This paper considers how a formative approach to pedagogy might intervene in the conditions of higher education teaching practices, discourses, and organisational priorities today. While the higher education sector is resolutely turned towards the accumulation of skills or 'content' to produce a credentialed job-ready graduate, we do these graduates a disservice if how we educate fails to take account of their formation as persons, citizens, workers, neighbours, and indeed as graduates. This is a focus on what education philosopher Gert Biesta calls subjectification. Through education's contribution to the making of populations, the neglect of this formative role of pedagogy has wider significance in the knowledge societies in which universities are operating. We first lodge the mattering of pedagogy within a contemporary moment in which calls to reform capitalism and redress democratic deconsolidation butt up against the fortunes of public knowledge and the consequences of hyper-individualist cultures. We then outline pedagogy as a formative cultural technology and provide examples and discussion from our own classroom practice.