdieu, pedagogy is a form of sym- 43
bolic violence, a cultural arbitrary imposed by an arbitrary power 44
(Bourdieu 1977: 5). Defined as such, pedagogy primarily explains the 45

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 The unsaid of socio-cultural theory 7
1 reproductive function of the habitus and class inequalities. There is, of
2 course, a common criticism of Bourdieu’s view of the habitus as overly
3 deterministic (Jenkins 2002: 110). This was a view Bourdieu rejected, but
4 with the possibility for transformation predicated on either structural
5 change within a field or a ‘strategic calculation’ prompted by a mismatch
6 between habitus and field, the degree of agency the habitus affords any
7 individual is constrained. Pedagogy here could provide a circuit-breaker in
8 relation to reproduction, allowing a stronger link between the habitus and
9 processes of habituation and a more dynamic basis for examining social
10 action and cultural change (Noble and Watkins 2003).
11 A key aspect of Bourdieu’s treatment of habitus that limits the theoret-
12 ical potential of pedagogy is his emphasis on forms of habitus that are
13 already fully formed. The pedagogy involved in their formation is largely
14 presumed; read off a resultant set of dispositions. The pedagogic processes
15 and relations involved in their formation receive minimal scrutiny. The
16 processual nature of the habitus, much of which is a function of pedagogy,
17 is sacrificed in his analysis for its reified instantiation. This can partly be
18 attributed to the methodological issues posed by the problem of analysing
19 the formation of habitus. As a set of practices framed by particular tempo-
20 ralities and spatialities it is perhaps best examined ethnographically.
21 Although such methodologies are the ‘bread and butter’ of much analysis
22 of everyday life in Cultural Studies, anthropology, sociology and cultural
23 geography, they have rarely been directed towards an empirical explica-
24 tion of the relation between everyday pedagogies and human conduct.
25 Bourdieu does venture into this territory in his early work on the Kabyle,
26 but the survey and interview data that inform his later accounts of habitus
27 are methodologies less suited to capturing the processual dimensions of
28 pedagogy.
29 The body of work often referred to as Actor Network Theory also points
30 to an implicit pedagogical imperative in social and cultural theory. Its
31 emphasis on the heterogeneity of networks, the forces at stake therein,
32 and processes of enrolment, inscription, assemblage and affordance all
33 suggest the need to explore the ways actors exist in a dynamic network in
34 which they not only exert force upon one another, but transform each
35 other (Fenwick and Edwards 2010: 3). This is illustrated in Bruno Latour’s
36 analysis of the door as a technology which entails a ‘distribution of compe-
37 tences’ between humans and nonhumans (1992: 233). While he focuses
38 on the delegation of actions, each change in the design of the door requires
39 a redistribution of competences and a reshaping of the actions in which
40 humans have to be disciplined (231). Latour uses the term ‘prescription’
41 to describe ‘the behavior imposed back onto the human by nonhuman
42 delegates’, ‘the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms’, which may
43 also be realised in instruction booklets and training sessions (232–233).
44 This amounts to a form of pedagogy, but the pedagogical imperative is
45 only implicit in Latour’s work because he is interested in things other than

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 8 M. Watkins et al.
the question of how people acquire the competences required in a 1
network. There is no room in this account for attention to the ways in 2
which the competences required by the door are learnt, or taught. 3
We can’t do justice here to all those whose work articulates the pedago- 4
gical imperative, and who provide productive tools for examining relations 5
of teaching and learning as broad cultural processes. The exploration of 6
mimesis developed by Gabriel Tarde, Rene Girard and Michael Taussig 7
invoke the pedagogic, as do theories of embodiment that gauge how par- 8
ticular capacities of the body are acquired. The phenomenological per- 9
spectives of Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Marcel Mauss, 10
Drew Leder and Iris Marion Young are particularly attuned to processes of 11
bodily capacitation, which might be reconsidered through a pedagogic 12
lens. In the wake of de Beauvoir a range of feminist social theory – includ- 13
