[SOUND] In order to become analytical about this.
So what is this form of didactic pedagogy?
So we've just done a kind of impressionistic, very subjective view of
what it feels like to be a person in those classrooms through a number of writers and
a number of people who were writing autobiographies later in their life.
What I want to do now is I want to become analytic about didactic pedagogy,
and I've got here eight dimensions that I'm going to examine.
And in order to build this idea of a paradigm, I'm going to apply the same
eight criteria, the eight issues in these eight dimensions.
When it comes, when we come in later videos to discuss authentic pedagogy,
what's its shape and form.
And then transformative pedagogy, what's its shape and form.
So I'll go through each of these one by one to analyze didactic pedagogy.
The first thing is architectonic, and
by architectonic we mean the configuration of the space.
The architecture of the space if you like.
So here we are, the kids in the classroom, there are four walls in the classroom.
But the architectonic is not just the four walls,
it's the way the desks are configured.
So, this photograph is actually taken from the perspective of the teachers.
So the teachers looking down over the classroom.
And you can see the classroom is of a certain size.
And it's of a size where that kid way over there in the back
of the room will be able to hear a teacher without a microphone.
So in other words, it's designed for it to be a space where it's possible to
hear the teacher, and any larger than this it may not be possible.
And it has to be configured in a kind of an audio kind of way for
it to work as a communications architecture.
But then when we look at the arrangement of the desks here, what you can see is
the eyes of the children are all coming to the teacher, right?
So in other words, the desks are arranged so it's not for
really the students talk to anybody else, they might at a pinch be able to
talk to the person beside them or the person behind them, but that's all.
But it's not even really configured for that.
It's configured to be a communications architecture which is about these linear
lines from the teacher and the students.
And so the way in which the desks are configured builds shapes,
I mean the physical shape of this room and the arrangement of the desks shapes
the forms of communication, which are going to occur in that room.
This is a rather extreme example of exactly the same principle.
This is a picture used in Foucault's discipline and
punish book of a lecture hall in the Fresnes Prison in France.
When? Maybe in the 19th century.
And the lecturer there is lecturing the students on the evils of alcoholism.
But you can see there,
absolutely there was no way that the prisoners would have talked to each other.
They were simply framed by the space to listen to the lecture theater.
Now I just wonder how many didactic classrooms are actually like this except
the little walls add up behind the people.
They're designed for their not to be that communication, and just to be
the communication between the one central person and all the people listening.
Secondly, I want to talk about the discursive configuration
of the didactic classroom.
We have a number of discursive artifacts.
You can see here all the students have textbooks on their desks.
And presumably it's the same textbook, and
they're all on the same page at the same time because they're doing the same work.
The teacher may well stand at the front of the room, and there's the teacher, and
give a lecture to the students.
The teacher may well have a Q&A session, where the students all put up their hands.
She asks a question, one person answers the question, and
the teacher says yes that's right or that's wrong.
So that's another characteristic discursive form of these classrooms.
And the other thing which was quite common was this idea of recitation,
everybody answers at once.
Everybody reads something together.
So in other words these were several of the kind of discursive
practices that classically occurred in these kinds of classrooms.
And of course these discursive practices, textbooks, lectures ,Q&A,
recitation, they all have certain assumptions in them about the role
of the learner to knowledge and the role of the learner to the teacher.
Which brings me on to the third point, which is intersubjective.
So how are the relationships of teacher students to each other configured?
Well, firstly, there isn't much interaction between student and student,
and if it is, it's off task and irrelevant.
You can create some sort of student to student interaction in these kinds of
spaces, these kinds of pedagogies, but by and large it really doesn't happen,
that's not the idea.
So if you like, it's kind of a hub and spoke model where
the teacher is the discursive hub and the students are all around them.
So intersubjectively, there are these relationships going on.
But essentially that relationship with the teacher to student is a relationship of
command and compliance.
Answer this question.
I'll answer the question.
Do this work, I'll do this work.
So the teacher is strongly in a position of control.
So the intersubjective configuration of the students and teachers,
which is very little happening laterally or little or
nothing happening laterally between students.
And this intersubjective relationship with the teacher and
the student, which is essentially a command and control relationship.
What does this mean socioculturally?
My fourth point.
Well, what this builds is a social architecture of sameness, or
one size fits all learning.
So everybody has the same textbook, and
when the teacher speaks they really need to speak to about the middle of the class.
So some kids might be picking up on it, but
hopefully they're getting roughly what's going on.
Some kids it might be a bit slow for them and boring, they already know it.
But somehow or other,
because everybody's hearing the same message at the same time from the teacher.
Everybody's in this communication architecture is listening to one message,
there can only be one message at a time.
The basic underlying social architecture is actually one of sameness,
which is we're going to try to configure you all as the same.
What are the underlying cultural purposes of this sameness?
Well, one element of these purposes is the idea of a nation.
So the kids come to school, they might speak different dialects.
The kids come to school and they might not even speak the dominant language.
Their language at home might be an immigrant language or
an indigenous language.
But when they're in that classroom, in this architecture of sameness,
they're going to become the same.
And part of the exercise is firstly to learn the national language so they can
become one of the great masses, one of the homogenous citizenry that's out there.
And the other thing that was literally done in this place is national stories
were taught.
So if you come in from a particular ethnic group, forget about that story.
If you came in from an indigenous group, forget about that story.
That what you did in social studies is you learned about the nation.
And in the morning you saluted the flag and you sing the national anthem.
So that was about building this homogenous citizenry around the idea of a nation.
And in fact, in a way schools were one of the most active places
to promote nationalism in the sense of loyalty to the nation,
willingness to go to war if asked,
an identification with the nation as a singular kind of entity and so on.
So in a way one of the agendas was to ignore or write over those differences
that the students brought to school, and to build a socio-cultural
environment in that classroom which is essentially one of sameness.
And what we did also in these spaces is if you were sufficiently
different we were going to exclude you.
So in other words, if you didn't speak any of the first language
maybe we'll send you off to an English language class.
If you were disabled in somewhere or another we can't really deal with that
because we have to be able to deal with the people who are all the students more
or less at the same level of capacity, ability, and so on.
So what we did is we streamed classrooms.
So they were streamed by ability.
They were streamed by not having disability in the classroom.
So what we did is we tried to build these classrooms, so
the students were as similar as possible in order to be able to speak to the whole
class in the same voice at the same time.
And in order to do that we had to exclude certain people, right?
If you're disabled and so on.
Or if you were to come in the condition of your coming in was assimilation, which is
okay, perhaps you don't have the first language of the language of instruction.
But try and learn it as quickly as you can if we throw you into the deep-end,
you become immersed in it, you will become assimilated, and
you'll become just like all the other students.
So in other words, the assumption was if you were different and
we let you in, we didn't exclude you.
If you were different,
you would become the same by virtue of a process of assimilation.
And one of the purposes of that classroom was the assimilation process.
