Negotiating the pedagogicisation of everyday life; the art of learning

This chapter explores the often contradictory and tense relationship between pedagogy in the home and pedagogy at school as a way of investigating whether the idea of ‘cultural pedagogy’ can be considered distinct from dominant notions of pedagogy as fundamentally residing in forms of schooling. This home- school relationship is examined in the context of differing interpretations of the pedagogicisation of young people’s lives in the current age. I attempt to disentangle the question of who defines whose learning, and how leisure activities become (or do not become) recontextualised in the home as academic and schooled forms of knowledge that can best be understood in terms of social class; or in what ways might they be constructed as an independent ‘cultural’ sphere. In doing so, I want to reflect on the value of pedagogy as a heuristic for interpreting the development of kinds of subjectivity. After an introductory section exploring the pedagogicisation of everyday life, the chapter is organised in three sections. First of all, I describe a discussion between two young people about the ways that they ‘do’ art out of school and then I offer a series of possible interpretations of their differing attitudes to these practices. I discuss how their differing understandings of the nature of the learning involved in these practices might indicate the creeping pedagogicisation of their everyday lives and conclude by reflecting on how claims made about pedagogy and its effects need to be considered over longer timescales and contexts.