In Search of Lost Place

Michael Young on the question of knowledge in the curriculum

2010-10-25T18:13:00.000+01:00

One book that has proven to have a formative influence on me as I begin my MRes is Michael Young's book Bringing Knowledge Back In (2008). Young is a notable sociologist of education who, at the beginning of the 1970's wrote a book titled Knowledge and Control (1971) in which he helped to usher in an approach to the sociology of education that linked the kinds of knowledge then enshrined in school curricula with vested power interests - an approach that has, of course, proved to be very popular. In this more recent book, Young charts how his position has altered significantly. Though he hasn't turned his back on the idea that knowledge is to a large extent socially and historically constructed, he now understands that the extreme social relativist views that have emerged since the 1970's have caused academics to avoid facing difficult questions about knowledge and truth. This, as I understand it, has in turn undermined, rather than advanced, the sociology of education's critical and emancipatory potential. As Young himself writes:

"the 'new' sociology of education that began... with a radical commitment to truthfulness, undermined its own project by its rejection of any idea of truth itself." (Young, 2008: 199)

Furthermore, Young now believes that it is the distinctly social character of knowledge that enables it to have a claim to truth and objectivity, and to give us a basis for choosing particular educational and curriculum principles over others. The fact that cultural objects are not analysable in the same way as natural objects does not mean that those working in the cultural sciences shouldn't pursue the maximum amount of objectification possible. He pursues a lengthy analysis of the works of Durkheim, Vygotsky, Cassirer, Basil Bernstein and others in order to substantiate this claim. I won't go into this level of detail here. The book, being as it is a collection of previously published essays, is a little on the repetitive side and I suspect that most readers will want to be selective in which chapters they turn to, as I was. However I do want to focus a little on the distinction Young makes between vertical and horizontal knowledge structures and on the idea of grammaticality, which can be found in the final chapter of the book.

Vertical, hierarchical knowledge structures are those which develop through integration into ever more unitary, more general sets of propositions and towards more general explanations and laws. Something like Physics would probably best represent this type of knowledge. Horizontal knowledge structures on the other hand are those which are plural rather than unitary and which contain parallel and largely incommensurable languages. The social sciences, in their current form, are more likely to be in this vein. Verticality and horizontality have to do with theory's internal development. Moving on to grammaticality, this term is to do with a knowledge structure's dealings with the external, empirical world; that is, its ability to identify 'empirical correlates'. High grammaticality therefore refers to a theory with a high level of worldly corroboration. Together, the criteria of verticality and grammaticality "determine the capacity a particular knowledge structure has to progress." (Ibid: 210)

For me, the interesting question then arises as to where geography fits into this framework. I suggest that here we have a discipline that is verticality challenging. We have a whole host of parallel languages, stemming from that original bifurcation of physical and human geography and then into further sub-disciplines such as economic, population, and various forms of cultural geography such as humanist, critical, feminist etc. My experience at university has been that these lines of enquiry tend to follow their own disciplinary paths, with few attempts made at dialogue and integration, though there may well be geography departments where a more integrative approach is taken. This is a far cry from the early holistic origins of geography (see Bonett, 2008) and reflects ever increasing specialisation in academia.

As for grammaticality, I think geography is particularly strong in this respect. Particularly in fieldwork, but even in the classroom, geography is a subject that reminds us that there is a world out there, beyond human imaginings and constructions. A world of human and non-human others that calls for our understanding and care. In this sense, geography is a corrective to a curriculum that has perhaps become too focused on the self, a topic I have broached in previous posts and which I will no doubt engage with again. One of the values of a geography education is precisely that it brings our attention to this world outside of ourselves and, if it does its job right, provides us with the resources and conceptual understanding to find our place within it.

Bonnett, A. (2008) What is geography? London: Sage.
Young, M.F.D. (2008) Bringing knowledge back in: From social constructivism to social realism in the sociology of education. London: Routledge.
Young, M.F.D. (1971) Knowledge and control: new directions for the sociology of education. London: Collier-Macmillan.

Photo is by Flickr user ChrisM70 and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Subjects and tradition

2010-10-19T12:51:00.000+01:00

A few words about tradition…

We keep hearing from certain quarters the need for a return to 'traditional subjects'. I'm not exactly sure what these people have in mind when they talk about tradition in the context of education, or even if they have taken the trouble to examine the term at all, but it seems to bring to mind the vision of a teacher, at the front of the class, reciting important dates, locations and other facts to be absorbed and regurgitated. But is this the only way we can think about tradition? Is the only alternative, as those pedagogues who talk about 'learning for the 21st century' seem to believe, to surrender ourselves to the future and to be urged along by passing fads and the pressing needs of our times? I don't think this is so. As we are about to see, there is also a potentially radical sense of tradition that we can draw from.

