Angelus Novus

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History IX, 1940

Benjamin is reported to have owned this little Klee drawing and to have carried it around with him, presumably among the notes for his Arcades project, also carried with him on his ultimately futile flight from the Nazis.  I heard that it had disappeared after his suicide.  Klee actually produced a number of similar drawings.  I was disappointed that none of them are included in the numinous Klee exhibition on at the Tate Modern at the moment.

Teachers and the cult of amateurism: enthusiasm isn’t enough

 

Would you want your child to be taught by the person appointed to this post?  If not, why not?

The coalition government has removed the basic requirement that teachers should be qualified for many state-funded schools and for all institutional providers in the Further Education sector.  An opposition motion that teachers in state-funded schools and colleges should have to be qualified or working towards qualification, was debated three weeks ago in the Commons, and defeated by about 40.   ‘What next’, asks Mark Steel in the Independent, ’surgeons and submarine commanders?’

 Of course all teachers need training, just as plumbers or brain surgeons do, for the protection of the public if for nothing else.  Teachers are brain surgeons, for goodness sake, the only difference is that, for better or worse, they operate on everyone, not just people who are ill.  To argue against the need for training is to argue for teachers to be cowboy traders, when actually more than ever we need them to be professionals, trusted as a body to set their own entry criteria and standards for working in the field, in the same way that doctors, lawyers, physiotherapists, plumbers, and the police now do.   To argue against the mild and practical motion debated in the Commons three weeks ago is to resurrect the Victorian cult of amateurism, which has many virtues, but which doesn’t cut the mustard in occupations as critical to an advanced 21^st century economy and society, as teaching. Competitor economies such as Germany, China and South Korea recognise the importance of nurturing innovation, which requires critical and collaborative thinking, creativity, team-working and research skills as well as knowledge.   The effective development of these capacities depends, for better or worse, on teachers.  

As well as subject knowledge, teachers in any setting need ‘know-how’ about the application of that knowledge, and also ‘practical wisdom’ –  a term used by Aristotle 2500 years ago to mean expertise in managing the vagaries of human behaviour and motivation for the benefit of the individuals and of the community.   Without ‘practical wisdom’ teachers will be less able or interested in inspiring and motivating learners, or encouraging and supporting them through difficulties: they will miss insights and unexpected ‘teaching moments’ that bring about learning breakthroughs, because they won’t be looking for them.  Their emphasis and focus will be on the content rather than the process and purposes of learning, on the subject rather than on the learner, on the short‑term, narrowly defined outcome rather than on learning for the future. 

Good teaching is not just a matter of knowing stuff, and then following a checklist of simple rules.  What works in one situation may well not work in another, because one group of learners is not the same as another group.  OFSTED regularly amends its list of quality criteria, and no doubt it will do so again, because they are trying to pin down something which cannot be pinned down.  Teachers so glibly described as ‘brilliant’ by one politician after another, cannot be certain they will do well on the day they are observed by inspectors, because teachers are like navigators – however good their subject knowledge, they can and do find themselves steering a leaky boat through a storm.    Teaching is an inherently complex business, requiring not just expert subject knowledge and technical knowledge about pedagogical practices, but knowledge of the world of work and of people, empathy, superb communication skills, and an unpredictable range of different kinds of know‑how.

As Aristotle recognised, it is also an essentially ethical business, aiming to support good outcomes for learners, communities, and society as a whole.  Its practitioners need the capacity to make judgement calls as they work, which bring into play each teacher’s individual dispositions and character, as well as their previous experience, and of course, their knowledge and skills.  This is because a key part of the teacher’s task is not just to know about, but to model appropriate roles: as an adult, as a citizen, as a more experienced practitioner.  Initial training helps start and focus the process by which teachers develop these capacities, skills and dispositions.

In further education there have always been teachers who started work unqualified, coming into FE as experts in various vocational or creative industries.  Most of them appreciate that training has helped them to present their experience and knowledge of practice and of the world of work more effectively than enthusiasm on its own could do.   Teaching is a very serious business: the days when it could be left to amateurs, however enthusiastic and well-meaning, are long gone.

