The friendly yet challenging and
stimulating Education conference was at Greenwich
We were presenting in the Symposium strand:
‘Stimulating or stultifying? Teaching as if education matters’, organised by
Eloise Sentito, from Plymouth
University
There were three excellent Key Note
speakers across the three days: Roger Slee, Diane Reay and Bev Skeggs. Roger
Slee spoke on the myth of ‘inclusion’, creating a poetic tapestry of references
to underscore his points. (Unfortunately I have already shared my notes on his
session with colleagues who are interested in Special Needs education so I
cannot make detailed reference to his talk here and now.)
Diane Reay, Cambridge University
Diane spoke of the current scholarisation
of childhood – with a middle class agenda which confers and reaffirms privilege
on that class whilst setting up a climate of pathology and blame around working
class failure in education. For the
w/class, school offers a mirage of opportunity whilst constructing collective
disappointment which is painful and shameful; constructing psychological and
social damage. In this system the working class child is systematically and
collectively constructed as worthless whilst being individually blamed and
stigmatised for their poverty, financial and aspirational; their failure; and
their silence. The new hidden curriculum of this age of ‘education’ is the inculcation
and normalising of a neo-liberal agenda which for the working class becomes
internalised as self-hatred and self blame. Reay argued that our political
elites put a lot of class work in to their policies and in ensuring that the
w/class are forever and always (blamed for being) educational losers.
Bev Skeggs’ fascinating and engaging key
note reported on her ESCR project: ‘Making class and self through televised
ethical scenarios’, which focused on constructions of the shameful (working
class) self through reality television (RTV) (www.identities.org.uk). This was a wonderful consideration of the
intended class work of RTV – and a making conscious of the oppositional
readings that we can make, aware as we are of the intended manipulation of this
melodramatic form. Great points about the ‘moral economy of person production’,
the ‘forensic gaze’ of RTV and, as with education, how the w/class are
individually blamed and shamed – and invited to aspire to individual
transformation at the hands of all powerful experts – whilst structural
inequalities and symbolic violence is hidden, denied.
Seminars and workshops
Eloise Sentito: Leader of the Symposium
Strand: ‘Stimulating or stultifying? Education as if learning matters’ – kicked
off our Symposium strand…
You might notice that is a slightly
different title to the one that I keep returning to – but I have left both in
this post – cos they capture some healthy tensions in our strand: In terms of a
stultifying education, how far is the teacher the issue? How important is
teaching? What is the role of learning? What ‘work’ is being done by the new
learner-centred rubric?
Eloise’s workshop was entitled:
‘Vortex street
dynamics in teaching and learning: conceptualising intellectual relationships’
Eloise opened with: ‘there is
stultification whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another… whoever
teaches without emancipating stultifies’ (Jacques Ranciere: The Ignorant Schoolmaster pp13, 18)… and
went on to consider the different intellectual models offered by Socrates;
Giroux, Rousseau and Dewey; Freire; Ranciere; Learning Development; Peer
Assisted Learning. Eloise illustrated these models with drawings of different
circles, spirals and vortices – and we were invited to produce visual or
three-dimensional models for ourselves. Discussing our different illustrations
allowed us to make conscious implicit attitudes to teaching and learning to
stimulate further discussion on what teaching is for, how we as teachers
interact and work with students – and whether teaching can ever be
emancipatory.
In a dialogic conversation with Eloise,
Gert Biesta’s session argued that despite the ignorant schoolmaster: ‘…
Teaching (still) matters in emancipatory education’
Biesta offered Mollenhauer (1968):
education is not necessary for emancipation – but it may contribute… and thus
considered the education model that would facilitate this. This was a rigorous
and stimulating session previously offered as a key note and one that I would
love to see again, perhaps at our own L&T conference or even at
#aldcon… The conclusions offered were
that what makes us human rather than robots is that we can be addressed, interrupted and taught by others. This is
something to celebrate rather than to apologise for. Emancipatory education is
not the transmission or revelation of a truth, nor even freeing ourselves from
power or an alienated existence – but rather the revealing of an intelligence
to itself. It is an emancipation from a self-understanding of being incapable
and voiceless – with equality not a product but an underlying assumption.
Heneke Jones considered fostering
meaningful dialogue and dialogic space in the primary classroom – and in the Education
Studies one, with: ‘Dialogue, disagreement and disaffection:
squaring the circle’
The opening proposition here was: ‘I
disagree with myself’ and Heneke explored philosophical thinking in the primary
school as a facilitator for creative thinking within a community of enquiry.
She offered a lovely model for generating questions drawn from Baumfield,
Higgins and Leat (2001):
- Setting the scene
- The stimulus scenario (here the audience recommended straying beyond m/class centric ones and suggested extracts from ‘The Simpsons’
- Thinking time
- Q-making
- Q-airing
- Q-choosing
- 1st thoughts
- Building of enquiry
- Last words
- De-brief.
Her research explored patterns of dialogue
within this mode of enquiry – and I thought that the model for generating
questions would work well within University settings.
