192 192 - optimistic but sceptical

Affect and Informal Learning Through Adaptation of Workplace Practice

2024-08-01T13:12:00.005+01:00

This paper written by me and my friend Tanya Harris was based on a small-scale study of self-employed artist-practitioners working in Hackney, carried out in the autumn of 2020, focussing on the ways in which their work was affected by the impact of the COVID pandemic. The paper was written for the NORRAG 06 Special Issue NORRAG 06 Special Issue ‘States of Emergency: Education in the Time of COVID-19’, and is structured as a response to a preliminary paper a preliminary paper written by Irving Epstein 'Education and COVID-19 through the Lens of Affect', also published in the NORRAG collection.

Affect and Informal Learning Through Adaptation of Workplace Practice
Jay Derrick, Senior Lecturer, UCL Institute of Education, UK
Tanya Harris, Arts and Culture Educational Consultant, UK

Work is an important context for lifelong learning. Much learning is informal, but nevertheless makes a significant contribution to personal and professional development over time. In workplaces, social relations, and the arrangement, affordances and limitations of the physical environment for productivity, problem-solving and learning are salient. This contrasts with formal contexts for learning, which tend to
foreground official, explicit aspects of curriculum, obscuring features that are tacit, affective and contingent. Each of Epstein’s (this issue) four forms of affect are reviewed in the light of evidence from a qualitative study of adaptations made by freelance creative practitioners to work practices, forced by the COVID-19 pandemic (Derrick & Harris, 2020).

The SOLO project
The East End of London is a base for many self-employed and sole-trader artists and craftworkers, whose work has been particularly disrupted by COVID-19. They are examples of “passionate workers” (McRobbie, 2016), typically concerned about the quality of their work, contributing to the community’s
quality of life, and earning income. McRobbie (2002) sees these attributes and precarity of employment as features of a rapidly changing Creative Industries sector. This group plays a role in the uniqueness of the area, and in its developing economy. SOLO: Surviving or Thriving? was a research project funded by UCL’s Listen and Respond programme. The aim of the project was to explore the pandemic’s impacts on self-employed creative practitioners based in Hackney, and specific changes made to their work in response to the crisis. Extended Zoom interviews with six practising artists enabled them to reflect on their
experiences and feelings during the lockdown, focusing on what they learned and changes they made to work. The three artists whose interviews are referenced in this paper are briefly profiled: VH runs Hackney Shed, an inclusive Theatre Company for children and young people. Lockdown in March 2020 meant the closure of almost every project and activity they were engaged in, including fully rehearsed theatre productions which were just about to start performing to audiences. VH and her staff, in consultation with some young participants, designed a range of new activities which could take place
entirely online. One highlight was a YouTube soap-opera. “We tried doing something different, an online soap opera, which in hindsight was way more work than we anticipated. It’s called Corona-nation Street.”1 PB, a community worker and gigging musician, drew homeless people he saw while on his daily exercise. His jobs had dried up, but he saw this as giving him time for visual art: “It’s changed my work. I’ve just been super creative. I didn’t for one moment feel that it was affecting me in a negative way.” He made collages with his drawings, using photographs of the skyscrapers lining the streets and framing the rough sleepers, and then taught himself to add music to his images learning to use composition apps he downloaded onto his phone. He published them on Instagram. Expressing his feelings about the plight of the homeless, he discovered, like VH, capacities he didn’t realise he had: “I spent an entire day in bed with a pair of headphones on and my massive chunky sausage fingers, trying to write music on an iPhone – that was a revelation, of my level of OCD capabilities.” CS, a photojournalist whose work ceased abruptly, had a chance to talk to his neighbours for the first time while exercising on his street during lockdown: “This is the first time as a community and worldwide, we experienced something like this, and obviously that affects the way we interact and the way we do things.” He began to feel it was important
to act as a witness to events impacting on the very diverse people living on his street. He started taking pictures of his neighbours, inviting them to tell their stories. Encouraged by the responses he received, his serendipitous project gradually became public art via Instagram, leading to an international exhibition and a book: “I’m particularly proud of the way in which it became a community hub; a way for neighbours to
connect and get to know each other.”

Intensities of encounter
The experience of COVID-19 has created what Deleuze and Guattari (1968) term intensive encounters. These generate first confusion, then thought, and a process of constructing an account which fits reality. These kinds of intensive encounters provide a way of describing the work of artists and educators,
before and after lockdown. The pandemic, while creating difficult challenges, provided new materials and conditions for work, through which the artists were able to produce new kinds of intensive encounters. For CS, this grew directly out of new and richer encounters with his neighbours; for VH, highly pressured team-working was required to redesign their project, requiring new modes of rehearsal and performance: “It was a huge learning curve, because none of us know how to do video editing. We’re downloading software and just trying to learn how to do it – it’s not in any of our skill sets.” Epstein (this issue) equates the concept of intensity of encounter with “direct and authentic contact”, pointing to the dramatically increased reliance on digital applications for sustaining formal education during the pandemic, and
the impossibility of meeting face-to-face. He argues “the performativity embedded in remote learning technologies is a questionable substitute for the interpersonal interactions that comprise typical classroom activity.” VH suggests the picture is more nuanced. The online activities she and her staff hurriedly developed afforded new kinds of educational encounters for both facilitators and users. These are not
inauthentic or less “intense”. Unexpected benefits for her users emerged: in a real sense distance was abolished for children who lived too far away to participate in person. The soap opera format they adopted was not compromised by irregular attendance, as a standard theatre production would have been: “We have a handful of young people that got rehoused and they were too far away. But once we started
delivering online, they were able to start coming again. They were members that we’d lost that were able to then join us again because the distance wasn’t an issue.” This suggests that equating online with pejorative senses of remote in relation to learning may simply reinforce the inequalities reproduced by the formal and static institutional structures of education systems; the “intensity of learning encounters” is no longer necessarily a function of physical distance: “Learning can be online but it can’t be remote – learning happens in your head and your body” (Harrison, 2020).

Meaning-making and assemblages
Meaning-making is not confined to formal educational contexts but takes place as part of and through all human activity – as a central element of Arendt’s (1958) concept of Vita Activa. The products of meaning-making are referred to by Deleuze & Guattari (1987) as “assemblages”, continually created anew, through processes of “coding”, “stratifying”, and “territorialising”. Work consists of continuous individual and collective meaning-making which entails direct engagement with the physical world, through which new
assemblages are brought into being. Insofar as learning and meaning-making are coterminous, the pandemic created conditions in which the practitioners in the study were thrown into a curve of intensive learning and meaningmaking, regarding their own capacities and aspects of their specialist practices. VH gained a new understanding of the potential and resilience of her organisation – co-constructed with funders, trustees, colleagues and young clients. The participants in the soap-opera project collaboratively created new meanings in relation to production and performance, demonstrating capacity for hard work and resilience in the face of a crisis. CS contributed to the creation of new modes of communication, recognition and identity for his neighbours and himself, extending their potential for the creation of new meanings and assemblages. PB sees the pandemic as a reminder of the danger of hubris: “Ask anyone
who had somebody die of AIDS in the eighties. Something not human comes along and wipes out this arrogant belief that we’re in control of a system.”

Contingency
Contingency meant that a rapid period of learning was suddenly imperative for VH and her team: they learned about the design of new modes of performance, online teaching and learning with young students with special needs, and how to use digital video conferencing software. The lockdown forced new conditions on both VH and SC. In different ways within circumstances which simultaneously provided new constraints and opportunities, each shaped their work. PB on the other hand deliberately cultivates both contingency and agility to enrich his work: “Sometimes you need to stop drawing the figure that you know, and just scrawl, lose your skill a bit – give it freshness. You won’t lose the stuff you’ve learned, you’ll find some new avenue for it. It’s a survival strategy. You put your ideas in a suitcase, and if you have to leave suddenly, you can reopen that suitcase and there’s your culture and there’s your ideas. If you can’t put it in a suitcase, it’s not a very good idea.”

Conclusion
The phenomenological view of workplace practice supported by this study suggests that the contingent aspects of any situation are always simultaneously both inhibiting and enabling, and these effects are “entangled” (Derrick, 2020). In this view, work consists of collective manipulation, exploitation
and management of these entanglements, through the process of which practice is shaped and practitioners are developed, for better or worse. This dynamic view, put into the spotlight by the disruptive experience of the pandemic, offers an alternative account not just of artists’ practice, but of the complex and
adaptive work of educators, whatever setting they are working in, suggesting that, to some extent, we are all teachers. This counters the idea that teachers are merely conduits for the “delivery” of pre-packaged curricula to students thirsty for the “acquisition” of knowledge (Sfard, 1998), suggesting rather that, like creative sector practitioners, their role is to design and facilitate participatory schemas for intensive encounters and meaning-making.

Footnote 1. This refers humorously to a long-running British TV soap opera called Coronation Street

References
Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1968, 1994 ed.). Difference and repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987, 2004 ed.). A thousand plateaus. London: Bloomsbury.
Derrick, J. (2020). ‘Tacit pedagogy’ and ‘entanglement’: practice-based learning and innovation. Journal of Workplace Learning, 32(4), 273-284.
Derrick, J., & Harris, T. (2020). SOLO: Surviving or thriving? London: UCL.
Harrison, B. (2020, November 6). Why there is nothing remote about online learning. TES.
McRobbie, A. (2002). From Holloway to Hollywood: happiness at work in the new cultural economy? In P. du Gay & M. Pryke (Eds.), Cultural Economy. London: Sage.
McRobbie, A. (2016). Be creative: Making a living in the new culture industries. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27(2), 4-13.

Machine evolution in the absence of humanity: The Invincible (Polish: Niezwyciężony) by Stanislav Lem

2024-07-29T18:18:00.002+01:00

The Invincible by Stanislav Lem is one of the finest ‘hard’ sci-fi novellas I know, absolutely as good as his other much better-known story, Solaris. It was written in the 1960s, and is a detective story concerning the mysterious loss of a spaceship and all its crew on a deserted planet. It’s told from the perspective of the commanders of a second space ship, called the Invincible, similar to the first, which is sent to investigate the disappearance. It reads mostly as halfway between a scientific report and a regular novel, very characteristic of one of Lem’s many different writing styles – sober, concerned primarily with factual occurrences, though also recording emotions in so far as these indicate the strangeness of the circumstances – the style of The Invincible is almost identical to that of Solaris, and to most of his Pirx the Pilot stories – Lem was after all a trained and sophisticated scientist.