Photo: Hubble

Toni Fazaeli from the Institute for Learning has made similar arguments in a recent Guardian blog-post, whose title echoes mine: Bring back FE teacher qualifications: learners deserve more than pot luck.  Her article responds to another by Ian Pryce, Principal of Bedford College, who argues the opposite.  I think he's wrong: his college's students, like those of many other colleges over many years, have benefitted from the freedom they have had to use vocational and industrial experts who have not been trained as teachers, and there is no suggestion that this should change, though it is being suggested that these people should be supported to develop their teaching skills. 

What is really needed for the post-compulsory, lifelong, or further education sector, whatever you want to call it, is a discussion about what professional development all teachers need at all stages in their careers, and what infrastructure is needed to support it properly.  Ian Pryce admits that even good teachers can improve.  He denies that there is any danger of employers exploiting learners using government funds, and suggests that quality assurance can be left to OFSTED: 'Many people fear that if qualifications are optional then colleges will simply replace qualified staff with unskilled, lower-cost people. But colleges deliver state-funded education and are accountable to the government and Ofsted.'  The trouble with this is firstly that the advert at the top of this post demonstrates that it is likely that some employers in the newly deregulated sector will all too readily take the chance to draw down government funds to pay for second rate educational opportunities for students who can't afford to go to the high quality college in their town; and secondly, that relying on OFSTED for quality assurance is no more than shutting the door after the horse has bolted.  They can close down a low quality provider, but not before hundreds or perhaps thousands of students have been sold short, not to mention the tax-payer.

Ian Pryce also suggests that the present teaching qualification is a one-size fits all model: this is absolutely not the case, or at least, it doesn't need to be.  The programme I work on serves the enormously complex and diverse post-compulsory sector in London - it couldn't do this effectively if it consisted of one size fits all.  The issue isn't how the training is organised, at what point in the teacher's career it takes place, or the content of it: all those things can and should be updated continuously to reflect the needs of the local and regional sector, local and regional employers, and its students.  His argument brings us back to Mark Steel's question: if teachers don't need training, what about plumbers, police officers (who as a matter of fact have a new Police College), and paediatric nurses?  Where does this argument end?  What next, volunteer teachers?  There are already an alarming number of internships being used to provide teachers in classrooms, in front of real students.  This seems to me an inevitable consequence of deregulation.  Professional standards aren't just about knowledge, but about behaving as a professional and a responsible person, as I argue above.

It is absolutely essential that we have a professional teaching and support staff workforce so that public funds are spent as productively as possible.  All the international evidence supports the view that high educational attainment at a national level is associated with highly-trained teachers who enjoy high status culturally and in their communities.  

Ken Bodden, an inspirational life

 

A wonderful guy I got to know over the past three years, as a conga player and singer with King Toadfish, who died two weeks ago.  I keep discovering more things about his extraordinary life.  He was born in Panama, half Irish-Jamaican and half Honduran, became almost blind in early childhood, was fostered for a part of his childhood in Manchester, a piano tuner, pub musician and songwriter, crosscountry skier and para-Olympian, Manchester United supporter, communal housemate, community and political activist, inveterate maker and keeper of friends.  So many people were at his funeral yesterday (in spite of appalling rain) that about 50 couldn’t get into the crematorium.  Wonderful explicitly atheist event with South African songs, Irish ballads, Bob Marley songs, and very moving tributes.  

 

This is an obituary written by his anti-apartheid comrades:

http://nonstopagainstapartheid.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/ken-bodden-anti-imperialist-singer-1950-2013/

This is a youtube of Kenny playing at a party in his house in Hackney: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-OY9oCL37U

 

(l to r) Bob Peachey, Pete Lamont, Kenny, Tsafi Ledermann and Percy Aggett, playing at a King Toadfish street party gig, Harberton Road London  N19 in summer 2012

'Kenny, it always looked as if we were leading you, when in fact it was you leading us' (John Maloney, tribute at the funeral)

 

Planning

 

 

‘Man makes plans,’ goes the Yiddish proverb, ‘and God laughs.’

