Japanese has borrowed the simple possessive my into its own lexicon with a bit of a twist. Rather than simply meaning something that belongs to me, my, in Japanese has come to mean, one’s own. So, while a sentence like, “He was running at my pace” may not make a lot of sense in English, when translated into Japanese it becomes “He was running at his own pace.”
We see this creeping up all over the place. Advertising and social media spawn neologisms like politicians spout lies, continuously and inventively. So in the past few years we’ve seen things like the aforementioned “my pace” along with phrases like “my bag.” At first blush it doesn’t look all that different from the English phrase. But questions like “Do you have ‘my bag’?” when checking out at the supermarket take on a whole new meaning.
All of this is backfill to explain why it stuck in my ear when, at a recent conference, I heard the phrase “my pedagogy.” Pedagogy, in English doesn’t usually take a possessive. After all, pedagogy refers to a field or discipline, not something you, as an individual, have. From Merriam-Webster:
the art, science, or profession of teaching
Simple enough. But let’s double check by examining the roots of the word. From Etymonline:
"the science of teaching," 1580s, from French pédagogie (16c.), from Latin paedagogia, from Greek paidagōgia "education, attendance on boys," from paidagōgos “teacher"
Well. Pedagogy seems to be a rare case in English: an old word that hasn’t seen much in the way of semantic drift. And yet, adding the possessive “my” to pedagogy makes a lot of sense if only because English lacks the semantic split between how and why I teach the way I do.
To illustrate what I mean, let’s look at some other languages:
Japanese actually breaks pedagogy into two disparate but related ideas - one term for the study of educational theory, the other for the practical aspects of teaching. In other words, Japanese uses 教授法 (kyoujyuhou) to discuss how we teach and 教育学 (kyouikugaku) to discuss why we teach.
Meanwhile, French and German both do the same thing but with words much closer to home. French uses pédagogie to discuss the purpose, theory, or style of teaching but didactique for the methods and technique of teaching (source). This aligns closely with German, which uses pädagogik and didaktik in much the same way (source).
And yet, in English, while pedagogy is right in line with kyouikugaku, pédagogie, and pädagogik, didactic means something else entirely. It’s closer to pedagogue1, something no one wishes to be. Both words describe someone who’s snobbish, who uses education to demean and talk down to someone.
The reasons for this are pretty straightforward, at least from an etymological perspective. As English was developing and growing, French, and to a lesser extent German, were the prestige languages spoken by the ruling classes. English was a bastardized, working man’s tongue spoken by the lower classes. This resulted in a weird chasm that runs through a lot of English: the word for theory or field of study remains positive, but the word for a practitioner has become almost derogatory, one that denotes someone who’s too big for their britches or that has their nose up in the air or both2.
Which brings me, in a very roundabout way, back to my and pedagogy.
As I said above, pedagogy is a word about a discipline and we do not usually assign personal possessives to those. Only that seems to be changing. While “my pedagogy” is not exactly a new phrase, it’s not all that common either. The earliest examples I could find date all the way back to the 1800s. But then there’s a long period of non-usage until we get to the early 1980s when, suddenly, it becomes…a rarely used combination that appears mainly in academic journals.
So, next we look at the good old Corpus of Contemporary American English, or COCA, the default corpus by which all others are judged in modern American linguistics. And there we see that “my pedagogy” appears only 9 times. That’s it. Nine. Of those nine, two are false positives where pedagogy is being used as an adjective to describe coursework or seminars, and only one of those use cases happens before 2001. However, and more interestingly, all seven use “my pedagogy” in the same more-nuanced-than-merely-possessive way that Japanese has borrowed and shifted the word my.
The (presumable) teachers using the phrase are using it to indicate that this is not simply a pedagogy that they possess, rather this is their individual interpretation of the theory and practice of education as they apply it in their classrooms.
When we shift to a larger corpus like NOW, we see that the trend continues. There we have 54 uses since the year 2001 and most of those are using “my pedagogy” the way the Japanese grocery stores are using “my bag.” Cue the Austin Powers: “That’s not my bag, baby.”
More seriously, my pedagogy is a useful term of art. Pedagogy is meant to be an elevated, erudite, study of educational theory and method. However, pedagogy is also a practical field. Every teacher, of any stripe, has to develop their own ways of interacting with their classroom, their students, the material, and their own morality and ethics. Why not sum this up under the umbrella of “my pedagogy”?
Stay curious,
Joel
Unlike most of the words I know, I can tell you exactly where I first heard the word pedagogue. At the 0:49 mark of Bare Naked Ladies’, “Brian Wilson,” lead singer Steven Page sings, “Dr. Landy, tell me you’re not just a pedagogue.” Let me tell you, that was an education.
This is part of a long history of English being on the one hand, one of the de facto languages of education around the world and yet also being one of the loudest and largest detractors of education.