Aiming for perfect truth and authenticity

Apparently, when asked why he didn't paint representational pictures, Jackson Pollock replied  'Because we have machines to do that'.

Robert Hughes asserted that it is impossible to make a forgery of Pollock's work - I think this is making a  similar point from the other direction. True authenticity cannot be forged, though it is also, of course, impossible to achieve perfectly....

Creativity and leadership: Jerry Dammers' Spatial AKA Orchestra

I went to see this wonderful band last week.  It was an absolutely brilliant concert: surprising, stimulating, awe-inspiring, tender, funny, and above all musical: it made me think again about tunes I thought I knew, and introduced me to wonderful songs new to me (in particular Blue Pepper by Duke Ellington, and I'll wait for you by Sun Ra).  The band consists of...wait for it....27 musicians (or thereabouts - there were also a number of mannequins positioned in and around the band, some of them apparently playing instruments, which made counting people difficult!): 9 brass and woodwind, 5 strings, 3 guitars, 2 keyboards, 4 drums, percussion and vibes, and 4 singers.  The music was eclectic (an overused word I know but absolutely precise in this case), encompassing Captain Beefheart, 'Library Music' (not sure what this is), Ellington, Coltrane, a reworked and even more doom-laden Ghost Town by the original Specials, cheerful ska classics, Edgar Broughton, Johnny Clarke, Dvorak, In the Bleak Midwinter, and especially the music of Sun Ra, pioneer and promoter of black consciousness and interplanetary travel, spiritual mentor and forerunner of George Clinton and Funkadelic.  Spatial AKA, like the Sun Ra orchestra, were kitted out in glittery and vaguely Egyptian robes, hairpieces, sunglasses and/or masks, arrived on stage piecemeal from amongst the audience, while making a collective sound like a gathering storm of didgeridoos (one instrument unaccountably absent from the proceedings).  They played continuously for three hours, and then for another half an hour out in the lobby as everyone was leaving!

Visually, the movements of the band members and their costumes were augmented by a strange set involving already mentioned mannequins, three of which were painted silver and suspended above the band as if flying, along with what I gradually realised was a small lunar module about to crash to earth.  Behind the band was a continuously changing and layered projection of slides, videos, and psychedelic lightshow, the like of which I haven't seen for years: it took me happily back to New Riders of the Purple Sage at Surrey University in about 1972!  But this backdrop wasn't just for decoration, it imparted a powerful cultural and political flavour to the music, so that even though there were almost no overt political statements or references during the set, the whole experiene was flavoured with a clear enough set of political messages and affiliations.

There were so many terrific musical and visual moments: Alcyona Mick playing whirlwind piano solos while apparently motionless, a kettle drum solo involving continuous de-tuning and retuning of the drums during the solo, wonderful ensemble arrangements and solos amongst the brass, woodwind and strings sections, complex textures added by percussion and vibes, and poetry and scat singing as well as a joyous impersonation of the late great Captain Beefheart by Edgar Broughton, himself something of a legend in his own lunchtime for those of us of a certain age, singing Frownland from Trout Mask Replica.  Johnny Clarke, the great Jamaican reggae singer, came on like a cheerful psychedelic Santa Claus, all in yellow and with locks reaching down to his calves!  For me the single best moment was Francine Luce singing Sun Ra's I'll wait for you, in memory of her father.  The band's website has a few short clips of music, and there are more on Youtube, but don't let anything stop you from seeing them live if you can.

