continuity and change

Chris Husbands
Organisation and governance in Post 14 education


Offered much needed inspiration amidst the devastation of CSR. The sense that arts in HE has just had the rug pulled from underneath it at the moment normally excluded communities have just entered the room. 


So using the image of the hinge to what extent does skills for sustainability represent significant change & to what extent continuity. 


Are skills still superhero designed to pierce the heart of economic decline?  What's the same and what is unexpectedly different? 

slime mould and survival

Organisation and governance of post 14

I love the idea. Metaphors - Images are so strong and so powerful and somehow they seem to nest themselves to easily in my mind.

• the skunk and the chameleon. 
• and today - organisation and governance in post 14

the metaphors of a marine biologist: 

• the spinning top
• the sponge 
• or slime mould

the first two retain their shape despite the impact of their environment. The top spins on a single axis. There is the sense of dynamism, of activity, you pull the string and away it goes, its almost exciting - it's centrifugal force is what keeps it going, going around a pre-defined point. 

The sponge - may be passed through a sieve. May apparently disintegrate - but at the end of it - will reform in exactly the same form it was before. 

Only the slime mould actually changes shape and form. It remains slime mould but its form - is different. 

And so members of the audience laughed - you have got us to admit that we want to become slime mould. Since this is the survivalist strategy.  

Complicating the Complex - Purcell-Gates (Ed) Ch 1

Trainee tutors may come to their CPD programme with a focussed desire to develop strategies fir teaching literacy more effectively and as such may experience a wider discussion of what literacy is to be a time wasting indulgence. Yet there has been significant shift over the past 20 years in conceptualizing literacy. This has profound implications: what literacy is must inevitably lead to theoretical and pedagogical debate over how people become literate. 


Dominant discourses are perpetuated and reproduced through official institutions of schooling which control access to cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 2001). This double discourse / power loop - denies marginalized groups access to privileged discourses, while convincing those same groups that these are the only legitimate discourses. The discourse associated with marginalized groups are denied legitimacy and capital.


So this is an exploration of how these two ideas co-exist. A theoretical investigation. 

• two circles  - few inches apart - completely different - the shift between them is based on space & time
• two overlapping circles - as in the Venn diagram
• two circles - inches apart with the circle overlay - third space
• two concentric circles skills at bottom with practices on top (representing a small aspect of skills)
• two concentric circles with practices at bottom with Skills in top - representing a shell that prohibits the emergence of fully functional literacy
• Venn diagram but with multiple literacies - literacy within each distinct domain - with the area of overlap representing skills
• a triangle - on its side - lines pointing in a single direction: the point represents skills but this is fractured by a multiplicity once 
• the ladder
• the straight line as a continuum

These ideas need referencing and image.

my busy week

When

Monday, November 01, 2010 from 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM (PT)

 Add to my calendar

Where

NCVO
Regents Wharf
8 All Saints StreetN1 9RL London
United Kingdom 

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Hosted By

Lifelong Learning UK

Hello and welcome to Lifelong Learning UK.  We are the Sector Skills Council for over 57,000 UK employers in the lifelong learning sector. We have an ambitious vision and mission and are passionate about achieving our strategic goals on behalf of our lifelong learning employers.

Writing and Being Written - Burgess & Ivanic

Burgess,  Amy and Ivanic, Roz (2010) Writing and Being Written: Issues of Identity Across Timescales, Written Communication  27: 228 

I see myself as aiming at more in this writing then a response to what I have read – but the truth is – there is no escape from the intertextual and I need to engage with others to feel ‘confident’ that my ideas are properly grounded.

This was a slowly read and to some extent savoured article with several interruptions. I have also changed to some extent my approach to reading and annotating – one that reminds me of how i started with the EdD. Throughout I have the sense of wanting to draw on these ideas to create something different and keep ‘Sculpting’ a literacy practice to the foreground.

So – where does this leave me / bring me – what possibilities / potentialities can I explore for myself as a reader / writer – wrighter. What possibilities / potentialities can I explore for my students?