As the story unfolds Lem gradually introduces the amazing idea of a process of competitive machine evolution carrying on for millions of years, with no human or other sentient involvement whatsoever, proposing that if the initial conditions are right, then the outcome of that evolutionary struggle would be the simplest and smallest kind of modular ‘device’, powered by the most widely available source of energy (solar power), but having the capability to join together with millions of identical others to form enormous ensembles, able to generate gigantic magnetic field gradients which enable them to ‘fly’ and to attack and disable other machines, which it detects through their electrical activity. Over time the remnants of their original programming become a kind of radically simplified group memory, including how to disable different types of potential competitor – and this includes sentient beings too – there are no animals or plants on the land areas of the planet, but there are in the sea, though these flee quickly if they detect any movement on land. The crew’s investigations lead to some of them being completely disabled by being subjected to massive magnetic field gradients, which wipe their consciousness, effectively reducing them to the state of babies, behaving completely anarchically and unable to look after themselves – and this is what has befallen the previous crew. Lem’s idea is that this form of ‘device’ might have evolved through millions of years of struggle for resources and power between different types of machines left behind on the planet by sentient beings, the key thing being that in this struggle and in the conditions pertaining on this planet, it wasn’t superior consciousness that won out, but simplicity, small size and flexibility. And he keeps reminding us that this process could take place in the complete absence of what the singularity merchants would call ‘consciousness’. The original machines that started the process were programmed to find resources and to protect themselves, whatever their other functions, and if necessary by competing with other machines: this programming was the driver for the evolutionary process the human scientists on the Invincible eventually hypothesise, before leaving the planet having recognised that the only way to ‘manage’ the situation would be to destroy all, or nearly all the tiny ‘machines’, which would effectively mean destroying the planet. Very interesting in the context of discussions and debates about the future direction of AI in the real world.

It’s impressive how absolutely topical the theme of this story is, written over half a century ago, but how in one respect at least it is of its time and its specific place in Iron-Curtain Europe – there are no women in the story, and no women are even mentioned. At least the US film version of Solaris made some of the crew women, and one of them black. Furthermore, Lem’s space ‘workers’ –always hyper-professional and who always proceed according to agreed protocols as far as they can – are Eastern-block explorer-scientists, apparently culturally neutral, egalitarian and non-competitive compared to their western counterparts, but as far as I can remember (I’ve been reading and collecting his stuff ever since seeing the Russian film of Solaris (directed by Andrei Tarkovski) while I was at university in the early 70s), absolutely always male….

I wrote this having forgotten about my earlier post on it, which is similar but not exactly the same.

Beware technological determinism!

2022-10-07T20:08:00.001+01:00

Dmitry-Kostyukov: Zora-the-Robot-Care-Giver-Wellcome-Photography-Prize

‘Social science has been largely a study of the ways in which humans are not free: the way that our actions and understandings might be said to be determined by forces outside our control. Any account which appears to show human beings collectively shaping their own destiny, or even expressing freedom for its own sake, will likely be written off as illusory, awaiting ‘real’ scientific explanation; or if none is forthcoming (why do people dance?), as outside the scope of social theory entirely. This is one reason why most ‘big histories’ place such a strong focus on technology. Dividing up the human past according to the primary material from which tools and weapons were made (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) or else describing it as a series of revolutionary breakthroughs (Agricultural Revolution, Urban Revolution, Industrial Revolution), they then assume that the technologies themselves largely determine the shape that human societies will take for centuries to come – or at least until the next abrupt and unexpected breakthrough comes along to change everything again.
Now, we are hardly about to deny that technologies play an important role in shaping society. Obviously technologies are important: each new invention opens up social possibilities that had not existed before. At the same time, it’s very easy to overstate the importance of new technologies in setting the overall direction of social change.’ (David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021, pp498-499)

Prospect Cottage, Dungeness

2022-08-16T07:50:00.005+01:00

Finally fulfilled a long term ambition to see Derek Jarman’s cottage and it’s garden on the weird shingle expanses of Dungeness, on the edge of Romney Marsh. Strange he should have included the poem by Donne (see my last post from ages ago) - this seems much more like a piece of deliberate artifice, whereas the other features, though clearly carefully arranged, appear much more to be found objects.

No Man is an Iland....

2021-05-08T17:48:00.002+01:00

‘No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’ (Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII, 1624)

Iron and Nickel

2021-05-08T12:11:00.005+01:00

Recently I re-read two 'stories', Iron and Nickel, from Primo Levi's The Periodic Table – I can’t remember how long ago it was that I last read this book – I didn’t have a clear recollection of either story, so I must have read them too quickly. The book was a very early edition given to me by a house-mate in about 1983. Both stories in different ways are absolutely wonderful, essential reading for everyone, as Saul Bellow says on the cover. Nickel is interesting but Iron is both moving and inspiring. The two stories, in different ways, bear on my focus of interest these days, about practice being the point of interaction between humans and the world, and the (for Levi, always moral) implications of this for the way we understand what happens to us, what we decide to do, and how we make the best of things. The name Nickel comes from the German for ‘little devil’…. – this section reminds me of an powerful episode in the amazing tour de force historical novel by Neil Stephenson, Quicksilver, an episode which takes place in the silver mines of Germany at the dawn of the modern age, and that the word dollar comes from thaler, one of the early modern currencies, that name deriving from the German word for valley (thal).

The Invincible: Lem's tale of one possible process of technological evolution

2021-05-08T09:30:00.003+01:00

I have just re-read The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem, one of the finest ‘hard’ sci-fi novellas I know, absolutely as good as his other much better-known story, Solaris. It was written in the early 1960s, and is structured as either a detective story or, if you prefer, a report of a scientific investigation concerning the unexplained loss of a spaceship and all its crew on a deserted planet. It’s told from the perspective of the commanders and crew of a second space ship, called The Invincible, similar to the first, which has been sent to investigate the disappearance. It reads as halfway between a scientific report and a regular novel, very characteristic of one of Lem’s many different writing styles – sober, concerned primarily with factual occurrences, though also recording emotions in so far as these indicate the strangeness of the circumstances – the style ofTthe Invincible is almost identical to that of Solaris, and some of his Pirx the Pilot stories – Lem was after all a trained and sophisticated scientist.

As the story unfolds Lem gradually introduces the amazing idea of a process of competitive machine evolution carrying on for millions of years, with no human or other sentient involvement whatsoever, hypothesising that if the initial conditions are right, then the outcome of that evolutionary struggle would be the simplest and smallest kind of ‘device’, powered by the most widely available source of energy (solar power), but having the capability to join together with millions of identical others to form enormous ensembles, able to generate gigantic magnetic field gradients which enable them to ‘fly’ and to attack and disable other machines, which it recognises through their electrical activity. Over time the remnants of their original programming become a kind of radically simplified group memory, including how to disable different types of potential competitor – and this includes sentient beings too – there are no animals or plants on the land areas of the planet, but there are in the sea, though these flee quickly if they detect any movement on land. The crew’s investigations lead to some of them being completely disabled by being subjected to massive magnetic field gradients, which wipe their consciousness, effectively reducing them to the state of babies, behaving completely anarchically and unable to look after themselves – and this is what has befallen the previous crew. Lem’s idea is that this form of ‘device’ might have evolved through millions of years of struggle for resources and power between different types of machines left behind on the planet by sentient beings, the key thing being that in this struggle and in the conditions pertaining on this planet, it wasn’t superior consciousness that won out, but simplicity, small size and flexibility. And he keeps reminding us that this process could take place in the complete absence of what the singularity merchants would call ‘consciousness’. The original machines that started the process were programmed to find resources and to protect themselves, whatever their other functions, and if necessary by competing with other machines: this programming was the driver for the evolutionary process the human scientists on the Invincible eventually hypothesise, before leaving the planet having recognised that the only way to ‘manage’ the situation would be to destroy all, or nearly all the tiny ‘machines’, which would effectively mean destroying the planet.

Very interesting in the context of discussions and debates about the future direction of AI in the real world, and of the MSc module I'm teaching this term on AI, Work and Learning, about the developing social impacts of AI on workplaces, with my colleague David Guile. It’s impressive how absolutely topical the theme of this story is, written over half a century ago, but how in one respect at least it is of its time and its specific place in Iron-Curtain Europe – there are no women in the story, and no women are even mentioned. At least the US film version of Solaris made some of the crew women, and one of them black. Furthermore, Lem’s space ‘workers’ –always hyper-professional and always proceed according to protocols as far as they can – are Eastern-block explorer-scientists, apparently culturally neutral, egalitarian and non-competitive compared to their western counterparts, but as far as I can remember (I’ve been reading and collecting his stuff ever since seeing the Russian film of Solaris while I was at university in the early 70s), absolutely always male.

An interesting attempt to imagine the tiny 'robotic' devices encountered by Horpach, Rohan and their colleagues on Regis 111 - but they look much bigger than I imagine them. There are hints on the web of an animated film of The Invincible being in the pipeline, but nothing definite that I can find.

Lifelong Learning policy at a turning point in the UK?

2020-01-07T11:41:00.001+00:00

(This piece was published on the UCL Institute of Education blog on 12th December 2019)

Exactly 100 years ago, it was argued in the 1919 Report, published by the Government Ministry for Reconstruction after World War 1, that Adult Education was essential for a confident, fair and democratic society. Its central recommendation was:

‘Adult education must not be regarded as a luxury for a few exceptional persons here and there… but a permanent national necessity, an inseparable aspect of citizenship, and therefore should be both universal and lifelong’.

Three separate Commissions on Lifelong Learning have published their reports in the last few weeks, and a fourth, a Parliamentary Inquiry, published its oral and written evidence in October. The timing of these reports – by the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, and also a politically-independent Centenary Commission, is striking. Rates of participation in learning activities among adults have fallen dramatically over the last decade, and the decline is sharpest among those who have benefitted least from their schooling.

We have also had research reports on the impact of adult learning from nearly 40,000 UNISON workers and from more than 5,000 Workers Education Association students; and if that isn’t enough, UNESCO’s 4^th Global Report on Adult Learning and Education was also published last week.