Why am I writing about the Spatial AKA Orchestra here, in a blog focussed mainly on education?  Well, the sheer size of the band got me thinking about the kind of organisation needed to put a concert like this together, and this led on to a perennial topic of thought and conversation with me: the qualities needed by the people who run such enterprises.  I'd love to talk to Jerry Dammers about this: his must be an incredibly complex and difficult job.  He is thought of as a song-writer and arranger, but he's obviously much more than that.  The economics of big bands can't be easy: many, if not all, of the individual members of the Spatial AKA are absolutely at the top of the tree in their various specialisms, and they all need to make a living.  I read somewhere that Miles Davis's legendary Birth of the Cool septet only existed long enough to make a  single record, and didn't play any gigs, because even with only seven they couldn't earn enough in New York in the late 40s.  Ellington and Basie managed it somehow, but for them it may have been easier because popular musical taste demanded large dance bands, at least during some periods; that is hardly the situation in 2011.  Captain Beefheart's uncompromising vision led him, allegedly, to shut his band up for a year to practice, hardly feeding them anything, let alone paying them, until they were note-perfect on Trout Mask Replica.   The band-leader's job, apart from choosing and arranging songs (for 27 parts!), includes all the organisational issues of publicity and marketing, negotiating and agreeing contracts with concert halls and promoters, travel and accommodation (for 27!), and then, most interestingly of all, the people-management issues within the band itself.  There must be so many potential headaches among such a large group of creative people!  Is Jerry an Arsene Wenger, an Alex Ferguson, or an ashen-faced Ron Knee?  His musical arrangements depend for their success on the skills of all the individuals playing them: suppose some of them aren't so enthusiastic about them?  This is analogous to footballers having to play within the tactical system designed by their manager: we know all too well how easily confidence of the manager in the player's capability, or of the player in the manager's system, can be broken down - similar issues must arise in big bands too.

All of this points to the fact that an enterprise like the Spatial AKA Orchestra is no trivial project, and this makes me marvel all the more at last week's gig: it was a triumph not just of musical creation and re-creation, but of leadership and organisation too.  Each depends on the other.  Thanks to everyone involved!

Mmm.....Murmuration

Beyond comment or analysis, you might think, but apparently not: these beautiful dances are produced by very simple rules observed by each starling once it is in flocking mode, identical to fish in a shoal, about following while keeping their distance from, the bird to the left: the variations and turns are produced by the birds on the outside of the murmuration, veering after insects, perhaps, or to evade a predatory hawk.

The music is a little annoying though....

Bad Science, Leonardo, and professional learning

Ben Goldacre, the Guardian's Bad Science columnist, is taking a holiday to write a book!  Not Science Fiction, surely, Ben?  I'm sure it will be worth waiting for, but how the hell will we manage in the meantime without you looking after things in the Truth Dept?

Your sign-off column this weekend is a beautifully succinct series of nuggets of wisdom - the most important one in my view being:

'everyone needs to understand how we know if something is good for us, or bad for us. The basics of evidence-based medicine, of trials, meta-analyses, cohort studies and the like should be taught in schools and waiting rooms.'

I fear this is not what Michael Gove has in mind for the central element of the English Bac....

Also this weekend I listened on the radio to a heart surgeon reminding us that while no one is perfect (so things may go wrong for even the most skilled and experienced practitioners of any craft or occupation), it is still true that when working in highly complex situations which in a real sense are unique every time, then more experienced practitioners, assuming they are working with the best available knowledge, are a better bet than relative novices, however brilliant those novices may be.  He was talking in the context of a discussion about the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition, and suggested that surgeons are researching and learning their craft every time they perform their work, just like Leonardo, who never stopped enquiring into nature, never stopped making descriptive notes and drawings, writing down thoughts and hypotheses, and then testing his new ideas to see what would happen; though with him it was in dozens of different disciplines. This is a perfect description of professional learning: practice on its own doesn't produce learning - it needs to be accompanied by reflection, and probably discussion with colleagues (something Leonardo may not have much opportunity for), but also crucially it needs to be made explicit in the form perhaps of writing, or of drawings, so that it can be returned to, re-evaluated, and repeatedly tested to see if it stands up to scrutiny.  If it survives this examination, then it might be reliable enough to be incorporated into future practice.

There's also a mouth-watering review in today's paper of a book on this topic by Daniel Kahneman, called 'Thinking, fast and slow', enquiring into the processes by which people make decisions, how learning contributes to these processes, and how and why even experts make unaccountable mistakes.  I hope it's out in paperback soon.  Meanwhile here's the link for a terrific TED talk by Kahneman on why we should stop using the word happiness!

We are shadows....

Sundial in Fournier St, London E1, UK.  From the wonderful blog Spitalfields Life (see right).  Its latest post is as good a way in as any to understanding what's happening at St Paul's, and has some terrific pictures.  More on this to come....

Professional learning by deliberately cultivating the unexpected

“He that confines himself to one book at a time, may be amused, but is no student.  In order to study, I must sit in some measure in the middle of a library.”

