Politics needs pedagogy
During 2016, I’ve been to a lot of political events which have had a lot of potential but have been frustrating. Often I’ve had to listen to people speak for over an hour (some of them apologising for overrunning their time before they drone on for another 5-10 minutes). Sometimes I ‘ve had to sit through a series of questions that aren’t questions but are statements (and ones that I feel sure the people making them have made 100 times before). These events are often billed as part of movement building but are as likely to alienate people from a movement as to involve them in it.. What all these experiences have underlined to me is that political organisers need to pay attention to pedagogy, the ways that we can support political learning, as much as we attend to the political knowledge we want people to develop. In this post I advocate for a political pedagogy drawing on my experiences in Momentum Hackney. Although what I say is framed by my recent experience, it also applies to most of the academic conferences and seminars I have attended where the lack of pedagogy is just as common and just as damaging.