Pedagogy is often described as the transmission of knowledge, the cultivation of skills, or the development of individuals. These descriptions are not wrong so much as superficial. They describe what pedagogy looks like once its deeper work has already succeeded.
Pedagogy is, at its core, the deliberate shaping of the field of possibility.
1. Why Pedagogy Is Not Transmission
Transmission models assume that meaning, knowledge, or competence exists independently and can be passed from one mind to another. But nothing can be transmitted unless the recipient already inhabits a field of intelligibility in which what is offered can function.
Teaching does not insert content. It reconfigures cuts:
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what counts as a relevant distinction,
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what counts as a legitimate question,
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what counts as a successful action.
Pedagogy works not by filling gaps, but by making new forms of coordination possible.
2. Learning as the Acquisition of Cuts
From within a relational frame, learning is not internalisation. It is the acquisition of new ways of carving the field.
To learn is to become able to:
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see differences that previously did not matter,
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coordinate action within new constraint structures,
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and recognise breakdowns that were previously invisible.
What changes is not what the learner “has”, but what the learner can now participate in.
3. The Power of the Pedagogical Cut
Because pedagogy operates at the level of cuts, it is intrinsically bound up with power. Teachers, curricula, assessment regimes, and institutional settings all participate in deciding which possibilities will be made available and which will remain inaccessible.
This power is rarely coercive. It is exercised through:
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selection of distinctions,
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pacing of exposure,
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normalisation of certain trajectories as “progress”.
The most consequential pedagogical power lies not in what is taught, but in what cannot yet be thought or done within the learning environment.
4. Assessment as Recognition of Coordination
Assessment is often treated as measurement: the evaluation of how much has been learned. From a relational perspective, assessment is better understood as recognition of coordinated variation.
A learner demonstrates learning when they can:
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act intelligibly within a field,
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vary their action without collapse,
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and participate in maintaining coordination with others.
Failure, correspondingly, is not lack of knowledge but misalignment of cuts. Treating it as deficit compounds breakdown rather than repairing it.
5. Pedagogical Responsibility
If pedagogy shapes possibility, then pedagogical responsibility cannot be reduced to care or good intentions. It consists in attending to how fields of intelligibility are opened, narrowed, or foreclosed.
Responsible pedagogy:
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expands the learner’s capacity to coordinate,
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preserves revisability of cuts,
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and avoids over-sedimentation that freezes possibility prematurely.
Irresponsible pedagogy produces brittle competence — coordination that works only under narrow conditions and collapses when contexts shift.
Conclusion
Pedagogy is not neutral. It never merely passes on what already exists. It actively participates in shaping what learners will later find possible, intelligible, and sayable.
To teach is to intervene in the evolution of possibility.
In the final post of this series, we will draw the threads together by returning to responsibility — not as moral burden, but as care for the ongoing evolution of relational systems themselves: Responsibility in Evolving Systems.
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