Any of my colleagues reading this will, no doubt, find it hard to imagine that the PGcert course could provide anything by way of “luxury” but the requirements of the course have led me to consider the skills that we acquire through the luxury of listening. So, yesterday, I had the luxury of “observing” my PGcert colleague, Robert, in a group session with his students in architecture. Although I was actively “observing”, I was not required to speak nor was I obliged to make any contribution to the group discussion – this was a luxury. Listening to Robert and his students made me think about my group discussions with students and how I behave as a tutor; not in any specific way but, perhaps, prompted me to imagine how group contact can be a hugely important facilitator of self-and peer assessment, often without any visible “structural” imposition. This “observation” also prompted me to think about this blog and how I have neglected this and my colleagues’ blogs over the months since the course began. Perhaps, as a new skill, its demands have obscured the benefits it might afford, like the group discussion or the conference seminar. Looking at both Robert’s and Cynthia’s recent blogs made me envious that they had found time to listen to themselves, even though it may be only as a course requirement. Cynthia’s thoughts on teaching different students different techniques and Robert’s comments on how his workload and pace of work make it a constant struggle to commit to the reading tasks of the course, highlight how significantly we all assess ourselves all of the time. Rather than negatively assessing ourselves, however, it might be better to accept the “indulgence” of self-assessment as a positive new skill with a range of benefits.

With this in mind, I will attach on the next post notes from my recent readings around the subject of assessment.

It has taken me a long time to get down to writing my thoughts on our meeting at the abode. This is partly due to my hectic family life and partly through my own hesitancy at putting these thoughts down on a blog. I enjoyed the three days that we spent discussing our various approaches to learning and teaching although, personally, this brought home to me just how “unprepared” my own approach is.

What struck me most about the few articles we were directed to during the three days was the emphasis on Martin Heidegger’s writings on education and I have been following up these ideas (very randomly) in an attempt to find a way in to this subject area. Heidegger’s notion of embodied knowledge is particularly relevant to teaching in the crafts and I was familiar with his essay “The Question Concerning Technology”. While this gives the impression that Heidegger was anti-technology, recent writings have suggested that he was, in fact, much more aware of what we might recognise now as “supercomplexity” in Barnett’s words. Which is why Postmodernists are attracted to Heidegger’s work. Reading Michael A Peter’s Heidegger, Education and Modernity, I came across this extract which seemed to touch on our discussions around the commodification of education more generally:

“Education as ‘soft technology’ in the so-called knowledge economy, treats people as ‘human resources’ or ‘human capital’ and is designed to turn out flexible, multi-skilled knowledge-workers for the twenty-first century”.

“When one has explored in some detail the way in which Heidegger’s thinking moves beyond objectivity, beyond ‘humanism’, beyond technological rationality, beyond traditional concepts of language, truth, and thinking as such, one cannot escape the sense that this is a path resolutely outside and beyond the general horizons of modern thought”.  (Richard Palmer, 1979).

“What might an education look like in these terms?”

“The answer to this question may well involve a critique of modernity and the nihilism of modernity and modernisation that levels everything and reduces human beings to flexible raw materials in the service of the world technological system. Exactly what can Heidegger contribute to an education that starts from this premise, rather than from the very opposite or opposing premise – one based on principles of the modernisation of education, that seeks to enhance education’s maximum contribution to national competitive advantage in the world techno-economic system? …”.

Clearly, in pursuing a sense of “being” Heidegger seeks to emphasise what we may consider to be “humility” and “authenticity” about what we do as teachers. My challenge to the suspicion of what a “commodification” of education entails is based on recent explorations of the anthropology of consumerism and how this allows us to consider the wider complexities of consumption theory. For example, it is only because we exist in a privileged, educated, Western European economy that we have the luxury to question other cultures for whom the economic imperative of life is prescient. Supercomplexity, in my basic understanding of it, encompasses these much wider implications of consumerism in the early years of the twenty-first century. Heidegger’s ideas, therefore, are useful in providing a “position” that can be determined as in some sense a form of “being” but that doesn’t require us to think of education as always looking to the past.

Also, I am thinking about the ARP – more about this later in the week.