a work in progress
When I was at art school, somewhere between reading Homer’s poetry of heroism and the tales self-sacrifice in Weary Dunlop’s War Diary, between watching Top Gun and military vehicles rumbing down our street in convoy, I decided that I wanted to be a man of action – and took myself off to the recruiting office. […]
So I watched an action movie set in some war-torn corner of the world, crumbling and dirty; walls not ancient but old and decrepit, the paint not shabby but shitty and ugly. Dead bodies were mostly off the streets but sometimes forgotten in a corner and garbage piled in corners. I’ve often observed that it’s […]
A creative friend recently pointed me to Australian artist and videographer, Struthess – Campbell Walker. It’s refreshing to find content in the style and language of my homeland. Like most Aussies, Walker calls it how he sees it, and he’s an inveterate storyteller. In this video, Struthless riffs on the ‘Helsinki Bus Station theory’ of […]
“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 […]
I’ve been watching a documentary called ‘My Stuff’. Young Finnish filmmaker named Petri Luukkainen. Update, 2023: The mystuffmovie website is now defunct (domain name appears to have been hijacked). Appears to be available on vimeo: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/mystuff/162674607 If you haven’t seen it and wish to, stop reading here. Small moments of ‘reveal’ in the film are […]
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. […]
Are you a right-brain or left-brain thinker? And more importantly…. does it matter? For the most part, the right-brain/left-brain idea is at best a handy model and at worst a limiting stereotype. As Kendra Cherry points out in her article on this pop psychology myth, research has often been contrary to the assumptions of this […]