ing the work of Judith Butler, Angela McRobbie, Bev Skeggs and Valerie 14
Walkerdine – has furthered our understanding of how gendered subject- 15
ivity is formed through an implicit sense of the pedagogic. Tim Ingold’s 16
work on processes of learning through embodied movement, Sarah Pink’s 17
work on sensory learning, and Elizabeth Ellsworth’s use of Donald Winni- 18
cott’s notion of transitional space to explore the materiality of pedagogy 19
in places of learning also suggest fruitful paths for development. Although 20
we cannot discuss any of these examples at length in this context it can be 21
said that they typically repeat a ‘problem’ we have already articulated: that 22
pedagogy as a particular set of situated practices and relations is not elabo- 23
rated in as much detail as it needs. 24
25
26
The black box of pedagogy
27
Few have done as much as Henry Giroux – often associated with the 28
concept of critical pedagogy – in giving fresh currency to discussions of 29
pedagogy. He has particularly emphasised putting the language of peda- 30
gogy back into Cultural Studies (1994: 128). Giroux is rightly critical of 31
the absence of sustained discussion of pedagogy and argues that in Cul- 32
tural Studies, as in the Humanities generally, ‘Pedagogy is often deemed 33
unworthy of being taken up as a serious project’ (Giroux 1995: 6) despite, 34
as Lawrence Grossberg (1994: 376) has pointed out, the importance of 35
teaching and learning to the formation of Cultural Studies. 36
Giroux focuses our attention on the pervasive pedagogic qualities of 37
popular culture, which he sees as largely negative. His recognition that ped- 38
agogy is not confined to the classroom is important. The key problem with 39
Giroux’s position, however, is the lack of discrimination and clarification in 40
his proliferation of the term: he talks about a ‘pedagogy of representation’, 41
a ‘postmodern pedagogy of mass advertising’, a ‘pedagogy of difference’, a 42
‘pedagogy of innocence’, a ‘pedagogy of power’, a ‘pedagogy of commer- 43
cialisation’, a ‘pedagogy of place and struggle’, a ‘pedagogy of identity for- 44
mation’, a ‘pedagogy of theorising’, a ‘pedagogy of enablement’ (1994: 6, 45

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 The unsaid of socio-cultural theory 9
1 22, 23, 29, 44, 56, 61, 62, 110, 117, 119), a ‘pedagogy of whiteness’, of ‘diver-
2 sion’, of ‘bafflement’, and so on (1997: 89, 119, 129). While we sympathise
3 with Giroux’s attention to pedagogy everywhere, this overuse renders the
4 term meaningless. Pedagogy becomes less a tool to analyse particular prac-
5 tices and more of a ‘black box’ through which something is done, without
6 explaining how it is done.
7 Giroux (2004: 61–63) criticises conventional definitions of pedagogy as
8 too narrow, arguing that learning takes place across a range of social set-
9 tings. He suggests that pedagogy refers to ‘the production of and complex
10 relationships among knowledge, texts, desire, and identity [that] work to
11 construct particular relations between teachers and students, institutions
12 and society, and classrooms and communities’ (1994: 30), but specific
13 practices are rarely, if ever, spelt out. He makes an impassioned argument
14 against seeing pedagogy as a set of strategies, and argues for a broader
15 conception that licences discussion of the pedagogies of popular culture,
16 on the one hand, and a ‘critical pedagogy’ on the other. When discussing
17 teaching he aligns a focus on technique with a ‘pedagogical terrorism’
18 that stifles students’ opinions and produces a ‘fear of intimidation’ (1994:
19 137). Even Cultural Studies, he argues, finds in ‘pedagogy’ ‘an unprob-
20 lematic vehicle for transmitting knowledge’ (1995: 6). As an alternative,
21 Giroux’s ‘critical pedagogy’ focuses on creating a space of ‘political activ-
22 ism’ where power relations can be questioned and where students feel
23 able to voice their experiences (1994: x, 30). Despite having moved peda-
24 gogy beyond the classroom, in one sense Giroux thus presumes that peda-
25 gogy must always be ‘deliberate’ and frames this as a political process
26 through which people are ‘incited’ to acquire a particular ‘moral charac-
27 ter’ (Giroux and Simon 1988: 12). For Giroux, in comparison to the more
28 nuanced accounts of the pragmatists, Foucault, or Bourdieu, pedagogy is
29 primarily about unpacking relations of power understood as repressive
30 rather than productive, and as something with which we can only either
31 be complicit, or consciously resist.
