LAUSR

Pedagogy is a thorny subject for curriculum scholars. In a 2013 special issue of Curriculum Inquiry (CI), editors invited a group of well-established authors and asked them to offer a critical reading of their contributions to the scholarship on pedagogy. In their opening essay, drawing on the work of David Hamilton (2009), the editors noted that pedagogy reveals society’s orientations towards “the good life” (Thiessen et al., 2013). These orientations are expressed not only in what is taught and learned, but in the processes and relationships by which human beings are socialized, acculturated, and ostensibly channelled in particular directions. The trouble, of course, is that somebody is doing the teaching and the learning and somebody is doing the socializing, acculturating, and channelling to somebody else. All these somebodies involve complex subjectivities and desires, complicated further by the fact that the interactions between them occur within social structures and institutions that demand something of them and that shape their interactions. Scholars and educators frequently refer to pedagogy in such terms as an art, a science, and a craft. Donna Adair Breault (2011) highlights the consciousness, intentionality, refinement, and belief that the designation of an “art” implies, highlighting that “the teacher engaged in pedagogy becomes acutely aware of the nuances, flows, and tensions within their work so they can move closer to their images of the ideal” (p. 634). Thiessen et al. (2013) suggest, however, that pedagogy is much more than classroom teaching, and consequently represents “a framework for understanding and guiding the development of a knowledgeable and professional teacher” (p. 5). Allan Luke (2006) reinforces this idea, noting the reproduction of pedagogical relationships over time as