Critical Professional Learning

quotation markI tell this story partly to illustrate what I think the values of a Labour Party ought to be but also to show how a political party can shift the centre ground so that other parties seek to go there. - Cliff Jones

you are here>> Critical Viewpoint

Constructing a personal philosophy of education: A starter critical conversation

downloadDownload this article

Is it possible to build a personal educational philosophy around just three concepts? Yes, I know that is a big question but maybe we can at least begin to hold a critical conversation about it. Here are some beliefs and ideas to start the conversation. I am not doing heavy stuff here about Rousseau or Marx though, of course, you might wish to, especially as they and many others provide valuable insights. Neither do I spend time digging deep to define the concepts. But at a time of accelerated educational change and some confusing and contradictory educational policy making I want to encourage a bit more critical conversation.

Back to top

 

Policy making by means of politics and consent or by means of power and imposition

downloadDownload the article

In this essay I begin by discussing the political left and the political right. Our current political World does not encourage parties to identify themselves as belonging to either; they all want to claim to be in the middle and, as a result, the terms Left and Right are often used as insults. Given what is now facing us in the form of educational and wider social policy I think we should remind ourselves of the differences between the two ends of this spectrum; politicians may shun identification with them but they remain in place.

Back to top

 

THE VALUES OF NEW LABOUR:
a discursion on its approaches to schooling in England and to government and politics in general

Download: The Values of New LabourDownload the article

While writing about New Labour I came to realise that I had already produced many thousands of words around and about this subject in relation to education. Some of those words I shall be making available on this website; some are implicit in various position and discussion papers that I have written or to which I have contributed; and yet more can be found in my writing for CPD Update as editor and subsequently consulting editor and also in my column for Breaktime Magazine.

I am not the only writer to realise at the end that I now know what, from the beginning, I ought to have been writing about. Maybe that is a lesson for governments. Just before retributive Nemesis appears at election time they suddenly awake to what ought to have been. It may be too late for us to go to the educational barricades on behalf of creating a fair society but it should never be too late to ask awkward questions and raise uncomfortable issues. The alternative is to condemn the generation of educators that come after us to yet another professional life dedicated to responding to poorly conceived policies that spring from a belief that unfairness can be reasoned away.

I have never ceased to think of myself as a professional educator. I am, therefore, keen to submit what I have written for others to critique. What, after all, can be learned if questions remain unasked?

The article includes the following content:

Preface
Introduction
New Labour
The moving finger writes: a story
The label
A Campaigning government
So farewell then Sir Humphrey
Avoiding accountability and passing it on others
Licence to teach, a further shift in accountability and the manipulation of evidence
Nationally shaming consequences of New labour
Declaring war on abstract nouns
No professional ghetto
Agents of government
A Story of out-sourcing policy-making
No real consultation but lots and lots of consultants
More on Government and Politics
A Story of contrasting secretaries and ministers of state
Dynamism and sense of purpose of the Gadarene Swine
Initiative fatigue and initiative withdrawal fatigue
A borrowed educational vision
A story about a gerbil and a dexterous and verbally agile secretary of state
The model
Loud but shallow
Professional Life
Gurus and consultants
Faultlines, flaws and a poverty of purpose
A story from Key Stage One
Judgment
How can we rise above current party political values A Critical Professional conversation

Download: The Values of New LabourDownload the article

Back to top

 

Critical Professional Voices in Education:
a series of essays for critical conversations

I wanted to write these essays because I believe that I have spent much of my professional and personal life responding to poorly constructed and socially damaging educational policies that have been put together by unthinking or narrow-minded politicians. Sometimes these people have been passionate about their policies; sometimes they could not have cared less; and sometimes education has been nothing more than a stepping stone for them towards bigger and better political rewards. Seldom have their policies been worth our efforts to make them work, especially since the best of them are usually dropped in favour of something worse. I think we should talk about this.

Professional educators, perhaps particularly those working in England, have been and are subject to interference that ranges from grand strategy (though not so grand that it does not keep changing) to minute advice on how to teach and how to assess; all of which is accompanied by blame dished out to the qualified by the unqualified.

  • Introduction:Download

  • Essay #1
    Professional Educators: searching for values and voices lost somewhere between compliance and autonomy. Download the essay

  • Essay #2
    Commodification: the packaging, shelf-stacking and labelling of learning for sale and exchange. Download the essay

  • Essay #3
    Stratification: ‘society, society, society’. Download the essay

  • Essay #4
    The Socially Critical Teacher: perceptions and misperceptions of postgraduate professional learning. Download the essay

  • Essay #5
    Collaboration and Partnership: coping with choice and competition. Download the essay

  • Essay #6
    Evaluating the impact of professional learning in education: constructing judgments serving whose interest? Download the essay

  • Essay#7
    Trahison des clercs     Download the essay

Back to top