Making a bid for utopia

1. Making a bid for utopia University of Wolverhampton: Pete Bennett, Senior Lecturer Post Compulsory Education Dr. Victoria Wright Head of Post Compulsory Education Exploring authentic assessments and student agency

2. Invitation Is everybody in? Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin. Jim Morrison

3. Note to self The Spry quote is the key to this hour. Ideally we would reveal it as the last act. The point is that this bid we are making is temporal/ situated/ meant/ enacted For any group of people to get an education of their own, the first need is to have a say and be listened to” (Griffiths, 2003: 34) Foucault said we always have a choice

4. Ethical Praxis Student choice in assessment/ providing alternative assessments/ moving beyond assessment (Going, going…gone)

5. Assessment as Insurance Policy Assessment is principally about accountability and as such it is about teachers NOT students. 1988 national Curriculum was designed around League tables Crisis management: all that is really ensured is that students get a very basic assurance of a very basic service (it’s a Health and Safety policy) For the potential return it’s too large a price to pay

6. The Power to Resist “Teachers and students alike can now be regarded as creative agents, capable of voluntary and intentional counter-practices, and always able, in principle, to resist (Leask, 2012: 68) As Leask (2012:69) notes quoting Foucault (2000): “‘We are always free’; we can always resist; our ongoing task is to construct ‘arts of living’ that might counter the manifold expressions of ‘fascism’ that lurk throughout institutions, systems, relations, and even ourselves.”

7. Active and creative – let/s go! • Baffling the regulatory discourse: An invitation for critical discussion: Sharing the development of the module, its self-evident and self-defeating learning outcomes and its assessments (Victoria) • Meaning Theory: assessment as participation and theory as theory you can use, not theory that will use you (Pete) • Making Assessment Work: Group discussion with short extracts of ‘theoretical’ literature: participation in the community • The Multiple must be Made: the rhizomatic model of learning: a mapping exercise

8. Masters in Professional Practice and Lifelong Education extending the ways in which students could respond within a formal assessment framework “shift[ing] the locus of control, and responsibility, in the classroom from the teacher, to the space between us and the students” (Waugh,2016: 119)

9. Barthes “What I hope to be able to renew, each of the years it is given me to teach here, is the manner of presentation of the course or seminar, in short of ‘presenting’ a discourse without imposing it” (Inaugural lecture) “Since…this teaching has as its object discourse taken in the inevitability of power, method can really bear only on the means of loosening, baffling or at the very least, of lightening that power”

10. Making an Invitation

11. Invitation I risk inviting; I want you here. And when you come I feel enriched, believe you feel the same. Peter Willis

12. Theory you can use? Peter Barry calls for us to seek “Theory you can use not theory that will use you” but this is not without risk or obligation because ‘use’ implies application, employment, even alteration/ amendment/development.

13. Meaning Theory Education has lots of theory but how we prove we mean it? Perhaps we live it and by it We are caught always in an ethical dilemma: writing of the impossibility/ unfeasibility of Learning Outcomes and then requiring our PGCE students to manufacture them! These systems are meant to support us (Habermas calls them ‘relief systems’ [assessment is a classic example] ) but when they disconnect from the lifeworld, they become pathological

14. Teacher as researcher “This approach privileges the researcher as thinker, not in the sense of some dreamy theorist, but rather in the sense of a someone who can summon a range of ideas and perspectives” (Peim, 2018; ).

15. “participatory epistemology,” Rendón calls for a “participatory epistemology,” she seeks the “union of the knower and what is to be known” validating “the knowing that occurs when the perceiver and the perceived are united as a single consciousness” (p. 86) …This means that “we must find ways to change the linear model of teaching [and] focus on collaborative learning and dialogue that promotes critical thinking, interpretation, and diversity of opinion” (1994, p. 62). For Rendón, the personal is the pedagogical – and the pedagogical is the political.

16. Pedagogical Logic Rancière speaks against ‘normal pedagogical logic’ which presupposes two kinds of intelligence (inferior and superior): “Instruction thus appears as a radical point of departure or a new birth as soon as it is not a matter of telling and interpreting, but of explaining and understanding”

17. The student is always a seeker This is the way that the ignorant master can instruct the learned one as well as the ignorant one: by verifying that he is always searching. Whoever looks always finds. He doesn’t necessarily find what he was looking for, and even less what he was supposed to find. But he finds something new to relate to the thing that he already knows. What is essential is the continuous vigilance, the attention that never subsides without irrationality setting in—something that the learned one, like the ignorant one, excels at. The master is he who keeps the researcher on his own route, the one that he alone is following and keeps following.

18. Community as Curriculum In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental condition. With this model, a community can construct a model of education flexible enough for the way knowledge develops and changes today by producing a map of contextual knowledge. The living curriculum of an active community is a map that is always "detachable, connectible, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits":

19. Days are where we live ‘Making a bid for utopia is a temporal act. It considers the triumphs and transgressions of the past, articulating them in the present while conflating a possible hopeful futurity.’ (Spry, 2016;42)

20. References • Barry, P. (2002) Beginning Theory, Manchester; MUP • Barthes, R. (1977) Inaugural Lecture in Sontag, S. (ed.), 1993, A Roland Barthes Reader. London: Vintage. • Cormier, Dave (2008) "Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum ," Innovate: Journal of Online Education: Vol. 4 : Iss. 5 ,Article 2. Available at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/innovate/vol4/iss5/2 • Leask, I. (2012) Beyond Subjection: Notes on the later Foucault and education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44:sup1, 57-73, DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2011.00774.x • Peim, N. (2018) Thinking in Education Research, London; Bloomsbury

21. References • Rancière, J. (1991). The Ignorant Schoolmaster: five lessons in intellectual emancipation. (translation by Ross, K.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. • Rancière, J. (2010), on Ignorant Schoolmasters in Bingham, C. & Biesta, G. (2010) Jacques Rancière : Education, Truth, Emancipation, London: Continuum. • Rendón, L.I. (1992) Validating Culturally Diverse Students: Toward a New Model of Learning and Student Development in Innovative Higher Education, Vol. 19, No. 1, Fall 1994 • Spry, T. (2016) Autoethnography and the Other: Unsettling Power through Utopian Performatives. Oxon: Routledge

22. References • Waugh, C. (2016) ConnectIng Text in Bennett, P. and McDougall J. (Ed.) (2016), Doing Text: Using Media After the Subject. Leighton Buzzard. Auteur • Willis, P. (2002) Inviting Learning: An exhibition of risk and enrichment in adult education practice. Leicester. NIACE