Gurnam Singh, NTF 2010Coventry University

Oxford Brookes University Learning and Teaching Conference: Building networks, partnerships and

communities25th June 2010, Harcourt Hill Campus,

Oxford

Education is absolutely essential to democratic life because it has the potential to be transformative, to enable individuals, through being informed and inspired to become social actors and make informed judgements about the world. In this sense, education has the potential to expand dignity, equity, human rights and freedom. This mission should under pin all other mission statements.

http://www.bis.gov.uk/ministers/david-willetts

“Accept the short term as your standard—support only what students want to study right now and outside agencies want to fund right now—and you lose the future. The subjects and methods that will matter most in twenty years are often the ones that nobody values very much right now. Slow scholarship—like Slow Food—is deeper and richer and more nourishing than the fast stuff. But it takes longer to make, and to do it properly, you have to employ eccentric people who insist on doing things their way”.

Anthony Grafton; Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities, in New York Review of Books Blog, March 9, 2010.

“Managerialism is not just the hall mark of neo-liberalism, but actually the motor: if neo-liberalism is a set of ideas, how neo-liberalism then gets into the system is through managerialism. It has swept over and transformed the university, where every procedure has been managerialised”

(Hall, 2007:111).

Less time for teaching and marking work of rising student numbers

Cultures of low-trust, greater insecurity, work-intensification as academics do administrative tasks, academic tasks are being done by administrators.

More time spent on performative accountability practices that we inevitably internalise (Ball 2005, Canaan 2008, Davies and Petersen 2005, Holloway 2005),

Despair filled lecturers begrudgingly complying with every new demand placed upon them (Fisher, 2010)

“the standardisation of…knowledge in the interests of managing and controlling it, and the devaluation of the critical intellectual work on the part of teachers and students for the primacy of practical

considerations” (1988:123).

“...not withstanding modern psychological attempts to derive (moral) educational conclusions from quasi-empirical research alone, it is difficult to see how such conclusions might be justified without appeal, however covert, to specific epistemological, ethical and even political considerations” (p3)

David Carr and Jan Steutel (eds)(1999) Virtue Ethics and Moral Education. London, Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education.

Has its roots in Aristotelian philosophical thought

contrasts from:Deontological (rules

based) approaches – e.g. Lying is always wrong

Teleological (Outcomes based) – e.g. Lying is acceptable in some situations

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Like deontology and teleology, virtue ethics are concerned with which actions a person should take in any given scenario,

However, virtue theorists argue that developing morally desirable virtues for their own sake will help aid moral actors when such decisions need to be made.

Hence it is based on the development of ‘good’ character and behaviour rather than beliefs alone:

“being virtuous is more than having a particular habit of acting, e.g. generosity. Rather, it means having a fundamental set of related virtues that enable a person to live and act morally well”

(James F Keenan, Proposing Cardinal Virtues, Theological Studies, 1995)

Based on three 1. arete (excellence), 2. phronesis (practical wisdom), and 3. eudaimonia (human flourishing)

This does not happen overnight, but the role of teacher is important.

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_our_loss_of_wisdom.html

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1. Arete (excellence – linked to craft and creativity) -

2. Phronesis (practical wisdom – must deal with real problems: moral will and moral skill),

3. Eudaimonia (flourishing – nurturing reason and intellect)

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Pedagogy is never innocent. But if it is to be understood and made problematic as a moral and political practice, educators must not only critically question and register their own subjective involvement in how and what they teach, they must also resist calls to transform pedagogy into the mere application of standardized practical methods and techniques. Otherwise, teachers become indifferent to the ethical and political dimensions of their own authority and practice.

Giroux, H (2010)Dumbing Down Teachers: Attacking Colleges of Education in the Name of Reform (Part I) - Tuesday 25 May 2010

develop and advocate pedagogies of engagement, life and hope, aiming to break down the barriers between informal and formal education, old and new universities, research and teaching and between classes and ethnic groups.

rethink the university as a radically democratic social and political institution and not a business.

create learning and teaching environments in formal and informal educational spaces that facilitate dialogue, reflexivity and connection to real life needs and that enable the creation of methodologies encouraging and realising more democratic practices

link activism outside and inside the academy, utilising the insights stemming from both practical engagement with the world and engagement with theory that seeks to understand the world?

challenge the individualised atomisation and instrumental and fatalist thinking and discourses that neoliberalism encourages in part through its assumption that ‘There Is No Alternative’ to neoliberalism

“Educational practice and its theory can never be neutral. The relationship between practice and theory in an education directed toward emancipation is one thing, but quite another in an education for domestication” (1970:12)

The present crisis of neoliberal economic banking is equally a crisis of “banking education” or education as training.

Just as neoliberal banking created a mirage of wealth, so the bureaucratic instruments of neoliberal education offered the mirage of good education. But both are now equally empty!

As teachers we need to be able to create the conditions for students to pose fundamental questions: asking WHY?

The need to think differently about how our economic life is organised is essentially a pedagogical challenge which makes creates the space to recover and reinvent the idea of education as the capacity for critically engaged citizenship.

Banking Education “involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient listening objects (the students)... His [sic] task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration -- contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance” (1970:52)

Problem-solving education…consists of acts of cognition, not transferrals of information…Through dialogue…the teacher is no longer the-one-who-teaches but who is himself [sic] taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach” (1970:61-62).

A major consideration for the development of contextual critical knowledge is affirming the experiences of students to the extent that their voices are acknowledged as an important part of the dialogue; but affirming students voices does not necessarily mean that the meaning students give to their experiences can be taken at face value, as if experience speaks romantically or even tragically for itself. The task of the critical educator is to provide the conditions for individuals to acquire a language that will enable them to reflect upon and shape their experiences and in certain instances transform those experiences in the interest of a larger project of social responsibility”

(McClaren & Da Silva, 1993:49)

Within our pedagogy we need to avoid the either/or division between intellect and emotion

Emotions think; ideas have feelings.