The trends they reveal are part of the broader decline in the social and cultural fabric over the past decade. They are a key issue in the general election, but they emerged first in the 1990s, when successive governments decided that public funds should be focussed on education for employment and for formal qualifications. Tightly-focussed outcomes and test results, rather than participation, became the primary indicator of value for money, and as a result much of the loose network of community organisations and local authority services which directly or indirectly supported adult learning lost its funding. Alison Wolf argued against these trends in 2002:

‘We have almost forgotten that education ever had any purpose other than to promote growth. To read government documents of even fifty years ago…gives one a shock. Of course their authors recognized that education had relevance to people’s livelihoods and success, and to the nation’s prosperity. But their concern was as much, or more, with values, citizenship, the nature of a good society, the intrinsic benefits of learning.’

However, things got steadily worse: since 2010, government funding for adult education has been cut by 40%, and nearly 500 public libraries have closed during the same period as a result of the policy of austerity.

The original 1919 Report, and its 2019 descendant, both argue explicitly and cogently that the whole social and cultural infrastructure, including clubs, theatres, libraries, allotments, parks and museums, all of which have suffered funding cuts, needs to be understood as supporting opportunities for adults to learn. This is because much of the most significant learning is informal, incidental and takes place as a result of participation in a wide range of activities, none of which need necessarily to be purposefully or wholly educational. They maintain that a broad and generous conception of adult education and its social value, and its integration with more or less all the organisations and institutions of civil society, is desperately needed now, no less than it was in 1919.

The UNESCO report also sees adult learning infrastructure as a central feature of a healthy democracy, as a central element of the ‘safety net’ supporting individuals at risk, for example, of homelessness or loneliness, as well as a stepping stone to more formal and certificated learning leading to improved employment prospects. It assesses progress made by 159 countries (sadly not the UK, which did not take part) against 30 Recommendations for Adult Learning and Education published in 2015, which support the Belem Framework for Action on ‘Harnessing the Power and Potential of Adult Education’ adopted by UNESCO exactly ten years ago.

For me, the most encouraging aspect of this sequence of global policy documents on Lifelong Learning is that they highlight clearly and explicitly the importance of informal networks for learning, not simply provision of formal courses; and of participation as the key goal for productive policy frameworks, rather than narrowly-defined commodifiable outcomes. The value of informal learning in supporting broad social, political and economic goals within a participatory and informed democracy, has not been taken seriously enough since 1919 to warrant much attention from policymakers, but I for one hope that December 2019 may be turning point for Lifelong Learning in the UK.

How about a Hawkeye-type system for monitoring and promoting truth-telling in the public sphere?

2019-11-19T12:22:00.002+00:00

This is a proposal for instituting a procedure which will allow members of the public to challenge the truth of statements made by public figures in public contexts.

Once a challenge has been made, a panel made up of individuals accredited by a new national body would judge whether the challenge was justified. The job of these individuals would be similar to that of magistrates or judges in legal cases, but the idea is that this procedure would operate relatively informally and flexibly, to avoid costly and time-consuming legal proceedings, as far as possible. If the panel upholds the challenge, the perpetrator would be given a first warning. If the panel finds that the challenge was not justified, the challenger would be given a first warning, as in the situation of drivers found to have broken the speed limit. Anyone who receives, say, three warnings would be banned, either from making public statements, or from challenging such statements, for 5 years. Being found to have made untrue statements three times, then, would in effect prevent a politician or columnist practising their profession, so they would have to resign. Mischievous challenges would also be discouraged.

The system would not be perfect, and panels may often difficulty separating statements purporting to be of fact, with statements of opinion. There will also need to be a working definition of 'the public domain' - but I see no great difficulty with this - it is illegal already for advertisers to mislead the public. However the primary purpose of such a system would be to promote the importance of truth telling in the public sphere, and to highlight the damage that lying and misleading the public can do to democratic culture and institutions. Difficult cases would produce debate about honesty in the public sphere, which over time would improve the quality of our political culture, and the probity of public life.

The popularity of such systems in cricket and tennis, which have now become valuable additions to the tactics of the game, and have clearly captured the enthusiasm of spectators and fans, suggests that the proposed system might also capture public attention, thereby undermining cynical but fashionable 'fake news' trends, and hopefully reinvigorating our democratic culture.

Inspiration

2019-10-17T18:48:00.001+01:00

‘Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working’. (Picasso)

Reality is unpredictable: a thriller that aims to minimise suspense

2019-10-17T18:32:00.000+01:00

‘In this film [The Passenger] I have instinctively looked for narrative solutions that are different from my usual ones. It's true, the basic format may be the same, but as I was shooting, every time I realized that I was moving on familiar grounds I tried to change track, to deviate from the norm, to resolve in some other way certain moments of the story. Even the way in which I had these realizations was strange. I noticed a sort of sudden disinterest in what I was doing, and that was the sign that I had to move off in another direction. We are talking about an area which is fraught with doubts, anxieties, and sudden, enlightening flashes. The only certain thing was my need to reduce the suspense to a minimum, even though there had to be some left - and I do think some has been left, even if it is an element of indirect, filtered suspense. It would have been very easy to make a thriller. I had the pursuers and the pursued; nothing was missing, but it would have been banal.’ (Michelangelo Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, p346)

· Q: ‘Why do you have such a strong preference for location shooting?’

MA: ‘Because reality is unpredictable. In the studio everything has been foreseen’.

(Michelangelo Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, p334)

Common sense as activity rather than knowledge - Hannah Arendt

2019-10-17T18:17:00.001+01:00

· “Common sense”, in Arendt’s use, is activity rather than knowledge; that is, it is something one does, not something one has. Moreover, unlike the ordinary term, Arendtian common sense is not self-evident but self-altering. “Common sense” as the “sixth sense” requires individuals to engage with others in the act of perception, sharing he world in a way that corrects and amends subjective insight. Because one’s bodily and social position in the world generates one’s perspective of reality, sharing corrects best when these positions overlap lest. There is no absolute truth to be achieved in this process – that is no “correct” way to view reality – but there is, in her words, a “control instance” against “errors”. Therefore, the pariah, constrained by law and custom to associate only with those most like him, is deprived of degrees of correction and alteration or, to use the language of taste she invokes, refinement. Encountering difference is the lever of correction. Therefore, any group formed around likeness, whether that be shared ideological commitment or national belonging, risks adopting these same perceptual restrictions by shielding themselves against different perceptions of reality. When Arendt advises the pariah to stand apart from the intimate society of the pariah group, she does not recommend self-sufficiency but plurality – that is, bringing the perceiving self into contact with non-intimate, differently situated others. The politics of plurality and common sense requires, then, something like and aesthetic of the fact, which is a discipline of perception as well as a practice of representation. (Deborah Nelson, Tough Enough, University of Chicago Press 2017, p77-78).

This thought reflects perfectly a whole series of ideas I've been working on in my thesis on how innovation emerges from everyday social and work practice. The key element implied in Arendt's perspective is that of 'for better or worse' - we can't be absolutely sure of the outcomes of our actions, and that uncertainty allows for the unexpected or unplanned, whether desired, unwanted, or completely new.

Nelson's book, which discusses a series of twentieth century women thinkers, each with a reputation for a kind of distancing toughness, including Simone Weil, Joan Didion, Diane Arbus, Susan Sontag and Mary McCarthy as well as Hannah Arendt, is highly recommended.

‘Tacit pedagogy’ in practice-based learning and innovation in one FE college workplace

2019-07-01T21:27:00.002+01:00

This is the guide text and the slides for the paper I gave at the 13^th Journal of Vocational Education and Training (JVET) Conference Oxford, June 2019.

In the event my laptop didn't work so I had to improvise the talk, but this gives a good idea of what I meant to say!

Full title:
The role of ‘tacit pedagogy’ in practice-based learning and innovation in one FE college workplace: the importance of informal interactions within and beyond specialist teaching teams.

Hello, in this talk I’ll be looking at an FE college not so much from the perspective of the content of its work, but as a workplace, as an environment for work, learning and potential innovation. It will primarily reference literature on practice and on workplace learning. My talk is based on a doctoral thesis study which compares the situation of practitioner teams in two workplaces in different occupational sectors, one of which, a General Further Education college in England, I focus on in this talk. I will be exploring some of the ways learning and innovation can emerge through practice, and focussing mostly on informal rather than formal aspects of work, though it is also concerned with the interaction of these dimensions.

A bit about me: I’ve worked for much of my career in adult and further education, for a long time as an adult literacy and numeracy teacher. About 20 years ago I started getting involved with workplace learning when my college won a contract to design and deliver basic skills to employees of London Underground. 10 years ago I started teaching part-time on the post-compulsory sector teacher education programme at the Institute of Education, and now I teach and research there full-time. I have been arguing for ome time that research in teacher education ought to be paying much more attention to the generic literature on workplace learning, of which there is a great deal that is relevant to the training and development of teachers, most of which in practice takes place in the workplace.

I completed my doctorate at the Institute of Education earlier this year, and this talk is based on my doctoral thesis.

I start by setting the theoretical context for my study, looking at changes in our generic understanding of practice, learning and innovation. I’ll then briefly outline the methodological approach used for the study and its main research questions, and describe the specific college context where data was collected. The main part of the talk will be a presentation of some of the findings of the study, my interpretation of those findings, and I finish with some tentative implications, both theoretical and practical. The presentation concludes with a list of relevant references.

As in so many other areas of social science, in relation to our understanding of practice, learning and innovation, we need to challenge the long dominance of positivist epistemological assumptions about knowledge and its relationship with the world. These assumptions still shape much of our thinking about work, learning and innovation, and are seen as ‘common sense’ in most economic and policy development communities. Jensen and his colleagues in their discussion of workplace learning and innovation interestingly distinguish between modes of knowledge they categorise as ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’ (STI) and ‘Doing, Utilising and Interacting’ (DUI), and argue that DUI knowledge is badly under-researched, probably because it is more difficult to study – that is, to observe, record and measure objectively.

More recent researchers have argued that informal dimensions of knowledge, learning and practice are essential for a fuller phenomenological understanding of both workplace learning and innovation: in short, of the processes through which workplaces evolve and practitioners develop their expertise.

Some examples of these more recent practice-based accounts are given on the slide above, and these have informed my study and my approach to analyzing its findings.