Jacques Derrida once talked about 'an appeal to tradition that is in no way traditional'. What on Earth did he mean by this? The philosopher Simon Critchley explains it very well indeed. A conservative sees tradition as an inheritance (the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott actually defines education as a sort of inheritance) and something to be passed down, from generation to generation as a kind of doxa, or body of unquestioned knowledge that, at least in theory, every individual should have access to. However, a radical conception of tradition sees it in a very different light. Here, tradition is something produced through a critical or deconstructive engagement with that inheritance. Doxa is now interrogated, questioned and made to answer for itself.

If we adopt this radical sense of tradition as an educator, we still, like the conservative, recognise the need for an inheritance of knowledge that helps us to make sense of the world, but rather than accepting it with blind faith, this sort of tradition calls for an attitude of critical engagement, a sifting through, or a recovery of sorts. As Critchley notes, "what this radical idea of tradition is trying to recover is something missing, forgotten or repressed in contemporary life" (Critchley, 2010: 32). The radical traditionalist understands that we have to sometimes look back in order to go forward. Engaging with tradition in this way might help us to avoid a situation in which education is reduced to a concern only with themes of contemporary relevance, and with preparing young people for 'the 21st century'.

This leads me to another point, that of society's ongoing obsession with the future. Critchely makes the interesting claim that talk of the future is actually reactionary. A relentless insistence on the future tends to curtail interesting, original thought. We are discouraged to cultivate memory and engage with tradition. For Critchley, "the future is about amnesia, and that's what's behind this ludicrous love affair with technology and forms of social networking… these are forms of oblivion, the desire for oblivion" (Ibid: 116). These will sound like awfully strong claims, but I do see his point, for I too experience social networking as a kind of oblivion, an unworld in which our identities are surrendered and where people endlessly 'communicate' but rarely seem to actually say anything.

Following from this, the frightening thing for me is any idea that education as we know it could be adequately replaced by the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter. This is perhaps not so far-fetched an idea, and Ian Gilbert (2011) has indeed just written a book on this very topic. What would such an 'education' look like? I suspect it would be defined largely by amnesia towards the past and a fixation with the everyday. Genuine education must look to tradition as well as the present and future, but do so in the radical, rather than the conservative, sense. This requires teachers who have a wide appreciation and understanding of their subject and who will be well equipped to engage their students critically with the various forms of human knowledge that are their inheritance.

Critchley, S. (2010) How to Stop Living and Start Worrying. Polity.

Gilbert, I. (2010) Why do I need a teacher when I’ve got Google? Routledge.

Photo is by Flickr user Raggedroses and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Place and identity

2010-09-23T14:08:00.000+01:00

"The so-called Romantic aspect of a region is a quiet feeling of sublimity under the form of the past, or, what is the same, a feeling of loneliness, absence, isolation." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

How can the 'form of the past' come to persist in the present? Furthermore, how can a region, or a place, make us 'feel' a certain way? Though there are really no ready answers here, let me draw your attention to Thursbitch (2004), a beautiful novel by Alan Garner which tells the story of the valley of the same name. Here, it seems that the landscape gathers together and somehow preserve the lives, thoughts and memories of those who have lived in and visited that valley. In the contemporary strand of the story, Sal, suffering as she does from a degenerative disease that causes short-term memory loss, returns to this valley over and over again as it quickly becomes the sole place which her memory clings onto and in which she feels safe. As a geologist, Sal can readily name and classify the valley's rocky outcrops and layers at first sight. Yet, there is far more to this landscape for her. She expresses to her carer, Ian, her impression that "this place knows we're here". Ian is more sceptical, merely permitting that what appears to be a "strong atmosphere is no more than our projection of our own experience and emotion onto a circumscribed place".

Many writers on place have commented upon its characteristic 'gathering' quality. In addition, many have tried to explicate the 'interanimation' of self and world that the comments of both Sal and Ian, taken as two equally compelling but incomplete perspectives, beg us to consider. For the philosopher Edward Casey (1993, 1996), that places gather is one of the essential traits revealed by a phenomenological topoanalysis. They gather not only material things but also "experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts." Interpretative archaeologist Christopher Tilley (1994) explores how particular landscapes take on meaning for the human inhabitants that dwell there, and how personal biographies and biographies of place are intimately connected. Places themselves, Tilley writes, "may be said to acquire a history, sedimented layers of meaning by virtue of the actions and events that take place in them".