William Godwin, The Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, Vol 81, 1818

I take this to suggest that 'students' need to do more than focus on and work directly at the subject of their studies; they must enrich this direct approach with other ideas, stimuli, experiences, so as to allow and encourage surprises, unexpected insights; in short, serendipity.  This might be boringly described as 'reading around your subject', but I think Godwin means something much more than that: something more like Rimbaud's 'systematic derangement of the senses', so as to try to be jolted out of one's preconceptions. 

I am pleased with this idea, as it aligns well with something I wrote recently about the messiness of real teaching and learning (Derrick 2010):

In the dominant model of public sector professionalism today, accidents are seen as prima facie evidence of failure: if unexpected events do occur, it must be due to inadequate preparation or human error. This view of practice assumes that in principle the job and skills of a teacher, social worker, parent, etc, can be defined in detail, without ambiguity, and therefore codified precisely. Regulation and quality assurance of these roles, it follows, is a straightforward process of checking that there is no variation from the code. The training of such professionals is also seen as straightforward, based on a well-defined, unproblematic body of knowledge and an accompanying skill-set that hardly changes over time. This positivist view of practice derives from a positivist view of learning, in some versions almost identical to behaviourism, in which the individual learner is seen as a passive recipient of pre-defined knowledge and skills, which are acquired usually through processes of memorisation and repetitive practice....

There is little room in the positivist view of practice for the idea of teaching as an art, or as a craft, something honed and fashioned over time in the context of a ‘community of practice’, and which takes for granted that changing circumstances and new learners will produce new problems for the teacher, who therefore needs the capacity to respond to new and unexpected situations.  Recent research shows clearly that teachers need to be ready at times to abandon their detailed plans and ‘go with the teachable moment’, not just as a response to difficult situations, but as an optimal strategy when things are anyway going well. Nor can the positivist view encompass the idea of the learning process as active, combining research, creation and re-creation by groups as well as by individuals, with a range of possible outcomes and wider benefits at the level of the individual learner, the group, the community and society in general . It does emphasise the role of the learner in choosing programmes of learning to enrol on, just as a shopper chooses products from the shelves of a supermarket, but this can only be equated with active learning from a reductionist, behaviourist viewpoint....[This] echoes Donald Schön’s famous distinction between different types of professional problem:
In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is the swampy lowland where situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that problems of high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of the greatest human concern.  (Schön 1983)
This view suggests that a crudely positivist philosophy and policy of learning, teaching, and teacher development, whatever its intentions, will be damaging both to society and to individuals. In particular, it will lead to deskilling: it nurtures in professionals a passive, bureaucratic and parochial version of their work, which over time leads to diminishing interest in, curiosity about, and capacity to deal with unexpected situations, or even to imagine crisis scenarios so as to prepare for them. Specifically it leads to diminution in preparedness and of the capacity to make judgements about the best course of action in the difficult, complex situations to be found in classrooms everywhere.
Richard Sennett (1970) argues that everyone needs to experience living and coping with the uncertain and the unfamiliar, of managing and dealing with life in complex and unpredictable situations without being in control of them, in order to reach full psychological maturity. If state-supported education seeks to eliminate the uncertain, the debatable, the unexpected, he suggests that it is condemning people to a kind of passive and frustrating adolescence, whatever their biological age.
Avoiding these problems, and harvesting the full potential of learners and teachers to enrich their practice for the economic, social and cultural benefit of society in general, will mean taking a quite different approach to learning in general, and following its implications through in terms of curriculum, the organisation, funding and accountability systems for state-supported learning, and of course to the formation and ongoing development of teachers.
References:

Derrick J (2010) The messiness of real teaching and learning, in Derrick J, Howard U, Field J, Lavender P, Meyer S, von Rein EN, and Schuller T (eds, 2010) Remaking Adult Learning: Essays on adult education in honour of Alan Tuckett.  London: Institute of Education

Schön D (1983) The reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. London: Maurice Temple Smith
Sennett R (1970 - 2008 edition) The uses of disorder – personal identity and city life. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

Does investing in computers produce better test scores?

Well, no, probably: see
http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/denying-the-facts-investing-in-computers-and-higher-test-scores/

Larry Cuban's piece is brilliant on the way blind prejudice often determines policy, rather than good research.  But who wants better test scores anyway?  Do better test scores mean better learning and better educated students?

