Posted in Writing

Pedagogy of Excess

‘Pedagogy of Excess: An Alternative Political Economy of Student Life’, written by myself and Andy Hagyard,  is published this week in a volume entitled The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer, published by Routledge. This book is edited by Lizzie Nixon, Mike Molesworth and Richard Scullion, all of whom work at the University of Bournemouth.

For more information about the book see http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415584470/

Pedagogy of Excess looks to the world-wide social protests of 1968, in which students played a central role, for inspiration for the notion of research-engaged teaching.  Grounded in critical social theory and based on  historical material that deals with the events in Paris, Pedagogy of Excess describes 1968 as a moment when the students became more than students, and acted as revealers of a general crisis by demystifying the process of research. The students did this by engaging in various forms of theoretical and practical activity that took them beyond the normal limits of what is meant by  higher education. It is the notion of students becoming more than students through a radical process of revelation that  provide the basis for  our concept of  Pedagogy of Excess.  At the end of the chapter we  discuss Pedagogy of Excess in relation to other critical pedagogies, and set out a curriculum  based  on the principles of pedagogical excess.