Furthermore, particular objects and features of the landscape can provide particularly compelling foci points in the lives of individuals and groups, "providing reference points and planes of emotional orientation for human attachment and involvement." (Ibid: 16) This is certainly the case in Thursbitch too, where the high stones and sacred spring that grace the valley offer points of orientation for Jack Turner and his neighbours, as well as acting as symbolic markers at which the land can be honoured, "just so long as it's done proper, and we mind us manners". The question remains however, as to whether this power of a place to gather together experiences and histories and to become a nexus of meaningfulness for human individuals and communities, is, as Ian would have it, a projection of our selves onto an inert and empty place. Or, whether we allow that place itself has a certain agency, as Sal would seem to aver when she remarks on the 'sentience' of the landscape.

In Place and Experience (1999), another philosopher of place, Jeff Malpas, demonstrates that place can be seen as a complex but unitary structure comprising spatiality and temporality, subjectivity and objectivity, self and other. He explains how these elements are established only in relation to each other and within the topographical structure of place. He refers to Proust's In Search of Lost Time to show how places have a fundamental role in forming the identity of people, and vice versa. Although places may have an agential role in the formation of identity, it is important to note that this is an identity established not only in place, but in time also. As he writes, "Proust's achievement is to display the disclosure of the multiplicity and unity of experience, and so of the world, as something that occurs through the spatio-temporal unfolding of place."

My understanding of place has been largely influenced by Jeff Malpas and it makes sense to sketch out here some more of his position. For Malpas, place is definitely not to be regarded as simply a specific region of space, defined chiefly by its objective location. Neither however, is place to be regarded as a purely subjective phenomenon, that is (as some humanist geographers have at times implied) a personal response to a particular environment that one finds oneself in. Place does indeed have all of these as aspects, but is also so much more. "Places", he writes, "are established in relation to a complex of subjective, intersubjective and objective structures that are inseparably conjoined together within the overarching structure of place as such." In the book Place and Experience (1999), Malpas devotes many chapters of painstaking philosophical analysis, drawing on the likes of Martin Heidegger and Donald Davidson, to show how place possesses this complex but unitary structure. In essence, he argues that far from being grounded in subjectivity, place is itself the ground for all of our experience. In other words, the very nature of human being, of human thought, is established in place. Place, when understood in such a way, takes on an unprecedented significance as the following quotation clearly shows.

"...the claim is that we are the sort of thinking, remembering, experiencing creatures we are only in virtue of our active engagement in place; that the possibility of mental life is necessarily tied to such engagement, and so to the places in which we are engaged; and that, when we come to give content to our concepts of ourselves and to the idea of our own self-identity, place and locality play a central role – our identities are, one can say, intricately and essentially place-bound.”

These are striking claims to be sure, and there are ones that I will no doubt come back to in future work. Speaking of which, it is now only a couple of weeks before I begin at university again, a change of place I am very much looking forward too!

References

Casey, E. (1993) Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Casey, E. (1996) ‘How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena’, in Feld, S. and Basso, K. H. (Eds.) Senses of Place. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

Garner, A. (2004) Thursbitch. London: Vintage

Malpas, J. E. (1999) Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Tilley, C. (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford and Providence: Berg

Photo is by Flickr user Revo_1599 and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Education: a journey into the unknown?

2010-09-14T15:00:00.000+01:00

An exceptionally well pitched and timely contribution to the curriculum debate is David Lambert's recent opinion piece in the TES entitled 'Crack curriculum's core and open a world of opportunity' (Lambert, 2010). With the ceaseless pendulum of educational policy apparently swinging back towards knowledge and away from the premium put on skills and pedagogy seen in recent times, now seems like a good time to put some thought into this matter and to think beyond the usual polarisations. Actually, it is essential that we do so, to counter the inevitable barrage of what Lambert accurately terms 'Gradgrind-sounding rhetoric about facts and old-fashioned subjects'.

Lambert argues that the past decade has seen the inexorable rise of a professional language of pedagogy. To my mind much of this language has become increasingly cumbersome and is often vacuous, with catchphrases such as 'learning to learn' being the order of the day. Because of this, many teachers have become disengaged from the curriculum, which has now been largely reduced to a 'vehicle' to 'deliver transferable skills'. Yet, as Lambert rightly points out, the curriculum is really more than this. The curriculum is all about the destination, or the aims, of an education and it is pedagogy that is perhaps better thought of as the vehicle. I certainly agree. We have all heard the old cliché that it is the journey and not the destination that matters yet clear headed thinking on this matter surely suggests that destination and journey are both of much import, even if that destination is not perfectly clear to us.

Crafting a curriculum involves making choices about the selection of knowledge that we are going to teach, and this selection, as Lambert points out, is always going to be influenced by our principles, values and our 'sense of educational purpose'. Although enlivening learning with relevant topics is an excellent idea, a curriculum totally fashioned according to the latest news items and contemporary themes is bound to be ultimately shallow and unsatisfying. Subject disciplines like geography are vital precisely because they offer a world of facts, ideas and experiences that take us beyond the everyday and familiar. As Lambert asserts, there is absolutely no doubt that starting with the world of the child's everyday experience is sound pedagogy. However, failing to move beyond that is a betrayal of education's promise. Again, it is to forget your destination through a preoccupation with the journey.

