{"id":6519,"date":"2015-12-08T09:46:17","date_gmt":"2015-12-08T09:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6519"},"modified":"2015-12-08T09:46:17","modified_gmt":"2015-12-08T09:46:17","slug":"activism-as-pedagogy-pedagogy-as-activism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2015\/12\/08\/activism-as-pedagogy-pedagogy-as-activism\/","title":{"rendered":"Activism as pedagogy \u2013 pedagogy as activism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"For much of its history the American academy has been fending off the attempts of various forces to hijack the enterprise for foreign ends. \u00a0Now the invading force resides on the inside in the form of students who want colleges and universities to be the vehicle of their preferred causes. \u00a0The fossil fuel divestment campaign is one of their fronts [and] must be resisted, as must any effort to make the academy an instrument of some political goal.\"<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the last para of a blog<\/a> by Stanley Fish which\u00a0I came across on\u00a0the\u00a0NAS\u00a0website as I read their report<\/a> on sustainability in universities which i commented on last week.<\/p>\n

Fish quotes\u00a0student activist Chloe Maxmin:<\/p>\n

\"The divestment movement ... aims to stigmatize the fossil fuel industry by rebranding it as a social pariah and a rogue political force that preys on our future. \u00a0We want to make it socially unacceptable for politicians and institutions to support a reckless industry that manipulates the political system and values short term profits over humanity's survival.\"<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

... and then writes:<\/p>\n

\"Now, shaming the fossil fuel industry might very well be a good thing to do (I am not going to pronounce on the substantive question), but it is not an\u00a0academically\u00a0good thing to do. \u00a0The category \"good things to do\" is practice specific: There are no generally good things to do, only things that are good to do given the aims and values of the particular enterprise in which they're being done. \u00a0If the enterprise is the academy, then the list of good things to do is limited to things that contribute to pedagogical goals narrowly conceived \u2013 the goal of introducing students to materials with which they were previously unfamiliar and the goal of equipping students with analytical skills. \u00a0Saving the world from fossil fuels is not a pedagogical goal and doesn't belong either in the classroom or in the mission statement of a university.\"<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fish also comments on the the demand for \"trigger warnings\" about course materials (and ideas) that might cause offence or discomfort \u2013 now increasingly seen in the UK with student groups demanding\u00a0not to be upset by ideas they don't like very much, something\u00a0AC Grayling<\/a> has recently written about.<\/p>\n

Had the NAS writers bothered to look\u00a0outside the USA, they'd have found that this activism as pedagogy<\/em>\u00a0\/ pedagogy as activism<\/em>\u00a0approach to be alive and well in the UK in what, for example, champions of ESD proclaim, in what\u00a0the NUS \u00a0routinely does, and\u00a0much more widely \u2013 calls for better dog training, for example. \u00a0Because I keep remembering that I'm supposed to be a liberal educator, my sympathies lie\u00a0with Stanley Fish<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 even though I can also\u00a0be found singing the praises of the NUS and the wholly admirable Jamie Agombar. \u00a0Umm.<\/p>\n

More to think about ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"For much of its history the American academy has been fending off the attempts of various forces to hijack the enterprise for foreign ends. \u00a0Now the invading force resides on the inside in the form of students who want colleges...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-new-publications"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}