What are Production Pedagogies?

A growing body of educational literature suggests that people learn best, and learn most deeply, through engaging real-world problems and co-constructing tangible real-world artefacts – material solutions – that matter to them, that have use-value to them, and that connect with the world at large in significant and meaningful ways.

What we call ‘production pedagogies’ extends learning action beyond the walls of the school and formal institutions, as well as the boundaries of traditional curricular forms, to intersect with wider communities of makers, with dynamic real-world models, and with authentic tools and situational practices of cultural production today.

In these modules, we will explore the means, media and support-interfaces (both social and technological) through which learners critically engage cultural texts and digital media artefacts – in turn using new media to produce their own art, knowledge and research as authentic cultural artefacts in their own right.

Production pedagogies help us rethink literacy and learning – and we invite educators to create and stage supportive social and media environments where learning actors can inhabit roles as composers, writers, critical makers, game-designers, and researchers — that is, as cultural (re)designers – directing their own learning in terms of their own aims, imaginations, and critical purposes.