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Learning with lions: public pedagogy in NYC

6 years ago

470 words

Recently, a friend of mine shared with me an amazing opportunity to join a reading group with Stanley Aronowitz, professor emeritus and world renowned public scholar in the fields of sociology, political science, and critical theory who taught at the Graduate Center for over 30 years. My advisor at UMass Boston had mentioned Aronowitz specifically by name as I was considering PhD programs, and he even went so far as to invite me to join them for dinner before I was accepted to the program. I believe I said three things at that dinner, two of which were, “no, thank you, I don’t need any more water at the moment.”

Fast-forward four years, and I found myself this afternoon sitting in a makeshift classroom with Aronowitz, a few of his colleagues, many admirers, and other curious and hopeful autodidacts from New York.


We listened to Aronowitz give a background to the course – an eight-week introduction to dialectics, through the writings of Lukács, Adorno, and LeFebvre – and then to each other as we explored our reasons for being there, our own work and intellectual journeys, and questions we hoped to answer in the coming weeks. What was truly wonderful was the fact that this course was nearly free: $100 suggested donation for sitting in a small room with one of the greatest living public thinkers today.

This learning with lions, as I playfully entitled this post, is something I espouse in my own work as a professor, which I adopted from the generous and committed work of my own advisor in my PhD program. I ran a public pedagogy reading group over the summer with several of my students from City College, where we discussed readings and videos and the events from the week. My advisor has just started something similar with me and several of her other students, which I think she hopes will become self-sustaining even when she can’t make it. Important to these kinds of groups is accessibility, and communal hope that learning in community is consequential, an event that has impact in all of our lives.

This is public pedagogy in body and spirit. What would be possible were we all to engage with this on a regular basis, learning and teaching and incarnating what “pedagogy” according to Lev Vygotsky truly meant? Vygotsky’s term was obuchenie, a concept that saw education as a co-constructed, dialectical (see, dialectics is everywhere!) process in which teachers and students experienced mutual transformation. This radically changes the top-down, unidirectional way we tend to enact education in public schooling today. It also challenges the ivory tower paradigm in which academia maintains the keys to the castle in terms of knowledge.

More is possible when the lions open their dens up for the rest of us to come in and warm ourselves by their fires!

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