Another important theoretical framework which informed my study was the ‘Productive Systems’ framework of Felstead et al (2009). ‘Productive systems comprise the totality of social relationships entailed in processes of commodity production….it traces the overall configuration of social relationships within economic systems, stretching from individuals and small work groups through to global financial and political systems’ (Felstead et al 2009, p18). In particular, the productive systems framework affords researchers a way of understanding how power works within and through the interconnected networks and hierarchies of which individual workplaces are parts. In relation to the college in my study, it provides a powerful explanation for the limitations of its scope to act expansively and innovatively, due to financial constraints and externally-set targets and quality assurance criteria.

The college which was one of the focusses of my study is a medium-sized general further education college distinguished in two ways: it is rated outstanding by the government’s education inspection agency, and it has had a very stable senior management: only 5 principles in over fifty years. Three groups of teachers were recruited for the study: specialists in Hair and Beauty, Motor Mechanics and Humanities.

This slide outlines the methodological approach adopted for the study.

The data was analysed thematically, using codes which were based on the literature of workplace learning and innovation but also codes that emerged from the data. A significance coefficient for each code was calculated from the frequency of occurrence and spread of occurrences across all the interview transcripts, and these coefficients were ranked so that the most significant were clearly identified as the basis of noteworthy findings.

The slide above shows the Research questions adopted for my study.

I hope there are enough copies of the sheet with some representative quotations from the interview and focus group data, to give a flavour of this particular context for practice and a sense of the practitioners who took part.

Some findings from the WBC data can be seen on this slide. The overall picture won’t be surprising to colleagues in this room, but note that the Productive Systems framework provides a convincing generic explanation for what was found: for WBC, there is little scope for variation or innovation within the horizontal ‘stages of production’. At the same time, the college management’s scope for innovation is highly circumscribed by the vertical ‘structures of production’, which act like a straitjacket: rising targets accompanied by increasingly reduced funding, and compliance-driven external inspection and quality control. There was evidence that the college management wanted to organize the workplace to allow staff to work as autonomous professionals as far as possible, but came up continually against external constraints seemingly designed to prevent this. The practitioners in the study repeatedly expressed their respect for their senior managers as highly competent, based on their record over a long period during which the college was recognized nationally as successful, and critically was not identified as being at risk financially, unlike many, if not most, other similar FE colleges In England.

What is significant for this presentation is the difference found between the college and the other organisation in the study, which at present at least is far less restricted than WBC, both financially and in terms of its objectives – its ‘structures of production’ are looser and far less constraining, which allows it to give more autonomy, professional license, and time to its teams of expert practitioners, and to be far less dependent on formal procedures: all of which seem to support their practitioners to produce better work.

The slide above presents three modes of practice observed in both organisations, though to different degrees, that the data suggests are important for both learning and innovation.

'Writing up' denotes any form of representation: from the very informal - handwritten notes, jottings, drawings, lists, charts, scribbled equations, etc, to the highly formal: academic papers or reports for publication. Peer review denotes any form of shared evaluation, however informal, of these representations. It might include momentary conversations, but also formal written feedback or review documents, and every kind of feedback conversation in between. Crossing boundaries refers to any incidence of ‘going beyond’ for this peer review feedback: the team, specialization boundaries, departmental or organizational boundaries. The key point is that all these modes of practice ideally need to be present, or at least possible, from the completely informal, transient and casual, to the highly explicit and formalized.

The data suggests that the differences of degree observed between the two organisations in relation to these modes of practice is due primarily to the different ‘structures of production’ experienced by the two organisations. The teams in WBC had little time for reflection, or informal thinking and talking about their work, let alone reviewing it or looking outside their organisational boundaries for ideas, except, for example, on the occasions when they decided collectively to come in and work informally on a Saturday (cf Orr’s photo-copier technicians having breakfast together outside of work time.)

The pressured political and financial environment of the college has the effect of reducing the scope of the organization as a whole to provide the cultural and material conditions that would tend to support and enable these practices, but it is striking how the teacher teams try to find ways to get around these restrictions in order to practice in these ways, even if it means working in their own time, or, as in one case, paying for their own training so that they could design a new programme of study in camouflage make-up.

The importance of these three modes of practice for innovation is demonstrated much more clearly and directly in the other organization, but is still evident in WBC, which, the data suggests, would in different circumstances, be enabled to be more expansive and innovative. The differences observed in the two organisations are evidence that change and innovation in response to shifts in the external environment, whether these changes are physical, ecological, technological, social or political, is made materially more difficult for organisations and for practitioners by centralized, highly-specified, standardised and compliance-based systems of funding and accountability – this appears to be a particular theme of this conference….

My thesis offers two theoretical concepts which I suggest help us to a more nuanced understanding of practice-based learning and innovation, which I see as evidenced by this study, and as a development in particular of Guile’s theory of ‘recontextualisation’, Gherardi’s view of innovation as arising from the ‘constant refinement of practice’ and Fuller et al’s idea of a ‘cause’ as a motivating factor for development and change in practice.

The first of these is ‘tacit pedagogy’. This is proposed as a generic term for key aspects of practice ignored by positivist perspectives, due to their resistance to clear identification and codification, to being abstracted from their context, and to being ‘pinned down’ in a static model of practice. These are essential elements of a dynamic and developmental account of practice in any domain or context, in which reflection, review and learning, mostly informal, is an integral feature and in which innovation is always a potential outcome.

The tacit pedagogy of a particular context clearly includes Jensen et al’s informal mode of knowledge and innovation (2007), but it also includes explicit STI knowledge too, because even formal, codified aspects of the context act tacitly, and have tacit effects on practitioners. Guile’s account of ‘recontextualisation’, for example, highlights the regular team-working process in which one practitioner might propose a course of action in relation to a particular task or problem. This stage of the process corresponds to the ‘writing-up’ mode of practice referred to earlier – it is the offering of a representation of practice, in words or in some other appropriate form. She may provide reasons for this proposal, and these reasons are then evaluated by her colleagues, who assess its reasonableness on the basis of their own understanding and expertise. They may agree with it, or make amendments, or reject it and make an alternative proposal. This corresponds to the ‘peer review’ mode of practice identified earlier. All participants in these negotiations are making use of knowledge which is tacit, embodied and affective, in addition to explicit knowledge, in coming to judgements on initial proposals and on giving reasons for possible amendments or alternatives to it. Soliciting critical review and evaluation from beyond immediate team members would constitute the ‘crossing boundaries’ mode of practice – this is valuable in terms of optimizing the resources of knowledge and experience brought to bear on the problem, but also to guard against teams getting stuck in a rut and reinforcing bad habits in simply repeating practice rather than continually reviewing and renewing it.

‘Tacit pedagogy’ therefore delineates a possibility space that is always present within practice: its outcomes are never wholly determined, and it is this indeterminacy which allows us to account for unplanned outcomes, both positive (innovation) and negative (accidents).

It is important to bear in mind that there is no implication here that that changes in practice and practitioner learning produced through these complex, fluid and uncertain processes are necessarily changes for the better. Whether innovations and/or learning are beneficial or not and whether they are seen as practically feasible and sustainable, are political and ecological questions: change is always provisional, and further change or improvement is always possible.

I propose a second concept I propose is ‘entanglement’. This idea is elaborated in detail by Barad (2007), who argues from the perspective of science that ‘the primary ontological unit is not independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties, but rather, phenomena.’ What is argued here is that phenomena are always distorted and fragmented by ‘rational’ thought, because though we are able to distinguish oppositions and paired distinctions, and though these help us, not just to engage with experience, but to share, shape and change it, experience is never reflected truly by these distinctions and mental bifurcations. Rather, the discrete elements of experience we perceive rationally are in reality 'entangled'.

The argument, then, is that these dualities are not phenomenologically distinct; and that practitioners individually and collectively manage the ‘entanglement’ of these categories in practice, making different judgements to inform their actions at different times.

I’m not suggesting that there is no value in making use of these intellectual distinctions: rather it is a reminder that such conceptual distinctions distort practice.

I hope to be able to test this conceptual framework using a similar methodology in different occupational domains and contexts for practice, as shown on the slide.

Particularly interesting to investigate would be practitioners working in what has been described as ‘digital crowdworking’ – situations where practitioners are self-employed contract workers, working remotely on collaborative digital projects, as this type of precarious employment becomes more common.

Thank you. The last two slides are references. I’d very much welcome questions, and can be contacted at j.derrick@ucl.ac.uk

Twitter: @JayDerrickIOE

How to build the social and work environment for inclusive Lifelong Learning

2019-05-03T16:34:00.003+01:00

The Centenary Commission on Adult Education, chaired by Dame Helen Ghosh, is currently considering “the provision for, and possibilities of, Adult Education in Great Britain” and will be making recommendations in a report to be issued in November, on the centenary of the Ministry of Reconstruction’s Adult Education Committee report, published in the aftermath of the First World War, in 1919, and in which Richard Tawney, Ernest Bevin and Albert Mansbridge had a hand.

The Commission organised an expert seminar to discuss 'adult education, work and society', which took place today, and I was very pleased to be invited to participate. The briefing for the seminar was as follows:

Many labels are used for the forces and factors that are reshaping our economy and the world of work, and are likely to do so in future. Among many others, these include: the knowledge or learning economy; Artificial Intelligence and robotics; globalised production and supply chains; precarity, flexibilization and the “gig economy”; inequalities at work and between those in and out of work; climate change, global ecological crisis and “sustainability”.

The Centenary Commission is exploring what need to be done not only to ensure an adequate supply of, and demand for, economically-significant “skills”, but also to build an adult education system that addresses all aspects of human life – for personal growth and social and democratic development, as well as for the economy, competitiveness and productivity – amid this economic, technological and social turbulence.

I started jotting down some notes in preparation for this meeting, but these grew very

quickly into an extended list of Theses on C21st Lifelong Learning, organised as responses

to the questions posed by the Commission. Here, for what they are worth, they are:

a) What do the changing nature of work and the labour market imply for the future of adult education?

