Tag Archives: university

the new politics of education: radical visions for further and higher education


Posted by hallymk1

Next Tuesday, 24 September, I’m chairing a discussion at the Labour Party Conference Fringe. The session is a joint UCU and Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS) event that emerges from some work that I undertook with Sol Gamsu of Durham University on A New Vision for Further and Higher Education. This was commissioned by CLASS, and we also wrote about it for WonkHE with a focus upon better policy-making through democratic renewal.

Participants at the session include: Jo Grady, the UCU General Secretary; Faiza Shaheen, the Director of CLASS; Vicky Duckworth, from Edge Hill University; Rob Smith, from Birmingham city University; and Emma Hardy MP, who is a member of the education select committee.

The discussion is titled: the new politics of education: radical vision is for further and higher education.

It takes place at 10.30-11.45am, in the Victoria Terrace of the Grand Hotel in Brighton.

There are further details on the Labour Party conference fringe website.


radical pedagogies livestream


Posted by hallymk1

Tomorrow, Thursday 19 September, De Montfort University is hosting “Radical Pedagogies: Macpherson 20 Years On”. The main focus of the event will be on how radical pedagogies can be used to highlight and address issues relating to race and institutional discrimination.

I have previously blogged about the event, including the call for papers.

The full programme is also online now. We are intending to live stream several sessions as follows:

09.45-10.15: welcome

10.15-11.15: Silhouette Bushay’s keynote on hip-hop pedagogy

14.45-15.50: panel discussion on radical pedagogy and challenging racial discrimination

16.00-17.00: local educators’ panel discussion

The live stream will be available from our conference homepage (you will need to scroll down the page).

We are also planning to record each of the presentations in the breakout discussion/workshop sessions. There are abstracts for these available. The presentations will be available on the website too. We will be using #radicaldmu19 to curate the dialogue from the day.

There are thematic streams on:

  • challenging institutional racism in education;
  • radical Pedagogies in practice;
  • against the attainment gap;
  • decolonisation in practice;
  • narrating raced and gendered experiences in education;
  • disappearing narratives.

It promises to be a great event.


a dialogue on issues in higher education: authoritarianism; neoliberalism; and technocracy


Posted by hallymk1

The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC) invites a dialogue on issues in higher education involving the audit culture, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and technocracy. These issues are addressed in a special issue of Social Epistemology (33 (4): 2019), “Neoliberalism, Technocracy and Higher Education,” edited by Justin Cruickshank and Ross Abbinnett (https://bit.ly/2OBNhWV).

If you want to reply to any combination of an article or articles in the special issue, or to Cruickshank’s “The Feudal University in the Age of Gaming the System”, or to add your thoughts on relevant articles and issues, the Collective ask for pieces of 1,000-2,000 words with streamlined scholarly apparatus.

In the spirit of equitable exchange, they encourage participants to respond to one another’s work. The SERRC will host the dialogue. The dialogue will be integrated into an article or series of articles and, if desired, may serve as a basis for a book in the Collective Studies in Knowledge and Society Series (Rowman and Littlefield).

If you are interested in participating, please contact Jim Collier by 2 September 2019. Jim can also help sort access to the articles for you.

Details of the Special Issue can be located here.


Better policymaking needs democracy


Posted by hallymk1

Over at WonkHE, Sol Gamsu and I have a piece on better policy-making through democratic renewal. This connects to our recently-edited collection for the Centre for Labour and Social Studies on A New Vision for Further and Higher Education. In the WonkHE piece, we argue:

It is time that the politics of education was created by the grassroots – it is time for staff and students to recognise their collective potential and push for democratic renewal. 

Authors from the report will be discussing the horizons of possibility for this vision at the Labour Party conference with Jo Grady (UCU General Secretary Elect) and a Labour Party MP on Tuesday 24 September in Brighton.


Social Epistemology: On Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Poetic Epistemology


Posted by hallymk1

I have an article accepted for publication in a special issue of Social Epistemology: a Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy that picks up on some work I have been doing previously on authoritarian neoliberalism (see presentations and notes from a BERA Special Interest Group symposium here and here). The article also attempts to maintain some momentum around academic labour, academic practice, knowledge formation and the critical terrain of decolonisation. In this, I explicitly connect to Audre Lorde’s work on life as a poetic existence.

