Exciting new journal

From: Phil Chappell (philchappell@mac.com)
Date: Sun Apr 10 2005 - 18:00:52 PDT


Pedagogies http://www.crpp.nie.edu.sg/portal/Journals/Pedagogies/

In Talks to Teachers on Psychology and Life (1892), the lectures that inaugurated the field of educational psychology at Harvard, William James referred to pedagogy as the "art and science" of teaching. A century later of educational paradigms gained and lost, educational researchers and scholars are attending yet again to pedagogy and knowledge in classrooms. In many educational systems, pedagogy is proving to be the key rallying point for teachers, teacher educators and researchers, and activists and policy-makers committed to reclaiming the art and science of teaching from narrow instrumentalist and economic agendas. Pedagogies: An International Journal aims to reestablish teaching and learning as the educational practices that matter.

In the last half-century, teacher educators, educational researchers, administrators, and policy-makers have focused on testing systems, school management, teacher quality, and assessment, monitoring and standards schemes of almost every conceivable kind in their efforts to renew and improve schools. But for teachers and researchers committed to reforming schools and reinventing teaching in the new millennium, there is a real urgency to attend more closely to theoretical and applied, empirical and hermeneutic work on pedagogies and knowledge in classrooms. Governments are realizing that they cannot make policies via test scores alone, but that they must have a much better grasp of what goes on in classrooms. The actual social and cultural, cognitive and intellectual work of teachers and students are and should be a focal area of research and development, description, illustration, debate and reform. Facing the social and cultural, political and economic challenges of this new millennium - as James and Dewey did in the last - the remaking of knowledge and pedagogy is the key to educational change.

The enterprise of redesigning knowledge and pedagogy, however, has changed. Transformation of communications media, innovations in aesthetic and representational forms, the spread of popular and educational cultures, the multiplication and dissemination of scientific knowledge, and powerful claims to indigenous and local knowledge have together placed systems, schools, and teachers under increasing pressure to reframe their basic assumptions: How should schools respond to changes in power and knowledge relations, the rapid proliferation and shifts in human knowledge, and the new designs of aesthetics, language, media, and everyday cultures? How can everyday classroom practices engage with diversity of knowledge, student communities, cultures and resources, and technology and design?

Pedagogies brings together emergent and breaking work on all aspects of pedagogy: classroom teaching and learning in response to new communities and student bodies, curriculum and responses to new knowledge and changing disciplinarity, blends of traditional and new communications media in classrooms, and most importantly, how we might improve and renew the everyday work that teachers and students do in classrooms. It features quantitative and qualitative, disciplinary and trans-disciplinary, empirical and theoretical work, and will include special editions on key developments in research on knowledge and pedagogy. It aims to push the boundaries of theory and research - to seek out new paradigms, models and ways of framing education - while at the same time keeping an eye squarely on that which matters: teaching and learning in classrooms.



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