Monstrous pedagogies: why every Jack needs a Giant

I have started with an image that illustrates how difficult it can be to separate heroes from their monsters, or to separate monsters from their heroes. It is from a chimney-piece in one of the 18th-century Adam-esque rooms in Grove House, now part of the University of Roehampton: my workplace. I've homed in on it as a vehicle to set out my initial thoughts in response to a Call for Papers that a colleague sent me earlier this week, and which might be the prompt that, after several years, takes this blog and the project on which it reflects, to a new level. The Call is for the 2014 Higher Education Academy Arts and Humanities conference, which this time round will be on a quest for 'monstrous' pedagogies as expressed via the event's title - 'Heroes and Monsters: extra-ordinary tales of teaching and learning in the arts and humanities'.  The particulars make clear that the event is looking for ways to challenge current ways of learning and teaching to 'make strange' academic practice and challenge what is taken for granted by its practitioners.  On the conference's definition, monsters dwell in realms just beyond our own; they can come into our world to 'unnerve' us and 'innervate' us, and thus a 'monstrous pedagogy' can 'disrupt habits' and 'articulate...different ways of being'.  But who are 'we'? 

There is a suggestion running through the particulars that 'we' are the heroes, while it is the monsters who come into 'our' world to shake it up.  The sense from the particulars is that this is a good thing and that the goal of the event can be to make room for this otherness to improve the experience of all, heroes and monsters alike. This is expressed most of all in the explanation of one strand of the conference, 'Slayers, Scoobies and Watchers', which, noting that 'every Giant needs its Jack', 'celebrates the heroes who hold the line at the hellmouth by sharing tales of epic battles and vanquished learning and teaching demons'.

But who are the monsters?  What about the learner or teacher who is not trying to find space for otherness, but who is already different... other... a monster...   Can a monster create a monstrous pedagogy, or does such a pedagogy get created for a monster, or even to vanquish a monster? For a initial illustration of what I am trying to get across, I'll mention two sets of articles that were published several years ago in CUCD Bulletin.  Firstly, in the 2009 volume, two papers sought ways to deal with the challenges encountered by dyslexic students on ancient language modules - including by seeking ways to understand how a dyslexic student might see the world.  Secondly, on reading these articles, Ray Laurence, 'dyslexic and...also a classicist' (Laurence 2010: 6), was prompted to write a piece for the 2010 Bulletin which challenges the perception of a dyslexic way of perceiving the world as one beset with problems.  In  place of the 'deficit model' of dyslexia, he advocates a focus upon the distinctive abilities that are characteristic of dyslexic people not least in visual and holistic thinking.  As Laurence makes clear, he is hardly saying something new when as long ago as 1996, the Tomlinson Report on Inclusive Learning was setting out the need for an inclusive curriculum that meets the needs of all students.

I have to break off now to prepare for a meeting - when I can get back to this, I will go on to discuss:

• how the angle that the HEA has selected for this conference dovetails with my autism/classical myth project;
• the potential of a 'disability studies' approach to disrupt the habits of academics;
• how the hero/monster metaphor can inform the quest for disruptive pedagogies;
• how the specific image of heroic monstrosity with which I started this posting can bear on the quest for such a pedagogy;
• how a heroic pedagogy can be a monstrous one;
• why it's still 'all Greek to me' to quote from an earlier posting title;
• how what I'm thinking through here builds on other work I've done and will be doing on building an inclusive curriculum, on teaching 'sensitive subjects' and on who 'owns' classical myth.