Interpretive Pedagogies for Higher Education

Book excerpt: Interpretive Pedagogies for Higher Education focuses on providing a humanistic perspective on pedagogy by relating it to the interpretive practices of particular public educators: thinkers and writers whose work has had an immeasurable impact on how we understand and interpret the world and how our understandings and interpretations act on that world. Jon Nixon focuses on the work of four public intellectuals each of whom reaches out to a wide public readership and develops our understanding regarding the nature of interpretation in the everyday world: Hannah Arendt’s work on ‘representative thinking’, John Berger’s injunction to ‘hold everything dear’, Edward Said’s notion of ‘democratic criticism’, and Martha Nussbaum’s studies in the intelligence of feeling. These thinkers provide valuable perspectives on the nature and purpose of interpretation in everyday life. The implications of these perspectives for the development of a transformative pedagogy – and for the renewal of an educated public – are examined in relation to the current contexts of higher education within a knowledge society.