The special issue as whole looks at the intersections of higher education and the University, neoliberalism as a contested terrain/heuristic, technologies and technocratic forms of management, and subjectivities. My abstract and references are appended below. The other contributors and pieces are as follows.

Robert Antonio: ‘Ethnoracial Populism: An alternative to Neoliberal Globalization?’

John Holmwood and Chaime Marcuello-Serovs: ‘Challenges to Public Universities: Digitalisation, Commodification and Precarity’

Elio di Muccio: ‘Core HR in British Higher Education: For a Technological Single Source and Version of the Truth?’

Justin Cruikshank: ‘Economic Freedom and the Harm of Adaptation: On Gadamer, Authoritarian Technocracy and the Re-Engineering of English Higher Education’

Liz Morrish: ‘The Accident of Accessibility: How the Data of the TEF creates Neoliberal Subjects’

Ross Abbinnett: ‘The Anthropocene as a Figure of Neoliberal Hegemony’

Jana Bacevic: ‘Knowing Neoliberalism’

ABSTRACT

As one response to the secular crisis of capitalism, higher education is being proletarianised. Its academics and students are shorn of autonomy beyond the sale of their labour-power. One heuristic for analysing this response is authoritarian neoliberalism, imposed as a means of enacting disciplinary practices in the name of the market with an anti-democratic rationale. This has a distinctly technocratic focus, rooted in techniques of performativity, including audits and assessments of teaching, research and scholarship, grounded in productivity, the management of time and value-creation. However, there are a range of intersectional and geogra- phical responses to such an imposition, through which it is possible to describe alternatives to these architectures of subsumption. In particular, a second heuristic emerges which  challenges the restructuring of  the University in the global North, erupting from struggles for decolonisa- tion. Here, Audre Lorde’s invocation to an integrated, poetic existence that situates bodies in places, and respects feelings and emotions as the site of epistemological development and understanding, underpins the possibility for dismantling hegemonic knowledge production. The article examines whether humanist  narratives of solidarity, in particular from marginalised voices, might help academics and students to analyse their alienated labour and to imagine that another world is possible.

KEYWORDS

Academic labour; authoritarian neoliberalism; decolonisation; poetic epistemology

REFERENCES

Ahmed, S. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Amsler, M. 2017. “Responsibilisation and Leadership in the Neoliberal University: A New Zealand Perspective.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 38 (1): 123–137.

Andrews, K. 2018. Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the Twenty-First Century. London: Zed Books.

Arvin, M., E. Tuck, and A. Morrill. 2013. “Decolonising Feminism: Challenging Connection between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy.” Feminist Formations 25 (1): 8–34. doi:10.1353/ff.2013.0006.

Azar, R. 2015. “‘neoliberalism, Austerity, and Authoritarianism.” New Politics XV (3). https://newpol.org/issue_post/neoliberalism-austerity-and-authoritarianism/

Barnett, R. 2016. Understanding the University: Institution, Idea, Possibilities. London: Routledge.

Bhambra, G., D. Gebrial, and K. Nisancioglu, eds. 2018. Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press.

Bhambra, G. 2017. “Brexit, Trump, and ‘methodological Whiteness’: On the Misrecognition of Race and Class.” The British Journal of Sociology 68 (1): 214–232. doi:10.1111/1468-4446.12317.

Bruff, I. 2012. “Authoritarian Neoliberalism, the Occupy Movements, and IPE.” Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies 1 (5): 114–116.

Bruff, I. 2014. “The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 26 (1): 113–129. doi:10.1080/08935696.2013.843250.

Bruff, I., and C. B. Tansel. 2018. “Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Trajectories of Knowledge Production and Praxis.” Globalizations. doi:10.1080/14747731.2018.1502497.

