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Walt Whitman Pedagogy Analysis

Decent Essays

Walt Whitman is one of the greatest American poets to have walked this planet we call Earth. There are several things that make him so special, and one of them is his pedagogy. To really understand Whitman's pedagogy, it is critical to understand and define a pedagogy. This article describes a pedagogy perfectly, “Pedagogy, study of teaching methods, including the aims of education and the ways in which such goals may be achieved”(Peel). Now that pedagogy has been defined; Whitman’s pedagogy is that we are all teachers and learn by experience. Whitman’s pedagogy is not as simple as this though, it is actually quite complex. He often uses his pedagogy in his writings. The poems where his pedagogy was most profound were in lines 1228-1236, also known as the destroy the teacher passage, in Song Of Myself, When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer, and passage 6 from Song of Myself.
First, is use of Whitman’s pedagogy in lines 1228-1236, or destroy the teacher passage, from Song Of Myself. Whitman used his pedagogy in this poem very well. He used it enhance the view of being your own teacher and that everyone is a teacher. Whitman talks about what the goal of a teacher is and what it means to be a teacher. He talks about this in this line from the destroy the teacher passage, “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher”(Line 1236). This line from the passage explains that the goal of the teacher is to make the student better, or more knowledgeable than the

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