This paper addresses two questions: How are education and pedagogy defined in U.S. policy, teacher education, and curriculum studies today? How might we bring a language of education and pedagogy from the continental tradition into conversation with these predominantly instrumental and critical discursive forms? Education and pedagogy are arguably defined today in the U.S. either through discourses of instrumentality or critique. Pedagogy is, thus, seen as a set of instruments serving the optimal attainment of learning outcomes or it is critiqued precisely for this functionalism. As a second critical variation, pedagogy is pressed into the service of broader goals in politics and social justice. As laudable as some of these aims might be, pedagogy is reduced in all of these conceptions to a mere means or technique in the service of predefined goals. Our goal is to realize pedagogy’s non-instrumental, relational significance in the context of an intergenerational dynamic in which the younger are able to discover their own potential for themselves. To this end, this presentation focuses on two examples from American teacher training where pedagogy is defined in various ways. The first is Grossman’s (2018) focus on “core teaching practices” which both converge and diverge from those of continental pedagogy and illustrate possibilities both for instrumental as well as less reductive conceptions of the pedagogical. The second example or set of examples call for “culturally responsive” or “sustaining” pedagogies to guide “teaching and learning for justice in a changing world” (Gay, 2018; Paris, 2017). To move beyond the instrumentalist elements in both of these articulations of pedagogical and teaching practice, it is necessary to expand our conception both of the purpose of pedagogy and of the nature of culture in which it operates. For this, we turn to continental theorizing in pedagogy. Curriculum theorists have tried to relate continental philosophy ideas with curriculum study; Bildung is studied alongside of currere and “the recurring question of subjectivity” (Pinar, 2016), and “didaktik” has been grouped with “subjectivity, curriculum, and society” (Autio, 2013). Moreover, Doll and Gough (2002) identified John Dewey as the ghost in the curriculum, indirectly positing that curriculum must be connected to education and pedagogy as well as subjectivity. In this context, it is useful to turn away from the recurring question of subjectivity—and its framing as currere or Bildung—and towards a broader understanding of education, not only as enabling subjectivity, but also as pedagogical in and of itself.

Autio, T. (2012). Subjectivity, curriculum, and society: between and beyond the German didaktik and Anglo-American curriculum studies. New York: Routledge. Dewey, J. and Archambault, R. D. (1997). John Dewey on education: selected writings. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Eisner, E. W. (2002). The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall. English, A. R. (2014). Discontinuity in learning: Dewey, Herbart and education as transformation. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Good, J. A. (2006). A search for unity in diversity: The "permanent Hegelian deposit" in the philosophy of John Dewey. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Mollenhauer, K. and Friesen, N. (2016). Forgotten connections: on culture and upbringing. London; New York: Routledge Pinar, W. (2016). Character of curriculum studies: bildung, currere, and the recurring question of the subject. [Place of publication not identified]: Palgrave Macmillan. Phillips, D. C., & Dewey, J. (2016). A companion to John Dewey's Democracy and education. Westbrook, R. B. (2015). John Dewey and American Democracy. https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501702044. Zimmermann, J. (2015). Hermeneutics: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.