Canaan, J. 2017. “The (im)possibility of Mass Intellectuality: Viewing Mass Intellectuality through the Lens of the Brazilian Landless Movement.” In Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education, edited by R. Hall and J. Winn, 69–80. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

CASA. (n.d.) “A Home Online for Casual, Adjunct, Sessional Staff and Their Allies in Australian Higher Education.” http:// actualcasuals.wordpress.com/

Connell, R. 2013. “The Neoliberal Cascade and Education: An Essay on the Market Agenda and Its Consequences.” Critical Studies in Education 54 (2): 99–112. doi:10.1080/17508487.2013.776990.

Davies, W. 2016. “The New Neoliberalism.” New Left Review 101: 121–134. https://newleftreview.org/II/101/william- davies-the-new-neoliberalism

Davies, W. 2017. “Elite Power under Advanced Neoliberalism.” Theory, Culture & Society 34 (5–6): 227–250. doi:10.1177/ 0263276417715072.

DBIS. 2015. The Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act. London: HM Stationery Office. http://www.legislation. gov.uk/ukpga/2015/26/pdfs/ukpga_20150026_en.pdf

de Sousa Santos, B., ed. 2007. Cognitive Justice in a Global World: Prudent Knowledges for a Decent Life. New York: Lexington Books.

DET. 2016. “National Strategy for International Education 2025.” https://internationaleducation.gov.au/International- network/Australia/InternationalStrategy/Pages/National-Strategy.aspx

DfE. 2017. The Higher Education and Research Act. London: HM Stationery Office. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ 2017/29/pdfs/ukpga_20170029_en.pdf

Dinerstein, A. 2015. The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gonzales, A. 2017. “Trumpism, Authoritarian Neoliberalism, and Subaltern Latina/o Politics.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 42 (2): 147–164.

Hall, R. 2015. “The University and the Secular Crisis.” Open Library of Humanities 1 (1): p.e6. doi:10.16995/olh.15.

Hall, R. 2018. The Alienated Academic: The Struggle for Autonomy inside the University. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Harney, S., and F. Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions.

Harris, K., A. Schwedel, and A. Kim 2012. “A World Awash in Money.” http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/ a-world-awash-in-money.aspx

Hillman, N. 2016. “The Coalition’s Higher Education Reforms in England.” The Oxford Review of Education 42 (3): 330–345. doi:10.1080/03054985.2016.1184870.

HM Treasury. 2015. Fixing the Foundations: Creating a More Prosperous Nation. London: HM Treasury. https://www.gov. uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/443898/Productivity_Plan_web.pdf

King, T. 2003. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Lorde, A. 2013. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. London: Penguin. Marx, K., and F. Engels. 2002. The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin.

McGettigan, A. 2015. “The Treasury View of HE: Variable Human Capital Investment.” Political Economy Research Centre Papers Series 6. www.perc.org.uk/perc/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/PERC-6-McGettigan-and-HE-and-Human- Capital-FINAL-1.pdf

Motta, S. 2018. Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Newfield, C. 2016. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Newman, J. 2012. Working the Spaces of Power: Activism, Neoliberalism and Gendered Labour. London: Bloomsbury.

O’Dwyer, S., S. Pinto, and S. McDonagh. 2018. “Self-Care for Academics: A Poetic Invitation to Reflect and Resist.” Reflective Practice 19 (2): 243–249. doi:10.1080/14623943.2018.1437407.

OECD. 2018. “Public Financial Management: An Overview.” http://www.oecd.org/dac/effectiveness/pfm.htm

Pasquale, F. 2016. “Two Narratives of Platform Capitalism.” Yale Law and Policy Review 309. https://ylpr.yale.edu/two-narratives-platform-capitalism

Pasquale, F. 2018. “Tech Platforms and the Knowledge Problem.” American Affairs II (2). https://americanaffairsjournal. org/2018/05/tech-platforms-and-the-knowledge-problem/

Roberts, M. 2018. The Long Depression: How It Happened, Why It Happened, and What Happens Next. London: Haymarket Books.

Steinþórsdóttir, F. S., T. M. Heijstra, and P. J. Einarsdóttir. 2017. “The Making of the ‘excellent’ University: A Drawback for Gender Equality.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 17 (3): 557–582.

Styres, S. 2018. “Literacies of Land: Decolonising Narratives, Storytelling, and Literature.” In Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View, edited by L. T. Smith, E. Tuck, and K. W. Yang, 24–33. London: Routledge.