‘To draw up in advance an exact and detailed plan is to deprive our mind of the pleasures of the encounter and the novelty that comes from executing he work.  It is to make the execution insipid for us and consequently impossible in works that depend on enthusiasm and imagination.  Such a plan is itself a half-work.  It must be left imperfect if we want to please ourselves.  We must say it cannot be finished.  In fact it must not be, for a very good reason: it is impossible.  We can, however, draw up such plans for works whose execution and accomplishment are a mechanical thing, a thing that depends above all on the hand.  This is suitable and even useful for painters, for sculptors.  Their senses, with each stroke of the brush or chisel, will find this novelty that did not exist for heir minds.  Forms and colours which the imagination cannot represent to us as perfectly as the eye can, will offer the artist a horde of these encounters which are indispensable to giving genius pleasure in work. But the orator, the poet, nd the philosopher will not find he same encouragement in writing down what they have already thought.  Everything is one for them.  Because the words they use have beauty only for the mind and, having been spoken in their head in the same way they are written on the page, the mind no longer has anything to discover in what it wants to say.  A plan however is necessary, but a plan that is vague, that has not been pinned down.  We must above all have a notion of the beginning, the end, and the middle of our work.  That is to say, we must choose its pitch and range, its pauses, and its objectives.  The first word must give the colour, the beginning determines the tone; the middle rules the measure, the time, the space, the proportions.’  (Joseph Joubert, 1798, The Notebooks)

 

 

‘The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane.  In the same way, the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.  The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it.  Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front.  Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.  The Chinese practice of copying books was thus an incomparable guarantee of literary culture, and the transcript a key to China’s enigmas.’ (Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, 1925-26: Chinese Curios)

 

I'm not sure I agree wholly with Joubert that the work of poets, orators and philosophers is qualitatively different to that of painters or sculptors, so that the role of planning is different.  From a craft perspective, all planning is to some degree provisional, hence the truth of his aphorism: 'A plan is however necessary, but a plan that is vague, that has not been pinned down.'  Joubert's view is that 'sticking to the plan' reduces the possibility of surprise and pleasure in the work, but Benjamin says something stronger: that over-reliance on planning results in the shutting off of possibilities, the denial of perspectives.  Over-dependence on planning suits those who want to avoid surprises, who wish to control, and those who are afraid of freedom.  In some sad cases it is all of these things.

 

Perhaps also relevant here is Andrew Lang's remark, which was actually about statistics rather than planning: 'He uses planning as a drunk man uses lamp-posts: for support rather than illumination'. 

 

Django Bates, Stravinsky, Charlie Parker

This is another post inspired by a concert of music, and coincidentally is about another great band-leader, following on from my post on Jerry Dammers eighteen months ago.  Last night I went to see Django Bates, who was playing at the proms - I'm obviously out of date as I still find it slightly surprising to hear that they have jazz as part of the proms, but Django actually first played there more than twenty years ago, with his band Loose Tubes.

The music last night was mostly inspired by and as a tribute to Charlie Parker, though Django also played his own composition called A Study of Touch.  Nearly all his band were Swedish - a superb rhythm section, a guitarist whose main role was to provide texture and subtle special effects, and a 13-piece brass band consisting of trumpets, trombones, clarinet, saxes and a tuba.  Django plays piano and often conducts at the same time.  The pieces were at times lyrical, at other times noisy and energetic - lots of complicated rhythm changes, and continual development and change, but often a sense of return to a simple pair of chords - perhaps echoing Charlie Parker's way of playing a basic tune, then going way off piste, before returning to the initial tune.  The music reflected more of Parker's fast, tight style, than of the slow, reflective numbers like Embraceable You.  I thought the band was astonishingly tight!

Django told a story about Stravinsky going to see Charlie Parker play in a New York club in 1951.  Parker recognised him, and quoted from the Firebird Suite in his solo, at which Stravinsky banged his drink down on the table with satisfaction.  It is only superficially strange that these two should appreciate each other's music - two of the most innovative composers in the world at the time.  As Django said, Stravinsky would have appreciated the proliferation of As, B flats, Bs, Cs, C sharps, Ds, E flats, Es, Fs, F sharps, Gs, and G sharps!