The 'move towards the unknown' that Lambert refers to here is particular pertinent for me and links up nicely with my previous posting on the question of education and technology. In that post I explored what Michael Bonnett (2002) had to say regarding 'education as a form of the poetic'. There we saw that genuine education may involve a listening to 'what calls to be thought'. This means an openness and receptiveness that goes way beyond the calculative, instrumental approach that both a single-minded focus on facts for the sake of facts on the one hand and generic skills on the other equally represent. Bonnett spoke of an 'an ever-evolving triadic interplay' that involves teacher, learner and subject matter. In this vision, the teacher lets the learner learn rather than attempting to impose learning upon them.

In the same way, both teacher and learner are engaged in letting that which calls to be learned show itself. This is an intent, rigorous, and by no means purely passive listening to what we may call, after Heidegger, the 'call of Being' or 'the song of the earth'. The geography curriculum is, I think, a particularly apposite place for this kind of teaching and learning to occur. Geography, as David Lambert reminds us, is all about trying 'to make sense of ourselves at home on planet Earth'. In this process of 'making sense' we are to a large extent venturing into the unknown. Of course, we know all kinds of facts and figures about the Earth and using these to incite curiosity amongst learners does no harm, but ultimately teachers and students alike are on a journey, and education is surely most at its most enjoyable when it is seen that way.

I fancy that his journey is somewhat like the ones taken by the early explorers of the Earth. That is, we are not completely without a destination in mind. We have an inkling of the direction in which we are headed and we are not totally 'lost at sea'. This would get us nowhere, and we would blunder forever onwards, with all the skills needed to sail the ship but with no guiding sense of purpose. However, our idea of our destination is necessarily patchy; its precise coves and peninsulas are hazy and as yet not fully revealed to us. It is this element of the unknown that pulls us and causes us to set sail in the first place. As I have said before, learning begins in wonder. Viewed like this, education is all about revealing and letting things come to light. It is an attentive, open-minded journey into what is part known, part unknown.

I should add, however, that to say that teacher and learner are on the journey together is certainly not to say that their roles are somehow equivalent or interchangeable. By virtue of the sheer fact that they have journeyed further and know the territory at least a little better, the teacher is charged with the praiseworthy task of guiding the learner, and this brings with it the need for serious, sometimes difficult, judgement. As Lambert rightly says, questions of knowledge and of curriculum are something that teachers should get involved with. Just as the learner’s role is not to passively absorb what is to be learnt, the teacher’s role is most decisively not to passively deliver it.

This is why any idea of education as simply an assimilation of prespecified facts or the acquisition of general skills is bound to be inadequate. It is time to bring to an end the persistent confusion and misplaced antagonism between knowledge and skills and to think hard about the heart of genuine education. Lambert's article is a commendable contribution to this task.

References

Lambert, D. (2010) 'Crack curriculum's core and open a world of opportunity', Times Educational Supplement, 27 August [Online]. Available at http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6055960. (Accessed: 14 September 2010)

Bonnett, M. (2002) 'Education as a Form of the Poetic', in Peters, M. (Ed) Heidegger, Education and Modernity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Photo is by Flickr user publicinsomniac and is made available under a Creative Commons license

The question concerning technology and geographical education

2010-09-08T15:23:00.000+01:00

In the post Heidegger and Technology we saw how, for Heidegger, it wasn't particular items of technology, nor even technology in and of itself that had led us to the nihilistic modern era but rather the essence that lies behind technology, that metaphysics of Enframing that wills to order everything and challenges things forth, including ultimately humans themselves, as resources to be exploited. Heidegger saw the work of art, such as the work of Van Gogh or of the poet Hölderlin for instance, to occasion a different, more authentic kind of world disclosure that allows things to shine forth and show themselves, free from the calculative and reductive tendencies of modern, technological, thinking. So, what consequences might all this have for our ideas about education? Is education also implicated in the technological mode of revealing and if so is there the possibility of an alternative?

From the emphasis put on examinations and 'teaching to the test' through to justifications of education that accentuate efficiency and 'economic competitiveness', it appears that there may be various reasons for thinking that education might indeed be under the insidious grip of Enframing. Fitzsimons (2002) writes that education itself has been reconceptualised as a key 'technology' for the projects of economic development and globalisation. In this vision, all the components of the educational enterprise, including students, teachers and knowledge are all seen as resources to be utilised as efficiently as possible. In addition, Dwyer et al (1988) have argued that 'schools are exemplars of inauthentic existence, and we can see it in many of their practices, such as the emphasis on rote memorization and unreflective praise of contemporary norms'.

