Pedagogy's "Space" in American Education

To start off dialog this time, I would like to begin with a summary of Robin Alexander's Culture and Pedagogy (2000), a comparative ethnographic study of 5 countries: England, America, India, Russia, and France and their respective educational practices as they relate to local and national culture(s). The aim of his work was to both draw out universalities among educational pedagogy as well as understand the ways in which certain aspects of educational pedagogy are local phenomenon composed largely by cultural distinctions which merit caution when considering the importation/exportation or the borrowing and transmitting of educational practices among international borders.

Of particular interest to me is Alexander's notion of centralized vs. decentralized educational systems. In his book, Alexander notes how “standardized” pedagogies and curriculums of a decentralized educational system like the U.S. are more open to resistance and opposition by teachers at the classroom level; Alexander argues that every act of teaching is an act of curriculum transformation and that, for US classrooms, this transformation is often conscious and more radical than in other school systems. Accordingly, Alexander illuminates how the conflict between standardizing pedagogies (pedagogies of cultural reproduction and nationalism) are always at conflict with pedagogies of critical awareness (563). But the questioning of curriculum and pedagogy seems a caveat currently privy to decentralized systems alone, as Alexander notes the seemingly indifferent or “at face value” opinions of curriculum and pedagogy held by teachers in centralized educational systems like Russia and India (549).

Furthermore, in Chapter 17 Alexander makes an interesting argument that in decentralized educational systems like America, there exists certain "borders" or conflicts between curriculum and pedagogy, in particular that pedagogy is subsidiary to curriculum (550). In systems like Central European education, Alexander argues "pedagogy frames everything else" (550); significant to note is that Alexander favors this latter paradigm. However, it seems that the ideas of resistance and curriculum transformation that Alexander discusses are at conflict with his claim that pedagogy is subsidiary to curriculum in American education. Indeed, for critical pedagogues, it seems pedagogy is everything.

In trying to work out this cognitive dissonance between the revolutionary/resistant teacher and the curriculum-driven US educational system, I would like to pose the following food for thought:

a. Do you see pedagogy as subsidiary to curriculum, or vice versa? Or, do you perhaps see them related in a different way than discussed by Alexander?

b. In what ways do you see RCTE as a program vested in “comparative pedagogy”? If so,
how does that complicate ideas of pedagogy as subsidiary to curriculum in our discipline?

c. If pedagogy is still largely seen as subsidiary to curriculum (and, I think it is possible to argue that is largely is outside our program), how do scholars like us work to perhaps invert, or transform this paradigm? Is that perhaps even necessary?

d. How does pedagogic inquiry, say, comparative pedagogy, open up possibilities for inclusion and democracy in education work, rather than traditionally exclusive and hegemonic practices of learning?