Doctored

…I just hit one.

I’ve been reading some more stuff on the history and context of UK HE (Anderson 2010), plus a long paper explaining neoliberalism and the knowledge economy (Olssen & Peters 2005), and trying to write some coherent thoughts about it… but it’s all too much. Too much stuff, literally, and too much emotion. The more I find out about the way universities are funded and measured, the angrier I get, to the point where I just feel really sad. Sad and tired. At the moment all I seem to do is work and read and write and do a bit of cooking and walk the dog and read and write some more, and it’s nothing new – loads of other people have had these ideas – and published very well-cited articles about them – and it seemingly hasn’t helped any.

I feel like I have drawn myself down into a dark hole of dark ideas. I am finding it hard to act normal with people. The thought of casual socialising is exhausting. I lack enthusiasm for our wedding; it is like the worst bits of teaching; chasing non-respondents, tinkering with enormous spreadsheets, replying patiently to endless requests from people who haven’t read the instructions, wondering whether anyone will actually turn up, and briefly entertaining the thought that it will be easier if they don’t…

I have left no time in my life to do anything for other people. My focus is turned inwards. I have fits of uncontrollable rage; I hit things.

I know this is just a blip; a necessary moment of real struggle in a learning journey that is overal an enjoyable one. These are wicked problems that I’m trying to deal with. I think the best way forward is to leave this week’s L&T reading blog in draft form (for now), to give myself a little rest from the deep stuff and attack my WrAP work afresh tomorrow.

Once I’m ready to start my T&L assignment in earnest I need to remember to think global but act local; to retain a focus on my own purpose. As my friend Graham told me earlier today – if we lose focus on our purpose, we just get buried in drama (see above).

Given the key message of Padraig Hogan’s book, and the papers I have read over the last week critiquing and explaining education policy, I was curious to discover the mechanisms through which academic research can inform education policy, and the extent of its influence.

I took Stephen Ball – whose paper was the subject of my last post – as a case study. The IoE website helpfully details the funded projects he’s been involved in and tells me that his work in this area has been funded by ESRC and the European Commission, among others.

The EU Commission calls for specific research in areas of priority set by themselves, and one would assume there is a direct path then for the findings to inform policy. NB – I was really pleasantly surprised to see the vast majority of the calls for EU Commission research funding are focused on green technologies, sustainability, gender equality and collaborative processes. Similar areas were the subject of the recent round of PhD scholarships awarded by the Leverhulme Trust.

The ESRC – where most of Stephen Ball’s research funding has come from – manages certain programmes specified and funded by government agencies (e.g. HEFCE), but also allocates a significant proportion of their funding to open calls. This is obviously an important system to have because it allows academics to research what they think is worthy of study and the ‘disinterested search for truth’ to continue. But where does this knowledge go – is an academic journal or book the only endpoint? It is particularly ironic if research on the knowledge economy and knowledge exchange between universities and the outside world (e.g. Olssen & Peters 2005) does not find its way to the policy makers! I did a bit of googling to see if any Knowledge Transfer Partnerships had been funded in education policy research but found none (most had a STEM focus).

Even research programmes explicitly demanded and funded by government agencies appear to have a very limited impact on policy. I found an ESRC evaluation document for the second phase of their Teaching & Learning Research Programme (TLRP) that explicitly examined the extent of impact on policy, the ways in which that impact has been achieved and the value of that impact.

The TLRP was a £30 million initiative (funded by HEFCE and the UK government departments responsible for education) to build research capacity in education within UK universities and respond to criticisms that educational and pedagogical research was ‘small scale, irrelevant, inaccessible and of low quality’. Overall the evaluation concludes that while the TLRP appeared to have succeeded in producing research that met certain quality criteria and impacted positively on some areas of teaching and learning practice (p11), there are “relatively few success stories” of impact on educational policy (p40).

It sounds to me as if – while the government wanted the quality of educational research (according to certain criteria) to be raised, they never actually intended to listen to it.

In the bit of the evaluation report that presents the lessons learned (i.e. how to have more of an impact on policy), a telling mismatch is disclosed between what the researchers think they should be doing (publishing in journals – p17) and the case study evidence that emphasises non-publication activities as impact enablers (such as liaison with external bodies). In fact, project stakeholders explicitly reported their concern about the ‘traditional focus of academics on refereed publications’, explaining that what was needed was clear, brief, jargon-free outputs that could be turned into direct action. Now, this isn’t to say that the more impactful projects (yes, that’s a word) didn’t publish in journals – they did. But this evaluation report underlines the concerns I outlined previously about certain kinds of educational research not ending up in the right places for it to make a positive difference to the world.

So, the report’s recommendations for enabling impact (p40-41) firstly suggest that policy research must be accessible to those in the ‘policy arena’. Naively I kind of thought the Department for Education would have a subscription to the Journal of Educational Policy, but it sounds like this isn’t the case. Actually… crumbs, I shouldn’t even admit to this, but I only found out this week that universities aren’t the domain of the Department of Education but the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – ‘the department for economic growth’. Ouch.

The report also seems to suggest that we need to involve a lot of middlemen; that engagement with ‘brokers’, ‘evidence mediators’ or others who influence policy teams may be more successful than direct engagement with policy-makers. Who are these brokers and mediators? Who employs them? In what capacity? This is all very interesting…

Think tanks. I never really considered what they actually were. I guess I imagined something like a septic tank that you put politicians in so that they can think about what they’ve done.  It turns out they’re small groups of ‘experts’ (not necessarily academics) who inform policy, with funding from somewhere (often charities) and a board of trustees. I picked one at random – British Future – made up of a Director, a Director of Communications, a Director of Strategy and Relationships, an Office Manager and an Intern. These are not academics – these are mediators – experienced ones. By the look of their biographies, they seem like decent people.

Million+ is a Higher Education think tank that produces the kind of brightly-coloured, jargon-free summary booklets that policy-makers supposedly want. Here is their Manifesto for Universities. I felt it was disappointingly anodyne and forgettable. Million+ comprises a VC, a chief exec, two policy officers, a press officer and an office manager.

I’ve come across HEPI before as I think they were the first people to suggest the rising cost of unpaid student loans is approaching the tipping point where it wasn’t worth raising fees. HEPI have written a briefing for the upcoming election, and an interesting collection of essays on student fees, including one from our own VC at UAL, Nigel Carrington. HEPI’s director Nick Hillman sounds like an amusing kind of chap. I’d like to see more on their website about who they are and who funds them. I don’t feel satisfied with these organisations calling themselves ‘non-partisan’ and ‘charitable’; non-partisan can mean anything you want it to mean, and charities have agendas too.

It transpires these think-tank people come under the umbrella term of ‘policy wonks’. There are some interesting theories about the origin of the word ‘wonk’ here, but it seems the wonks have chosen to own their name. They now have their own community website; wonkhe.com, that speaks in unusually glowing terms about our glorious Chancellor. There is a very balanced THE article about wonks here. You would expect it to be balanced, given that it’s written by someone I would describe as a ‘career wonk’.

So, there we go – that’s who is influencing policy, apparently. There is, of course, Universities UK – made up of the executive leaders (VCs, etc) of UK Universities – they speak of ‘shaping the agenda’, which seems like a rather diluted version of influencing policy. I checked out the vacancies page, curious about what kinds of people Universities UK were looking for – ‘dynamic, well-connected and politically astute’, apparently. I think I’ll stay where I am, thanks. And that’s part of the problem; people with certain kinds of views and feelings about HE simply don’t want to get involved with this lot.