Work has always had important lessons for education, which is always misleadingly thought of as only taking place in formal institutions: ‘Working, learning and innovating are closely related forms of human activity that are conventionally thought to conflict with each other. Work practice is generally viewed as conservative and resistant to change; learning is generally viewed as distinct from working and problematic in the face of change; and innovation is generally viewed as the disruptive but necessary imposition of change on the other two.’ (Brown and Duguid 1991)

Education through practice (including through work) is a model for serious learning of all kinds. Modern working situations often throw up problems to be solved, or require new customised plans to be developed, often in collaboration with colleagues who are specialists of different kinds. These activities are not necessarily seen as learning, but to work in this way requires learning behaviours and produces learning, even though that is not the purpose. Learning through practice requires unstructured time and appropriate facilities for thought, talking with colleagues, and sharing and reviewing ideas and proposals for new courses of action. Some of this activity can be structured and formalised, but my research (Derrick 2019) suggests that unstructured informal spaces and time are necessary for the formal work to be most effective.

To make hard and fast distinctions between adult education for work, citizenship, or leisure is largely meaningless in terms of the ways in which adults experience learning – these contexts are ‘entangled’ in the lives of individuals and groups, and these entanglements are understood and experienced in myriad different ways by different people, and continually ‘managed’ by them, for better or worse.

Rapid technological change in workplaces and in the social, political and economic environments within which organisations operate has begun to change employers’ ideas about learning, and the role of employers in supporting the learning of their employees, though there is a long way to go. Government at both national and local level could do far more to promote productive ideas about learning and productivity in a changing world to employers. This is emphatically NOT just about providing formal courses of study in work time, though these may be appropriate on occasion. It is more about the physical organisation of the workplace, its social culture, and the design of work processes (Brown and Duguid 1991).

One approach to developing policymaking that supports organisational and employee learning at the same time as attacking intractable social, political, economic and technological problems such as climate change, is that of the Institute for Innovation and Public Policy at UCL, which advocates mission-oriented planning and policy initiatives, using government power purposefully to ‘tilting the playing field’, so that employers are incentivised to collaborate, research, build capacity and innovate (Mazzucato 2017). IIPP points to the US govt decision in 1963 to put a man on the moon by 1970. Whatever the initial reasons for this decision, the programme produced a high level of learning and innovation for decades afterwards, and US economy benefitted enormously from the product development and the skills and capacity developed through that programme. The key characteristic of suitable missions is that they are complex and multi-faceted. Adult learning possibilities and potential could be built around ‘missions’ of various kinds, including for example caring for the elderly and infirm, eliminating plastic in households, improving air quality in cities, etc.

b) How can adult education contribute to making the world of work (and the world as it is reconfigured by the changes taking place in the economy) better and fairer, and to making people more resilient, productive and happy at work?

Change in society and in the workplace highlights the importance of supporting learning not just for entrants to adult society and the workplace, but for everybody, whatever their situation with respect to work. Critically we need to find ways to highlight and if possible provide support for semi-formal and informal learning throughout life.

All contexts and activities educate people, mostly in tacit ways, for better or worse. Policy needs to consider how it can support contexts so that they support rather than inhibit useful learning, whether this is within formal contexts of education or not. The concept of ‘expansive or restrictive environments for learning’ (Fuller and Unwin 2004), developed for workplaces, can be usefully extended to any context, including material or organisational environments of any kind, but also to cultural and policy environments.

Models of state support for informal exist but are under threat everywhere: public libraries, public museums and art galleries, public parks, allotments and sports facilities. Schuller, Tuckett and Wilson’s (2018) call for A National Learning Entitlement: Moving Beyond University Tuition Fees would be another example of this kind of unstructured and enabling entitlement. The call for a Universal Basic Income is another such proposal.

The kind of imaginative thinking that is needed is illustrated by Hans Rosling’s 2010 TED talk on ‘The Magic Washing Machine’. He argues that the spread of literacy among poor communities can be associated with people’s access to washing machines.My point here is that these facilities indirectly provide largely unstructured and relatively unmediated resources for learning, and are thus models of for the types of informal and social learning which have been unnoticed or ignored by both policymakers and, for the most part, educational and social researchers.

The rationale for the establishment, provision and sustaining of these facilities by both public and private finance from the Victorian period onward has not changed, and had similar objectives to this Commission. These facilities, together with a stable, equitable and properly funded public schooling system, run primarily at a local level, effectively support the ability and potential of people not just to adapt their lives to a world being configured by economic change, but to contribute to that configuration.

What is needed is a framework of imaginative and relatively unspecified entitlements that can be drawn on as flexibly as possible, to support individuals and groups of adults in fitting the widest range of productive social and educational activities, both formal and informal, into lives crowded with continually changing combinations of family and community responsibilities as well as work commitments. These ideally would include entitlements in various possible forms under the headings of funding (money), access to facilities (spaces and resources) and ‘time-off’ to study (time).

21^st society and the 21^st century workplace now function within a global digital economy. The new types of risk associated with the development of platform capitalism and the proliferation of automated and robotic systems do not in my view invalidate the basic ideas of, for example, Albert Mansbridge, Richard Tawney and Raymond Williams about the relationship between adult education, politics, work and society, they just makes the need for a policy framework informed by these ideas more urgent. In the contexts of these particular risks a fundamental element of a productive environment for adult learning will be an appropriate and effective legal framework for the appropriate protection of individuals from the anti-social uses of such technologies.

c) How adequate are current systems and structures of educational provision

(public, private, not-for-profit) – and including funding, governance and

management – for meeting the economic and social challenges society will face in

the future?

Systems and structures need to be designed to support and enrich learning through practice, and learning through participation. People should start learning programmes by being celebrated for what they already know and have already achieved, rather than on their supposed deficits.

A person’s education is another word for their life. Education for work, or citizenship, or leisure - these are largely false distinctions in terms of the ways in which adults’ lived experience – these contexts and purposes are ‘entangled’ in the lives of individuals and groups, and these entanglements are understood and experienced in myriad different ways by different people, and continually ‘managed’ by them, for better or worse.

Learning needs to be seen as seamless human activity, whether they are at work, at home, purposefully or accidentally learning, on their own or with others.

Certification is hugely significant for someone who gains a certificate for the first time, even if it has little objective value in the labour market.

All social activity has learning and development potential.

The systems we have had up till now have never been designed for part-time adult learners, but always for full-time children and young people. Systems that work for part-time and learners will also work better for full-time learners.

These systems have only recognised learning when it has been formalised into courses and programmes, rather than as a process of development which evolves uniquely as the learner goes through life.

The systems and structures of their schooling, for better or worse, shape the attitudes and motivation towards, and understanding of learning affecting every adult. For the future, probably the most important area to redesign, develop and adapt, for supporting productive adult learning, is the form and regulations surrounding initial schooling. In particular, the political fashion for ‘command and control’ management of schools from the DfE, aiming to produce change through successive waves of short-term, unresearched curriculum initiatives, as successive governments have done since the 1970s, has been very damaging. It has supported the widely-held idea that education is exclusively associated with highly defined formal programmes leading to certification, and that no other learning is worthwhile.

Systems are needed which recognise that adult education needs to be supported directly and indirectly, for better or worse, by locally-based networks of interdependent organisations and resources; networks within which local employers, whether public or private, are active and involved and which are supported, co-ordinated and governed locally within enabling national frameworks of funding and regulation, and which allow for local distinctiveness to emerge and flourish.

A key part of what is wrong at present, and not just with our schooling system, is our obsession with a particular kind of public accountability. This is much less about moral accountability than about financial accountability to the tax-payer, ie an accountant’s version of accountability. This has led to a public sector measurement industry, which is enormously expensive and for which the evidence of effectiveness is debatable and slim at best. This is problematic for a number of reasons:

It takes up a significant proportion of the workload of every education practitioner, community worker, which could otherwise be used for teaching or supporting students or making use of community networks to support people in their learning
It promotes a false idea that learning is about getting things ‘right’ and ‘wrong’
It focusses on pre-defined outputs of learning processes, and ignores all other outputs, both desirable and undesirable
It promotes the idea that measurements are objective and do not need interpreting and/or scrutinising for bias
It leads to the elimination of learning opportunities that are open-ended or in other ways cannot demonstrate their value in narrow pre-defined terms
It leads to the elimination of valuable educational activities for perverse reason

d) What key recommendations would you like to see the Centenary Commission make?

Design and implementation of a framework of imaginative and relatively unspecified ‘enabling entitlements’ that can be drawn on as flexibly as possible, to support individuals and groups of adults in fitting the widest range of productive social and educational activities, both formal and informal, into lives crowded with continually changing combinations of family and community responsibilities as well as work commitments. These ideally would include entitlements in various possible forms under the headings of funding (money), access to facilities (spaces and resources) and ‘time-off’ to study (time).

A specific element of such a framework would include a scheme along the lines of Schuller, Tuckett and Wilson (2018) on an entitlement for formal study.

A renaissance of subsidised public sector facilities that directly and indirectly supporting learning, including adult education services, public and culturally neutral meeting and social spaces, childcare facilities, libraries, museums, parks, allotments and sports facilities in terms of funding and attention.

More spaces people can walk into without being asked any questions or to give any information about themselves, like a park…..

All contexts educate people, mostly in tacit ways, for better or worse. Policy needs to

consider how it can support human activity so that it supports learning as far as possible, whether in formal contexts of education or not. Fuller and Unwin’s concept of ‘expansive or restrictive environments for learning’ (2006), developed for workplaces, can be extended to any context, including material or organisational environments of any kind, but also to cultural or policy environments.

My view is that we cannot ‘ensure’ an adequate supply of skills for an uncertain future. This

kind of thinking is a symptom of the technocratic mindset we have been using in policymaking and planning for a better society. What we can do is support the development

of environmental conditions which will optimise our chances of improving a wide range of

skills and capacities, and which at the same time will produce a whole range of other

societal benefits.

References:

Brown, J.S., and Duguid, P. (1991). Organisational Learning and Communities of Practice: Towards a Unified View of Working, Learning and Innovation. Organization Science 2 (1), pp 40-57

Derrick, J. (2019). Learning, innovation and ‘tacit pedagogy’ in workplace practice: a comparison of two high-performing organisations in different sectors. Unpublished EdD thesis. London: UCL Institute of Education

Fuller, A. and Unwin, L. (2006). ‘Expansive and restrictive learning environments’, in K. Evans, P Hodkinson, H. Rainbird, and L. Unwin (eds), Improving Workplace Learning. Abingdon: Routledge

Mazzucato, M. (2017). Mission-oriented innovation policy: challenges and opportunities. London: UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/sites/public-purpose/files/moip-challenges-and-opportunities-working-paper-2017-1.pdf

Rosling, H. (2010). The magic washing machine. TED talk, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=42&v=BZoKfap4g4w

Schuller, T., Tuckett, A. and Wilson, T. (2018) A National Learning Entitlement: Moving Beyond University Tuition Fees. London: UCL Institute of Education Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies (LLAKES). Available at: http://www.llakes.ac.uk/sites/default/files/63.%20Schuller%20Tuckett%20%26%20Wilson.pdf

#AdultEducation100

The Wrench, a new MSc in Engineering Education, and Blogging as reflective practice

2018-07-18T17:54:00.000+01:00

During the International Symposium for Engineering Education 2018, which has taken place at UCL over the past two days, I have recommended The Wrench by Primo Levi to two engineering educator colleagues, so I'm including it here too - one of my favourite books, essential reading anyway in my view, but it happens to be about the trials, tribulations and achievements of an engineer, the main protagonist....a wonderfully wise and life-affirming novel (?) which I have written about before.