·          constructing an aspired to self, a desired self through text – a more confident, witty, sophisticated self, assertive ... those sorts of things

·          metaphors for writing – the diver poised waiting to take the plunge; the motley mass that needs sorting – slowly combing through, oiling and plaiting; the well equipped but encumbered vs. the unclad but vulnerable deep sea diver (one that is at odds completely with the www surfer). How would you describe the writing process – this may take a bit of thinking – but can you offer a metaphor?

·          asking my ‘Sculpting a literacy practice trainees – some general opening questions – what do you think about writing, do you enjoy it? Are you a good writer? What do I mean when I say ‘good writer’ – what do you mean?

The addition of timescales allows a chance to explore a identification instead of identity – an active process of construction rather than a thing – but has the feel of being squeezed in. My reading seemed to require constant referral back to the image that I was not able to do – didn’t fit my preferred approach.  But this is a very enjoyable text. I feel like I have eaten a sumptuous meal. I also learn from it. The writers are tow people who – their approach – seems to create possibilities for this writer. A self I aspire to. One that seems tangible and possible and part of the process of social change that they refer to and I believe in.

·          Tell me about writing for this assignment – I suspect they place greatest attention on the content rather than the approach. Writing what we know, not how we write what we know.

RaPAL – write up of workshop

·          Start with binary (and of course the momentary sticking with this position)

·          Explore more complex constructions – but focus here for now (why)

·          My question revolves around how they coexists as ideas in practice

Cultural Practices of Literacy

Cultural Practices of Literacy: Case Studies of Language, Literacy, Social Practice, and Power

Victoria Purcell-Gates (Editor)

• Complicating the complex: comprehending the complex. 

Through the looking glass darkly

Amanda French - 0024
BERA conference paper


effective student writing requires certain kinds of 'situated' writing practices. How and why particular writing practices reflect and shape the world view of individuals and their place in any given discourse community. 


What are the values and attitudes that underpin discourses around writing in higher education. And how do these inform and shape lecturer's expectations and perceptions of students' writing. 


Her question mirrors the question I have asked - although the terrain within which it is located is different. 


The desire is to deconstruct and interrogate these assumptions. (They - the assumptions, beliefs -  must first of all be made visible). The point then of research is to disrupt, de-familiarise and problematise the 'discourse of transparency'. 


I also want to identify the tensions and trace the contours along which these tension are manifest. To arrive at a new set of metaphors for how these two notions of literacy co-exist. 


Saturated discourses - rendered invisible by their very situatedness.  Often writing is treated as the finished product. 


I remain interested and deeply curious about Bereiter and Scaramalia (1987) the role that writing plays in the learning process - which would fling me back to the position that views it as thoroughly embedded - writing what we know is thoroughly entwined in the process of what we know. 


I note in this thinking that one of the attitudes that literacy teachers often have about writing an literacy is that language is either right or it is wrong. I suspect they treat my attempts to dislodge the ultimate correctness of language - its thorough mutability as idiosyncratic. 


For some this absoluteness of language is an anchor. Like the belief in intelligence. 


My desire is to explore teachers perceptions of language, their own experience of language and theory constructions of language as a pedagogic resource with the intention of understanding how they embody or reflect particular epistemological or political world views. 


Methodology - I am here drawn to situational analysis - grounded theory pushed around the postmodern turn & Institutional ethnography. 


I am at data that has 'depth' & thickness rather than breadth. 

Rethinking Education

http://www.red-conference.ch

what next: explicit criteria sometimes lack depth

We are dealing with judgements that are not regulated by categories. I judge. But if I am asked by what criteria do I judge, I will have no answer to give. (Lyotard, 1985: 14)

Activity

Some good and constructive ground covered


1) Paper proposed to 'The Learner' Conference in Mauritius in July - Quality and Worthwhile Professional Knowledge


2) Another conference identified in Canada - and possible paper idea well formulated


3) Still waiting from Literacy & Numeracy Studies


4) Mid way through Framing Quality: what do we know? I think an American Journal as a try out or Discourse studies as option #2


5) Looking actively for collaborations - RaPAL ... any other ideas


This is beginning to feel like activity and becoming a researcher. It will all land in good time. 


Sam Duncan's - what are we doing when we read was enjoyable. 


Next I think I need an email to my UnDips to see how many feel they can participate. All that is different now - the photographs.