The Danish drummer also had a message for the audience: there are more people alive today than have been alive at any time in the world's history.  This means that if everyone alive today wanted to perform Hamlet, there wouldn't be enough skulls to go round.....

It was a wonderful evening, and the result of pure serendipity: I'd heard of him, but had never seen him before, didn't really know what he looked like, but I did know that he lived somewhere near me.  Two days before the gig, I passed a bunch of guys loading a car.  One of them pointed to my T shirt and said 'Montreal Jazz Festival - were you there?'  When I said I was, he said they were too, they performed there this summer.  So we got talking and I realised who he was, and then he told me about the gig at the Royal Albert Hall.  And as it's the end of the summer, and we are all feeling relaxed enough to go for a good thing when it presents itself, we went.  As Sartre says: 'We only have this life'.....I hope I bump into him again to say thankyou in person!

Walter Benjamin - the work of learning: writing and thinking as collecting

'Benjamin, always working, always trying to work more, speculated a good deal on the writer's daily existence.  One Way Street has several sections which offer recipes for work: the best conditions, timing, utensils.  Part of the impetus for the large correspondence he conducted was to chronicle, report on, confirm the existence of work.  His instincts as a collector served him well.  Learning was a form of collecting, as in the quotations and excerpts from daily reading which Benjamin accumulated in notebooks that he carried everywhere and from which he would read aloud to friends.  Thinking was also  form of collecting, at least in its preliminary stages.  He conscientiously logged stray ideas: developed mini-esays in letters to friends; rewrote plans for future projects; noted his dreams (several are recounted in One Way Street); kept numbered lists of all the books he read.' (Susan Sontag: Introduction to One Way Street and Other Writings, Walter Benjamin, London: New Left Books, 1979)

I once wrote an essay on Walter Benjamin.   I argued that his characteristic style of writing, collecting wreathes of aphoristic, tentative and often gnomic paragraphs which delineate his themes as it were from the outside, indirectly, rather than presenting them descriptively and directly, could be compared to a gestural, bodily style of communication as opposed to the more direct and familiar use of spoken language. He believed that copying a text was the best way to understand it, as a landscape is best understood by walking through it rather than by flying over it. 'All the decisive blows are struck left-handed'. Benjamin's work first suggested to me an idea which has come to seem more and more important in my work as a teacher: that writing (or drawing, composing music - the making of any cultural artefact, or as Raymond Williams and Stephen Yeo would say, cultural production) - is a mode of thinking and therefore of learning.  But should 'copying' be seen as production in its own right, or merely a stage or tool of the production process?  Ultimately there is no difference - copying is always a process of re-creating, re-contextualising.  My smallest utterance, in whatever form, is both completely original and a 'copy' of other people's work, made new by the act of my uttering it, and the context in which I am uttering it.  All work consists both of archeology and craft, and as well as existing for itself, it also exists to be recycled



The true size of Africa

This is mind boggling - Africa is actually bigger in area than China, USA, India, Mexico, Peru, France, Spain, PNG, Sweden, Japan, Germany, Norway, Italy, New Zealand, UK, Nepal, Bangladesh and Greece combined!
Also a great example of the power of visual/graphic data display.
More info and an enlarged version of the image above at:
http://flowingdata.com/2010/10/18/true-size-of-africa/
Thanks to Izzy for this.

Scepticism: it's a tough job, but someone has to do it

'Scepticism does not suit everybody.  It supposes a profound and careful examination.  He who doubts because he is not acquainted with the grounds of credibility is no better than an ignoramus.  The true sceptic has counted and weighed his reasons.  But it is no easy matter to weigh arguments.  Which of us knows their value with any exactness?  Out of a hundred proofs of the same truth, each one will have its partisans.  Every mind has its own telescope.  An objection which is invisible to you is a colossus to my eyes, and you find an argument trivial that to me is crushing in its efficacy.  If we dispute about their intrinsic value, how shall we agree upon their relative?  Tell me how many moral proofs are needed to balance a metaphysical conclusion?  Are my spectacles at fault, or yours?  If, then, it is so difficult to weigh reasons, and if there are no questions which have not two sides, and nearly always in equal measure, how come we to cut knots with such rapidity?  How do we come by this convinced and dogmatic air?  Have we not a hundred times experienced how revolting is dogmatic presumption? "I have been brought to detest probabilities", says the author of the Essays [Montaigne], "when they are foisted on me as infallible; I love words which soften and moderate the temerity of our propositions - peradventure, in no wise, some people say, methinks, and the like; and if I had to teach children I should train them to answer in this hesitating and undecided manner: 'What does that mean? I do not understand; maybe; is it true?' that they would have the appearance of apprentices at sixty years of age, rather than of doctors at ten, as at present.'  Denis Diderot, Philosophic Thoughts XXIV, 1747, translated Jourdain.

