ABSTRACT
Pedagogy is central to what educators do. It is the act and the art of engaging learners in learning, opening up new possibilities and ideas, and, perhaps, changing the learner and the teacher through this process. It is influenced by how educators think about and engage with educational systems, structures, spaces and processes. It involves how they think about what it means to learn and to teach, and how they think about and engage with students. The encounter between the educator and the student, then, is a pedagogic encounter. But inserting a radical politics into pedagogy is not the ‘normal’ state of affairs. As Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrated, this is not a straightforward ambition or practice for either a well-supported national project like the No Outsiders research, even at the relatively ‘simple’ level of identifying potential resources and inserting these into the curriculum, or for teachers engaging with students in the day-to-day life of schools. In this chapter I explore what engaging radical politics in education settings might look like in the classroom. I consider some of the forms that the practices of critical pedagogies have taken, what else might be possible, and what the effects of such pedagogies might be. And I explore the ways in which critical pedagogic interventions might be resisted and recuperated.