32 Giroux’s substitution of a ‘narrow’ definition of pedagogy with this
33 broader emphasis on power relations is replicated in David Trend’s (1992)
34 Cultural Pedagogy. Trend’s book uses a critical pedagogy framework to
35 analyse arts education and cultural work, giving centre stage to arguments
36 about participation and democracy. Once again this emphasis on power as
37 a general social condition shifts the focus away from the material specifi-
38 city of pedagogical practices. As with Giroux’s work on popular culture,
39 the emphasis is on issues of representation and much of the analysis pre-
40 sented is ideology critique. But this further obscures the pedagogic prac-
41 tices themselves. The pedagogy Giroux desires is a radical curriculum with
42 transformed content (transformed by postcolonialism, for example). It
43 relies on textual analysis and is framed by explicitly progressive values like
44 giving voice to the oppressed. This approach has been criticised for ignor-
45 ing its own positioning as a new ‘truth regime’ (Kramer-Dahl 1996), and

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 10 M. Watkins et al.
certainly Giroux rarely unpacks the material processes that structure the 1
temporality and space of either the classroom or popular culture. While 2
he makes much of the critical skills fostered by his pedagogy, Giroux never 3
explains how they are acquired. If this is the most overt discussion of peda- 4
gogy in Cultural Studies it nevertheless includes no practical account of 5
pedagogy. Because Giroux’s emphasis is on critiquing the politics of 6
representation and consumption it presumes subjects that are already 7
formed. In other words, the temporal and spatial processes of subject for- 8
mation are not explored. 9
This ‘blackboxing’ of pedagogy, through which the actual ensemble of 10
situated practices and relations drop out or become effects read off a 11
broader context or social force, is typical in critical pedagogy. Such ‘black- 12
boxing’ occurs, of course, because a phenomenon is so complex we can 13
only talk about it in terms of inputs and outputs (Latour 1987: 2–3), but 14
we would like to return that complexity to the discussion. This blackbox- 15
ing is replicated in related work under the rubric of public pedagogies. 16
This literature makes some key points: Giroux argues, for example, that 17
public pedagogy is central because ‘culture now plays a central role in 18
producing narratives, metaphors, and images that exercise a powerful 19
pedagogical force over how people think of themselves and their 20
relationship to others’ (2004: 62). He sees this work as centrally 21
understanding ‘how the political becomes pedagogical’, ‘how private 22
issues are connected to larger social conditions,’ and ‘how the very 23
processes of learning constitute the political mechanisms through which 24
identities are shaped and desires mobilized’ (2004: 62). Giroux’s approach 25
thus represents a broader shift. The preface to the Handbook on Public 26
Pedagogies defines its aims in terms reminiscent of critical pedagogy, 27
announcing that: 28
29
this collection asks teachers, researchers, scholars, activists, artists, and 30
theorists to decentre taken-for-granted notions of education, teaching, 31
and learning and raise important questions regarding how, where, 32
and when we know education and learning; about the relationship 33
between dominant, oppressive public pedagogies and a reconsidered 34
perspective that integrates public sites of resistance; and about the 35
species of pedagogy occurring in public spaces that might still elude 36
our vision. 37
(Sandlin et al. 2010: xxi) 38
39
As influential as ‘the critical pedagogy’ approach has become, it tends to 40
focus on particular institutional structures, displacing the multidimen- 41
sional nature of belonging and reproducing a focus on the reproduction 42
of power distilled into ideological effects. Despite its desire for critique 43
this approach rarely grapples with pedagogic processes and relations 44
themselves, or their enabling and transformative potential. Jessica Pykett 45

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 The unsaid of socio-cultural theory 11
1 (2009) and Glenn C. Savage (2010: 103–106) have also critiqued the hazy
2 notion of pedagogy in public pedagogies scholarship along these lines,
3 focusing on its lack of nuance in thinking about power, its tendency to
4 focus on negative ideological forces and its discounting of the situated
5 nature of pedagogy. Our intention with this collection is not to dismiss the
6 rich body of work in critical and public pedagogies, but rather to suggest
7 that it doesn’t do the kinds of empirical and theoretical work needed to
8 explore the pedagogic qualities of social life. To initiate this shift we want
9 to reorient the field by using the notion of ‘cultural pedagogies’.
10
11
Why cultural pedagogies?
12
13 Any understanding of the ‘pedagogic’ needs both a stronger empirical
14 grounding and an adventurous conceptualisation attentive to the ways in
15 which it operates as a broader cultural process extending beyond formal
16 sites of learning. With the full spectrum of social and cultural practices as
17 its palette, how pedagogy mediates the ways in which individuals acquire
18 the cultural resources that enable or constrain their participation within
19 particular sites requires more careful consideration. Both these orienta-
20 tions, the theoretical and empirical, are given emphasis in this collection,
21 with different contributors varying their attention depending on their
22 focus. In all cases, however, they use cultural pedagogy as a key reframing
23 device to examine the shaping of human conduct within various domains
24 of the lifeworld.