Diderot was so modern.   Compare this with, for example, Nietzsche: 'All seeing is perspective, and so is all knowing', virtually identical with 'Every mind has its own telescope'.  Of course I am even more pleased to see him quote Montaigne, and I am resolved to use the words peradventure and methinks whenever the opportunity presents itself.

I am reading a collection of Denis's early works, and expect there may be more quotations from it here before long....

Amnesty for international students at London Met: Petition

Sign this e-petition to support an amnesty for international students enrolled at London Met, who unless they find another course within 60 days, face deportation.

Without warning these students have been told that they are unable to continue at London Metropolitan University, due to management failings in complying with the Government's 'Points Based Immigration System'.

The petition simply calls for an amnesty so that they may complete their studies. The reasoning is that the priorities of the government "taskforce" announced today should aim to put right the problems at LMU, not merely seek to move students around the UK as a consequence of the decision to withdraw the University's sponsorship status.

If there are management failings for which London Met is responsible, it seems wholly counter to elementary natural justice to deport some 2,700 international students - which is the inevitable result if they are unable to find (or accept) university places elsewhere in the UK.
Please sign the petition here, and forward to colleagues:
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/amnesty-for-international-students-at-london-metropolit.html

The Outernet

No comment needed:  I feel it could probably be extended with a bit of thought....

Benjamin and Dali in Catalunya

One of the things I most wanted to do when I visited Catalunya for the first time in 1989, was to go to the town where Walter Benjamin died and is buried.  In the event on that occasion I wasn’t able to, but what did happen is that my personal interest in his life and work was put into strong relief by a visit to another Catalan shrine, a place I didn’t even know about before I went.  This was the Dali Theatre and Museum in Figueres.

At the prospect of visiting this item, one friend, who had OD’d on Dali while working in the Tate Gallery giftshop during the big Dali exhibition in 1980, was interested but critical: ‘All tits and bums’, was her succinct summing up.  I remembered weird landscapes and melting clocks.  I recollected his moustache, his reputation for publicity stunts, and that he had died about two years before.  I had the idea that he could still be seen embalmed and lying in state, and this added a frisson of ghoulishness to the attraction of going to Figueres.   I said to myself that I didn’t really like Dali, but we were only staying 30 kilometres away.   And, after all, he was a surrealist: hadn’t Benjamin written an important essay on Surrealism?   The visit to Dali’s museum would also be a kind of homage to Benjamin.  So we went….

The Museum building, though bizarrely decorated, merges structurally with the surrounding buildings right in the centre of Figueres.  The entrance is down a narrow street which opens into a tiled Plaça surrounded by the Museum, a Library of Surrealism, and the tables and chairs of a bar.  In front of the main entrance is a huge decorated tree stump, which with an egg shape for a head, looks like a seated person, head in hands.  Bit and pieces of plaster and sculpture are stuck into the niches of the stump, which is closely hugged by railings.  Also in the courtyard are two columns of tractor tyres, each with statues of enthroned kings on top, about thirty feet high or more.  There is also a totem pole of TV sets, covered in plaster that looks like petrified semolina.  The building itself is Theatre Del Arte-style, like a paper cut-out model, but full size.  Golden science-fiction figures with raised hands and no features are arranged around the parapet.  There are decorative eggs everywhere you look.  A huge bearded head in a glass case has a TV in its forehead and dolls eyes for eyeballs.  Its case is dotted with eggs stuck to the walls and floor.