Well, not necessarily.  Standardised testing is a good way to evaluate the outcomes of a process intended to produce millions of identical items to the same objectively measurable quality standards, as efficiently as possible.  It's good for mass production processes, for making knives and forks, for example, or cars, or washing machines.  But citizens?

Education processes produces voters, citizens, members of communities and families, workers, and this is one factory where we don't want identical products.  In fact, we probably don't want a factory at all: see Ken Robinson's brilliant animated lecture at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U.  So why do policymakers persist in applying mass production methods, such as standardised testing, payment by results, league tables, and command and control inspection systems, to learning?

The Spectator on Blogging (1711)

A man who publishes his Works in a Volume, has an infinite Advantage over one who communicates his Writings to the World in loose Tracts and single Pieces.  We do not expect to meet with any thing in a bulky Volume till after some heavy Preamble...This gave Occasion to the famous Greek Proverb....That a great Book is a great Evil.

On the contrary, those who publish their Thoughts in distinct Sheets, and as it were by Piece-meal, have none of these Advantages.  We must immediately fall into our Subject, and treat every part of it in a lively Manner, or our Papers are thrown by as dull and insipid: our Matter must lie close together, and either be wholly new in itself, or in the Turn it receives from our Expressions.  At the same time....it is expected that every Sheet should be a kind of Treatise, and make out in Thought what it wants in Bulk: that a point of Humour should be worked up in all its Parts; and a Subject touched upon in its most essential Articles, without the Repetitions, Tautologies, and Enlargements that are indulged to longer Labours. An Essay Writer must practise in the Chymical Method, and give the Virtue of a full Draught in a few Drops. Were all books reduced thus to make their Quintessence, many a bulky Author would make his Appearance in a Penny Paper....The Works of an Age would be contained on a few Shelves; not to mention Millions of Volumes that would be utterly annihilated. (Addison, No 124, full text at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12030/12030-h/12030-h/SV1/Spectator1.html#section124)

Blogs in history

One of the main spurs to me to get this blog going has been The Spectator, published in London every couple of days during the period 1709-15 that enjoyed enormous circulation for its time, and was highly influential in developing ideas about behaviour and social mores in the public sphere, traces of which can still be observed today.  The authors achieved this by being highly idiosyncratic, gently mocking of fashion and fads, and of easily identifiable social types, slightly cynical and ironical but wearing their liberal values on their sleeves. The word 'lucubration' in the my Blog's strapline comes from the Spectator: it means 'laborious and intensive study' - of course used ironically in the original, as well as by me!  What Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, the main authors, were doing, though they didn't know it, was blogging....I am slowly reading the complete lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaffe, the Spectator himself, in the Everyman Edition, which fills four volumes, so it will keep me going a good while!

While on this subject I will provide a quote from the said Bickerstaffe's ruminations, of relevance to educationists. After complaining about the widespread use of beating by school teachers, he goes on: 'Tis pity, but we had a Set of Men, polite in their Behaviour and Method of teaching, who should be put into a Condition of being above flattering or fearing the Parents of those they instruct.  We might then possibly see Learning become a Pleasure, and Children delighting themselves in that, which now they abhor for coming upon such hard Terms to them: What would be still a greater Happiness arising from the Care of such Instructors, would be, that we should have no more Pedants, nor any bred to Learning who had not Genius for it.'

It occurs to me that Montaigne's essays (1588), one of the few books known to have been in Shakespeare's library, are also very like a blog.

Other examples of historical blogs will be referenced here when I come across them: any contributions will be gratefully received

A Devils' Dictionary of Education

One of the projects I will occasionally pursue with this blog is a Devil's Dictionary of Education: an attempt at a series of corrective discussions of words and phrases used commonly in the world of education that need unpacking, either because they are misleading, or have had their meanings forcibly changed by policymakers.  Why Devil's Dictionary - well, because one of my favourite books is Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, compiled about 1890, which is addressed to 'enlightened souls who prefer dry wines to sweet, sense to sentiment, wit to humour.'  In it, for example, Education is defined as 'that which discloses to the wise and disguises to the foolish their lack of understanding'. 

Having conceived this plan, but before I had done anything about it, I came across John T Spencer's blog Ditch that Word (see address to the right), which has a related, but perhaps more pessimistic purpose: he discusses words and phrases whose meanings have become so corrupted he believes we should stop using them altogether. 