Another notable recommendation from the TRLP evaluation report is that it helps (obviously) if research projects and outputs have explicit, direct relevance to policies and policy areas, and are appropriately timed to inform the cycle of policy development. The wonks are clearly taking this approach.

What all this is pointing to is that academics need to wise up and play the game. If they want their work to have more of an impact they need to be proactive in this whole circus without becoming one of its dancing bears. But they’ll need to hold on tighter to their principles than Frodo with his stupid ring.

Some other articles, policy research & policy documents I found on my virtual travels:

How to Influence HE Policy – Guardian (2012)

How I’m taking University of Hertfordshire to the Policymakers – Alix Green, Guardian (2011)

Students at the Heart of the System – BIS White Paper for England (2011)

The Funding Environment for Universities – Universities UK Report (2013)

Futures of Higher Education: Analysing Trends – Universities UK Report (2010)

Higher Education & Society – OU CHERI Research Report (2011)

Effective Learning & Teaching in Higher Education – TLRP Commentary

Ball, S. (2003) The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18 (2) p215-228

In this article Stephen Ball explains how market, managerialism and performativity are replacing professionalism and bureaucracy in education, making the public sector more like the private sector in its methods, culture and ethics. While this may or may not be an explicit preconditioning for privatisation as seen with the health and transport sectors, it exemplifies a ‘culture and a mode of regulation that uses judgements, comparisons and displays as means of incentive, control, attrition and change’.

I accidentally caught a Lib Dem cabinet minister on TV the other day saying he believes their ‘huge mistake on tuition fees’ has actually turned out to be good for students(!), because universities are now more accountable for the quality of their education. Yes, students should have a good educational experience – no-one is disputing that – the question is; quality by whose definition? And what about the quality of the teaching experience? Ball explains that teachers – particularly, I think, in the compulsory sector but increasingly so in HE – are finding their values being challenged and displaced by other agendas; the ‘care of the self’ being set against the ‘duty to others’.

The quotes from UK school teachers at the bottom of p216 raise strong emotions because I recognise how much tenacity these individuals must have/have had to have lasted so long. I bailed at the close of my PGCE year, my confidence and creativity shattered by a persistent, crushing assessment of my own teaching, and the relentless focus on teaching to the test. Later on, when I found my home in HE, I was initially guilty of pushing some of the kinds of changes Ball alludes to here; particularly the use of IT to cut back on ‘inefficient’ personal contact. My views on this have undergone a seismic shift.

I am probably naive (definitely lucky), but I don’t feel like managerialism and performativity have completely taken over in HE. The structures are certainly there; appraisal, accreditation, the NSS… but I do feel in most cases we are free to interpret them in a way that dovetails with our own values and beliefs. One example is the scheme we have at UAL to work with courses with low NSS scores, which at first glance screams ‘performativity’, but our department – who were given the responsibility of developing it – designed the scheme with a genuine focus on building and rebuilding relationships in course teams. The fact that it does appear to actually raise NSS scores is seen by those who facilitate the scheme as a convenient side-effect. A small victory for the academics perhaps; that we have found ways to negotiate these structures without resorting to meaningless fabrications (although fabrications do abound… it is easier to fabricate than to reconcile). I do accept that my particular context of an academic development unit in a creative arts university is probably going to have a good degree of self-protection.

Thinking again about the Professional Standards Framework – which I need to talk to my students about tomorrow – the PSF is a professional technology, but it is at risk of being used for performative ends by universities, especially those in a weak ‘performance position’ (elite institutions of course having less to prove). Ball’s paper lends a rather grim perspective to the recent shrinking of the HEA’s activities down to accreditation, recognition and competitive reward (e.g. the National Teaching Fellowships). It also threw into sharp relief the amount of time I have spent in the last week putting samples of work and feedback together for external examination; time that I could have spent on catching up with my students’ projects and exchanging advice and encouragement. Like them, I also find these activities are too easily squeezed out now they reside online.

It’s hard to argue against external examination (provided it knows its place), but it takes a ridiculous amount of effort these days – when students’ work and feedback is spread across blogs and forums and a range of other channels – to get a sample together that makes sense to an outsider, particularly when some of it is of a sensitive nature and not easily sharable with external parties. I see aspects of this process that are prone to at least some kind of fabrication, and I doubt, where the students and myself are concerned, that it is the best use of my time. But worse than this – as Ball says, it is not that performativity gets in the way of academic work, but that it’s a vehicle for changing it. The online systems we use for collaborative peer and self assessment make perfect pedagogic sense, but for external examination they are utterly useless. Twice a year I tear my hair out getting this sample together, and seriously consider returning to a physical box of plastic folders. Yes, really – I would consider rolling the clock back on what I see as my biggest success, for the sake of a happy external.

Was it Heidegger who said we needed a new God? We have one… and His name is Quality Assurance. I don’t think he’s going to save us, though.

What does the word education mean? Where does it come from?

I came across the word educe the other day, which means ‘to lead out’ – from the Latin ducere – ‘to lead’. Exchange the prefix ‘e’ for ‘de’ and you have the more familiar word deduce – ‘to lead down’ or arrive at.

Normand Baillargeon – in A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense (2007) says the following:

“Partisans of a liberal conception of education have claimed that the word ‘education’ comes from ‘educere,’ etymology that invites a conception of education as an act of leading (induco) out of (ex) ignorance – which conforms to the liberal notion of education. On the other side are those who favor a notion of education understood as nourishing and, more broadly, furnishing the conditions necessary for a person’s development. They invoke a second etymological hypothesis, according to which ‘education’ comes from ‘educare,’ which means ‘nourish’ or ‘raise.’ And still others maintain that education is an indeterminate concept and support their thesis with the very uncertainty of the etymology. You see that etymology, as illuminating as it sometimes is, cannot, in any instance, resolve problems of conceptual definition on its own.” (p48)

Now, I got an A in my Latin GCSE in 1995, and I think that definitely qualifies me to say that it’s the ‘duc’ part of either infinitive that is the important bit; it signifies a ‘drawing out’. Ductility is a particular kind of plasticity; the ability of a substance or object to undergo change of form without breaking. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about ductility:

Ductility is especially important in metalworking, as materials that crack, break or shatter under stress cannot be manipulated using metal forming processes, such as hammering, rolling, and drawing.

I like to think of education like this; a process that requires a kind of flexible resilience on the part of the student and the teacher. You are always in flux, and you must never let it break you. Something to bear in mind in the face of looming assignment deadlines 😉

I’m trying to get my thoughts straight on finishing Hogan’s New Significance of Learning, alongside a 2006 article I came across in Pedagogies by a chap called Michael Apple who writes well and says a lot of things I agree with. However he only ever references his own work – check out the terminal reference list – which gives the impression that he feels he is a lone wolf in considering these issues. He clearly isn’t – Taylor and Francis’ very handy ‘users also read’ column directed me to a whole collection of similar writings – many in the Journal of Education Policy. One of the key messages of Hogan’s book is that educators need to get themselves stuck in with the policy makers rather than attack their decisions from dreaming spires through journals they don’t read, and it is with this in mind that I plan to consider more of these articles in the coming weeks.