Tansel, C. B., ed. 2017. States of Discipline: Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Reproduction of Capitalist Order. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Tuck, E., and K. W. Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1 (1): 1–40.

Tuhiwai Smith, L., E. Tuck, and K. W. Yang, eds. 2018. Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View. London: Routledge.

Wilson, S. 2008. Research as Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Blackpoint: Fernwood Publishing.


New book project: The hopeless university


Posted by hallymk1

In other, exciting news, I have agreed with Mayfly books, based in Leicester, to produce a new monograph on academic life. Mayfly are extending their work on critical university studies, and have also published Ansgar Allen’s The Cynical Educator and Toni Ruuska’s Capitalism, Higher Education and Ecological Crisis. Mayfly also publishes the journal ephemera: theory and politics in organization.

Working with Mayfly is important because I am particularly interested in supporting radical publishing houses that are open, or that resist the subsumption of academic work by corporate publishers. Transparent, democratic engagement is very important to me, and in my role is something I can help celebrate and support. It is why I have been a trustee of the Open Library of Humanities.

Anyway, the book has the working title:

The hopeless university: intellectual work at the end of the end of history

The book will integrate some thinking I have been doing since the publication of The Alienated Academic. I guess its starting point is that I want to tell my story beginning from the last story I told. So, it continues to develop some of the common themes I play around with, including: hopelessness and helplessness inside the University; University as an anxiety machine; the almost overwhelming sense of Weltschmerz felt inside educational institutions; the University predicated upon alienated academic labour-power; and, the University as an abject space, unable to engage meaningfully with crises of social reproduction. It asks whether it is possible to refuse the University as is, as a trans-historical space that can only exist for capital?

I want to think through the re-emergence of engagement with ideas of hope, and their relationship to progressive politics and horizons of educational possibility. In part, I do this because I believe the current situation to be hopeless. I have written about this here. Or you could also read the chapter on Weltschmerz in The Alienated Academic. Or check out some of my other writing here.

So, the structure will focus upon: terrains of hopelessness; hopeless struggle; forms and structures of hopelessness; cultures and pathologies of hopelessness; practices and methodologies of hopelessness; hopeful despair; and the potential for hope at the end of the end of history.

I have shamelessly stolen the idea of the end of the end of history from the guys at Aufhebungabunga: The global politics podcast at the end of the End of History. From a left perspective. The idea of the end of the end of history exposes the fraud at the heart of narratives of the end of history, and of the inevitable, timeless, transhistorical victory of capitalism. This is a narrative generated from a North Atlantic context, which lays out space-time as a capitalist entity, and forecloses on all possible historical, material futures. No new history of struggle or resistance can emerge, precisely because all such struggles and resistances are subsumed as Capital, and its institutions re-purpose all of social life in the name of value, production, profit and surplus. In this subsumption of social life, the University is a critical node precisely because it provides a constant funnelling of individuals into a normalised existence framed by debt and work. In this way, it is hopeless to imagine any other form of historical and material existence beyond the freedom offered through an individual’s sale of labour power in the free market. Beyond the institutions of capitalist society, life has limited meaning.

Yet, in analysing the place of the University at the end of history, we note that it is situated inside a terrain of global, socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which have been amplified during the ongoing secular crisis of capitalism. Once more, capitalism as a means of social organisation is under threat from ruptures both inside and outside of work, grounded in intersectional, temporal and geographical injustices that erupt from points of labour and points where labour touches society. A range of indigenous resistances, struggles grounded in race, gender, disability and class, emergent revolts against toxic ecological policies, resistance to economic and political populism, each place the institutions of capital in stark opposition to the everyday, lived experiences of individuals and communities struggling for life. The historical and material realities of existence, of social reproduction, of struggle, have returned with a vengeance.