A good example from the world of education in England is perhaps 'satisfactory'.  This word is used as a technical term by OFSTED, the Inspection Agency for schools and colleges, to mean 'unsatisfactory'.  Ambrose would have loved that....

John Spencer gives a long list of words and phrases he plans to discuss.  Here are some of the ones I will try to get round to in the fullness of time:

Intervention, Delivery, Learning Styles, Outcomes, Individual Learning Plans, League tables, Lesson plans, Quality standards, Consistency, Fairness, Differentiation, Well-being, Self-esteem.

New suggestions and any contributions to the dictionary will be very welcome!

Visualising the scale of the Universe

Try this out, a tool developed by Cary Huang to help vosualise the scale of the universe, using an app rather like Prezi - maybe it is Prezi.

I'm trying to think of ways this could be used this in teaching - years ago Alison Tomlin and I modelled the solar system with students standing on a scale of 1m miles to 1 inch: Mercury was a few inches from the sun, someone was a mile away (I guess Neptune) and someone else (Pluto - this was before it was downgraded) was 60 miles away!

This app is awesome in the same way.... http://primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale_of_universe/

Thanks to Dawn at: http://www.gardensforlearning.com/resources.html

Models for the perfect teacher

According to a YouGov survey of 543 children who were asked to choose their perfect teacher from a list of celebrities and fictional characters, the most popular choices were (drum roll):

Female: 1st JK Rowling, chosen by 40%, 2nd Cheryl Cole, chosen by 25%.
Male: 1st Albus Dumbledore, chosen by 36%, 2nd Jamie Oliver and Yoda, chosen by 26%.

The most popular choices by parents were (muted drum roll):

Female: Carol Vorderman, chosen by 48% of parents in the sample
Male: Stephen Fry, chosen by 40%.

Children thought that a sense of humour and fun as the most important qualities in a teacher.  Interestingly, more than 80% of parents opposed cutting education spending, 71% thought that teachers should have a higher self-image, and 74% thought that teachers should have 'more freedom to teach as they please.'  Only 36% of parents think that teachers' pay and pensions should be subject to cuts.  But 49% of parents, and 19% of schoolchildren, think that corporal punishment should be an option in schools (see the TES, 16th Sept 2011).

Yoda is an interesting choice for perfect teacher to me, not least because I am a bit surprised children today have heard of him - Star Wars was released in 1977!  He does have a very impressive range of teaching techniques, including a tangible aura of wisdom, weird sentence construction, telepathy and telekinesis, all of these shared with Dumbledore, who also has saintliness and magic in his arsenal.  I suppose Cheryl Cole is in the frame because of excellent feedback technique demonstrated on X Factor or Celebrity Come Dancing (or whatever).   And Stephen Fry because he seems to know everything, can talk the hind legs off a horse, but still has a smiley, kindly manner.

Memo to self: note other fictional or celebrity characters that could be role models for teachers, for better or worse.  The only one I can think of at the moment is Dr Cox in Scrubs, wonderful but probably not an ideal role model.  If you know the programme, you'll know what I mean.

Teaching ‘Bad Science’: implications for teacher professionalism

How important is the truth status of what we are teaching? This question was raised for me years ago when I was responsible for a programme of adult education that included a course in Astrology. The issue appeared again during the past year, when as a teacher educator I observed an experienced vocational teacher in Hair and Beauty Therapy, who was teaching a session on Hot Stone Massage Therapy to 16-19 year old students at a London Sixth Form college, as part of an NVQ level 3 qualification. Among the materials she gave to the students was a hand-out from the official curriculum document validated by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority containing information the students are required to learn about the maintenance of massage stones. According to this document, students have to learn how to use:

 

appropriate methods to re-energise the types of stones (sun, moon, the elements, natural sea salt, sage, energy, mandalas, labradorite) (ITEC 2010 p3, appendix 9)

 

The ideas that stones can become ‘de-energised’, and must then be ‘re-energised’ by such methods as ‘burying them in the earth in your garden overnight’, ‘leaving them out in moonlight overnight’, or ‘covering them with sea-salt’ are completely non-scientific, and yet are here presented as core curriculum knowledge within a context of vocational training overseen by a national occupational body, and funded and quality-assured by government agencies.