Apple, M. W. (2006) Understanding and interrupting neoliberalism and neoconservatism in education. Pedagogies, 1 (1) p21-26

I’ve also been motoring through Caroline Lucas’ book Honourable Friends, which is quite simply the most enjoyable thing I’ve read since Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Lucas’ general philosophy and approach to political engagement and reform – not merely her views on education policy – resonate strongly with Hogan’s writings.

I’m coming to the conclusion that the purpose of HE should be to help human beings realise their individual educational potential, and that the intellectual development of the human being in society is not, or should not be, a means to a specific end. Education may well be a means that generates ends, or it may be an end in itself; I think that depends on the context and the person.

I feel incredibly privileged to be on an educational journey where I am encouraged to consider about my own educational means and ends. I am not tied to a particular thesis; I’m not even worried about it; just confident that one will arise if I carry on thinking and reading. As I told the EdD course team in my interview two years ago – my goal is intellectual development; that’s it. For what end? Don’t know yet. It’ll come. That’s why I’m here for five years, instead of at the OU for three. I want to do good in the world and for myself, but I don’t yet know what that looks like.

So, for some learners – like myself – this ‘development of individual potential’ perspective on HE isn’t a pipe dream. But in order for it to be this way, the legitimacy of this purpose needs to be understood; at the very least between the course team, myself the student, and – to an extent – my employer the sponsor. This is a very different situation to the one many of today’s undergraduates find themselves in. In Honourable Friends, Caroline Lucas writes of her conversations with present-day undergraduates that carry a strong sense of gain and loss. What do they see as the purpose of HE? Personal financial security? A meaningful career? Social mobility? Economic growth? Many teachers at UAL feel that their concern is to about prepare students for predetermined roles and working practices; the kinds of skills and knowledge that used to be ‘handed down’ through apprenticeships. Perhaps this view is more prevalent at UAL and other institutions where fractional staff continue to work in industry alongside their academic roles, but tuition fees have raised the recruitment stakes across England and Wales, and employment statistics have become a key weapon in the arsenal. What happened to the apprenticeship model? Has the ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, Illeris) rendered it unworkable? Have we rejected its supply/demand mode of operation in favour of educating anyone who wants to learn? In the 70s and 80s the art schools all become subsumed into Universities and the creative disciplines ‘academicised’. Why? What about ‘education’ versus ‘training’? Should we return to a more segregated educational infrastructure? In whole or in part? Why? What would that look like?

To ask these questions about ‘education’ versus ‘training’ is to infer that showing someone how a particular skill might be performed, or what can be achieved with a particular tool, is a very different activity to questioning what it means to build, or to create. And of course it is – but there’s no reason why they can’t be done together, by the same educators even, with the same students; and perhaps every reason why they should be. What I am concerned about is that the inflexibility of the infrastructure of large organisations; the moves that ‘save costs’ – the sharing of management, enrolment and assessment structures, IT strategies – force a one-size-fits-all approach to different types of learning that have very different purposes.

The more that universities become like businesses, the more everything they do is focused on a single bottom line. The ideological bottom line – as presented in a university’s long-term strategy, for example – may sound pretty wholesome. But that cannot be measured directly; so the real bottom line becomes the various metrics that are used to assess performance. And of course those metrics – what can be measured – become king.

So – it’s not that universities are too big. It’s that they are too universal, in a managerial and structural sense. Departments and course teams feel crippled by the imperative to homogenise our courses and working practices for the sake of efficiency and central control. We would love to move to a pass/refer assessment model on the MA Academic Practice, for example – and have a zillion reasons for doing so. And there are a hundred administrative issues we have to untangle every year because the flexible, modular nature of our programme does not fit our student records and assessment system. Standard external examination processes assume paper-based, written assignments (even though we are at an art college), so we have to find creative ways to manage that. These imperatives are supposed to make us more efficient (i.e. to do more with less), but they actually create more work for us. They are also supposed to ensure minimum standards are reached, and I’m sure in some cases they probably have; but we often feels like we could do better without them.

What’s my point here? It is that what we see as being the purpose of higher education will influence how we approach teaching and learning. If we take as our starting point that the purpose of a university education is to prepare young people for business and industry, then this will impact on everything we do. I remember teaching about John Richardson’s work in this area – conceptions of and approaches to teaching and learning – back when I first started teaching on the PG Cert. But in those days I wasn’t thinking much further beyond the classroom; to those who decide university strategy – certainly not to those who set out education policy.

This widening of perspective is immediately important on a personal level. The argument for the rejection of performativity is very strong (although the dominant discourse shouts louder). How do I reconcile this with the requirement that I measure the teaching capability of others against the Professional Standards Framework (through FHEA application statements)? I think I have thought of a way to work with this tension, which is a good thing, because I start teaching the UK PSF portfolio unit on Monday(!). My thoughts on this may not make it into a public blog post… it depends how anarchistic they sound… but I will try.

This morning, on the bus, I finished Chapter 9 of Hogan’s New Significance of Learning, which draws together the arguments developed in previous chapters for education as a practice and tradition in its own right. It firmly sets Hogan’s view apart from that of MacIntyre’s, and identifies strongly with the practices and convictions of Socrates.

The dog is also enjoying Padraig Hogan

I agreed very strongly with all of it. But perhaps that is because Hogan’s view validates my own role as a teacher of teaching. The majority of the teachers I work with are employed – with varying degrees of explicitness – to prepare students for a specific career, practice or industry; sports journalism, fashion textiles & print, digital marketing. For a lot of them, this aspect of their role is their primary concern, as indicated by their practitioner research projects and dissertations; ‘What specific screen print techniques are demanded of graduates?’ ‘How prepared are my students for work in the PR industry?’ I found it useful to read the examples from secondary teaching of literature that demonstrated what a ‘collateral’ (Dewey) engagement of attitudes and beliefs might look like in practice, and I recognise this as what I am attempting to achieve in my own teaching. However, I wonder what my own students think of education being a practice and tradition in its own right, rather than existing in the service of a secondary discipline and/or tradition.

Higher education is, these days, very focused on preparation for employment. Should it be? How does the blend of vocational (training?) and academic education vary across courses, disciplines and institutions, and why? How does this affect the status of education as a practice in its own right?

As a first port of call I am going to revisit the Dearing report with these questions in mind, and also the paper on HE Governance in Scotland that Ferdinand Von Prondsynski sent me via twitter, alongside Hogan’s next chapter on the teaching of teachers.

I’ve been reflecting on the workshop we had on 14 March with Andrew Davis on brain-based learning. This was very much focused on what I like to call ‘neurodiversity’; specific cognitive differences that are often termed ‘difficulties’ or ‘disabilities’.

I am reminded of the Ian Munday piece on problems and mysteries. Brains and minds are incredibly mysterious, and I feel – as do many others – that is not helpful to see and treat neurodiversity as a ‘problem’. This is particularly relevant at the moment as I work individually with a number of my students who have particular needs.  This is not a problematic process so much as a reason and an opportunity to examine the accessibility of the course for all participants; also its purpose – and my own purpose too.

Andrew highlighted the difference between the physical brain, and the subjective experience of the world that arises from the interplay between our perceptions, social institutions and the physical world. As an alien on a spaceship would not be able to ‘decode’ the meaning of a £20 note through a physical analysis, so the mind cannot be deduced from the brain, which is merely a cognitive tool we use in entertaining thoughts and emotions.