So, if schools are indeed fully caught up in and actively perpetuate the technological mode of revealing things, is there any possibility at all for a more poietic mode of attunement to take place in the classroom? In an article that is as yet unpublished, James Magrini (2010) puts forward the case that there are windows of opportunity, particularly in the arts and humanities, to create 'small worlds apart from the oppressive effect of Enframing', in which students and teachers can engage aesthetically with the world and listen and respond to the 'call of Being'. These small but potent windows of opportunity put students in touch with 'contextual ways of knowing' in which they have the potential to see, hear, feel and 'attend to more facets of the experienced world'. This puts me very much in mind of the sort of 'Living Geography' initiatives that the Geographical Association have been advocating.

In a similar vein, Michael Bonnett (2002) has considered what 'education as a form of the poetic' might look like. In this vision we are invited to see education as essentially 'an ever-evolving triadic interplay between teacher, learner, and that which calls to be learned'. Unlike the highly controlled and instrumental way of thinking that defines the era of Enframing, poetic thinking does not conform to an externally imposed framework but rather involves a 'genuine listening to what calls to be thought in the evolving situation'. Such thinking is context-relative and expresses 'a receptive-responsive openness to things'. In a poetic mode of education, the teacher must 'let the pupil learn rather than impose learning upon her'. Importantly, this is not a wholly passive process. This kind of thinking is demanding and rigorous in its nature, for, as mentioned, it requires the learner to listen for what calls to be thought.

Bonnett rounds off with this wonderful passage which incisively captures what genuine thinking means for Heidegger, and what a poetic form of education would mean for learners, and is well worth quoting at length:

"For Heidegger, genuine thinking is not the assimilation of a series of gobbets of prespecified information and ideas, nor the acquisition and application of free-floating 'thinking skills,' but an exciting and demanding journey into the unknown. It is deeply rooted, being drawn forward by the pull of that which is somehow incipient in our awareness but has yet to reveal itself, and the fundamental achievement of education lies in learners coming to feel for themselves the call of what is there to be thought in this unthought: the harmonies, the conflicts, and the mysteries." (2002: 242)

This is an especially interesting quote because it connects with the ongoing debate about knowledge, pedagogy and the geography curriculum that my own research will be contributing towards. It would seem that the recent predominance of generic and transferable 'thinking skills' and other pedagogical devices have caused us to forget the real purpose of schooling, which is to give young people access to the ever evolving store of powerful and important knowledge (such as geographical knowledge) which can enable them to understand themselves and the world. As this quote points out however, this is best approached not as a matter of assimilating a series of predetermined facts, but rather as a continuing journey, made by both teacher and student, into what is, at least to them, as yet unknown.

There is a related question here about the extent to which technology might aid or hinder this journey. Does technology in education inherently conceal Being? That is, does it cause us to become less receptive and open to things, and more reliant on prespecified, highly structured frameworks that distance us ever more from the earth? In a rather interesting little interview on Radio 4 with author and TV presenter Christopher Somerville, he argues that in the age of the Sat Nav we have as a nation become more disorientated and geographically illiterate than ever before. The interview itself, spanning only four minutes, is short and Somerville's assertions are frankly shaky, but there are a few points made in it that can act as launch pads for further discussion.

In the interview, Somerville argues that people today are so dependent on their mobile phones and Sat Navs to orientate themselves that they fail to see the 'real' geography around them. It would be interesting to reflect a little more, from a Heideggerian perspective, on what constitutes this 'real' geography; is it the lakes, mountains and seas that lie behind the representations we see on our screens? If so, what precisely is it that makes these things so unique in their realness? Is it not possible that technology might actually help us to see, feel and hear more, thus enlivening our experience of the world? Could mobile phones and Sat Navs, creatively used, not enable us to become more, and not less, responsive to the landscape? These are all questions that are well worth exploring further, and I hope to do just that in a future article.

References

Bonnett, M. (2002) 'Education as a Form of the Poetic', in Peters, M. (Ed) Heidegger, Education and Modernity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Dwyer, M., Prior, L. And Shargel, E. (1988) 'The educational implication of Heideggerian authenticity', Philosophy of Education, 44, 140-149.

Fitzsimons (2002) 'Enframing Education', in Peters, M. (Ed) Heidegger, Education and Modernity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

James Marini (2010 - unpublished) 'Worlds Apart in the Curriculum: Heidegger, Technology, and the Poietic Attunement of Art' Submitted to the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory. Draft available online.

Photo is by Flickr user Luca Rossini and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Bringing geography home

2010-09-02T15:48:00.000+01:00

I am now gearing up to begin my MRes and subsequent PhD at the Institute of Education in London this October. Here is a taster of some of the things that I will be working on...

