Christian will lead off a discussion on the text Streetwork by Colin Ward. The reading for Monday is the first chapter of it (it can be found in the dropbox) Some background below…
In 1973 the anarchist Colin Ward and journalist Anthony Fyson published “Streetwork”, a result of their research for the UK’s Town and Country Planning Associations Education Service. Left to their own devices by the Association they were given time and money to focus on the environmental education of the non-academic urban child. Having noticed a recent upsurge in public interest in town and country planning and the physical environment, the two collaborators set about rethinking environmental education. The ideology of “Streetwork”, was the use of the urban environment as an educational resource and its aim was to develop a school department into an integrated community based program of decision making on local urban issues. The bulk of their research was into existing ‘schools without walls’ experiments in the US and the UK.
Kevin will lead off a discussion on the text Democratic Education: An impossibility that yet remains to come.
From Kevin…
…that text is quite dense but approaches the issue of democratic education from an unusual angle (whether one agrees with it or not, is another story, but stimulates some reflection on the very words we use at least)… not so much about the impossibility of democratic education, more about how democracy is negated whenever it is posited as a distant goal to be reached through planning, and so it is more a momentous break than something that can be established…
what i think might be interesting to dig into is the ‘pedagogy of what if…?’, which in school terms can be translated, for example, into thinking beyond a deficit conception of childhood, thinking of ways of teaching that are based on equality as a starting point, and where such a starting point might lead to. in a sense, it’s a pedagogy of improvisation (something that outcome-based, ofsted-testable education would consider to be a failure).
Please find the text in our dropbox …
Fouad Asfour and Janna Graham lead a reading session on The Road Map for Arts Education.
Not a radical text but rather a text that requires a radical reading. the Roadmap to Arts Education developed by Unesco is based on deliberations during and after the World Conference on Arts Education, which took place from 6 to 9 March 2006 in Lisbon. It’s stated aims are ‘to explore the role of Arts Education in meeting the need for creativity and cultural awareness in the 21st Century’ Used to shape arts education policies around the world, and to connect the practices of arts education directly to neoliberal agendas, a group of educators internationally have hosted critical group readings of the document as a way to begin the discussion of another road map to education, based on theories, histories and practices of arts education aligned strongly with social struggle.
See the Roadmap document at
http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=39546&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
See the site for Making Another Road Map group readings of it at:
The next reading group meeting will take place Monday 7th November
at the Brady Arts Centre (Hanbury St, E1) between 7 and 9 pm (nearest underground/ overground: Whitechapel).
Michael will lead off on a discussion about Communities of Practice and Radical Pedagogy.
For an introduction to communities of practice see: http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm
The next reading group meeting will take place Monday 3rd October at the Brady Arts Centre (Hanbury St, E1) between 7 and 9 pm (nearest underground/ overground: Whitechapel).
Thinking about post-riot pedagogies i.e. what can be done to set a different tone for public discussion and to think about the degree to which youth centres and youth work in the uk are or are not a form of radical education.
The reading for this session is a booklet by Bernard Davies, published in the early 1980s, called From Social Education to Social and Life Skills Training: In Whose Interests? that set off a debate amongst radical youth workers etc at the time when the Youth Training Scheme was being introduced by the Thatcher government following the 1981 riots.
http://www.infed.org/archives/bernard_davies/davies_in_whose_interests.htm
The next reading group meeting will take place Monday 5th September at the Brady Arts Centre (Hanbury St, E1) between 7 and 9 pm (nearest underground/ overground: Whitechapel).
Basement Writers and Stepney Words
We will listening to a radio programme (approx 30 mins) about the events around the publication of the poetry book Stepney Words and the subsequent sacking of teacher Chris Searle in 1971. Discussion to follow.
A reading ‘Moral Education, Liberal Education, and the Voice of the Individual’ by Paul Standish, is available in the dropbox. It’s not essential reading but it does give some idea of what was happening in the wider context of education in the UK at that time.
http://spitalfieldslife.com/2011/08/16/the-stepney-school-strike-of-1971/
Very belated, but here are the readings for tomorrow evening. Ashley will be facilitatng a discussion on academies. The reading aims to not only provide information on the debate around academies, but also to link the development of academies with the question of why there was never a truly comprehensive education system in the UK. Readings are:
Collection of writings by Anti-Academies Alliance (in dropbox)
Melissa Benn, ‘On Dreams and Dilemmas, Class and Cities: Some Thoughts on the Modern Politics of Comprehensives’, in M. Benn (ed) A Tribute to Caroline Benn: Education and Democracy, available at http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=dtRC3Yf_XFwC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false , p.21
Sally Tomlinson, introduction to her Education in a Post-Welfare Society (in dropbox)
As usual, we will meet at Brady Arts between 7 and 9pm.
Please note that we will not be meeting in August, so the meeting after this will be on Monday 5th September.
