I will fight for my children (in the general sense)

no comment - just need to notice the moment

The coalition has achieved what it took even Thatcher years to achieve: protest riots on the streets

no comment - just like the image

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.