Making Pedagogical Adaptability Less Obvious

• In Event: An Examination of Adaptive Teaching: Exploring Democratic Spaces in Education

Abstract

The purpose of this theoretical/conceptual paper is to make the concept, pedagogical adaptability, less obvious. Drawing on Thompson and Wiliam’s (2007) conception of classroom-based formative assessment—students and teachers, using evidence of learning, to adapt teaching and learning, to meet immediate learning needs, minute-to-minute and day-by-day—I begin by suggesting that pedagogical adaptability is deceptively obvious.

To complicate pedagogical adaptability a bit, I briefly describe some theoretical perspectives that undergird what I have been calling post-intentional phenomenology (Author, 2010b, 2014b, 2015) and a pedagogical concept I have been working on with a colleague called social class-sensitive pedagogy (Author, 2012b, 2013b). Then, I put these concepts to work on pedagogical adaptability using a post-structural methodological process called plugging in (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1987; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012)—in which multiple concepts and ideas are plugged into one another in order to see what might be produced, what Deleuze and Guatarri call an assemblage.

Plugging in to produce something new is a constant, continuous process of making and unmaking. An assemblage isn’t a thing—it is the process of making and unmaking the thing. It is the process of arranging, organizing, fitting together. So to see it at work, we have to ask not only how things are connected, but also what territory is claimed in that connection. (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 1)

As a result of plugging these theoretical perspectives, ideas, and concepts, I argue that pedagogical adaptability is also not a “thing” that can be codified, taught, and applied to practice in a literal sense. Rather, pedagogical adaptability is seen as an assemblage—a process that can be continuously made and unmade depending on what it plugs into and what plugs into it. Here, I am suggesting that when philosophical and pedagogical concepts undergirding post-intentional phenomenology and social class-sensitive pedagogy are connected with pedagogical adaptability the territory claimed among these connections includes:

1. An opportunity to resist the urge to treat adaptability as only a technical teaching practice, and to embrace the deeply intuited and embodied ways in which adaptability can be lived in classrooms;
2. An opportunity to experience adaptability as a dynamic, complicated, and reciprocal relationship between teacher and student, rather than something that only the teacher invokes; and
3. An opportunity to explore some of the complex ways in which adaptability is socially-classed in classrooms.

This paper is significant and consistent with this year’s conference theme in that it aims to illuminate some of the diversity and complexity of a seemingly straightforward aspect of professional teaching practice. When one conceives of pedagogical adaptability as an assemblage there is no way to arrive at a final destination. Pedagogical adaptability is a never-ending contextual, situated, and contested process of making and unmaking—a process that, if taken seriously, can help us continually re-imagine our role as public scholars.

Author

• Mark D. Vagle, University of Minnesota