 

At the time I was very disturbed to find myself playing an indirect role in validating and in effect giving authority to this type of false knowledge. An equivalent in a geography curriculum would be to teach that the earth is flat. The teacher herself pointed out to the students apparent contradictions between some of the methods listed as being appropriate for ‘re-energising’ the stones, such as ‘leaving the stones out in the moonlight overnight’ and ‘burying them in the garden overnight’.

 

As my role was to support the teacher in relation to the generic teacher training curriculum, I had no direct professional responsibility to raise issues concerning the content of the subject curriculum.

 

But there are still very important implications here for professionalism in general within the post-compulsory sector. One of the effects of the technocratic approach to standardizing quality assurance and funding arrangements within the sector is that the content of the curriculum is implicitly assumed to be completely unproblematic: these arrangements embody a view of teacher professionalism in which raising questions about the curriculum is not seen as something that teachers would need or want to do (this applies to students too for that matter). Once a teacher’s institution has taken the decision to offer a particular subject, the view is that a professional teacher will teach it according to the standards and content laid down by the relevant occupational body, which itself is validated and recognized by the relevant government agencies. Their professionalism is not understood to stretch so far as to raise questions about the validity of the curriculum itself; and still less would this be appropriate for a generic teacher educator like myself.

 

In this view of professionalism, therefore, I am expected to see no difficulties in supporting a teacher to teach what most people would consider to be ‘false knowledge’ to young people. The only way I can see the students rationalizing this situation is that their future clients are assumed to be willing to pay for services based on and justified by this false knowledge, and, in the interests of improving their employment prospects, going along with and spreading this false knowledge is justified.

 

In this view of professionalism, the truth status or otherwise of the content of vocational courses is not seen to be an important issue, as long as it has commercial credibility. Personally, I find this view morally, politically and professionally unpalatable. A society in which teachers are not supposed to be concerned with teaching truths as opposed to falsehoods is one in my view which has become almost entirely relativist, one in which knowledge is defined by those who can pay. This is a society in which teacher professionalism is more or less equivalent to brand loyalty.

 

The moral dilemma created by these materials for teachers concerned about truth rather than the commercial nexus reflects wider changes in British society during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and specifically the significant incursion of private and commercial interests into the sphere of public education during this period.  This has had two effects which contribute to the creation of the teachers’ dilemma: firstly, it has tended to blur the differences between the private and public sphere – because of the extent to which educational services and functions have been ‘contracted out’ to private companies, including the writing of curriculum content and standards, as well as the increasing tendency for the main provider institutions of education to be ‘incorporated’ as independent organisations expected to operate as businesses within a competitive commercial environment. Secondly, this blurring effect also has implications for authority: in a commercial world, commercial interests are paramount: there are no independent and impartial sources of information which can be trusted to provide the best (ie truest, most impartial and objective) information available.
What implications does this problem raise for the concept of ‘professionalism’ in relation to teachers in this situation? For example, how does this situation fit within Whitty’s typology of professionalisms?  His is a somewhat positivist model, in that there is a strong sense that the dominant concept of professionalism is evolving over time and gradually getting ‘better’. He prefers ‘collaborative’ to ‘traditional’ professionalism, though he is rather vague about what would mean in practice:

 

It potentially offers teachers new professional opportunities to support ….learning by achieving a balance between defining the teacher’s proper role and staking out the territory too rigidly. Identifying the contribution of teachers’ specific expertise remains important, but this will need to be deployed and disseminated differently in collaborative contexts (Whitty 2008, 43).

 

He also seems to favour ‘democratic’ over ‘collaborative’ professionalism, but this too seems to involve little more than sensitivity ‘to a wide range of stakeholders, some of whom have traditionally been silent’ (Whitty 2008, 44).