So, the plan for the book is predicated upon the following precepts. This is its current direction of travel. Although I have some Hegel and Marcuse to read first, alongside a bunch of stuff on rage, courage, justice, faith, and solidarity movements that are indigenous, identity-driven and intersectional. I have to revisit some stuff on hope too…

  1. The University has become a place that has no socially-useful role beyond the reproduction of capital, and has become an anti-human project devoid of hope. It projects and protects a condition that is irredeemable. It is hopeless in all senses, and this reflects its inability to respond meaningfully with crises that erupt from the contradictions of capital, including that between capital and climate. Yet in its maintenance of business-as-usual, the University remains shaped as a tactical response to these contradictions.
  2. The book describes and analyses this position against the terrain of higher education (HE) in the global North. It does so in relation to the ways in which the University has been re-engineered in relation to the law of value. This process of subsumption situates the University inside a transnational geography of accumulation. This changes the very idea of the University, and what it means to work inside the Academy, such that they are emptied of political, democratic content, and instead reorganised around surplus. The University has become a key site for reproducing the separation of polity and economy.
  3. The fixation on surplus, efficiency, enterprise, excellence, impact, and so on reinforces a turn away from intellectual practice as a use-value for individuals, such that it has a focus upon the creation of commodities that have exchange-value. This relentless process can only be met by hopeless struggles inside the University, or a retreat into helplessness by academics and students, in the face of authoritarian performance management.
  4. These hopeless struggles are analysed in terms of: first, forms of hopelessness imposed by institutional structures: second, the diseased, pathological hopelessness that the University represents through its normalisation of cultures of ill-being, overwork and privilege; and third, the methodological, process-based hopelessness engendered by everyday academic practices that are enforced by toxic managerialism.
  5. Emerging from an analysis of the intersection of these forms, pathologies and methodologies of hopelessness is a moment of hopeful despair, grounded in the ability of labour to awaken to its predicament both inside a crisis-driven institution, and at the level of society. In this way, the book calls for the dissolution, dismantling or detonation of institutions that engender hopelessness and helplessness, including the University.
  6. The book closes with a discussion of the idea of hope, and its intersection with institutions of formal HE or informal higher learning, at the end of the end of history. The realisation of the impossibility of recovering stable forms of capitalist accumulation, the collapse of socio-environmental systems, widespread forms and structures of inequality and inequity, and the rise of political and economic populism, have foreclosed upon our collective inability to imagine that another world is possible. We are no longer living at the end of history. Rather we need to imagine the idea of the intellectual work at the end of the end of history.
  7. Therefore, the book addresses the following questions. How have we been betrayed by the University? In this sense, what is the University not capable of becoming, being, knowing and doing? Can mapping the University as an anxious, abject, hopeless space, distorted and exploited by Capital, enable us to define a counter-cartography? Is another education possible?

Radical Pedagogies: Macpherson 20 years on


Posted by hallymk1

Conference call: Radical Pedagogies: Macpherson 20 years on

Radical Pedagogies: Macpherson 20 years on

Thursday 19th September 2019

De Montfort University, Leicester

#RadicalDMU19

Call for papers (Please note that the call for papers has been extended to Friday 5th July.)

In November 2018 the University of Kent hosted the first event organised by Radical Pedagogies: The Humanities Teaching Network in Higher Education. This group was established as “a forum for Lecturers, Educators, Administrators and students to share resources and discuss innovative pedagogy and praxis.”

It is with great pleasure that De Montfort University (DMU) will be hosting the second Radical Pedagogies event in conjunction with the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre and the Freedom to Achieve project at DMU. The main focus of the event will be on how radical pedagogies can be used to highlight and address issues relating to race and institutional discrimination. This event is not constrained by subject area, discipline or geographical location and is not just open to academics. We hope that researchers, PhD students, learning technologists, library professionals, academics, teachers, parents, students, educational activists and anyone interested in radical pedagogies, both within the UK and internationally, will consider contributing to and attending the event.

We are therefore looking for proposals for papers and interactive sessions (the more interactive the better!) or more innovative and radical session proposals for this one-day event.

On the 20th anniversary of the publication of Macpherson Report into the death of Stephen Lawrence, we are reminded that Macpherson made reference to organisations and areas beyond merely the police force when he was referring to the problem of institutional racism. Paragraphs 6.54 and 45 state that:

6.54 Racism, institutional or otherwise, is not the prerogative of the Police Service. It is clear that other agencies including for example those dealing with housing and education also suffer from the disease. If racism is to be eradicated there must be specific and co-ordinated action both within the agencies themselves and by society at large, particularly through the educational system, from pre-primary school upwards and onwards.