Before I read Andrew’s paper I assumed that the physicalist/monist view was more widely held; the view that only physical entities exist, and that mental processes will eventually be explained in terms of these entities as physical theory continues to evolve. I guess I also assumed that neuroscience was more advanced than it actually is. See… it’s insidious, the mainstream media, you try to avoid it but it gets to you somehow.

It is perception itself that interests me; particularly in terms of enhanced perception (i.e. perceiving more than is ‘normal’). It was revealed in 2004 that Francis Crick and his fellow Cambridge academics “used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas.” Crick apparently perceived the double-helical structure of DNA while under the influence of the drug.

The following quote from comedian-activist Bill Hicks is also pertinent:

“Wouldn’t you like to see a positive LSD story on the news? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition? Perhaps? Wouldn’t that be interesting? Just for once?

“Today, a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”

When I took LSD for the first time in June 2013, I too became aware of these vibrations, and of a collective consciousness. Have you ever caught a stranger’s eye and had a brief moment of unspoken connection? It was like that, only magnified a thousand times. Whether these were people whose subjective experience of the world was similar to mine, or just also on LSD – I couldn’t be sure. I think, possibly, both. The most obvious, palpable connection was with my boyfriend; our minds became so sharp and inextricably connected, we no longer had to finish our sentences as we knew what the other was thinking. Speaking was tricky anyway – partly for laughing… we’d become a comedy double act. You’ve heard of ‘callbacks’ – jokes that link back to those previously told? We were calling back to previous incarnations of ourselves. Everything was connected.

Last summer, I had a somewhat different LSD experience. The intensity of this trip was physically overwhelming, but I became acutely aware of an ability to register the physical sensations as neutral rather than unpleasant; a feeling that the brain was soft-wired rather than hard-wired. This ability stayed with me to an extent over the next few weeks; I felt more resilient and tolerant. It was enlightening. Notably, this trip also rendered me literally speechless. I was only able to spit out an occasional embarrassingly inane comment and became very conscious of my own awkwardness and its effect on others. This was the only negative aspect, but it was significant; there were a large number of Brendan’s friends at that festival who I had resolved to get to know better, and it was a bit of a backward step in that sense.

I share my own experience here because it enables me to link up Andrew’s session on March 14th with the one that followed. We were looking at a piece of writing about the teaching of phonetics in schools, and I was puzzled all the way through – something really didn’t make sense – and then I realised – I never knew it was normal to learn to read at school. My only memory of Reception class is being sent – alone – up to the junior school to get my reading books; I knew I was ahead, but I had no idea by how much.

I didn’t have any friends as such until the age of ten, by which time my precocity had faded and – importantly – I had a fresh start in a new junior school. I always suspected my reading ability had something to do with that. My parents have never enjoyed socialising and to be honest I thought they’d deliberately set out for us to be different in order to minimise social obligations from other children and their parents.

Then – earlier today – I came across hyperlexia; an autistic spectrum disorder. Everything added up; very early reading, late talking, social awkwardness. It wasn’t that I was shy – quite the opposite. It was the rules of appropriate behaviour that seemed arbitrary and/or opaque.

The rather mindblowing connection that I made today is that a good dose of LSD seems to amplify the hyperlexia characteristics I experienced as a child;

• a powerful sense that speech is irrelevant or inadequate;
• an overwhelming need to sit quietly and decode visual signs;
• an awareness of my own lack of social graces, or a feeling of social exhaustion.

I also recognise this pattern from a few weeks ago when after taking a microdot at a party I suddenly needed to be alone, outdoors. I walked home slowly, delighted by and engrossed in ‘decoding’ the footprints left in the sleet on the pavement under the glow of the streetlamps.

I know from a lecture I attended last year that LSD has been found to activate neural pathways that are normally subdued. It’s thought that these pathways are normally faded out to save energy and prevent distraction, allowing us to focus on particular necessary tasks and actions we need to survive. Could it be the case that I’ve experienced the awakening of old, subdued hyperlexic pathways in addition to others? I think I am also alone among my friends in experiencing intense synaesthesia under the influence of LSD (e.g. a metallic taste in the mouth when I touch a metal object). Synaesthesia has been found to involve ‘similar neurocognitive components’ to hyperlexia, and I do recall having synaesthetic experiences as a child.

But what are ‘neurocognitive components’? I’ll need to access the neuroscience journals to find out. The term sounds very woolly, and it seems philosophy of mind is still a hotly contested arena; which suggests that very little is known about how the brain actually works.

So – my conclusions from linking all this lot together…

First, given that my broad aim for this unit is to consider the purpose of Higher Education, I might consider the role the university plays (and has played) in experiments with the adjustment of perception, as it did for Crick and his contemporaries. Personally, I see this kind of venturing as separate from the alcohol-fuelled ‘hazing’ of Freshers’ week, which I have written about before; to me they have entirely different intentions; the former activity seeking to make us more fully human, the latter less so.

Second, I think psychoactive substances have an important role to play in advancing knowledge in both neuroscience and philosophy of mind. I’d like to check the progress on the work being done at Imperial and Cardiff in this area, further to the lecture I attended last year. If they haven’t met their crowdfunding target yet for the analysis I’ll chip in some more (I already donate monthly to Drug Science).

Third, the analysis of my own experience with psychedelics suggests that I would probably be best not taking them in times of social demand, but perhaps in conjunction with writing, drawing, reading or other creative pursuits  (check out this fascinating experiment where a woman drew self-portraits of herself while under the influence of LSD).

It’s been a very interesting week, reading-wise. In addition to the prescribed papers on assessment, I’ve been following my own path with Hannah Arendt (via the Times Higher) and Ron Barnett’s 2004 paper Learning for an Unknown Future. I’m also now halfway through Hogan’s New Significance of Learning.

There is much that resonates between these three, and all point towards a claim for the intrinsic value of education. The short piece on Arendt posits the importance of ‘thinking together’ in the fight of ‘good versus evil’, and hence the University as a place where this collective thinking takes place. It was useful to be reminded of this, and the piece made me reflect on my own position as a student and a lecturer in HE, and the extent to which I engage in and promote collective thinking. I am constantly reflecting how to improve on both counts, and it feels like there are more opportunities to practice the art of collective thinking just now. Perhaps it’s just that I am feeling more open/able to work with others? Barnett does a good job of describing my initial feelings about these kinds of discussions; being confronted with the myriad ways of seeing and describing the world can still unsettle or even upset me, and I realise anew the extent of what I ask my own students to do in making sense of the world.

Barnett is essentially arguing that we need a new way of teaching in the modern world which is not only complex – in that so many actions and interactions are influencing each other it is impossible to generalise and predict – but supercomplex, in that the range of different perspectives and understandings of the world are infinite and often incompatible. The question of the University itself and its purpose springs from different value positions that may be diametrically opposed; Barnett speaks of seeing universities as consumers (and producers) or resources – what Hogan terms the ‘natural view’ – and an incompatible view of them as sites of open and transformatory engagement (Hogan’s ‘independent view’). To add to this supercomplexity, we no longer recognise ourselves. The societal developments of the last few decades have led to destabilisation of family and some class structures, the dissolution of the manufacturing industry, its related communities and ‘jobs for life’, and retarded development of our own identities – what Bauman termed the ‘liquid modernity’, the subject of the Knud Illeris book I reviewed last year.

