ideas and secrets

I want to start each blog with a quote. I warn that the quote need not relate to the text below but may indicate my desire to be thinking in many directions at one time. I will get better at this blogging. But for now, it's a valuable motivational space that does not need to be good. Some of this - most of this is after all 'vomit'.  'Good' in this context and perhaps in other contexts too -  is just a way of censoring. 


Many students who fail early literacy are refusing a form of cultural exchange that is increasingly marked out as commodity exchange - an institutional exchange with costs and benefits from extensive 'buy-in' and rewards that often are inaccessible and invisible. This institutional exchange increasingly is dominated by corporate texts and legislated pedagogic scripts. 


Luke 2008 Pedagogy as Gift Chapter 8 in Albright and Luke (Eds) Pierre Bourdieu and Literacy Education, Routledge Taylor & Francis: London


Someone will have written something about blogging. For now I have to say these words are in a public space - deliberately and consciously so but to work have to be written as if there is no public. 


And this is what I presume. After all, why would it be interesting or relevant to anyone except me? 


I think I have somewhere the idea that written is always and already a communicative act. The idea of writing as self communication seems unconvincing. So a public space for what is a private communication. For now this makes the difference to what and how I write. 


That is the public nature of this private blog ensures that I discuss ideas rather than secrets. 


(Blog is not in my spell check. Not even the one attached to my blog.)


So my paper - in 3 parts - 'Is the Professionalisation of adult basic skills teaching possible, desirable or inevitable?' The desirable aspects of my discussion is sophisticated. I will not merely reproduce it but will neaten and tighten it. The possible is the part I need to work on. The inevitable - I can weave my EdD research into. 


But 'The possible' I want to explore 3 lines:


i) the area is fragmented and the place and organisational culture that surrounds the multiple sites within which basic skills teaching may take place makes the emergence of a single cohesive professional culture extremely difficult. It is not just that each space has its own series of contingencies. It is rather the role the teacher may play is radically different and defies a general set of principles, ethics, orientation and therefore identity. The nature of the diversity is other than the nature of the diversity professional use to justify their closed shop autonomy. Even within a single institution this is true (quote the improving learning cultures). It is the divergent nature of the field makes the enterprise fraught.  


Hillier 'Nothing will prevent me from doing a good job' might help to define the occupational filed and its fragmented diversity. 


ii) the specialised nature of the subject area is in doubt. Unlike many teachers in FE who have what might be called a 'dual' professionalism - one that they maintain when the move into the sector and which they base a high degree of credibility upon, the basic skills teacher has not such duality. The mature of their subject knowledge is public - in as much as it is reading and writing - this has changed to a large extent with the introduction of the core-curriculum documents. But there are distinct strands even within adult basic skills that view reading and writing as a public and shared domain - I here refer to Kohl - reading, how to. What basic skills teachers know - reading and writing - is known to everyone. It is no more then common sense. Similarly to teaching in general - after all we have all been taught and taught someone something. There is no secret garden. 


iii) my final line of argument refers to  the notion of adult basic skills teaching as distinctly anti-professional. What I mean - somewhere caught up in notions of professionalism are notions of 'client' a relationship between expert and laity. I want to argue for the pervasiveness of Frierean thought. The belief in equity as a fundamental driver. The teacher-student / student-teacher dynamic. The reading the word and reading the world. I want here to make reference to the barefoot professional. Usher and Edwards (check) offer 3 typologies of worker identity - activist, professional and entrepreneur. The basic skills teacher is an entrepreneur. I also suggest that in part the low status of the client group is surely connected to the low status of the occupational group. That as time changes - newer recruits shift away from the principles and politics of basic skills teaching. 


Hillier might help here  - the argument is that what drives workers is a commitment to social justice and equity. 


This seems a fine set of arguments. 


My linking idea that shifts from possible to desirable has to be based on more recent pronouncements that actually this shift has happened. I may quote here NRDC literature that assumes the professionalism of adult basic skills teaching. Along with a raft of other measures. It is possible - that this may be a prescribed rather than enacted professionalism - it is possible that this merely institutionalises the barefoot professionalism that I refer to earlier. 


But with what consequences?  This links me to arguments about the desirability of these changes. 


I want to read Pierre Bourdieu and Literacy Education. I have it but feel I have to focus on the story in hand. It feels like a treat I have waiting for me. 

Frustration - 50 obligatory

Findsen B. The Professionalisation of Adult Educators: Issues and Challenges. Journal of Adult Learning Aotearoa New Zealand [serial on the Internet]. (2009, July), [cited July 30, 2010]; 37(1): 27-43. Available from: Education Research Complete.