45.15 There was a weight of opinion and concern in relation to two specific aspects of education. First the failure of the National Curriculum to reflect adequately the needs of a diverse multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society. Secondly the number of exclusions from schools which were apparently disproportionate to the ethnic mix of the pupils.

What followed were recommendations 67 and 68:

67. That consideration be given to amendment of the National Curriculum aimed at valuing cultural diversity and preventing racism, in order better to reflect the needs of a diverse society.

68. That Local Education Authorities and school Governors have the duty to create and implement strategies in their schools to prevent and address racism. Such strategies to include: that schools record all racist incidents; that all recorded incidents are reported to the pupils’ parents/guardians, school Governors and LEAs; that the numbers of racist incidents are published annually, on a school by school basis; and that the numbers and self-defined ethnic identity of “excluded” pupils are published annually on a school by school basis.

This event is an opportunity to explore and discuss issues such as (although not exclusively):

  • how far recommendations 67 and 68 have been implemented and had an impact, not just in schools, but across the education sector?
  • whether a focus on the curriculum goes far enough in addressing institutional racism in education?
  • has the focus on working class white boys shifted the attention/discourse away from institutional racism in education?
  • what needs to be done to close the attainment gap?

We therefore welcome proposals for sessions which address some of the above broad themes.

Please note that the call for papers has been extended to Friday 5th July.

The call for papers is here: Radical Pedagogies Call for papers

Other indicative areas for discussion are:

  • anti-oppressive teaching practices;
  • punk pedagogy;
  • the role of the marketisation of higher education on radical pedagogies;
  • critical race theory;
  • intersectionality and pedagogy;
  • the role of radical pedagogies in reducing attainment gaps;
  • institutional discrimination and radical pedagogy;
  • student experiences in the classroom; and
  • the role of parents/carers as educational activists.

The aim of this event is to encourage participants to push the boundaries of current educational and pedagogic practices.

Please submit a 500-word abstract, or a 2-minute video clip by Friday 5th July 2019 to RadicalDMU@dmu.ac.uk

This event is a free, one-day, event. Travel bursaries are available. Please contact us for further details.

To book on the conference, click here.


A New Vision for Further and Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

With Sol Gamsu, I have co-edited A New Vision for Further and Higher Education, published by the Centre for Labour and Social Studies. Launched at the recent UCU conference, the report is available from the CLASS website.

The abstract is as follows.

Our systems of further and higher education are no longer fit for purpose. After decades of marketisation and years of austerity cuts, recent high-profile strikes in the education sector signified a service at breaking point. But what to do? How do we pursue education, not as a commodity, but as ‘the practice of freedom’?

How can we dismantle the elitism of higher education, the degradation of further education and create a system that promotes the values of justice, hope and solidarity? There are no easy answers but this collection of essays hopes to start a conversation about how we move forward.

The report was discussed at a recent West London Socialist Educational Association meeting. A report of that meeting, entitled Education and Wandsworth Transformed, can be found here.


Presentation: Strategic Visions & Values: Inclusive Curricula and Leadership in Learning and Teaching


Posted by hallymk1

On Wednesday I spoke at a Leadership in Learning and Teaching programme event at the Durham Centre for Academic Development. I was asked to share my experience of working to embed inclusivity in the curriculum, and framed what I said/our discussions around:

  • policy and institutional change;
  • participants’ perspectives on embedding inclusivity in the curriculum;
  • two DMU examples of institutional change projects relating to disability (Universal Design for Learning (UDL)) and work to close the attainment gap (Freedom to Achieve); and
  • participant engagement with DMU’s UDL framework.

I utilised our UDL2 project interim evaluation report and UDL2 literature review, alongside our Freedom to Achieve interim evaluation report.

I also made contextual reference to DMU’s access and participation plan, submitted to the Office for Students for 2018/19, and pointed participants to Durham’s plan. These highlight the differences across the sector between intake, upon which approaches to inclusivity/diversity (whatever they mean) rest.