Inside the building is a small courtyard surrounded by four floors of enclosed galleries and show rooms.  These contain pieces of Dali’s collection, much by himself.  One floor contains dozens of paintings of human shapes discovered in piles of stones.  A life-size statue of a naked woman, painted to look real and with no pubic hair, is in a glass case brightly illuminated with neon lights.  A nude human shape is painted on polystyrene boards, with a shell placed at the crotch.  One doorway is a brightly-rouged mouth, festooned with corn-cobs.  In the courtyard is a black Cadillac our of a Bogart movie, with three figures inside and a lot of ivy growing around them.  There is also a column with a real fishing boat on the top, painted yellow and white, from which blue globules are suspended as if falling.  All around the fourth gallery level, visible from the courtyard, are yellow reliefs of washbasins.

At the back of the courtyard on a sort of enclosed stage, serenaded by a white plaster orchestra with real instruments, is an amazing 20 foot-high portrait of Abraham Lincoln.  From close up his face consists of a nude woman and a series of square blocks of colour.  From afar it’s an uncanny portrait of the man.  You can’t stand far enough back in the room to be able to appreciate this, and I can only tell you about it because I happened to catch sight of a postcard of the picture in the gift-shop window, from the other side of the Plaça.

There were hundreds of people, and the galleries narrow and no complete circles, so that you have to keep retracing your steps, squeezing past those behind you going forward.

 This building and its decorations and artefacts are Dali’s tombstone, and his 1000 decibel-epitaph.  He is buried beneath it.  (I was mistaken about him lying in state, though I feel it would be perfectly consistent with everything else here.)  It represents homage to Dali from himself.  The public are amused and bemused bystanders, in fact voyeurs, in the great show Dali is giving to himself.  His throwing together of images and textures is done with dazzling technique and pazazz.  He made a stupendous effort to achieve immortality, amazingly consistent throughout his career, by apotheosising the effort itself.  His life’s work has no purpose but itself, and its meaninglessness follows from this concentration on effort – meaning diverts attention from the star of the show.

What would Walter Benjamin have made of it?  His great essay on Surrealism, published in 1929, makes no mention of Dali.  Benjamin’s interest was in the extent to which Surrealism was revolutionary and subversive by making revelation which could be utilised in political ways.  To me Dali’s effort seems to have been to domesticate and channel the dangerous energies unleashed by Surrealism.  His Museum provokes at best a kind of urbane amusement: it does not shock or disturb, and few of the images and objects provoke thought, as opposed to bewilderment or sniggers.  There is nothing here remotely as shocking as Bunuel’s image of the razor slicing through an eye in Le Chien Andalou, and nothing half as powerful as an insight, or with as much metaphorical content.  Dali’s stuff is not particularly funny either.  One gazes, impressed by the undoubted energy and technique, but there is no answer to the question implied by this: what is it all for?  It is possible that people looking for significance and meaning will be assured that it is there, even if they cannot detect it, just because of the impenetrability of the images.  But this impenetrability is the adman’s illusion of a world of surfaces and appearance.  There is nothing to penetrate, no underlying significance or point to uncover, not even a joke to get.  Significance can be attached to meaninglessness in an alienated world, but Dali in no way represents pressure for change.  He was a public supporter of Franco, who won the Spanish Civil War with the support of the Nazis, and who suppressed Dali’s own Catalan language.

Walter Benjamin died and is buried at Port Bou, on the French Catalan border, about 35 kilometres from Figueres.  He was fleeing from the Nazis, and, held up by the Spanish authorities after an asthmatic climb to the border, he committed suicide, in September 1940.  His life’s work, a collection of essays and notes for unfinished projects on a huge range of cultural activity, have nonetheless a consistency, which is his struggle to articulate the real complexity of the relation between history, culture, politics and human experience.  His memorial is a gravestone overlooking the sea at Port Bou.  His legacy is a provisional whisper of wisdom, in contrast to the shouting fairground medicine show of Dali.

I didn’t get to visit Walter Benjamin’s grave on that trip.  My friends dropped me at Girona on their way to the beach, from where I planned to take the train the relatively short distance to Port Bou, but found after they had left that there was a train strike that day.  Somehow, after I got over my disappointment, it seemed appropriate.  Benjamin lives on in his ideas, not lying in state.  Nevertheless, I said to myself, I will go there one day.