25 As well as emphasising the pedagogic processes of culture, this collec-
26 tion uses the notion of cultural pedagogies to mark out a space slightly at
27 odds with existing work. While we consider many insights drawn from
28 educational analysis, we also want to recognise the pedagogic beyond this
29 domain. As influential as this work has been, we don’t want to reduce the
30 exploration of the pedagogic qualities of social life to power relations
31 framed only by public institutions but to examine the wider pedagogic
32 qualities of other realms of life. Drawing on diverse theoretical and empir-
33 ical literatures, the book approaches this understanding of pedagogy
34 across a range of settings, through its organisation via four themes: on
35 Pedagogical Processes and Relations, Shaping Conduct/Forming Citizens,
36 Institutional Pedagogies, and Habituation, Affect and Materialities. These
37 sections do not indicate hard distinctions between the essays they organise,
38 but indicate shifts in focus and emphasis.
39 Also, this book does not aim to provide a definitive account of cultural
40 pedagogy, as though this is a thing that could be discretely defined, but to
41 articulate a space in which the pedagogic dimensions of culture can be
42 more fruitfully examined. Given the breadth of situation, experience and
43 practice to which it must be relevant, ‘cultural pedagogy’ must be an open
44 and exploratory concept (Savage and Hickey-Moody 2010). In many ways
45 this echoes the original project of Cultural Studies, and the ‘cultural turn’

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 12 M. Watkins et al.
more widely, by refusing to see culture in conventionally institutional terms. 1
We emphasise the constitutive role of cultural processes in social life and, 2
recognising the limitations of structuralist and positivist approaches, 3
emphasise a view of culture as complex and dynamic, inviting diverse ques- 4
tions of social phenomena and encompassing the semiotic and material 5
practices and subjectivities of everyday life as well as socio-structural cat- 6
egories (Frow and Morris 1993). 7
Nevertheless, this idea of cultural pedagogies cannot be entirely open. 8
The fact that we identify this term as uniting the various approaches in 9
this book necessarily stakes a claim for its saying something new. As the 10
pragmatists we discussed earlier would expect (James 2010: 61–72), we 11
need to make a case for why this concept is needed, and it is not merely as 12
an opportunity to critique the work done under other names, like critical 13
pedagogy, for trying to stretch thinking about pedagogy beyond the rela- 14
tions between teachers and students in a classroom. We think cultural ped- 15
agogies is the best name at present for thinking about the diverse 16
pedagogical processes of the lifeworld because it brings with it, after many 17
decades of work in Cultural Studies, a recognition that social structures 18
and institutions can never be separated from the ordinary lives that sur- 19
round them, inform them, and bring people to act in them. When Wil- 20
liams stressed that ‘culture is ordinary’ he did so in order to think about 21
everyday life and cultural institutions and social structures together, con- 22
sidering also ‘the significance of their conjunction’ (Williams 1989: 6). It 23
is too often forgotten that the ‘special processes of discovery and creative 24
effort’ that Williams juxtaposed with ‘a whole way of life’ and its ‘common 25
meanings’ involved not only art but also education. This conjunction has 26
always been of special interest to Cultural Studies, and it is from such 27
foundations that we think Cultural Studies has something particular to 28
contribute to thinking about pedagogy. Paul Willis’ iconic Learning to 29
Labour (1977), for example, shows that what happens in the classroom is 30
only a part of a much more complex ensemble of pedagogic processes 31
where social relations and cultural meanings around labour, gender and 32
race are made and remade. Thus, while we want to press the point that 33
pedagogical processes proliferate through all domains of the lifeworld, 34
from the most ordinary to the most specialised, this means that institutions 35
of many types, including classrooms, appear in this book. 36
If cultural pedagogy allows us to articulate the ‘unsaid’ of subject for- 37
mation and human conduct by operating as a space in which to consider a 38
range of questions around pedagogic relations, modes, sites, temporalities 39
and scales, a number of key issues need to be elaborated. First, under the 40
name of cultural pedagogy we wish to foreground dialogue between com- 41
peting accounts and formations of pedagogy and encourage the blurring 42
of definitional boundaries. The space opened up here does not dramatic- 43
ally distinguish between formal and informal, institutional and everyday 44
learning: Tess Lea’s essay, for example, explores this distinction in her 45

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 The unsaid of socio-cultural theory 13
1 examination of Indigenous education. And while we have linked our
2 concept of cultural pedagogy to the project of Cultural Studies this space
3 is not a disciplinary demarcation – certainly it is not a critique of educa-
4 tion studies – but shaped by a logic of interdisciplinary engagement. The
5 essays collected here do not radically distinguish between critical, public
6 and cultural pedagogies: Andrew Hickey, for example, moves between
7 these bodies of work to explore what he sees as the operation of cultural
8 logics in public space.