My Optimistic but Sceptical blog has never exactly become extinct, but I have made very few posts over the past five years. I am hoping to be able to post more often now, for a number of reasons: first, I have come to the end of my stint as Programme Leader for the Institute of Education post-compulsory PGCE, and second, I am teaching and leading one of the core modules for an exciting new MSc here at UCL Institute of Education, in Engineering Education.

The first change means I expect to have a little more space and time for musing and reflecting on the issues and ideas that arise from my work, and for sometimes at least writing them down. The second development has come about as a result of my Ed D thesis study, now completed in draft, and awaiting the final stage of formative feedback before formal submission in September. This study is about the contribution of informal aspects of workplace life and activity to effective practice, practitioner learning, and innovation. My research sites included a Further Education college and the R&D division of a large engineering company. My department at the Institute of Education has teamed up with the UCL Faculty of Engineering in a number of different projects, one of which is this new MSc, and I am leading one of the core modules, on Engineering and Education: Practice, Innovation and Leadership.

This module will cover such topics as:

Persuading more girls to study engineering
Organisations and change: the engineering workplace as a site for learning and innovation

Preparation for C21st engineers: innovative design in UG and PG engineering programmes

Apprenticeship as a model for learning engineering in times of change
Approaches to leadership in multinational engineering partnerships
Policy development and organisational strategies for an uncertain future

Anyone interested in finding out more about this programme should contact me here.

A third reason for coming back to my blog is that one of the stand-out findings of my research is the importance for effective practice, and especially for innovation, of 'writing' on the one hand, and of 'peer review' on the other. By writing I mean any form of representation of any aspect of practice, including the most informal or temporary incidences of writing - doodles and scribbles for example, also notes, drafts, rough drawings or charts, and more formal types of writing such as reports or position papers, hether or not for publication. By peer review I mean any kind of evaluative feedback, whether formal and written, or informally and unplanned as part of a conversation. Organisations which enable and encourage these practices as key elements of work, in terms of making space and time available for them, are likely, my study suggests, to be more effective and more innovative. A blog is both a platform for writing in different degrees of formality, and a medium for sharing and potential evaluative feedback. So I'm aiming to practise a little of what my study appears to teach.

My final reason for taking up the blog again is that my colleague working on the new MSc, Abel Nyamapfene, blogs regularly about Teaching and Learning in Engineering - see the link over on the right - and I like the idea of occasional blog conversations, especially as we work in different buildings!

Primo Levi

Professional Judgement and Standards in Educational Assessment

2016-04-17T21:23:00.001+01:00

Note: This is a slightly adapted version of a lecture given to Adult Literacy Organisers in Galway, Republic of Ireland in April 2013, under the title: Initial Assessment - What Works? The lecture was organised by The Republic of Ireland's National Adult Literacy Agency (NALA). A video of part of the lecture is available here.

I’m here to talk about Professional Judgement and Standards in Assessment. Most of what I want to say doesn’t just apply to initial diagnostic assessment in Adult Literacy work, but to teaching in general, and to many other areas of human activity. It builds on a paper written for my doctorate (Derrick 2013).

I want to start by giving you all some questions to think about. How much experience do you have as an adult literacy practitioner – hands up: more than ten years? Five to ten years? Under five years? Anyone in their first year? Can I ask the people with more than ten years’ experience – would you say you are good at Initial Diagnostic Assessment? What is it that makes someone good at it? For example, is experience essential? How important is formal training? How can you learn to get better at it? Is there a formula, or a recipe for getting better at it? Is Initial Diagnostic Assessment a science? Is there, or could there be, an instruction manual for it?

The answers to these questions are vital for sorting out the role of standards, skills frameworks, levels, etc in the work of adult literacy teaching.

The three main propositions of my talk are these:

Expert teaching (and within this, expert assessment) is essentially about the exercise of professional judgement in making decisions
Professional judgement can be supported by all sorts of tools, resources, measurements, rubrics, standards, etc, but cannot be replaced by these
Learning to become better at teaching and assessment is a process of training professional judgement.

30 years ago, Donald Schön, writing about professional practice in general, said this:

In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is the swampy lowland where situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that problems of high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of the greatest human concern. (Schön 1983 (1991), p42)

Schön suggests that professionals need to be able to deal with, not just technical, generic problems for which there is a recognised procedure, a standardised routine, but also other, more complex, essentially unique problems for which there is, and can be, no standard ‘correct’ response, and which are therefore amenable only to judgement calls.

A practical example of this type of problem might be the question of whether to take a child into local authority care, which has to be considered all too often by social workers. There can be no absolute instruction manual for making a decision like this, because every situation is uniquely different.

Standard procedures, checklists, etc are helpful, but in the end a decision like this is not reducible to standard procedures – we can only try to ensure that they are made by people highly motivated to make the best possible decision, and who have as much knowledge as possible of the particular situation – and note that ideally this knowledge is not just technical knowledge of the law, of child and of family psychology, etc, but also personal knowledge of the unique pattern of the individual circumstances of the people involved.

Schön’s work is a sustained argument against the dominance of what he calls the ‘technical-rational’ view of professional practice.

Procedures and rubrics are models or hypotheses which always simplify and ‘clean-up’ the ‘messiness’ of real-life situations. As Goethe warned:

‘Hypotheses are scaffoldings erected in front of a building and then dismantled when the work is finished. They are indispensable for a workman, but you mustn’t mistake the scaffolding for the building.’ (Goethe Posthumous (1998), p154)

The scaffolding is useful, even perhaps essential, but it cannot replace the building which it supports. This it seems to me, is an accurate metaphor for the role of rubrics, standards, technical terminology, pro-formas, skills frameworks, assessment criteria, grade descriptors, diagnostic assessment tests and procedures, and the like. They have their uses, but ultimately teachers need to make the decisions, because each situation, each learner, is essentially unique. This is why we should resist talking about education as if it was like mass-production – it is not about using standardised raw materials to produce identical objects.

Addressing educational problems as if they can be reduced to a technical model of one kind or another ignores the local knowledge, practical wisdom and perhaps the long experience of the professional in making similar decisions. It also ignores the moral dimension: that the professional is motivated to find the right way forward for the clients and others concerned – by which I mean the best and most just response to the situation, not just a technical solution which ‘will do’. A hypothetical model cannot be relied on to do this because it is a simplification of the situation, and by definition ignores factors in it which in a particular case may be critical.

The holistic argument I am making here highlights the importance in decision-making of ‘local distinctiveness’: a nuanced awareness of what is distinctive in the features of a particular locality or situation. Schön might put it as appreciation of the distinctiveness of each particular ‘swamp’, so as to make informed decisions about appropriate actions. This view is a critique of the kind of overly-simplistic ‘technical-rational’ modelling of situations that makes decision-making (for example about whether to build a new supermarket in a country town) appear to be easier, perhaps to the long-term detriment of the locality and its community. Sue Clifford and Angela King (2009) argue against the homogenising tendency of technical-rational modelling in all aspects of life, emphasising the importance of detail, particularity, patina, authenticity, fineness of grain, divergence, messiness, and quality in the everyday. This may be caricatured as a conservative critique of regulation through standardisation, of technocratic policies and procedures: but it is an argument primarily against shoddiness, against work in any field that will merely do, rather than reflecting the best efforts of the practitioner. Research (eg Black and Wiliam 1998, Hattie 2009) tells us clearly, for example, that teachers’ sense of the particularity of situations is central to their understanding of the specific needs of individual students at a given moment in the learning process: this sensitivity is also undoubtedly a foundation of trust and mutual respect between learner and teacher. It is clearly possible to teach without this detailed knowledge of students and their situation, and perhaps even to teach ‘adequately’, but professional practitioners are deeply and morally concerned about ‘local distinctiveness’ as part of doing the job as well as possible. Attempting to encapsulate this sensibility in a rubric will always tend to diminish it: minimum standards tend to produce work that simply satisfies the minimum acceptable level of quality.

In England, much has been made in recent years about the use by teachers of data in their decision-making: it has been suggested, perhaps with some justice, that they have relied too much on hunches and on their intuition, and not enough on ‘objective’ data about their students’ progress. There is also evidence that teachers and other professionals have sometimes been discriminatory in their practice (for example, having lower expectations of students from particular backgrounds), and this too has been used to support arguments that their work should be regulated within procedural and externally-imposed quality standards.

In my view this is to throw the baby out with the bathwater: it is to argue that the work of teachers is simple rather than complex; it is to argue for the production of an instruction manual for teaching, one consisting of a highly intricate flow-chart, that would provide teachers, whether qualified or not, with a procedure for correctly addressing every teaching problem, or, in terms of our topic today, for correctly the assessing the skills of every new student.

I think that most people would agree that this is not what teaching is about: they recognise that the work of teachers is essentially complex and cannot be reduced in this way. On the contrary, teachers should be supported to develop their intuition and their capacity to make good judgements, just as surgeons, doctors and social workers do. So what is the role of all these frameworks, rubrics, standards, pro-formas, tests, etc? It must be to provide information that teachers can use in their decision-making, and in discussing with students their learning goals, their attainments, feedback on their work, and, most importantly, how they can get better at supporting their own learning – in a word, these tools can be used to support formative approaches to learning, provided the information they provide supports, rather than determines, the authentic judgements and feedback of the teacher. In this way, tools can also support teachers’ own professional learning.