My slides are available below. I have also appended some of the key points that emerge from our discussions. Finally, I append a limited number of resources, which I find particularly useful or challenging.

Key points from participant discussions

Q. What are your experiences of working to embed inclusivity in the curriculum?

  • Issues around the pace of change, and who has responsibility when so much activity is devolved.
  • What is the meaning of these terms, and in particular in different disciplinary contexts and at different levels of study?
  • What is the relationship between strategy, policy and practice? Here, issues of curriculum development and curriculum delivery, pivoting around curriculum Design, pointing towards assessment and feedback are surfaced. There needs to be discussion about institutional, departmental and subject-specific agendas, in order to avoid the impact of hidden or unconscious curriculum intentions.
  • There are issues of workload that need to be considered.
  • How do we encourage sharing across disciplinary boundaries and separations created by different workloads/roles/job types?
  • We recognise a range of cultural expectations, including the expectations of students attending different institutions with different histories, cultures, practices, forms of capital. We also recognise a range of expectations in relation to employability and the generation of new skills, competencies and knowledge.
  • We recognise the need to create a lingua franca, through which we can generate a shared approach to communication. However, this needs to be sensitive to different expertise and experience, and the ways in which language can affect interpretation and activity. Our aim is to avoid unnecessary friction, whilst supporting and scaffolding our students’ struggles to master the curriculum.
  • Is it possible to avoid simply retrofitting a physical or curricula infrastructure, and to build something that celebrates diversity and inclusivity (whatever they are)?
  • There are competing pressures upon staff in relation to career, Department and institution, and in terms of student experience/support. There are competing pressures upon staff in relation to research, teaching and administration. How do search innovation projects relate to academic progression?
  • How do we decide what is valued and who is valued in our approaches to innovation? How do we engage with new workload models in this process?
  • We have more agency than we think, and are able to shift the emphasis of the curriculum, in order to focus content and activity upon previously marginalised areas of study. In this way, we can begin to ask questions about privilege and power, and centre new individuals/groups. In this way we can also approach problems differentially, and enabling students to take ownership.
  • In terms of having a framework for inclusive practice, at the level of curriculum design, delivery and assessment/feedback, there is interest in the concrete practices of particular subjects (as opposed to more abstract or open-ended frameworks). How might this work in different disciplinary contexts? As a result, is it possible to move beyond the threshold engagement with inclusivity/diversity, in order to do more?

References

Ahmed, S. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ahmed, S. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Barnett, R. 2016. Understanding the University: Institution, Idea, Possibilities. London: Routledge.

Bhambra, G., Gebrial, D., & Nisancioglu, K. (Eds., 2018). Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press.

Connell, R. 2013. “The neoliberal cascade and education: an essay on the market agenda and its consequences.” Critical Studies in Education 54 (2): 99-112.

De Sousa Santos, B. (Ed., 2007). Cognitive Justice in a Global World: Prudent Knowledges for a Decent Life. New York: Lexington Books.

O’Dwyer, S., S. Pinto, and S. McDonagh. 2017. “Self-care for academics: a poetic invitation to reflect and resist.” Reflective Practice 19 (2): 243-49.

Steinþórsdóttir, F. S., Heijstra, T. M., & Einarsdóttir, Þ. J. (2017). The making of the ‘excellent’ university: A drawback for gender equality. ephemera: theory and politics in organization, 17(3), 557-82.

Styres, S. (2018). Literacies of Land: Decolonising Narratives, Storytelling, and Literature. In L. Tuhiwai Smith, E. Tuck, & K.W. Yang (Eds.), Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View (pp. 24-33). London: Routledge.

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, 1(1), 1-40.

Tuhiwai Smith, L., Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (Eds., 2018). Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View. London: Routledge.


Podcast episode seven and alienated knowledge production


Posted by hallymk1

Episode seven is up over on the podcast channel, I’ve been talking with John Coster about coffee, documentary media and the boundaries between us, with a particular focus upon academic work and public engagement.

I’ve also been speaking at Academics, Professionals and Publics: Changes in the Ecologies of Knowledge Work. My slides on alienated knowledge production are below. Next week, I will give a fuller write-up of this event, with my takeaways in terms of academic identity and the abolition of academic labour.