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Book Cover for: After Pedagogy: The Experience of Teaching, Paul Lynch

After Pedagogy: The Experience of Teaching

Paul Lynch

What does it mean to teach after pedagogy? For a long time, composition's pedagogical conversation has been defined by its theoretical disagreements.

Is learning a cognitive process or a social one? Is the self expressed or distributed? Can writing be understood as a process, or is any process too messy to be understood? These debates have finally run out of steam, argues Paul Lynch, leaving composition in a "postpedagogical" moment, a moment when the field no longer believes that pedagogical theories can account for the complexities of teaching. After Pedagogy extends the postpedagogical conversation by turning to the experience of teaching itself.

Though the work of John Dewey, After Pedagogy argues that experience offers an arena in which theory and practice can coexist. Most important, experience can fashion the teachable moments of postpedagogical practice into resources for further growth. "We cannot know what precisely the student will do with what we have offered, but we can think with the student about the experience of the offer itself." By turning what students and teachers know about writing into an area of intellectual inquiry, a philosophy of experience can make teaching sustainable after pedagogy.

Book Details

  • Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English (Ncte
  • Publish Date: Dec 20th, 2013
  • Pages: 171
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.50in - 0.60in - 0.57lb
  • EAN: 9780814100875
  • Categories: Testing & MeasurementTeaching - Subjects - Language ArtsWriting - Composition

About the Author

Lynch, Paul: - Paul Lynch is assistant professor of English at Saint Louis University, where he teaches courses in rhetoric and composition. His work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, College English, Pedagogy, Present Tense, and Rhetoric Review.

Praise for this book

"In After Pedagogy, Paul Lynch opens a space for the ongoing development of an 'inspired adhoccery' over the course of a teacher's life in the classroom. Because we are always in the inescapably contingent position of teaching after whatever has been taught and learned before, we can never know in advance, either via our training in theory or our prior experience in the classroom, how best to prepare for or respond to what happens in our next class. This is not a crisis, Lynch argues; it is the condition that underlies the experience of all teaching." --Richard E. Miller, coauthor of Habits of the Creative Mind