Barnett talks of the Western University as having an ‘understood character’ of producing new ideas that will ‘startle’ and break with convention. I’m not sure this understanding is universal. Why did Tony Blair set his 50% in HE by 2010 target? Because he wanted to improve access to HE; to increase ‘social mobility’ (presumably only upwards). This is not the same aim as the ‘critical enlightenment’ that Barnett speaks of, which is a collective enlightenment rather than an individual one. However, Barnett later speaks of students ‘prospering’, which whether you interpret that materially or holistically still implies a benefit to the individual. Are individual and collective benefit the same phenomenon viewed from a different standpoint? I think we need to interpret ‘prosperity’ as something that can be achieved by all, rather than at the expense of others, and I suspect Barnett would agree.

A sceptical view of the current government’s reasons for wanting to increase participation in HE (especially if they can get students to pay the upfront cost), is that graduates produce a lot more tax revenue over the course of their lives, and STEM graduates in particular allow us to ‘compete on the global stage’ (i.e. make money out of other countries). It would also be in the interests of the present government to shrink the working class further so that there is absolutely no chance of them presenting an organised challenge as they did in the 80s (that particular threat is now coming from the liberal left middle-class). I certainly don’t get the sense that the current government wants us all to get better at thinking, generally. I think they want people to invent things to export, and things that make it easier to buy and sell more stuff.

*ranting again*…

Barnett has proposed a model; a matrix of transformation and risk where the intended outcome is ‘Box 4’ – transformation for an unknown world. I remain sceptical of matrices. Having argued for the ridiculous complexity of the world, it then seems disingenuous to stake a claim for the explanatory power of a grid. However, having stepped away from the paper itself for a few days, the matrix does work as an aide-memoire of the main point.

Barnett’s 2004 paper carries new significance today in the midst of a backlash against the ‘employability’ agenda (see Iannucci in the Guardian and Rickett in Vice) which sits firmly in his maligned Third Box. Robin Barrow and Michael Young would also have (different?) strong words to say about this box, I think. But the skills agenda is alive and well in industry, as I found attending the Draper’s Lecture at QMUL in January. Employers may claim they are looking for human qualities rather than skills, but even if the definition between the two is clear (not always the case) – they are very specific qualities that fit what the industry is now, and therefore not what Barnett is promoting. Many of my own student teachers are interested in making their courses ‘fit the needs of industry’. Without an industrial driving force, many of the courses we offer would cease to exist. How do we reconcile this?

While Barnett describes education as primarily an ontological task. I would prefer to use the word ‘ultimately’. Let’s use Barnett’s skating/ice metaphor and make it real; to teach someone to be a brilliant, innovative skater, yes of course it is important to get them thinking about what a skater is; what it means to skate – this should form the basis of everything they learn and how they learn it. But without an embodied understanding of the mechanics of the blade/ice interface and the interaction between the muscles of the leg and foot and the placement of the blade on the ice (that comes from coaching and practice), such considerations are meaningless. Considering the purpose of skating is a philosophical activity that is core to the overall endeavour, and of particular importance in the face of an unknown future, but knowledge and skills are surely vital to this process of becoming. As spoke the Dalai Lama: ‘Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively’. This is how I think we can reconcile the present with the future; by making this intention explicit.

How to prepare my own students for an unknown future? New applicants often speak of wanting to become a more confident teacher through learning ‘tips and tricks’ (i.e. knowledge and skills). However, I believe confidence comes through mindful practice; that is how you accumulate the knowledge and skills required for your specific teaching context. Knowledge and skills are not specified in our PG Cert curriculum. Instead, participants are led to practice mindfully, and learn the value of theory in this process.

One final point – I am sceptical of Barnett’s assertion that the history students’ confident presentation is a sign of their sense of themselves and ability to go forth in a challenging world. First, if students are already so prepared, why would Barnett bother to write this paper? Second, the lecturer’s students had lots of practice at giving presentations, so it makes sense that they would become confident presenters. At university we had to write endless handwritten essays in exam conditions, hence we became confident essay writers. Similarly with my own students and their blogs. Is this confidence evidence of our ability to prosper in a supercomplex world? Or is it just ‘assessment backwash’?

Overall I felt this read like a paper of two halves; the holding aloft of a novel, explanatory matrix, and the softer and more human final pages reminiscent of hooks and resonating clearly with Hogan. Here, Barnett presents us with a set of dispositions – carefulness, thoughtfulness, humility, criticality, receptiveness, resilience, courage and stillness – a mantra that belongs on a t-shirt. Or a mug. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Hogan, P. (2010) The New Significance of Learning: Imagination’s Heartwork. Routledge.

I am SO happy about this book… I feel that is affirming everything I’ve been writing and thinking about in the last few weeks/months!

Hogan opens by acknowledging that education has been almost always been harnessed (hijacked?) by large bodies of interest; religions, governments and corporations. The first universities – Bologna (1088), Paris, Oxford (1167) were Christian institutions. Even at the separation of church and state following the Enlightenment, educational institutions were merely taken over by other (secular) custodians. Many educators appear to take for granted the custodial nature of education (which presumably has a lot to do with who is paying for it), and Hogan calls this the ‘natural view’; one that assumes or accepts education should have extrinsic utility from the perspective of its custodians.

When custodial organisations introduce requirements for measurable performance and impact against their goals, atrophy of the educational endeavour turns to disfigurement. Hogan aims to ask anew how education benefits humanity as an undertaking in its own right; to provide a substantive account of educational practice. He alludes to the educational practice embodied by Socrates and terms this the ‘independent view’. A modern-day example that comes to mind is the School of the Damned (http://theschoolofthedamned.com/) – an anarchic, free postgraduate fine art course of one year in duration that was originally set up as a protest against tuition fees but achieves so much more than that in terms of its educational aims.

Even in this short introduction, Hogan hints at some insights and definitions that resonate so strongly with my own feelings about education that I wonder whether it is best to stop and read something else! I feel like I am sneaking a peek at the answers in the back of the textbook of life itself…

For Hogan, the purpose of education is to uncover and nourish human potential that benefits others as much as the self – this is what I meant in an earlier post by fulfilment of the self in society. He also raises the potential difficulty of cultivating some of a person’s potential while leaving others undiscovered or undeveloped; this is adjunct to my concern – noted in the same post – that we miss out crucial aspects of our humanity if we only focus on and value that which is unique to us as a species. It also resonates with the discussion at the GLAD conference about forcing specialisation on students too soon – or at all. Yes, it is true that without personal specialisation we won’t reach the same dizzy heights of expertise and accomplishment as a species, but as Hogan points out, high personal accomplishment often turns to – or is fed by – greed and selfishness.

In these opening pages we are already given a strong hint of what Hogan thinks it means to be well-educated; to have a vibrant sense of personal identity, to be an open-minded but discerning learner, and to have a sense of responsibility for one’s continuing learning.

…and on that absolutely bloody fabulous life-affirming note, the sun is shining and I am off to take my beautiful little dog for a run.

Barrow, R. and Woods, R. (2006) An Introduction to Philosophy of Education. 4th edition. Routledge.

