Teaching to a different beat

“Mashing up music, style, poetry, make up, material culture, and philosophy, historian Lucy Robinson uses punk and rave to disrupt the predominant dynamic in the classroom and refashion it as an alternative intellectual space. Daniel Frost interviewed her on the origins, design, and ethics of these pedagogies for a special issue in Postgraduate Pedagogies titled Conversations on teaching in the contemporary university: Perspectives from within and across disciplines The excerpt below features two passages from the interview – why Daniel chose to interview Lucy, and a lightning round series of questions and answers where Daniel quizzes her about teaching, dream courses, and invaluable resources Punk – which emerged as a subculture in Britain, the United States and elsewhere in the mid-1970s – is often characterised by its do-it-yourself ethics and aesthetics, its irreverence towards authority, and its emphasis on nonconformity and personal expression. Punkademics take their inspiration from the mix of people, places, and practices that make up the punk scene, and typically take punk as their object of study as well as inspiration for an approach to teaching. However, whereas much of the interest in punk pedagogies has come from academics involved in the punk scene themselves, Lucy’s experience and work is slightly different, shaped more by the rave scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s – a scene associated with electronic dance music and semi-spontaneous parties in fields and disused warehouses (Holmes et al., 2024). As someone not particularly enmeshed in the predominantly music-oriented youth subcultures we discussed in our interview, I was interested in the relevance of Lucy’s version of critical pedagogy to the scene to which I do belong, and on which my own work focuses: an activist, left-wing subculture with its own distinctive values and practices. As workers and students explore different ways of being in the university, I knew that Lucy would be a source of valuable reflections on do-it-together approaches to contemporary pedagogy. Lightning round Daniel: What is one idea that every student you teach should come away knowing? Lucy: That it’s all right to use ‘I’ in their writing. Daniel: Name one concept that you cover in your courses that most students struggle with? Lucy: Understanding historiography in context – the idea that some books might have informed other books that might have informed other books, and the importance of when something was written. Daniel: Name one topic on the Post-Rave Britain course that you really enjoy teaching. Lucy: Huggy Bear and the Spice Girls . Daniel: What is one development that contemporary history contributes to wider society and the world? Lucy: Understanding the dynamic relationship between the past and the present. Daniel: Could you recommend a blogpost or podcast that someone unfamiliar with the field could read and understand? Lucy: Matt Houlbrook’s blogs about writing and I really love Owen Emmerson’s blog too. Daniel: What would be your dream course to teach? Lucy: Post-Rave Britain! Daniel: As a teacher, what do you find the hardest? Lucy: Lectures. Daniel: Recommend an invaluable resource to your fellow teachers in this field. Lucy: Padlet. Daniel: Whose teaching or pedagogy in this area do you follow or are inspired by? Lucy: Alan Sinfield – I read the book that he wrote with Jonathan Dillmore, Political Shakespeare (1994), while I was at Oxford Polytechnic, and a chapter about a Brechtian tour of Shakespeare got completely under my skin! I decided to try and do the course that was described on the back of the book, MA Sexual Dissidence at the University of Sussex. Daniel: And what is your magic tip when it comes to giving feedback on assignments? Lucy: That it’s not about you! Read the interview in full in Postgraduate Pedagogies who have kindly permitted us to re-publish this excerpt. This post is opinion-based and does not reflect the views of the London School of Economics and Political Science or any of its constituent departments and divisions. Main image: Huggy Bear performing in 1994. Greg Neate/Wikipedia (CC-BY 2.0) The post Teaching to a different beat first appeared on LSE Higher Education .

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