Benjamin, W. (1929, 1979 edition) Surrealism.  In One Way Street and Other Writings. London: New Left Books

Words in the design of images

I love this simple and expressive image, from one of David Pearson's designs for Penguin.  I have always liked graphic images which incorporate words, but many people feel precisely the opposite, as if the domain of images, posters and pictures should be kept separate and unpolluted by words.  But words have image content too: in fact visual memory is an indispensable element of reading: it is the shape and visual appearance of the word (provided this is familiar) which summons up meaning for the reader.  If this was not so, reading would be a much slower process than it mostly is, at least for efficient readers, and when the overall context and the words themselves, are reasonably familiar.

The images of this sort I like best are those in which the type is not used entirely for their visual content: the various possible meanings of the words involved are also part of the point.  That is perhaps why David Pearson's image works so well for me: there is a point, similar to the point of a joke, to get.  The process involved is also analogous to the point of puns, which of course can be visual as well as verbal.  Puns and punning, too, tend to divide people: you either like or hate them.

This last example is great but doesn't work unless you really look at it very carefully - which is to miss the point!  Well, perhaps not. 

The scale of the universe 2

This is an updated and improved version of an app I posted a link to last September. It is awesome, and I mean that literally.  Click on the picture. 

Dickens was a blogger

This is another post in my 'Blogs in history' series, and the stimulus for it is another example of those coincidences of thought I'm experiencing a lot at the moment: moments when you read something in an unexpected place that echoes a resonant idea you had already come across in a different context.

The latest Spitalfields Life blog post is on David Pearson, the typographical designer, who has worked on the recently-published Spitalfields Life book, to be launched this Friday evening ( 

(Cover design by David Pearson, Staffordshire dogs by Rob Ryan)

David has designed much of the recent output from Penguin Books, which generally have a striking and highly effective emphasis on typographics.  Familiar examples include the covers of the 'Great Ideas' series of extracts from classic authors, and a subtle redesign of the iconic penguin itself, slightly more active than its ancestors. 

(It hardly needs to be mentioned to regular readers of Spitalfields Life that the 'gentle author' has written a beautifully-illustrated (with pictures of Penguin Books!) and poignant piece about his personal connections to the history of Penguin Books and the family of the company's founder, Allen Lane).

The 'gentle author' of the SL blog describes discussing the design of the book with David, and sending him the nearest thing he could think of as a model:

For interest’s sake I sent David a copy of a page of Dickens “Household Words” from 1851, as the closest precedent I knew for a collection of short literary pieces. Dickens published these weekly and for tuppence his forty thousand readers in London received a pamphlet of half a dozen stories every Saturday morning – a publication that today would almost certainly be a blog.

As soon as you come across the idea that Dickens might have been a blogger, it rings true.  Almost his entire output was originally published in serialised form in weekly newspapers and journals, such as 'Household Words', illustrated above.  Imagine a series of blog posts which tell a story over several, perhaps dozens, of posts; imagine the story is a mystery, about a murder perhaps, or a plot to steal an inheritance, and that it incorporates social caricatures, commentary, and a strong set of implicit and explicit moral messages reflecting the opinions of the author: here you have many of the basic ingredients of a Dickens novel.  Most of his earliest readers would have read his books in sections as they came out, having to wait for the next instalment.

Cultivating and developing intuitive decision-making in teaching

I have to admit that throughout most of my career my ideas about, and practice in, effective teaching have been relatively incoherent and intuitively arrived at, rather than the products of careful and analytical thought. According to Yvonne Hillier (1998) this is common even amongst the most experienced and well-trained of teachers.


At the same time, I don't subscribe to the view that deliberate reflective practice is at the opposite end of the spectrum from intuition: I firmly believe that valuable insights can be gained from both rational thinking and from inspiration, and that in principle it is valuable for professionals in any practice to be receptive to insights that come unexpectedly, unplanned, and from unlikely sources, as much as those that are the product of rational processes of deliberation and analysis. I posted a couple of months ago about the value of deliberately going off piste and 'seeing what happens', and this view connects closely with the idea that effective teaching is not necessarily a neat and tidy business (Derrick 2010).


