Pedagogy Lost and Regained

Pedagogy: Disturbing History, 1819-1929. Edited by Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.

Whatever attracts Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori's attention, whether it is the transaction between reading and writing, the hermeneutics of difficulty, or popular literacy, she explores with a deeply interrogative spirit. Her scholarly inquisitiveness drums with a steady beat, and nowhere is this more evident than in Pedagogy: Disturbing History, 1819-1929. In this important but underexamined book (it is, unfortunately, still not available in paperback), Salvatori answers three questions that have "disturbed" her for some time: why pedagogy is widely derogated in American higher education; how it came to be viewed as the reproduction of a teacher's knowledge; and by what mechanisms—institutional, ideological, and cultural—it is constructed as secondary to and derivative of scholarship (60). This unusual, engaging hybrid collection includes personal narrative and theoretical reflection; it is the story of a quest, as private as it is professional, for pedagogy's forgotten history.

Salvatori's book found its impetus in the perception of a difference. In the European tradition in which Salvatori was trained as an undergraduate, pedagogy was highly regarded as a philosophically inflected concern, a subfield of epistemology, and the "the sine qua non of any teacher's professional life" (6). However, in her American graduate education (received in a department of English and comparative literature), pedagogy had virtually no status. It was what scholars did when they were not doing their real work; it was "something so 'natural' or 'elementary' as to make the study of it superfluous or arbitrary" (6). Salvatori, who found this negative appraisal baffling—especially given the importance of teaching in classical and humanist traditions—tried to account for it historically through research, searching for works that actually used the term pedagogy. To her surprise, she found little, and her attention shifted from archival research to other issues. She completed her graduate studies, published widely in composition studies (producing especially important work on the interaction between reading and writing), and continued to deepen her understanding of pedagogy "as an always already interconnected theory and practice of knowing, that in order to be effective must 'make manifest' its own theory and practice by continuously reflecting on and deconstructing it" (7). Her interest in pedagogy as a theoretical site of investigation never abated, but she also began to realize that others viewed her interest in teaching as "either idealistic or foreign, ex-centric or extravagant" (8). Fortunately for Salvatori—and her readers—before she was tempted to concur, she made two important discoveries.

In the 1913 edition of A Cyclopedia of Education, Salvatori found an extended entry on pedagogy that opened up a fruitful path for study. She learned that when pedagogy entered the curriculum of higher education as an emergent social science, it was thought necessary to cleanse it of its associations with children, pedagogues (i.e., slaves), and pedants—to raise its profile. This goal was achieved through an act of renaming: "pedagogy" became "education." This change helped Salvatori account for why her earlier efforts to locate work on pedagogy had turned up so little; she needed to track a different path. Salvatori's personal quest, having acquired scholarly momentum, gained additional energy from a second discovery. While examining the 1922 Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Education, she noticed that, although it contained no entry for either pedagogy or pedagogue, it did list the "Pedagogical Institute, Chile" and, below it, pedantry. She was intrigued by what had been left out and began to look for similar gaps in the collected knowledge of the period.

Salvatori repeatedly found herself returning to two historical moments. The first, the 1840s and 1850s, marked the establishment of the normal schools (the first publicly funded teachers' schools, later criticized by university academics for attaching too much importance to technique and pragmatic objectives). The second, the 1880s and 1890s, signaled the establishment of academic chairs and departments of pedagogy, soon to be renamed departments of education and then schools of education...