Page 10 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
2.
Thinking about pedagogy not in general or generic terms, but in disciplinary and field specific ways
Without actually using the term ‘pedagogic content knowledge’ (PCK), innovations were nonetheless rooted in this concept. PCK is specialised knowledge about the content to be taught possessed only by teachers. ‘This knowledge is often hidden in that teachers do not realise that they have it or that it is important’ (Rollnick & Mavhunga 2017). In drawing attention to the limitations of ‘general pedagogy’ applicable to all disciplines, PCK draws attention
to the importance of a subject teacher being able to combine the content knowledge of her subject with knowledge of how to teach the specialised methods of enquiry, concepts, methods and rules characteristic of that particular discipline.
Facing the limits of knowledge, humans resolve tensions by abbreviating issues into crisp commoditised ideas, reductive categories and prepackaged narratives (Taleb 2016). It could be argued that PCK carries an implicit warning on the dangers of pedagogy being overwhelmed by popular orthodoxies. Advocacy of an approach runs the risk of becoming a slogan: ‘student-centred’ learning, which meets ‘the needs of the student’ could be two examples. This is not to say that these principles have no place in pedagogy. Of course they do, as several of the papers in this collection demonstrate. But in these initiatives, they are used selectively
and purposefully. Student needs are balanced with disciplinary needs.
3.
Impulse for innovation and quality improvement, and what we learn from that
As Professor Kim Berman argues in her contribution, and in what has become a strong theme across the papers, is how the responses to crisis became an impulse for innovation:
The Covid-19 pandemic lockdown was devastating
for most people, but it also offered extraordinary opportunities for students to learn and act in new ways, adapt their expectations and gain insights that were both enriching and transformative.”
This begs a question. What happens to innovation beyond Covid-19 and the hopeful return to normality? Clearly, innovation requires agency as well as supportive institutional structures and this
starts with reflection on how we can think and act differently.
One possibility for thinking differently would be to take heed of Plato. In the thirty-six books he wrote, Plato showed that what the Greeks called Doxa – common sense – was riddled with errors, prejudice and superstition.1
But some forms of common sense are surely also necessary for quality teaching and learning. A more all-encompassing precept for innovation might be drawn from the work of a leading academic and activist who was assassinated, almost certainly by the security police, in 1978. As Webster (2022) argues, the common sense precept is expressed in the title of the first chapter of Rick Turner’s book The Eye of the Needle (1972) and is ‘The Necessity of Utopian Thinking’.
What he [Turner] meant by the word ‘utopian’ is that
we need to develop realistic alternatives to the current institutions and social structures – ideas that are grounded in the real potential for social change. What some have called ‘Real Utopias’ – a belief that what is pragmatically
possible is not fixed independently of our imaginations but is
itself shaped by our vision.”
1
Alain de Botton, podcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNTUoLkVSfg&t=2245s