A pedagogy of engagement

An important part of leisure time pedagogues work in the Danish Primary School is to participate in teaching activities. And according to the Danish Public-School Law a crucial part of this work is to cooperate with teachers, developing teaching activities that engages pupils. Pupil engagement in teaching activities is a fundamental part of their primary schooling, because they develop themselves as responsible human beings through meeting the world with initiative (Biesta 2015). But what characterizes teaching activities that contributes to the development of pupil engagement, and why they increase engagement? These questions are in this research project investigated through an empirical focus on how creative teaching activities can contribute to pupil engagement.
The empirical focus on creative teaching activities is established through an intervention-based study. In an intervention-based study the researcher cooperates with practitioner’s about creating an intervention that makes it possible to examine the research topic in focus. In the intervention of this study, I cooperated with a leisure time pedagogue, a mother tongue teacher and their third grade. The intervention consisted of a pedagogical experiment where the leisure time pedagogue, the mother tongue teacher and their third grade were making puppet animation film using different kinds of tools and materials. The purpose of the experiment was to be able to generate theory about the relation between creative work and pupil engagement. Theoretically this relation is analyzed through the perspective of pragmatism. A theoretical perspective where the creative use of tools and materials is a central part of understanding how pupil engagement is created and sustained (Dewey 2013; Sennett 2009).
The preliminary results point to, that the pupils in their filmmaking developed a kind of engagement characterized by persistence and devotion. A kind of engagement that was caused by the fact, that the pupils in their creative process did something active with ideas, knowledge, tools and materials and therefore were capable of grasping the meaningfulness of their schooling experience in a better way. These results are relevant to Nordic educational research because they both point to new ways of understanding pupil engagement in educational contexts and to new ways of understanding how leisure time pedagogues and teachers can cooperate about developing engaging teaching activities.