What's Next?
In After Pedagogy: The Experience of Teaching, Paul Lynch proposes that we think of pedagogy “as the work that follows classroom activity rather than precedes it” (xviii). Instead of asking how we can use or apply this or that theory in our teaching, what he calls the “Monday Morning Question,” he suggests that we should instead ask “The Tuesday Morning Question: 'What do we do on Tuesday morning with the experience of Monday morning'” (xviii)? For the first-year writing program, our Tuesday-morning questions will be: “What do we do the next quarter and the next quarter and the next year based on our experience of this quarter? Where do we go next?” I suspect that the instructors in our program—even if they have not yet articulated it explicitly in words for themselves—now understand on some level that “the class that creates the class creates the class.” Making participation—in all of its complex permutations and formulations—a visible and collective subject for inquiry in the first-year writing course offers one way for students and teachers to examine and reflect on the conditions that contribute to creating and maintaining a learning space (middle class or otherwise).
In many ways, this collection represents another kind of Tuesday-morning question for both contributors and readers. As Lynch reminds us, “Pedagogy does not produce teaching; rather it reflects upon it. Pedagogy is not what we do before we enter the classroom or even while we are there. It is what we do after we leave” (xviii).The editors and contributors demonstrate what they have done with the knowledge gained from knowing Genevieve personally and by reading her dissertation. Contributors have taken up her call to examine their own practices as well as deepen and extend her work into new areas. It is with and because of Genevieve that this important work continues. And now dear readers, it is up to you. What will you do with this information?
