Instead of critical pedagogy, my theoretical discourse should perhaps be labelled ‘Pedagogy of the Curmudgeon’. It is dificult to demonstrate sustainable, successful pedagogy … I mean the stuff that really engages kids. But is that the issue? Are our children and youth disengaged, or merely too smart, too busy, too cynical and too bored to engage in the non-engageable? And am I just too cranky about this successful pedagogy stuff?
As educators, we consistently, emphatically, eternally seek to engage our students, yet little is done to create the pedagogical nuance, the pedagogical construct, the pedagogical ‘ah ha!’ in which to engage them. This came to me recently, when I determined to make the ultimate salad for a dinner I was hosting. I gathered fresh nuts, exotic vegetables, funky spices, unexpected fruits, the ultimate vinegar and, my pièce de résistance, pure Greek olive oil, which I’d schlepped on the plane in my laptop case from Korinthos. I sliced, I diced, I mixed, I blended. I kept the salad fresh and, at the last instant, swirled my oil and vinegar over the bowl. Placing the salad on the table, I waited to hear my guests’ reactions … there weren’t any. Indeed, most took a bite or two, and pushed the rest to the side. Rescued by a great leg of lamb, everyone seemed to enjoy the meal. But at the end, my salad remained. I took the bowl to the kitchen, took a bite. Beautifully cut and selected vegetables, fruits and nuts … and l at, old, outdated oil. It was the damn oil. Oil from the fields of Korinthos, hand-carried, authentic, the best … and it was stale.
Not usually prone to food analogies, I still can’t forget the taste of stale oil that night. That oil is what I taste when most educators seek to engage students in learning. Preparation is often over the top; materials can be the best; naturally the source is, well, educated and expert; … and it is stale. As teachers, professors and parents, we (more often than not) expect engagement in that which is not engaging, and we do it through unengaged, uninspired, non-contextual pedagogy. All this is to say: we must interrogate our own practices of engagement. Are we engaging? Are we engaged in creating engagement? Do we understand and contextualise our students as an audience? Can we sustain engagement? And the question we don’t want to ask: do students want to be engaged?