Continental Pedagogics from a Northern American Perspective : A Language for Practical Pedagogy

How do we give practical pedagogy a language? This question forms the ground for a new interest of Anglo-American educational discourse in the continental tradition of pedagogics. Contemporary Anglo-American discourse makes little explicit reference to the continental tradition. Traces can be seen in Dewey’s work – we will come back to this. In North American educational discourse, education has always been submitted to society. Contemporary education scholarship in the U.S. has developed in a self-understanding way since the establishment of the What Works Clearinghouse in 2002 to as a digital library of ‘evidence-based’ or instrumental programs that ‘work’ for success in high academic outcomes, or, in another dominant approach, after the civil rights era, with critical perspectives on societal inequities that address the needs of increasingly culturally diverse students. The terminology, thus, refers to innovation, interventions, and economic metrics, on the one hand, or to cultural sensitivity and critique of social inequities, on the other hand, all of which have a normative and socio-political perspective. In this paper, we draw on continental pedagogics to develop a common language for a new cross-national dialogue about practical pedagogy.'Rehumanizing' Educatio