The Pedagogical Imperative

I ran across this from Culture Cat. Basically, she sums up research projects, dissertations, and manuscripts that require authors to add a pedagogical imperative (particularly for RhetComp scholars), that addresses the pedagogical implications for the project, regardless of whether or not the project is readily applicable to pedagogy.

Chapter 1 of my dissertation, "Teacher-Research Don't Die: Pedagogical and Methodological Implications for Those Wishing to do Afracentric Work," argues that there is a decline in empirical teacher-research studies journal articles and book length projects in rhetoric and composition (with some statistical work counting teacher-research projects). I argue that this decline can be attributed to 1) Institutional pressures to publish more *rigorous* empirical and theory-driven scholarship, and 2) disciplinary pressures (in RhetComp) to meet these institutional demands. I also argue that this has affected Afracentric empirical teacher and classroom-research work.

The point I'm getting at in summarizing this chapter of my dis is that although there may be questions to add a pedagogical imperative to manuscripts, we're still seeing some trends to push the focus away from pedagogical research. Could it be that the pedagogical imperative sections could be more applicable if we did more pedagogical empirical research? Thoughts?

PC