Kassandra from Plymouth Dyslexia Services
explored academic reading with students with dyslexia. Her key proposition was
that the person with dyslexia is a curious visual reasoner – who is made to
feel ‘too stupid to learn’ within the education system. She argued that the
dyslexic is consumed by anxiety, exhausted by continuous self-monitoring and
the sense that the locus of control for their learning (and their lives) was
always elsewhere. I took from it another argument against the imposition of
de-contextualised phonics work in the primary classroom – arguing as she did
for the need to use whole words that can be understood through context and
meaning…
Helen Bowstead, also from Plymouth
Drawing on Butler
Sandra Birkett from Ontario
Sandra de-constructed and elaborated upon
staff expectations of students when they use terms like, ‘You will be awarded
marks for:
- Knowledge and understanding
- Thinking and enquiry
- Communication
- Application.’
These taken for granted terms – by staff –
have no meaning for most students – even more so in a digital era of super-fast
responses, bite-sized learning, multi-tasking and instant-answering. This was
no process of dumbing-down but of explication and de-mystifcation that really
did seem to empower students to understand what was expected of them. I would
like to get the PPT of this session to show to my own University students …
Julian Ingle of QMUL, and previously of
London Met, explored ‘Writing as exclusionary practice…’
I heard rumblings amongst the younger
participants as Julien argued against the privileged position of writing in the
University assessment landscape. Writing tasks are proliferating with ancillary
writing tasks sprouting like weeds and reinforcing prejudice against those,
including those with various SpLDs, who find writing difficult. Julien
suggested mildly that all students are offered more choice as to the way they
would like to be assessed and asked us to consider how we might challenge the
pre-eminence of writing and what alternative assessments might look like.
Almost in response to Julien, Zotzman and
Hernandez-Zamora from Mexico
Perhaps unsurprisingly the Mexican public
university system is as divided as the UK one with private universities
well-resourced and heavily fenced – whilst the public sector is under-funded
and attended by w/class students regulated and controlled by exclusionary
practices such that even if they do produce a final dissertation – their voices
will never have been heard and will not be visible in their own work. The
re-authoring and re-genring work that Z and H-Z undertook with their students
drew on Bakhtin (1981), Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) and Kress (2010) - arguing that words are only our own when we
populate them with our own weight and that the affordances of multimodality
offers agency, voice and expression… Examples included producing illustrated
A-Z after Dahl and seemed to have empowering and transformative effect. This is
another PPT that I would like to get so that I could under-take such work with
my own students.
A powerful dialogic reply came from Choi
who argued for ‘Using autobiography as pedagogy’
Choi encountered resistance when seeking Hong Kong w/class students to write autobiographically of their educational experiences.
The power of this session, as with Bowstead’s, came from the poetic power of
the student voices. Heartbreaking to hear the implicit internalised
self-loathing of: ‘I got no cultural capital from my parents’. These bleak and
desolate, to me, autobiographical extracts illustrated again the symbolic
violence enacted on more communal and collective social groups when engaging in
neo-liberal, individualistic education systems.
Simon Bell from Coventry School of Art and
Design shared his PhD research work: ‘short odds = safe bet: go on, you know it
makes sense’
Our session followed Bell Bell and our sessions complemented
each other – and we hope to work with Bell
Burns, Sinfield, Holley and
O’Reilly: ‘Third Space – the final frontier? Disrupting
learning landscapes, renegotiating pedagogic spaces’
Our proposal was predicated upon our belief that Education is in transition - commodity driven, marketised, rationed and
controlled in ways that we have arguably not seen since the days when only the
‘top’ seven per cent went to University.
And wondered how can we be challenging, creative and yet more inclusive
in these ‘interesting’ times. Winnicott (1971) argued
that play is important in counteracting the implicit threat that occurs when we
are in transitional spaces – between worlds, between social classes and in
alien educational settings. We wanted to
see if we could playfully:
- Disrupt
concepts of educational spaces -
and use space differently
- Devise
authentic assignments and engaging pedagogy
- Promote
students as actors and agents
- Occupy,
name and yet liberate new pedagogic and virtual spaces?
We created alternative educational spaces in Second Life, a 3D
immersive world (www.secondlife.com),
to see if students inhabited these disrupted spaces in more powerful ways than
the traditional lecture hall or seminar room. Our educational landscape became a
seashore with sussurating sea, deck chairs, bonfires and puzzle cubes. We found
that our students appeared as Bee or Klingon as well as ‘Barbie on the Poop
Deck’ – and argued that disrupted pedagogic space can allow for more powerful
student agency… Our more recent work (elaborated upon in the blog post below)
argues for creative pedagogy and assignments – including the design and
production of digital artefacts as alternative, empowering assignments.
I found this DPR really engaging, exciting and inspiring – I left with
memories of creative and stimulating people and practices – with so many new
things to do and try out and – hopefully – with a few more people out there
with whom I might collaborate and cooperate in the future.
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