From this perspective, it is not the tools themselves that are good or bad, it is how the teacher uses them that matters. It is important, though, that teachers are free to determine for themselves how best to use them. If they are not free in this way, then a particular technical-rational model is being imposed on them, and this may lead to students being sold short, and also to the deskilling and demotivation of teachers. The problem for policymakers is that education is full of swampy, messy situations, which by definition are hard to predict, control and regulate. To make the best of them we need teachers who are confident in weighing up situations, highly effective communicators in terms of knowing the kinds of questions to ask and how to listen, expert at qualitatively judging students’ strengths and weaknesses, and motivated to make the best decisions possible about the right courses of action for the student and for the next stage of teaching and learning. They are very likely to find supporting technical information useful in making these judgments and decisions, and they should certainly pay attention to such data.

It is difficult for policymakers to regulate teachers without imposing limitations on their professional autonomy which may limit their scope for action, as well as reducing their motivation. But this difficulty does not justify the misconception of learning as merely a technical issue of standard procedures, and teaching as a simple, technical job involving the obeying of standard rules.

If we had time I would invite you all to consider how best we should organise the training and development of adult literacy teachers in a non-technocratic policy environment. Instead I’ll leave you with an inspiring story of exemplary professionalism that illustrates many of the issues we have been addressing here: on January 15th 2009, a commercial aircraft with 150 passengers and crew on board took off from La Guardia airport in New York. The pilot in command was 57-year-old Capt. Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, a former fighter pilot who had been an airline pilot since leaving the United States Air Force in 1980, and who is also a safety expert. During the plane’s initial climb, it struck a flock of Canada geese. The bird strike, which occurred about three minutes into the flight, resulted in an immediate and complete loss of thrust from both engines. When the crew of the aircraft determined that they would be unable to reliably reach any airfield, they turned southbound and glided over the Hudson, finally ditching the airliner in the river about three minutes after losing power. All 155 occupants safely evacuated the airliner, which was still virtually intact though partially submerged and slowly sinking, and were quickly rescued by nearby ferries and other watercraft. The recording of the incident makes it clear that, immediately following the bird strike, it was obvious the plane had to land as soon as possible, and there was intense radio communication from the air traffic controllers, concerning availability of nearby runways, and the distance to each one. After about a minute of listening to this information, the pilot asked just one question about the possibility of landing at New Jersey but then suddenly seems to make up his mind: ‘We are gonna be in the Hudson.’ He then said nothing more, apart from ‘Brace for impact’, until the plane was down. In interviews afterwards he said that there were two factors that helped him pull off the manoeuvre safely: that the plane’s design was state of the art, and that he himself was 55 rather than 25. ‘In a sense my whole career had been training for this event’ (Couric 2009).

This story illustrates how all sorts of tools, procedures and data made important contributions to the successful outcome of this manoeuvre, but these would have been irrelevant without the skills, experience and professional behaviour and attitudes of Captain Sullenberger and his crew. None of these guaranteed success, because off the technocratic map (ie, when the unexpected happens) success is never guaranteed. The experienced and motivated professional aims to optimise the chances of success. Even though teachers rarely deal in life or death decisions like the ones Sullenberger found himself taking, in reality the various parts of their job, including initial assessment, are more often off the technocratic map than on it; and this means that the question ‘What Works?’ is misconceived.

References

Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (1998). ‘Assessment and classroom learning: Principles, policy and practice’. Assessment in Education 5 (1), pp 1-78

Clifford, S. and King, A. (1993: 2009 edition). Losing Your Place, in Local Distinctiveness – Place, Particularity, Identity. Accessed 05-04-13 at http://www.aughty.org/pdf/losing_place.pdf

Couric K (2009). Interview with Chesley Sullenberger accessed 05-04-13 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qKXgG-imh4

Derrick, J. (2013). ‘Practitioner learning’, not ‘professional learning’: towards a non-technocratic model of autonomous development for post-compulsory sector teachers. Research in Post-Compulsory Education. 18 (3) pp269-279

Goethe, J.W. (Posthumous, 1998 edition). Maxims and Reflections, ed P. Hutchinson . London: Penguin

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning. Abingdon: Routledge

Schön, D. (1983, 1991 edition). The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd

Happy New Year! And a plug for Eddie Playfair's blog

2015-01-01T12:33:00.000+00:00

Very pleased to discover recently that a colleague who has worked for many years in FE in London is also a blogger (much more productive than me!), and seems to have many very similar interests and enthusiasms. This is Eddie Playfair, whose blog is now listed in the right column of this page. I have been particularly stimulated recently by his posts on the keyboard and the music and on xenophilia. The keyboard one follows on nicely from my last post on Thelonius Monk. Eddie has also posted on William Morris, xenophilia, Hugh MacDiarmid, and George Clinton, just to give a hint at his eclectic range of references - but all are related brilliantly to arguments for more progressive policies and practices in further education, particularly as these affect young people in East London.

Monk's wisdom

2014-06-30T09:56:00.001+01:00

Here is a terrific, witty, but also slightly scary image of one of the most creative and innovative musicians of the last century, together with some handwritten advice aimed at musicians he's playing with. I think some of these guidelines have relevance in much more general contexts too.

For me they have great resonance, as I am a very amateur and inexperienced keyboard player in a rather good pub band, which for me is an intense context of rather feverish learning! The next step up for me is for a one verse solo in the middle of a standard Bluenote number such as Horace Silver's 'Song for my Father' to become something I can attempt without feeling I am doing a slalom without ski-poles down the steepest run at Val d'Isere.

The assumption in Thelonius's notes that everyone is learning, even if they are good enough to play in his band, and that this is a collaborative process taking place as a result of doing the job itself, is very encouraging for novices like me....

At the last gig I managed to survive at the bottom of two solos, hot, breathless and excited - and as Marcus encouragingly pointed out, that's more than the number of goals scored by Rooney in the World Cup!

Thanks to Perse for these gems, and for his excellent and formative leadership!

Season's greetings to teacher-bloggers everywhere!

2013-12-23T09:34:00.002+00:00

Angelus Novus

2013-11-24T08:44:00.000+00:00

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History IX, 1940

Benjamin is reported to have owned this little Klee drawing and to have carried it around with him, presumably among the notes for his Arcades project, also carried with him on his ultimately futile flight from the Nazis. I heard that it had disappeared after his suicide. Klee actually produced a number of similar drawings. I was disappointed that none of them are included in the numinous Klee exhibition on at the Tate Modern at the moment.

Teachers and the cult of amateurism: enthusiasm isn’t enough

2013-11-24T00:00:00.000+00:00

Would you want your child to be taught by the person appointed to this post? If not, why not?

The coalition government has removed the basic requirement that teachers should be qualified for many state-funded schools and for all institutional providers in the Further Education sector. An opposition motion that teachers in state-funded schools and colleges should have to be qualified or working towards qualification, was debated three weeks ago in the Commons, and defeated by about 40. ‘What next’, asks Mark Steel in the Independent, ’surgeons and submarine commanders?’

Of course all teachers need training, just as plumbers or brain surgeons do, for the protection of the public if for nothing else. Teachers are brain surgeons, for goodness sake, the only difference is that, for better or worse, they operate on everyone, not just people who are ill. To argue against the need for training is to argue for teachers to be cowboy traders, when actually more than ever we need them to be professionals, trusted as a body to set their own entry criteria and standards for working in the field, in the same way that doctors, lawyers, physiotherapists, plumbers, and the police now do. To argue against the mild and practical motion debated in the Commons three weeks ago is to resurrect the Victorian cult of amateurism, which has many virtues, but which doesn’t cut the mustard in occupations as critical to an advanced 21^st century economy and society, as teaching. Competitor economies such as Germany, China and South Korea recognise the importance of nurturing innovation, which requires critical and collaborative thinking, creativity, team-working and research skills as well as knowledge. The effective development of these capacities depends, for better or worse, on teachers.

As well as subject knowledge, teachers in any setting need ‘know-how’ about the application of that knowledge, and also ‘practical wisdom’ – a term used by Aristotle 2500 years ago to mean expertise in managing the vagaries of human behaviour and motivation for the benefit of the individuals and of the community. Without ‘practical wisdom’ teachers will be less able or interested in inspiring and motivating learners, or encouraging and supporting them through difficulties: they will miss insights and unexpected ‘teaching moments’ that bring about learning breakthroughs, because they won’t be looking for them. Their emphasis and focus will be on the content rather than the process and purposes of learning, on the subject rather than on the learner, on the short‑term, narrowly defined outcome rather than on learning for the future.

Good teaching is not just a matter of knowing stuff, and then following a checklist of simple rules. What works in one situation may well not work in another, because one group of learners is not the same as another group. OFSTED regularly amends its list of quality criteria, and no doubt it will do so again, because they are trying to pin down something which cannot be pinned down. Teachers so glibly described as ‘brilliant’ by one politician after another, cannot be certain they will do well on the day they are observed by inspectors, because teachers are like navigators – however good their subject knowledge, they can and do find themselves steering a leaky boat through a storm. Teaching is an inherently complex business, requiring not just expert subject knowledge and technical knowledge about pedagogical practices, but knowledge of the world of work and of people, empathy, superb communication skills, and an unpredictable range of different kinds of know‑how.

As Aristotle recognised, it is also an essentially ethical business, aiming to support good outcomes for learners, communities, and society as a whole. Its practitioners need the capacity to make judgement calls as they work, which bring into play each teacher’s individual dispositions and character, as well as their previous experience, and of course, their knowledge and skills. This is because a key part of the teacher’s task is not just to know about, but to model appropriate roles: as an adult, as a citizen, as a more experienced practitioner. Initial training helps start and focus the process by which teachers develop these capacities, skills and dispositions.

In further education there have always been teachers who started work unqualified, coming into FE as experts in various vocational or creative industries. Most of them appreciate that training has helped them to present their experience and knowledge of practice and of the world of work more effectively than enthusiasm on its own could do. Teaching is a very serious business: the days when it could be left to amateurs, however enthusiastic and well-meaning, are long gone.

Photo: Hubble

Toni Fazaeli from the Institute for Learning has made similar arguments in a recent Guardian blog-post, whose title echoes mine: Bring back FE teacher qualifications: learners deserve more than pot luck. Her article responds to another by Ian Pryce, Principal of Bedford College, who argues the opposite. I think he's wrong: his college's students, like those of many other colleges over many years, have benefitted from the freedom they have had to use vocational and industrial experts who have not been trained as teachers, and there is no suggestion that this should change, though it is being suggested that these people should be supported to develop their teaching skills.