My last blog post was just a warm-up… there are lots of other thoughts I’ve been chewing over while reading the first half of this book. Here they are… with some resolutions for further reading:

The authors write much of Hirst and his forms and fields of knowledge; a basis for the argument for academic subjects. They present a stronger argument than Young’s. However I still think these forms and fields of knowledge should be discussed explicitly with young learners, and there should be more collaboration between the subjects so that students can experience the coming together of different forms of knowledge, and see the benefit of approaching a particular problem in different ways. My main concern is not that young people are going out in the world unable to draw on different forms of knowledge, but that some forms are too easily ‘dropped’ or avoided going forwards, and the more we keep them separate, the more likely this is to happen. You probably imagine I am talking about maths, but it is also the creative arts that are uppermost in my mind (which may require a loose interpretation of Hirst’s requirements in order to be recognised as a form of knowledge, but perhaps that’s the case for the humanities as well).

Extrapolating this to higher education… Barrow and Woods would, it seems, agree with Hirst that the purpose of HE is to extend disciplinary understanding; to take a particular form (e.g. physical sciences) or field (e.g. engineering) of knowledge further still. If the forms of knowledge are equal to the constituents of a rational mind (I wonder if this is a fair assumption), then the rational mind will surely only become partially developed if we focus on one form or field. Clearly if we broadened our focus we wouldn’t get very far with anything; that’s why I think it is more useful to talk of a collective rational mind. It is my belief that real, sustainable development can only come about if we are better able to work together, understand each other and find common purpose. We cannot send people out into the world believing that there is only one correct way to see and think about the world, and it’s their way.

The authors’ criticism of Hirst is that his theory includes nothing on selection – or value judgements about what is to be learned. They argue that education must have a purpose extrinsic to it; otherwise selection is not possible, and philosophising about education becomes redundant. Do I agree? I’m still not sure. There are clearly opposing schools of thought on whether education has intrinsic value, but I’m beginning to think this argument is circular; how can we agree on what is ‘extrinsic’ to education without agreement on what education is? If we are to say for example that indoctrination is not education for reasons x, y and z, then we start to form an argument for the intrinsic value of education (otherwise it is not education). Or do we? Is this merely an argument for the neutrality of education – learning that does no harm? The training of a suicide bomber wouldn’t fit this definition of education. But what about the CISI Level 7 Diploma in Wealth Management? Or our BA in Advertising? Discuss 😉

At present, I envisage a fuzzy continuum upon which instances of learning are placed relative to their utility to the self in society (i.e. not the selfish self as promoted by Ayn Rand). Also, I would initially have said that fulfillment of the self in society is an extrinsic purpose, but maybe it isn’t; maybe this is inherent in the concept of ‘education’, and is what is meant when people talk of its ‘intrinsic value’.

Perhaps we can’t logically discuss these matters in the abstract as the forms of knowledge are such different beasts. The authors present an argument that the humanities don’t need to be geared to utilitarian ends as they are by their very nature incredibly useful to all of us; enlarging our imaginations and enabling us to recognise our problems as symptomatic of the wider human condition (I liked the McNicol quote – ‘history is not a subject for children’). I’m not sure I agree with the assertion that our educational endeavours should focus on those things that are unique to human beings; the understanding and control of our world – in favour of – for example – making and using tools. I don’t see why we shouldn’t value the latter just because we’re not the only species who uses tools. Are Barrow & Woods suggesting that we get our houses built by chimpanzees? Or that learning how to do these things doesn’t count as education? I am reminded of Barn the Spoon, a local guy with a wood-whittling shop who runs classes in spoon-whittling and tool-making on Hackney Rd – http://barnthespoon.com/. And the lovely people at the Dorset Centre for Rural Skills, where I learned to build with straw bales. Does ‘fully human’ have to mean ‘uniquely human’? If we only focus on and value that which is unique to us as a species, we miss out crucial aspects of our humanity. Imagine if henceforth I decided to just focus on those behaviours that are unique to myself; I might break the blog server and then drown in my own homemade kimchi. It would not be good.

The major issue I have with Barrow & Woods’ central question ‘what does it mean to be well-educated’, is that I think a good education never stops (unless you are deceased – in which case the question is fine). I’d question the use of the past tense and also the passive implication; the extent to which the word ‘educated’ acknowledges the learner’s own agency in the process of their education. Maybe it’s time to resurrect and repurpose the term ‘deep learner’, for one who constantly advances their own ideas on how best to tend to their body, mind, community and environment. For me, this is more meaningful – and relevant to the needs of the individual and society – than describing someone as ‘well educated’.

I’d like to look up the writings of Patrick Nowell-Smith as his approach to the judgement of educational value interests me – in short, identifying skills and activities promoted by the study of disciplines, then justifying why these skills and activities are worthy of promotion. I’m curious to see if any method of selection can transcend the vested interests of teachers, management and funding bodies, and the wider value systems of the time and place. STEM subjects, for example, have an easier time promoting themselves in the present context where controlling natural phenomena and ignoring the negative aspects of technological and scientific progress is seen as necessary to continue the rise in our standard of living (and Nicky Morgan goes on air telling kids not to ‘ruin their lives’ by studying anything else).

I thought – if it’s true that present-day kids pick STEM subjects for vocational reasons, then it wouldn’t be surprising. Co-incidentally, at this moment in the book I noticed the young lad sat opposite me on the train shuffling his UCAS interview paperwork and a brochure from the University of Sheffield Physics department. I asked him why he’d chosen to study physics. He said because it was his favourite subject. He wanted to be an astrophysicist, but if that didn’t work out he could ‘always go into finance’. I told him not to go into finance because that’s where all the c**ts are, and wished him luck with the physics. So there you go. Conclusion from sample size of one – we all want to do something we enjoy for a living, despite knowing that the way to make money is to work with money. Our first choice is doing something we actually like, so that we don’t end up hating ourselves.

Another writer I’d like to read more from is George Steiner; in the 1971 quote on p.51 he is writing about the ‘all-governing axiom of continued advancement’ being questioned for the first time: “the next door opens onto realities ontologically opposed to our sanity”. I’m keen to consider whether certain lines of enquiry should not be pursued at all – weaponry, for example. And a tonne of greyer areas… I need to talk to one of my students about this too – Alex McIntosh, who works in the Centre for Sustainable Fashion as a teacher & researcher. I’m sure he’ll have an interesting perspective on all of this.

To finish… I really think Barrow and Woods need to educate themselves a little (they could watch the documentary Still The Enemy Within for a start) before they dismiss those who are ‘content to dig for coal’ as not enlightened, and their way of life as incongruent with higher order thinking. I am enjoying their book, which is generally well-balanced, and am continuing to find points I can respond to, but passages like this – and their barbed comments about Marxism (e.g. p.62) – betray their elitism.

Here are some thoughts on getting halfway through An Introduction to Philosophy of Education by Robin Barrow & Ronald Woods.

We looked at a chapter of this book last term and I really enjoyed it so I thought I’d buy it. My intention for my T&L assignment is to write a theoretical analysis of the Purpose of Higher Education, and I thought reading this book would help me to philosophise about Higher Education, deepening my thinking into its purpose. According to Barrow (who updated this most recent edition alone), philosophising is a skill; it is not sufficient to know the rules – it needs to be practiced. I think what I do in preparing my posts for this blog – thinking, talking to others, relating what I am reading to contemporary events – is philosophising. But of course I’d like to get better at it. Having got halfway through the book, it doesn’t look like the precepts or rules of philosophising are going to be made explicit – or that the authors are going to give me specific exercises. I guess the idea of this book is to engage with the authors’ own philosophising about education, and respond to it.

