a work in progress
“Don’t be a teacher” said Mrs Small, “if you want to be an artist”. She played Shostakovich and encouraged us to destroy things. Peter Bishop tut-tutted about the standard of painting in the art school and showed me how to stretch a canvas properly. He showed me how to print the old-school way, with slow, […]
The community of practice is enjoying a bit of a moment in educational design. I see it as a kind of pedagogical flipside to the sage on the stage. Etiene Wenger is credited with defining the concept: Being alive as human beings means that we are constantly engaged in the pursuit of enterprises of all […]
The Sage on the Stage is a well-worn trope describing the old-style lecturer delivering content from the podium: a revered actor, deeming to bestow their knowledge upon grateful audience-students. It represents, we are told, everything that is the worst about education. Why, then, if this model is so terrible, do we still buy into […]
Burke’s 2008 paper, Writing Power and Voice: Access To and Participation in Higher Education has been pivotal for me. How my understanding of the issues raised in this paper will translate into practice remains to be seen, but it demands a radical rethink of my epistemological position. An initial reservation is that my own […]
Some of my most interesting insights this session were generated not by my own initiative, but by a student’s questions about Mead’s theory of the social self. We were talking about Mead’s (1934) notion of the social construction of the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’, and comparing these with Freud’s ideas about id, ego and superego. […]
There’s an image of ‘traditional’ teaching as filling students up with knowledge, rote learning, absent of any context or interest. Every other day someone dutifully reposts the latest diatribe on social media, exhorting teachers to embrace 21st century values and reject all that old-fashioned, straightjacketed learning. I wonder where, exactly, these people went to school. […]
![[Twenty] First Century Pedagogy?](https://helensouth.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/greekteacher.jpg)