This is what I want to read. I can find the reference but not the text. Not anywhere - not in any of my libraries, not on amazon not any of the many many searches.


Still - the reassuring point is that it at least seems to explore ideas that I know are relevant and recent and cover the kind of ground I am interesting in. It points perhaps to the depthlesness of my own argument - but for the aspect I want to explore this line is an introduction rather then the main point of the paper. I had rather though things had move on - but this does suggest that somewhere there are writers who want to talk and write about the same thing.


So - a day of frustration - but a day of legitimation and the knowing that there are others out there.


This is useful, Bottery (2003) his hierarchy of Trust - the use of metaphor interests me.


calculative trust - the logician
practice trust - the gardener
role trust - the professional
identificatory trust - the musician


There is no assumption that each encounter requires or aspires to the identificatory trust; this is not the case. It is rather that lack of trust where it is required is experienced as a violation. Once broken it is expensive and time consuming to repaired. The required reweaving never manages to return the fabric to new.


Of course I remember my tutors comment - Halpin - quoting some place, someone or other - trust is written into the grammar of our relationships.


These are 50 obligatory words.

Some words ... they come more easily than others

I'm rather caught by these ideas of 'imagination' the sociological imagination - social scientific imagination - literary imagination - professional imagination. It allows a connection between academic writing and creativity. 


I agree with the idea of all writing  - including academic writing - as story telling and that a fluent well written text is seductive; that is, it disarms the reader and part of its truth criterion is based not on the value of the argument but the emotional engagement it seems to draw from the reader. 


And so the 'professional imagination' Power 2008: 144 enables us as workers to create a space between an over-individualised self and an over-determined self. I don't want to be a dupe and am not always, everyday brave enough to be a hero. 


Besides, my experienced is embodied; it happens to and in my body. But sometimes my experience is merely the mechanism through which wider social and political structures are able to articulate themselves. there is determination, obduracy. Yet, I have the capacity to react differently to these system structure's and forces: to accept my fate, to hit my head repeatedly against a brick wall.  Or to adopt a more imagination response. 


Ok  - these blogs need a structures. I suspect the format of a quote and a discussion will do. 


Much of everyday life used to be based on a high degree of trust between people, but now trust is less personalised, and more invested in processes and abstract systems. 


The result of this is a challenge to the taken-for-grantedness of everyday life; a threat to the 'ontological security' of the self. Giddens, 1991


It threatens the ontological-security of the self in other ways. There is a 'game playing' balance between a warts and all presentation of self - one that creates the impression of accurate analysis and sound judgement while at the same time presenting the best possible image of who you are and what you are doing. The anaesthetised self. 


But these are not new ideas for me. Just a new forum for writing. New ways of expressing what I want to say. Or at least a new forum for saying it. 


The mere fact of trust being invested in processes and abstract systems suggest a distinct lack of trust n individuals. It is a reminder that the individual can not or should not be trusted. With immense psychological strength a person may refuse to take this personally. But in the same way we can only experience the world 'as a person' in the world. So the mistrust of the professional is happening to me and not to me at the same time. This requires perhaps a sense of self disassociation.  


Anyway enough blabbing. 


August is coming. 

August

I'm looking forward to 4 weeks of writing and making a concerted effort to ensure that I let nothing creep into my time. Hubby will be in London - decorting the house. So I shall have some time alone.

I have afew glimpses of ideas about how to locate my paper into an Australian context. yet frm reading the papers what i really need is to ensure I fully explain the one in which I am writing.

Robson 2006: 54

Conceptions of teaching varied according to context.

this is a central idea for my paper. My suggestion is that it is the multiple contexts within which the teaching of ALLN take place that makes the potential for the development of a single and cohesive professional identity fraught with difficulty - though perhaps this is complex rather than impossible.

The role changes, the templates for good practice vary - this may be linked to Coffield's text about ubiquitous perfect practice.

An understanding of literacy is driven as much by client as it is by subject.

The lack of what might be considered as a 'subject specilaism' that carries with it  a vocational identity.

'The importance of [...] the teachers existing identities and communities of practice can not be overstated.' Robson 2006: 55

ah - BigBrother is one.

Exploration

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. T. S. Eliot 

Onwards and Upwards

The sense of direction has given me new momentum. It really doesn't matter that a 'PhD by Publication' may not be the path I take, Just those small concrete ideas - 50 words a day; a mole skin notebook; a pen I love; an iPAD - a blog. They all seem to have motivated me. And I'm quite motivated anyway. 

I have just cracked a new one: how to embed a word document into a blog. 

You may click on this hyper-linked text  to understand the point I am making. 

An academic

An academic - someone who writes, teaches and engages in research.