 

Whitty’s discussion implicitly assumes that knowledge itself is unproblematic: he therefore seems to imply that epistemology is irrelevant to a discussion of professionalism.  His endorsement of what I see as ‘New Labour’ professionalisms ignores the spread of cultural, political and factual relativism which undermines moral authority and allows the increasing dominance of consumerism in society as a whole.
The problem here (and there may well be other examples) lies in the perceived need for an officially defined curriculum in each publicly-funded course; this is exacerbated by the complete institutional separation and division of labour between teachers and those bodies now responsible for ‘defining’ the curriculum, in this case QCA and the ‘industry body’, ie ITEC. In my discussion of teaching as craft, I suggest that this separation itself is a source of difficulties and problems: craft practice should be separated as little as possible from teaching, expert craft practitioners attain this status to some extent because they are teachers – teaching is part of their craft practice. The alternative leads, in capitalist society, to mass production, which may be appropriate for many basic and useful items in our lives, but is surely not an appropriate mode for education. We do not want the products of education, that is, learners, to turn out identical in every way! Dickens made this point 150 years ago, interestingly enough about teachers ‘lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs’ (Dickens 1854, in Hard Times).

 

The Risk Society analysis (Beck 1992) puts a premium on individuals and organisations making decisions for themselves, because the traditional sources of authority and expertise are not reliable. Absolute certainty even about important scientific questions may be impossible to attain, but professionals nevertheless must make decisions on the basis of the best-evidenced knowledge available, and not, at least in my view, on the basis of commercial opportunity. For me the key role of the professional teacher is to make judgements about what learners need to know and how they need to learn that knowledge. In order to maintain this role they need to work to establish trust with their learners, and a reputation based on moral probity and proven expertise. Any organisation they work for also needs to command the same trust and respect. This is difficult if its primary aim is to make profits for shareholders. The key feature of this professionalism, therefore, is ethics.

 

A further aspect of this issue is that it is possible that teachers would be more likely to aspire to and take on this more complex and demanding professionalism if they saw themselves more as generic teachers than merely as experts in subject knowledge: if this is so, then more emphasis should be laid on the generic aspects of teacher development in policy frameworks for CPD.  A new paradigm for CPD, in other words, would also contribute to the development and maintenance of what we can call an ‘ethical professionalism’.

 

• Beck U (1992): The Risk Society. London: Sage
• Derrick J (2011): Teaching as craft? Adults Learning 22 (9), May 2011
• ITEC (2010): Level 3 Unit 826 - Apply Stone Therapy Massage Syllabus, Taught Content 1.14.1, p3, accessed 21-08-11 at http://www.itecworld.co.uk/Syllabus/Unit%20Documents/Unit%20826%20Apply%20Stone%20Therapy%20Massage%20-%20Syllabus.pdf
• Whitty G (2008): Changing modes of teacher professionalism: traditional, managerial, collaborative and democratic, in Exploring Professionalism, ed Cunningham B.  London: Institute of Education

Teaching doesn't get more productive over time, so it gets to seem more expensive

This point is not often recognised:  it takes just as long to teach a child (or indeed an adult on a vocational training course, for example) today as it did 20 or 200 years ago.  The same is true of caring for the young or the elderly, or providing a meal in a restaurant.  Technology does not in itself make these activities more productive, because in these occupations quality is a more critical issue than quantity, and people haven't become inherently better learners since the 19th century.  (This relates to the points I made in my earlier post on craft, about mass production techniques being inappropriate in education.)  But the point needs stressing because in many other areas of work and production, salaries rise in response to productivity gains.  'Teachers' salaries however, like those of other 'efficiency-resistant' professions, rise in response not to productivity gains in education (which have thus far proven extremely difficult to achieve)' - or indeed to measure accurately - 'but to higher salaries in other sectors.  This means that staff wages consume an ever larger share of the budget, even if education does not improve.  And because the reasons for this are not immediately apparent to the average voter, dissatisfaction with education budgets may also grow.'  There also seems to be an implicit assumption among politicians that introducing new technology inevitably results in increased productivity. A great deal of research says that this is not the case in any clear and straightforward way - and see, for example this post from 'Creative Catalyst': Technology Does Not Make a Classroom Succesful, the Teacher Does.



This rather grim point was made 15 years ago by Paul Pierson, in 'The New Politics of the Welfare State', World Politics, 48.2 (1996): 143-179.

It's important therefore for educationists to question this assumption about increased productivity over time, perhaps by asking how such increases would be recognised, exactly where they might be expected to manifest themselves, and exactly how they could be achieved.  And to get one out of the way straight away, new technology does not straightforwardly enable teachers to teach more students effectively.

The coast at Seaford

Can't resist posting about some photographs I came across via a friend on facebook, by Ian Cairns: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/media/set/?set=a.10150365338275815.403982.653720814&type=1

Seaford has never looked so epic!