"The geographer Tim Cresswell informs us that prospective geography undergraduates often arrive at his university for interview expressing an interest in places and the differences between them. However, this interest is rarely about a deeply theorised notion of what place is as a concept. Cresswell argues that if students at school were to engage with thinking more deeply about place then it might not only ease their transition to university geography, but their experience of studying geography could be enlivened and their understanding of contemporary social and cultural issues enhanced. I find this an appealing argument. The ideas of place, home, identity and belonging are often evoked in the media, and are part of young people's everyday experience. It would seem therefore to be important for them to develop the capacity to think about these issues carefully and critically, in order to take them beyond the 'everyday'. This is a crucial part of what has been termed 'geo-capability'. However, more research is required in order to how to see precisely how this conceptual approach might work in practice. In response to this perceived gap, my research project will be focusing on these two key questions:

How can we teach and learn geography in way that fosters a richer and more critical understanding of place, home and belonging by drawing upon both the resource that is the academic subject of geography and the experiences of young people?

What would a geography curriculum built upon and led by such concepts look like and what benefits would this would bring about for learners, in terms of their 'geo-capability'?

My intention is to carry out research with young people and teachers from three Sheffield schools representing considerably varied catchment areas. They will be involved in a project about place, home and belonging. The young people will be asked to keep a multi-media diary documenting personal and shared geographies of their 'home' city of Sheffield over the period of one year. Although the group will have a high degree of autonomy over their project, it is anticipated that they will use an experiential fieldwork approach that may include creative writing, photography and the use of digital media such as online mapping and Twitter. I aim to find an approach that allows young people's voices to speak honestly and freely. My methodology will be chiefly qualitative and will include a large ethnographic component, as I will be accompanying the young people as they carry out fieldwork and compile their diaries, thus being at once researcher and participant. Other techniques that I may employ include interviewing and the analysis of media that students produce during the project.

It is important to recognise that this research will also contribute to broader debates about the role of geography in the school curriculum. It has become commonplace to hear arguments about the irrelevance of 'traditional' school subjects in the information age and their inability to provide young people with the skills they require for the 21st century. However, David Lambert and John Morgan argue that the 'curriculum wars' here alluded to are based on a superficial reading on the relationship between subject knowledge and the curriculum. I agree, and my research is located in opposition to both the idea of a subject discipline as a 'transmittable' body of knowledge but also to the 'debilitating anti-intellectualism' that occurs when subject content is supplanted by a sole focus on educational processes and skills-building. I wish to contribute to an emerging vision for geography education that integrates student experience, teacher knowledge and skills, and the subject resource that is geography. I believe that my research will help clarify important distinctions between everyday experience, pedagogy and the school curriculum as well as contribute to academic discourse on place, home and belonging.."

Photo is by Flickr user Kirk Siang and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Heidegger and technology

2010-08-17T15:14:00.000+01:00

In March of last year, newspaper readers in the UK were met with headlines along the lines of 'Primary pupils to learn Twitter instead of history' and 'Exit Winston Churchill, enter Twitter'. These articles were written in response to the publication of Sir Jim Rose's proposals for a new primary curriculum, which have since been overturned by the new coalition Government. Predictably enough, conservative papers such as the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph were deeply disapproving towards such ideas. Now, let us put aside for the moment the question of whether these articles have distorted Rose's report. Let us also put to one side the absurdity exhibited in the idea of teaching the next generation of pupils about a strain of technology over which they will no doubt have a level of mastery over and above that of many of their teachers!

Let us instead cut to the chase. These newspaper headlines help us to focus our attention on a very important matter, that of the relationship between education and technology. Let us note that 'technological understanding' is one of the six 'core areas' identified in Rose's review. We see technology pervading every subject area, not least in geography where Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are playing an ever more central part. Is this, on the whole, a desirable circumstance? Is it anything new? Has education ever in fact been detached from technology? Or has a technological understanding of being always permeated education? In coming blog posts I will be considering these questions through Heidegger's critique of technology. First though, I need to take a closer look at what Heidegger actually had to say about technology, again with the help of Michael Zimmerman.

This is made all the more difficult because Heidegger's attitude to technology changed significantly during the course of his life. But we can say that, in general, he saw the modern technological era as but the latest and most degraded phase in humankind's forgetting of being, an era in which entities are viewed as mere resources to be exploited in the name of human power and security. To understand this, we need to get our head around what Heidegger understood by 'being', and in particular by 'Dasein'. For Heidegger, being is not an entity, but rather the event of the 'presencing' or 'unconcealment' of an entity. Dasein names the very distinct kind of being pertaining to humans. Only Dasein exists in the world in such a way that its own being and the being of others is an issue for itself.

