ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I seek to explore a conception of ‘publicness’ as a quality of pedagogical thinking. I take the individual pedagogue as my focus in the hope of highlighting a potentially overlooked aspect of contemporary discussions of public pedagogy and public education. My exploration draws first from the work of Gert Biesta, and scholarship on public pedagogy, to identify central aspects of two common conceptions of publicness and some of their implications. I then seek to build on Biesta’s notion of a ‘pedagogy concerned with becoming public’ and ask the question of how one might nurture such concern in the individual pedagogue. To answer the question, I draw from Hannah Arendt’s conception of thinking as ‘calling oneself into question’ informed in part by Mary Morgan. I argue that applying the kind of thinking outlined by Arendt to our pedagogical actions opens one up to a kind of internal disruption, analogous to the kind of disruption Biesta sees as essential to educational engagements that create opportunities ‘for freedom to occur.’ I then offer a set of questions to help call oneself into question in ways that will nurture our pedagogical concerns and infuse a quality of publicness into our pedagogical thinking – public and otherwise.