Robin Barrow seems to me to be an interesting fellow. I think we would get on famously. I would try to persuade him to replace half his ‘he’s for ‘she’s, to stop peppering his writing with Latin terms like an unbearable toff, and perhaps – if he can bear it – to refer to a female author once in a while. He would in return – I imagine – be totally charming, and summarily dismiss all my suggestions.

The question Barrow and Woods seem to be answering in this book is ‘what is education’. ‘What is education for’ is perhaps a slightly different question, and ‘what is higher education for’ – maybe different again. But this is probably as good a place to start as any, particularly as the authors emphasise educational aims as the basis for all discussion of educational problems.

Interestingly, when Barrow talks of the purpose of philosophy I hear something fundamental; the advancement of our own ideas and the development of our own responsibility, which enables us to lead an authentic existence. He could be talking about the purpose of education – at any stage in life. Or indeed the meaning of life itself. Need I actually have read on?

I think so, yes. There is some great content in this book that had helped me to make better sense of other things I’ve read – especially the sections about Plato and education in early civilisations. There are some parts that don’t seem that relevant at first – e.g. the chapter defining indoctrination – but in hindsight I realise that having a clear idea of what education is *not* is needed to understand what it *is*.

Looking back over my reading notes, I feel that what bothers me most is the lack of discussion of what is to be learned through the education system, and what is to be learned outside it. Here are some examples of what I – in my opinion – feel to be key skills for living well in the 21st century:

1. How to eat (real, fresh, non-processed food, etc.)
2. How to move & rest (good quality sleep, posture, functional movement – e.g. safe & efficient running, sitting, lifting)
3. How to concentrate (e.g. focus, active reading, meditation)
4. How to communicate (e.g. writing, group & 1-2-1 discussion)

My opinion at the moment is that these four skills are of equal importance and are the basis for thinking, learning, the good life and an authentic existence. I think only the last two need to be embedded formally into university curricula, but HEIs can and should do a lot more to help their students to eat well and cultivate good habits of the body. Campus environments are particularly destructive to physical and mental health. Freshers’ Week (and every other week) is an ethanol fest. Campus shops sell caffeine drinks, inverted sugar syrup flapjacks and other highly processed, packaged food that serves the manufacturing industry while being hazardous to health and the environment. ‘Kitchen’ facilities are often not set up for communal cooking, and traditional canteens are being replaced with pizza and sandwich bars. There is a culture of partying into the night and being eternally online. Even the sports clubs are often a mask for yet more excessive drinking. And guess what… student mental health is in decline.

Learning the ways of an academic discipline and making friends for life is all well and good, but if higher education is to play a part in developing our sense of responsibility, I think it should be a place where people learn how to live in a more holistic sense. Maybe I am being a boring health nut…

It is important to note that I hated university; it was easily the worst three years of my life. The nicest thing about it was the rambling society; long weekends away on wild, windy moors, youth hostel log fires and playing a simple game with spoons (called ‘Spoons’). Even this was a struggle at the time. Everyone was rather shy (lack of alcohol?), and I had anorexia, which made me permanently cold and tired – not good for enjoying a country walk.

In the Guardian article linked to above, the CEO of Universities UK is quoted as saying that universities were ‘academic, not therapeutic, communities’. I simply do not believe that is is possible or desirable to compartmentalise academic learning in today’s mass HE system. The level of therapeutic intervention I needed at university was possibly beyond what was available on campus; however it is obvious to me that the living on campus enabled – even normalised – my disordered eating and contributed to my social isolation and the worsening of my psychosis.

If we are to have these ideas about the purpose of higher education that looks at the self and our existence in an holistic way, we need to examine how modern institutions are fit for such a purpose and look at the student lifeworld as a whole; not merely curricula. Not being HE-focused, I doubt I’m going to get such an analysis from this book, but I will press on and see what connections are there to be made. Robin Barrow’s university experience (at Oxford in the 60s) would have been very different to mine. He probably had an awesome time. I’m sure he would have been properly fed at least.

The recent increase in my engagement with politics has coincided with reading certain texts on society and social justice. It’s difficult to say how one might be influencing the other; I suspect it’s a two-way thing. I’m this far (pink bookmark) through David Held’s Introduction to Critical Theory and it is awesome.

In school history lessons we learned about the brave men fighting in the trenches and the horrible things the SS did to the Jews. It seemed over-simplified – good versus evil (a bit like Star Wars, which I didn’t get either) – why would anyone choose to be evil? It didn’t make any sense. I wonder if we should dissolve History as a school subject and instead integrate it into Sociology and Philosophy. What, after all, is the point of teaching History? Surely to enable us to use the lessons of the past to inform the future? In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire proposes than we are are the only species on Earth to possess a sense of our own history; I suspect this ability is not being used to best effect. Much of what the Frankfurt School observed and explained in the first half of the 20th century we can see happening right now in the UK; direct, heavy promotion of capitalism by the state, the ideological division of the working classes and the unemployed, the suppression of the masses through a constant drive to produce. The HE sector has not escaped impact; tuition fees have created not only a consumer culture but also a culture of production as we are required to work harder for our salaries; to teach more students with the same resources.

Coming through very strongly in Held’s second chapter – as Freire also stipulates repeatedly – is that only the oppressed masses can create radical societal change. Lukács (son of wealthy investment banker turned communist philosopher) described the proletariat standpoint as ‘the only one from which the totality can be grasped’.

Like Lukács, Marcuse et al.,I don’t really count myself among the ‘oppressed masses’, but rather one of Marcuse’s middle-class intellectuals, working to form a cohesive, democratic radical Left, and trying to educate the people. This is bloody hard work. It seems that vast swathes of our society are trapped in a paradigm where insults are traded for entertainment. Attempts to educate are often met with abuse (see comment thread under next Youtube link for numerous examples). Natalie Bennett (leader of the Green Party) is often criticised for her performance in media interviews, where she never interrupts, and refuses to sling mud. I suspect – like Freire – she appreciates that the revolution needs to liberate and humanise the oppressors as well as the oppressed. I often think Russell Brand could do with living out this theory too, but that would mean sacrificing column inches. Brand is trying to cut through the distractions and anaesthesis provided by the mainstream media and wake the public up to the inequalities in the system, but he is stuck in a paradox; in order to get the attention his cause deserves, he has to play the very game that he is trying to subvert. It’s not surprising that he is labelled a hypocrite; he must feel very conflicted.

This assumption that societal development requires production and suffering in place of pleasure and self-preservation appears to be deeply embedded in our social consciousness; if anyone questions this they are looked on as mad or stupid. In this Natalie Bennet interview, Andrew Neil is like a dog with a bone about the Citizens’ Basic Income: “but how are you going to PAY for it?”. No-one ever asked that about Trident, or the Iraq war, or bailing out the banks. Probably no-one ever asked that about the first world war (which we still haven’t paid for). The idea that something as fundamental as CBI can be costed as an isolated financial intervention within the existing political paradigm is ludicrous. It is about far more than a financial bottom line; it’s about rethinking production and easing repression, guilt and the aggression we subsequently direct at ourselves and each other. It’s about transcending a system that relies on us being mentally and physically diseased. Unfortunately if you say that it sounds like you’re dodging the question, but if you don’t hold the view that we should all suffer for the sake of production, the question is pointless.