Heidegger put special emphasis on the role of Dasein in enabling the being of entities to come to presence and manifest itself, by providing the 'clearing' in which entities can show up as entities. In case this all sounds a little too anthropocentric however, Zimmerman reminds us that Dasein did not own or produce this clearing, but rather is appropriated as this clearing. Dasein is in this fashion summoned by being and finds itself always already thrown into the world of entities and the ontological play of concealing and unconcealing. Authentic Dasein denotes a kind of embodied being-in-the-world whose essence is 'care', where 'to care' refers not only to ontic intervention but principally to the simple 'letting be' of entities; of not submitting them all the time to the calculating reason of human subjectivity. Authentic Dasein can be seen in this way as the 'shepherd of being'.

According to Heidegger, the degeneration of our understanding of being began in ancient Greek thought. Though Plato was to an extent still alert to the 'presencing' aspect of being, it was nevertheless he who first interpreted being as constant presence or eidos, the eternally unchanging form, thereby founding Western metaphysics. At a later date, Christianity would further embed this understanding of being as permanent presence, now produced by and grounded in a creator God. With the coming of Descartes and the age of reason, humanity would finally arrogate this creation and grounding to itself, "by asserting that for something 'to be' means for it to be representable as a clear and distinct idea of the human subject." In this critical phase entities, or 'things in themselves', were once and for all swallowed up by the human subject who was now the source of all knowledge and value.

This deteriorating historical, metaphysical understanding of being is what ultimately paved the way for the modern, technological, nihilistic era. The technological understanding of being is first and foremost a metaphysical one; hence Heidegger's famous claim that "the essence of technology is nothing technological". In the modern age, entities are 'challenged forth' to be interchangeable raw material to service human needs. Nature is thereby "deprived of any status apart from that of an object for scientific analysis or raw material for modern technology." This highly calculating and rationalistic era may not mark the end of history however; Heidegger appeared to believe that a post-metaphysical era of being was imminent. This would not be a straightforward return to an archaic way of life, but rather a new receptiveness to being as is exemplified in the work of art.

There is much that could be expanded upon in this short account, but this is far as I am going to delve into Heidegger's philosophy of technology at the current time. Needless to say, Heidegger's perspective on technology was, and still is, seen as rather idiosyncratic and has been subjected to much criticism over the years. However, though Heidegger's precise delineation of the 'history of being' might be disputable there is certainly something in his overall analysis that chimes with my own thinking. In the coming months and years I look forward to contemplating carefully the relationship between education and the objectifying, technological understanding of being that may still even now constitute our fundamental way of being-in-the-world. Does technology necessarily restrict the authentic disclosure of being, or can technology actually aid in renewing and revitalising our connection with being, or with nature? Can education, properly thought, bring us 'back to being' and facilitate a less domineering, more respectful attitude towards nature that would meet the aims of environmentalists whilst remaining progressive and optimistic about the capacities and future of humankind?

Zimmerman's 2002 essay 'Heidegger's Phenomenology and Contemporary Environmentalism' makes for excellent further reading and can be found at his departmental web page.

Photo is by Flickr user mandyxclear and is made available under a Creative Commons license

On reconciling progressivism and environmentalism

2010-08-10T15:23:00.000+01:00

In my last post I remarked on the similarities to be found in Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes' controversial thesis that a therapeutic ethos is becoming prevalent in our culture with the arguments made by humanist critics such as Luc Ferry against the theory of deep ecology. In the former we are told that there is in our culture an increasing and dangerous preoccupation with our emotional and irrational self and in the latter we see the emergence of a theory that seemingly wants to expel humanity from its position of superiority and views us instead as being of only equal importance to any other part of nature. It is arguable that both trends point in the same ultimate direction: towards a diminished notion of the human being that views it as fragile and vulnerable with little of the capacity for rational thought and willed, autonomous action so beloved of all those of a progressive stripe. Since writing that post I have been reading an essay by Michael Zimmerman (2003), who surveys some attempts that have been made to philosophically reconcile progressivism and environmentalism.

Many thinkers are in agreement that the emergence of European modernity saw a definite break from previous understandings of our relationship to nature, largely due to advances in natural science which have enabled us to predict, control and exploit the natural world. Meanwhile, in modern times 'man' developed "a new mode of subjectivity, egoic rationality, and a related ideology, anthropocentric humanism, which portray man as the source of value, the standard for truth, and the master of nature." (Zimmerman, 2003: 4) For many radical environmentalists, it would seem that only a turn towards a post-anthropocentric horizon could remedy the environmental and societal ills that have been caused by such an egotistical attitude, as it is simply not possible to fix the ecological mess with the same rationalistic, calculating tools that instigated it. From the perspective of radical ecologists, humankind is often portrayed as but one strand in a 'cosmic web' and only an attitude of compassion, empathy and submission to the greater whole will enable humans to get over the current ecological impasse.