9 Second, the reframing offered by the idea of cultural pedagogies
10 requires that we think of pedagogy as potentially operating everywhere, at
11 any time. Grossberg (1994: 384) has argued that we need to consider ‘not
12 only pedagogy as a cultural practice, but the pedagogy of cultural prac-
13 tices’. He doesn’t offer much detail on what is meant by cultural practices
14 in this context, moving instead to a discussion of progressive teaching
15 practices, but we take him to mean that we need not reduce pedagogy to
16 an argument about the reproduction of power but should see everyday
17 practices as always entailing a pedagogic element. The notion of cultural
18 pedagogies signals the importance of the pedagogic in institutional realms
19 other than education, but it goes beyond the notion of public pedagogies
20 by including many spaces and practices which could not be considered
21 public. While critical and public pedagogies emphasise the deconstruction
22 of power and Foucauldian analyses emphasise governmentality, the
23 reframing offered by the idea of cultural pedagogies foregrounds the rela-
24 tions between teaching and learning themselves, wherever they appear.
25 How processes of teaching and learning are realised within and across the
26 pedagogic processes specific to various social sites is thus a core concern
27 for this book. Several chapters undertake this task by a reframing of media
28 representation (James Hay), media classification (Liam Grealy and Cathe-
29 rine Driscoll), and ‘little publics’ (Anna Hickey-Moody) as pedagogic
30 processes.
31 Third, the relations between teaching and learning are understood
32 here not as an ideological apparatus nor as a simple dyadic relation, but
33 through a complex entanglement of spatial and temporal relations
34 (Ellsworth 2005). By this we mean several things. The pedagogical process
35 is cumulative, a continuous but uneven set of routines and recalibrations.
36 What one learns cannot be read off a moment, a text, or an image, but
37 must be considered in terms of a sequence of actions and experiences.
38 Thus learning cannot be divorced from teaching even if they are not co-
39 present, an issue explored by Megan Watkins in her discussion of didactics
40 and paideia. The pedagogic process is also dispersed across social settings
41 as well as times, posing problems of alignment that Julian Sefton-Green
42 considers in his discussion of relations between home and school. These
43 pedagogic processes also involve diverse pedagogic modes (instruction,
44 imitation, discussion, doing). Even within a given setting, pedagogic rela-
45 tions entail an ensemble of ‘actors’, human and non-human, material and

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 14 M. Watkins et al.
semiotic, as Elaine Lally’s chapter aptly demonstrates. Ensembles of 1
people, things and practices are brought together in specific institutional 2
and everyday settings to manifest pedagogic processes, and technologies, 3
architectures and objects as well as people and curricula ‘teach’ us to 4
shape our various capacities, direct behaviour and encourage the forma- 5
tion of habits within individuals and across populations. 6
Fourth, what is learnt is never reducible to particular content, but rather 7
entails technical and cultural capacities, ideas, affects and practices. This 8
book asks how specific pedagogic relations and practices generate the capa- 9
cities not just for different forms of conduct but for a wider understanding 10
of embodied capacities. In this collection, Andrea Witcomb’s analysis of 11
‘pedagogies of feeling’ in museum spaces and Ben Highmore’s examination 12
of habits of mood characterising home front morale require that we think 13
of the affective and sensory dimensions of pedagogic processes as well as 14
their role in constituting social practice. Greg Noble similarly takes up the 15
role of bodily movement in learning to belong. What is learnt in this sense 16
operates at various ‘scales’ so that instructional techniques involve acquiring 17
a ‘social vision’ (Gore 1993: 4) that can involve reproducing categories of 18
class, race and gender. On the one hand, this can be framed as the distinc- 19
tion between explicit and implicit pedagogies, an issue taken up by Ruth 20
Barcan in her discussion of academic formation. On the other, this involves 21
linking specific forms of conduct and broader characterisations of subject- 22
ivity. David McInnes’ discussion of yoga as both embodied technique and an 23
ethics foregrounds these links as questions of pedagogy, and Watkins and 24
Noble also discuss this as an issue of scale through their focus on the 25
‘deeply’ cultural nature of writing as habituated, embodied capacity. 26
The essays collected here bring together researchers whose work across 27
the interdisciplinary nexus of Cultural Studies, sociology, media studies, 28
education and museology offers significant insights into what we have 29
called ‘cultural pedagogies’. We hope this book will open up debate across 30
disciplines, theoretical perspectives and empirical foci to explore both 31
what is pedagogical about culture and what is cultural about pedagogy. 32
33
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