So, given Held and Freire’s writings resonate so strongly with my own concerns, what can I do to help the cause? How can I live these convictions out in my work? Two of my best friends – Kirstine and Naomi – are currently studying for their PhDs. Kirstine teaches philosophy in prisons and has advised the government on prisoners’ right to vote. Naomi teaches politics and sociology to school pupils on Widening Participation projects. They are both fully, directly engaged in the political education of the masses that Marcuse identifies as being the only way forwards in reversing state-capitalism and reducing inequality.

On the face of it, my job doesn’t seem to allow the same kind of impact. I teach art and design teachers in HE; generally creative, autonomous people with a strong sense of their own individuality. I would even describe many of them as radical thinkers. But they do need liberating. Many of them are chronically overworked; made to teach more students with less, expected to cover for absent colleagues, jobs downgraded, hours cut… Three years ago – a decision I now regret being complicit in – much of the PG Cert course was moved online. One result of this was that staff are now expected to do all the coursework in their own time; they are supposed to receive cover for the handful of days in the year they attend face-to-face workshops, but as these are irregular (rather than, say, every Friday morning, as they used to be), it often doesn’t happen in practice.

I have been talking in depth with some of my students about these issues over the last few weeks. I approached this academic year with a strengthened resolution that 14/15 would be the year I didn’t let a single student slip through the net, and I am delighted to say I feel like I already know the new cohort better than I have previous groups. Since taking on the course leadership I have worked to ensure things of worth are actually learned rather than boxes merely ticked. This year my emphasis has been on ensuring the course is accessible and flexible, and students are supported and listened to. What I am hearing is that it is unacceptable to ask teachers to do so much of the course in the time they should be spending with their partners and families, and on their own creative endeavours.

I think this is where I need to go next; arguing the case for 20% time – 0.2FTE paid release throughout the 12-month PG Cert course for full-time teaching staff, and 0.1FTE for part-time staff and those continuing on the MA beyond the Cert. What I find really interesting is that every year I see my students working harder and achieving more, but – as is evident from the recent unit evaluations – increasingly protesting about the workload. Here is the thing; the first unit is entirely peer and self assessed. The students themselves collaboratively decide the required standard, and that standard appears to be getting higher. They want to do more, to learn more, but their jobs and lives prohibit this, and they are frustrated. It seems incredibly short-sighted to suppress this tremendous desire to learn and to innovate.

Dye, V. L. (1999) Is Educational Theory being Valued by Student Teachers in Further & Higher Education? Journal of Vocational Education and Training. 51 (2).

I picked this article to read because it seemed to relate to my questions about the accessibility and impact of the PG Cert course I lead, the first unit of which is all about engagement with and discussion of theory, and relating it to practice.

Vanessa Dye describes the place of theory as “facilitating the neophyte teacher in to the practice of teaching” – i.e. giving them pointers about how teaching should be done. Our PG Cert course is not designed for ‘neophyte’ teachers (although we have a small number doing it alongside a voluntary teaching placement); it’s a CPD course for in-service technicians and lecturers who are generally pretty competent already. So what are we teaching them? We could be cynical and suggest that the course is simply a means of getting our FHEA numbers up – which looks good from a quality/marketing perspective – but if I was that cynical about my job I wouldn’t be doing it. Most would say that we are looking to improve the quality of teaching. However, while my own students often request more input in terms of ‘tips and tricks’ – both at the start of the course when I ask them about their personal goals and expectations, and at the end in the unit evaluation forms, I think we need to be wary of the technocrats who oversimplify the practice of teaching into competencies. On our course, I feel a primary role of the theory is fuel for debate; a starting point for the sharing of practice and the building of supportive networks and effective communities. Theory is a conversation starter.

As Dye suggests, the student teacher must clarify and reconcile theory with practice to legitimate what is of value. You could even say the more experience teachers have to relate to the theory, the more they will value it, and the more they will get out of it. I now find myself considering the paradox of the true neophyte teacher; where does one start? With theory or practice? My own PGCE seemed to be a careful blend of both; a few weeks brushing up on subject knowledge, covering some basic planning frameworks and classroom management techniques, and then a gentle introduction to the classroom; shadowing, team-teaching and then taking on a class or two. Did it work? Initially. I think being back in a learning situation myself – at St Martin’s – raised my confidence instantly. I was enthusiastic, I worked hard and my first placement was a roaring success. But by the end of the year – in complete isolation on my second placement – all that confidence had been shredded. I was too occupied with trying to figure out what the other teachers wanted from me (and what they had against me) to relate theory to practice. There wasn’t any opportunity to anyway; I was instructed to stop planning my own lessons, given a ringbinder of ready-made plans and worksheets, told when and what to shout, and to shout louder. Jarvis’s (1992) framework didn’t really come into it… I had a few teaching books on my bookshelf but by the end I didn’t feel like I had any autonomy to try anything out for myself.

In contrast, in the HE sector – at Bath, and now at UAL – I have been supported and encouraged to develop my own ideas and my practice. It was quite obvious to me that I was initially hired to work full-time on the PG Cert because of my competence in designing and running blended learning courses – where theory and practice had both contributed to practice – rather than my classroom teaching competence. I felt I had little of the latter; a fact I confessed to my line manager at the time, Susan – to which she replied ‘well, you’d better get better at it then, hadn’t you’. Ha. My own development in this area has come about almost by accident; my engagement with theory continuing to focus on learning technology until my MA dissertation showed me a more critical perspective on blended learning, and also that I needed to listen to my students more. I then started the EdD and began to engage with writers like Freire and hooks, which has, I think, further humanised my approach and my teaching self.

I suspect it helps to be quite content in your work, with a strong sense of your own autonomy, in order to put all the politics aside and engage constructively with theory. I’ve been talking to some of my own student teachers in depth over the last few weeks about their experience of the course, and I have been amazed at their resilience; their continued enthusiasm for engaging with theory and developing their practice despite the shit hitting their metaphorical fans. Even though the coursework of the worst affected fell by the wayside, all stressed how much they value the theory, and have shown this in their ability to discuss what they have learned, and in catching up with coursework tasks before the close of the unit.

I think those on our course who would claim to value the theory least would be those who already have well-formed ideas about learning and teaching, and therefore tend to be more critical of the theory. But I still see them engaging deeply with it, and synthesising new ideas – so that doesn’t bother me in the slightest 😉

To conclude – I feel the relationship with theory – and the type of theory to be engaged with – is very different on a CPD-type teaching course than on the initial teacher training programmes that Dye is discussing in this paper. I have made major design changes to promote authentic, personally-relevant engagement with theory rather than the mechanistic, ‘name dropping’ approach described by Jarvis (1992).  Rather than an integrative terminal assignment – as is common on PG Cert courses of this nature – I use regular, collaborative and cumulative coursework tasks that require deep engagement with only one or two sources. This doesn’t suit everyone; a small number of participants would much prefer to have a single essay at the end. But whereas before only these participants would be able to access the higher grades, now everyone gets by with a decent pass at the very least – despite the fact that everyone says how much harder the course has become! So it’s harder, but everyone is doing better… which I like 🙂

Secondary reference: Jarvis, P. (1992) Theory and practice and the preparation of teachers of nursing, Nursing Education Today, 12, pp. 258-265