What is really needed for the post-compulsory, lifelong, or further education sector, whatever you want to call it, is a discussion about what professional development all teachers need at all stages in their careers, and what infrastructure is needed to support it properly. Ian Pryce admits that even good teachers can improve. He denies that there is any danger of employers exploiting learners using government funds, and suggests that quality assurance can be left to OFSTED: 'Many people fear that if qualifications are optional then colleges will simply replace qualified staff with unskilled, lower-cost people. But colleges deliver state-funded education and are accountable to the government and Ofsted.' The trouble with this is firstly that the advert at the top of this post demonstrates that it is likely that some employers in the newly deregulated sector will all too readily take the chance to draw down government funds to pay for second rate educational opportunities for students who can't afford to go to the high quality college in their town; and secondly, that relying on OFSTED for quality assurance is no more than shutting the door after the horse has bolted. They can close down a low quality provider, but not before hundreds or perhaps thousands of students have been sold short, not to mention the tax-payer.

Ian Pryce also suggests that the present teaching qualification is a one-size fits all model: this is absolutely not the case, or at least, it doesn't need to be. The programme I work on serves the enormously complex and diverse post-compulsory sector in London - it couldn't do this effectively if it consisted of one size fits all. The issue isn't how the training is organised, at what point in the teacher's career it takes place, or the content of it: all those things can and should be updated continuously to reflect the needs of the local and regional sector, local and regional employers, and its students. His argument brings us back to Mark Steel's question: if teachers don't need training, what about plumbers, police officers (who as a matter of fact have a new Police College), and paediatric nurses? Where does this argument end? What next, volunteer teachers? There are already an alarming number of internships being used to provide teachers in classrooms, in front of real students. This seems to me an inevitable consequence of deregulation. Professional standards aren't just about knowledge, but about behaving as a professional and a responsible person, as I argue above.

It is absolutely essential that we have a professional teaching and support staff workforce so that public funds are spent as productively as possible. All the international evidence supports the view that high educational attainment at a national level is associated with highly-trained teachers who enjoy high status culturally and in their communities.

Ken Bodden, an inspirational life

2013-11-09T13:53:00.000+00:00

A wonderful guy I got to know over the past three years, as a conga player and singer with King Toadfish, who died two weeks ago. I keep discovering more things about his extraordinary life. He was born in Panama, half Irish-Jamaican and half Honduran, became almost blind in early childhood, was fostered for a part of his childhood in Manchester, a piano tuner, pub musician and songwriter, crosscountry skier and para-Olympian, Manchester United supporter, communal housemate, community and political activist, inveterate maker and keeper of friends. So many people were at his funeral yesterday (in spite of appalling rain) that about 50 couldn’t get into the crematorium. Wonderful explicitly atheist event with South African songs, Irish ballads, Bob Marley songs, and very moving tributes.

This is an obituary written by his anti-apartheid comrades:

http://nonstopagainstapartheid.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/ken-bodden-anti-imperialist-singer-1950-2013/

This is a youtube of Kenny playing at a party in his house in Hackney: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-OY9oCL37U

(l to r) Bob Peachey, Pete Lamont, Kenny, Tsafi Ledermann and Percy Aggett, playing at a King Toadfish street party gig, Harberton Road London N19 in summer 2012

'Kenny, it always looked as if we were leading you, when in fact it was you leading us' (John Maloney, tribute at the funeral)

Planning

2013-09-15T15:57:00.000+01:00

‘Man makes plans,’ goes the Yiddish proverb, ‘and God laughs.’

‘To draw up in advance an exact and detailed plan is to deprive our mind of the pleasures of the encounter and the novelty that comes from executing he work. It is to make the execution insipid for us and consequently impossible in works that depend on enthusiasm and imagination. Such a plan is itself a half-work. It must be left imperfect if we want to please ourselves. We must say it cannot be finished. In fact it must not be, for a very good reason: it is impossible. We can, however, draw up such plans for works whose execution and accomplishment are a mechanical thing, a thing that depends above all on the hand. This is suitable and even useful for painters, for sculptors. Their senses, with each stroke of the brush or chisel, will find this novelty that did not exist for heir minds. Forms and colours which the imagination cannot represent to us as perfectly as the eye can, will offer the artist a horde of these encounters which are indispensable to giving genius pleasure in work. But the orator, the poet, nd the philosopher will not find he same encouragement in writing down what they have already thought. Everything is one for them. Because the words they use have beauty only for the mind and, having been spoken in their head in the same way they are written on the page, the mind no longer has anything to discover in what it wants to say. A plan however is necessary, but a plan that is vague, that has not been pinned down. We must above all have a notion of the beginning, the end, and the middle of our work. That is to say, we must choose its pitch and range, its pauses, and its objectives. The first word must give the colour, the beginning determines the tone; the middle rules the measure, the time, the space, the proportions.’ (Joseph Joubert, 1798, The Notebooks)

‘The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. The Chinese practice of copying books was thus an incomparable guarantee of literary culture, and the transcript a key to China’s enigmas.’ (Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, 1925-26: Chinese Curios)

I'm not sure I agree wholly with Joubert that the work of poets, orators and philosophers is qualitatively different to that of painters or sculptors, so that the role of planning is different. From a craft perspective, all planning is to some degree provisional, hence the truth of his aphorism: 'A plan is however necessary, but a plan that is vague, that has not been pinned down.' Joubert's view is that 'sticking to the plan' reduces the possibility of surprise and pleasure in the work, but Benjamin says something stronger: that over-reliance on planning results in the shutting off of possibilities, the denial of perspectives. Over-dependence on planning suits those who want to avoid surprises, who wish to control, and those who are afraid of freedom. In some sad cases it is all of these things.

Perhaps also relevant here is Andrew Lang's remark, which was actually about statistics rather than planning: 'He uses planning as a drunk man uses lamp-posts: for support rather than illumination'.

Django Bates, Stravinsky, Charlie Parker

2013-08-29T16:12:00.001+01:00

This is another post inspired by a concert of music, and coincidentally is about another great band-leader, following on from my post on Jerry Dammers eighteen months ago. Last night I went to see Django Bates, who was playing at the proms - I'm obviously out of date as I still find it slightly surprising to hear that they have jazz as part of the proms, but Django actually first played there more than twenty years ago, with his band Loose Tubes.

The music last night was mostly inspired by and as a tribute to Charlie Parker, though Django also played his own composition called A Study of Touch. Nearly all his band were Swedish - a superb rhythm section, a guitarist whose main role was to provide texture and subtle special effects, and a 13-piece brass band consisting of trumpets, trombones, clarinet, saxes and a tuba. Django plays piano and often conducts at the same time. The pieces were at times lyrical, at other times noisy and energetic - lots of complicated rhythm changes, and continual development and change, but often a sense of return to a simple pair of chords - perhaps echoing Charlie Parker's way of playing a basic tune, then going way off piste, before returning to the initial tune. The music reflected more of Parker's fast, tight style, than of the slow, reflective numbers like Embraceable You. I thought the band was astonishingly tight!

Django told a story about Stravinsky going to see Charlie Parker play in a New York club in 1951. Parker recognised him, and quoted from the Firebird Suite in his solo, at which Stravinsky banged his drink down on the table with satisfaction. It is only superficially strange that these two should appreciate each other's music - two of the most innovative composers in the world at the time. As Django said, Stravinsky would have appreciated the proliferation of As, B flats, Bs, Cs, C sharps, Ds, E flats, Es, Fs, F sharps, Gs, and G sharps!

The Danish drummer also had a message for the audience: there are more people alive today than have been alive at any time in the world's history. This means that if everyone alive today wanted to perform Hamlet, there wouldn't be enough skulls to go round.....

It was a wonderful evening, and the result of pure serendipity: I'd heard of him, but had never seen him before, didn't really know what he looked like, but I did know that he lived somewhere near me. Two days before the gig, I passed a bunch of guys loading a car. One of them pointed to my T shirt and said 'Montreal Jazz Festival - were you there?' When I said I was, he said they were too, they performed there this summer. So we got talking and I realised who he was, and then he told me about the gig at the Royal Albert Hall. And as it's the end of the summer, and we are all feeling relaxed enough to go for a good thing when it presents itself, we went. As Sartre says: 'We only have this life'.....I hope I bump into him again to say thankyou in person!

Walter Benjamin - the work of learning: writing and thinking as collecting

2013-03-03T10:50:00.002+00:00

'Benjamin, always working, always trying to work more, speculated a good deal on the writer's daily existence. One Way Street has several sections which offer recipes for work: the best conditions, timing, utensils. Part of the impetus for the large correspondence he conducted was to chronicle, report on, confirm the existence of work. His instincts as a collector served him well. Learning was a form of collecting, as in the quotations and excerpts from daily reading which Benjamin accumulated in notebooks that he carried everywhere and from which he would read aloud to friends. Thinking was also form of collecting, at least in its preliminary stages. He conscientiously logged stray ideas: developed mini-esays in letters to friends; rewrote plans for future projects; noted his dreams (several are recounted in One Way Street); kept numbered lists of all the books he read.' (Susan Sontag: Introduction to One Way Street and Other Writings, Walter Benjamin, London: New Left Books, 1979)

I once wrote an essay on Walter Benjamin. I argued that his characteristic style of writing, collecting wreathes of aphoristic, tentative and often gnomic paragraphs which delineate his themes as it were from the outside, indirectly, rather than presenting them descriptively and directly, could be compared to a gestural, bodily style of communication as opposed to the more direct and familiar use of spoken language. He believed that copying a text was the best way to understand it, as a landscape is best understood by walking through it rather than by flying over it. 'All the decisive blows are struck left-handed'. Benjamin's work first suggested to me an idea which has come to seem more and more important in my work as a teacher: that writing (or drawing, composing music - the making of any cultural artefact, or as Raymond Williams and Stephen Yeo would say, cultural production) - is a mode of thinking and therefore of learning. But should 'copying' be seen as production in its own right, or merely a stage or tool of the production process? Ultimately there is no difference - copying is always a process of re-creating, re-contextualising. My smallest utterance, in whatever form, is both completely original and a 'copy' of other people's work, made new by the act of my uttering it, and the context in which I am uttering it. All work consists both of archeology and craft, and as well as existing for itself, it also exists to be recycled