Abstract:
This paper considers what constitutes the pedagogical relation in current enactments of Australian schooling. Relational pedagogies give attention to what it means to be in-relation in the enactment of teaching and learning, making explicit the influence and constitutive character of the ‘ordinary’, day-to-day encounters that configure the experience of schooling. Enacting teaching and learning from a relational perspective requires cognisance of the deliberative nature of education, and that students and teachers come to the pedagogical encounter as ‘situated’ beings. The positionalities that teachers and students occupy and the contingencies that are inherent to the learning context shape the complex of sociations that mediate the pedagogical exchange, and it is toward these dynamics that relational pedagogy gives its attention. Yet, in a rapidly changing world of education, where the wider neoliberal reformation of the socio-economic sphere has inculcated education under a conjoined logic of uniformity, performativity and accountability, working against prescriptive enactments of practice represents a ‘risky’ undertaking. In schooling contexts where narrowly defined and prescriptive approaches to schooling constitute the only acceptable frames of enactment, relational pedagogies instead preface the ‘immediacy’ of the pedagogical encounter and the negotiations of learning that students and teachers broach. Drawing on theorisations from our latest book, Unlocking the Potential of Relational Pedagogy, we will work through the coordinates of a relational pedagogy for the present moment, and will advocate for modalities of teaching and learning that enable its actants to engage in the generation of knowledge that matters.