The tension between these different modes of apprehension has often been polarised into antagonistic and supposedly irreconcilable approaches to the practice of teaching (and indeed practice in other domains): I believe rather that these modes of thought should be seen as complementary, and that teachers need to be able to negotiate a balanced track between the two to be really effective.

Highly relevant to this suggestion is Daniel Kahneman's brilliant survey (2011) of psychological research studies into the way we make decisions: It is as if, he argues, that there are two ways in which we make decisions, which he calls Systems 1 and 2.



System 1 is very quick, in fact more or less involuntary. It utilises what might be called ‘intuition’:


We have all heard….stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day.... Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvellous that the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician – only more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic….Valid intuitions develop when experts have learned to recognise familiar elements in a new situation and to act in a manner that is appropriate to it. (Kahneman p11)


System 2 thinking, on the other hand is slow, requires motivation and effort, and uses what we might call ‘rationality’. We use these different systems in different circumstances, confronted with different types of problem. We prefer to use System 1, which evolved as a survival mechanism, and with which we make very quick decisions based on the continually developing capacity for correct intuitive judgements which we have developed throughout the whole of our past lives. Of course these decisions may sometimes be wrong, but in familiar situations System 1 decision-making has evolved to be accurate most of the time, and as a result it takes a great deal of conscious effort to go against what it tells us.


System 2 is used for problems that clearly do not require an immediate solution, and/or which demand that we follow a procedural algorithm in order to solve them, such as a complicated long-multiplication sum. Kahneman argues that we only use System 2 reluctantly, when we have to, because it takes effort and energy, whereas System 1 thinking is effortless and easy. System 1 decision-making is more likely to be accurate the more familiar we are with the situation we are in; it can work astonishingly well in such familiar situations, even if the problems involved are very complex, indeed too complex to be easily solved by the use of System 2 heuristics and algorithms.




This research-based psychological typology of our decision-making capacity is strikingly reminiscent of Donald Schön’s well-known theoretical distinction between reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action (1983). The key issue for practitioner learning, therefore, given the need for expertise in tackling both well-defined ‘high ground’ problems and complex, ill-defined, ‘swampy’ problems, is how best to develop and improve ‘reflection-in-action’ or System 1. For a new idea to contribute to changed System 1 decision-making, according to Kahneman, and in different terminology, to Schön, the practitioner has to 'practice' using it, reflect on this practice consciously and probably collaboratively (System 2 activity), and repeat this many times over a long period. 'The accurate intuitions of experts are better explained by the effects of prolonged practice than by heuristics' (Kahneman 2011, p 11): there are no short cuts, no quick intellectual fixes or magic bullets, in shaping our intuitive capacities.



This System 2 work of developing System 1, essential to practitioner learning, is difficult, both to carry out and to reflect on: it takes a great deal of conscious effort because it involves a decision to engage in practice in a different way from that informed by our System 1 thinking. This demanding process is one way to imagine that practitioners might strive to enhance their intuitive capacity for ‘divergent thinking’, cited by Schön as an essential capacity for tackling ‘swampy’ problems. Such careful, effortful, disciplined and probably repetitive practice over time does lead to changes in patterning and routines in relation to our work, which gradually influence changes in our intuitive responses to it, and so to our intuitive judgements and actions. What is needed as part of practitioner learning, therefore, is to support a deliberate process of learning that mimics the way our intuitive decision-making capacities have unconsciously and continuously developed and evolved, since we used them to save ourselves from being eaten by lions on the plains of Africa millennia ago.


Derrick J (2010): ‘The messiness of real teaching and learning’, in J. Derrick, U. Howard, J. Field, P. Lavender, S. Meyer, E.N. von Rein, and T. Schuller (Eds), Remaking Adult Learning: Essays on adult education in honour of Alan Tuckett. London: Institute of Education.
Hillier Y (1998): Informal practitioner theory: eliciting the implicit.  Studies in the Education of Adults, 30 (1) 35-52
Kahneman D (2011): Thinking, fast and slow. London: Allen Lane
Schon D (1983): The reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action.  Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd