Mapping the Complexity of Public Pedagogy Scholarship

Abstract

The term public pedagogy first appeared in 1894 and has been widely deployed as a theoretical construct in education research to focus on processes and sites of education beyond formal schooling, with a proliferation of its use by feminist and critical theorists occurring since the mid-1990s. This integrative literature review provides the first synthesis of public pedagogy research through a thematic analysis of a sample of 420 publications. Finding that the public pedagogy construct is often undertheorized and ambiguously presented in education research literature, the study identifies five primary categories of extant public pedagogy research: (a) citizenship within and beyond schools, (b) popular culture and everyday life, (c) informal institutions and public spaces, (d) dominant cultural discourses, and (e) public intellectualism and social activism. These categories provide researchers with a conceptual framework for investigating public pedagogy and for locating future scholarship. The study identifies the need for theoretical specificity in research that employs the public pedagogy construct and for empirical studies that investigate the processes of public pedagogy, particularly in terms of the learner's perspective.

Becoming (a) public: what the concept of public reveals about a programmatic public pedagogy at the university

“…Biesta develops a distinctive concept of public pedagogy. The concept has been used in educational scholarship in many ways (Sandlin et al 2011) that show not only broad diversity but also confusion of what 'public' might mean. Furthermore, the ways scholars have used the concept of public pedagogy stretch 'pedagogy' across a wide spectrum, from socialization to teaching in formal educational institutions (Rantala and Ripatti-Torniainen 2013;Sandlin et al 2009Sandlin et al , 2011.…”

She reads, he reads: gender differences and learning through self-help books

“…Such research has revealed how gender structures the experience of students in school systems, and how the experience of schooling (re)produces gendered identities and divisions of labour. Reading self-help books is a form of 'public pedagogy' (McLean, 2013(McLean, , 2014Sandlin, O'Malley, & Burdick, 2011;Sandlin, Schultz, & Burdick, 2010;Wright & Sandlin, 2009), through which adults access resources from popular culture and learn without the involvement of educational institutions. Past studies of adult learning through related forms of popular culture have included those focused on women's experiences (Jarvis, 1999;Kapell & McLean, 2015;Wright, 2007), but gender differences in informal adult education have not been subject to empirical research in a manner parallel to work done in the context of schools and post-secondary institutions.…”

New Kinds of (Ab)normal?: Public Pedagogies, Affect, and Youth Mental Health in the Digital Age

“…We reflect on "precisely how pedagogies are conceptualised and how these pedagogies are enacted" (Burdick and Sandlin 2013, p. 143) within these environments. As such, our examination of the public pedagogies of digital mental health is partly a response to the call from Burdick and Sandlin (2013) to offer clarity as to what is meant by pedagogy (see also Savage 2010;Sandlin et al 2011). Scholarship focused on informal sites of learning (Ellsworth 2002(Ellsworth , 2005, pedagogy writ large (Hickey-Moody et al 2010) or public pedagogy (Sandlin et al 2011), has drawn attention to the learning that takes place across a range of public sites and spaces.…”