The progressive response to such ideas is one of alarm and consternation at the apparently regressive tendencies that they display. As Zimmerman notes, in "demanding that humans conform to an allegedly more 'natural' way of doing things, and proclaiming the need for a mystical reunion with nature, radical environmentalists ostensibly promote an anti-humanism that... is inconsistent with progressive views of history." (Ibid: 5-6) These anti-humanistic views are seen to be all too compatible with reactionary politics, and we may indeed see in some of them (as Luc Ferry certainly does) the disquieting trace of the kind of ecofacism that drove anti-modern Nazi rhetoric. It is of interest here to examine the thought of Martin Heidegger, as Zimmerman does. Heidegger is a philosopher I have a considerable interest in, but his contribution to Western thought is often overshadowed by his engagement with National Socialism and his now well-proven early allegiance to it. Nevertheless, it is perhaps this dangerous tension in Heidegger’s thought that makes his work so fascinating and so crucial to engage with.

Heidegger saw the current phase of technological modernity as but the latest expression of humanity's degenerating relationship to the being of entities. According to his 'history of being', the domineering, exploitative relationship to Nature that typified his age could not be explained in purely social or economic terms but only with reference to metaphysics. In pre-Socratic times, humans existed in an authentic 'ontological openness' that allowed the being of entities (or Being) to reveal itself or 'shine forth'. However, with the coming of Socrates, Plato and their followers, humanity began its quest to find an underlying ground or foundation for reality. This search intensified and culminated in the philosophy of Descartes and others who saw humans as possessing a self-grounding rationality and free will that made them quite separate from nature (that infamous mind/body split). This changing conception of humanity and of Being paved the way for the typically calculating modern relationship to entities in which they are viewed as a 'standing reserve' to be 'challenged forth' and ordered. This is the essence of modern technology which Heidegger termed Gestell, usually translated in English as 'enframing'.

The modern way of revealing entities is thus essentially an objectifying one: "technological modernity is simply the working out of the claim that for something to be it must be the object for the autonomous, self-grounding human subject." (Ibid: 18) If we accept this as an accurate portrayal of modernity, then we can reasonably ask: where next? We have already seen some of the criticisms levelled at radical ecologists and others who would have make us return to a more primitive, 'authentic' way of dwelling upon the Earth. Zimmerman turns to the thought of Ken Wilber, who has developed an integral approach that tries in many ways to accomplish a reconciliation of environmentalism and progressivism. I haven't read any of Wilber's work myself, though now I have read this essay I expect I shall do. It would seem that Wilber perceives a future course for postmodern humanity in which body and nature 'below' and divine 'above' are reintegrated into a new evolutionary consciousness. In such reintegration, "the individual selfhood of rational-egoic subjectivity is both included and transcended in a more comprehensive form of awareness that is open both to nature and divine."(Ibid: 31)

For Wilber, progressives and environmentalists alike share a 'flat' ontology, largely influenced by natural science, in which the material and the physical alone comprise reality. According to Wilber, however, reality is not at all like this. The physical is but one plane in a many levelled reality, and the biosphere is contained within the 'noosphere'. In this vision, self-reflective consciousness constitutes a different level of reality that evolves from and surpasses the physical and organic planes. This seems akin to many Eastern philosophies that I have read. Wilber maintains that humans must develop this postmodern awareness, which is certainly not a regression, but which rather "transcends customary boundaries" such as the physical, organic, mental and artificial. Interestingly, as Zimmerman clarifies, "a prerequisite for the rise of this more integrative awareness is that the majority of people need to develop modern consciousness and institutions, although such development must avoid critical damage to the biosphere. Hence, the need for environmentalists and progressives to cooperate in reminding each other of what the other finds so important." (Ibid: 40, my emphasis)

So, in order for humanity to advance to the next level of consciousness, it would appear that the contemporary modern era of rational-egoic selfhood is, if you like, a necessary evil. It is a troubling but obligatory stage in our evolution. What’s more, despite its disdain by many primitivists, technology itself might be a crucial element in this evolution. The key may be in finding ways to use technology in ways that enhance rather than constrain human awareness. As Zimmerman writes, “there is no inherent reason that such technological innovations will impede rather than develop freedom, or that they will undermine rather than contribute to the higher, more integrated forms of consciousness.” (Ibid: 37-38).

With this blog posting I realise that I have somewhat strayed away from my usual field of geography education. I am treading in relatively unknown land. This is purposeful. Sometimes it befits us to look far beyond our immediate discipline, our intellectual comfort zone, in the hope that we may bring something back. Indeed, I hope in future posts to think through what the ideas explored here might mean for education and geography education in particular.

You can access Michael Zimmerman's 2003 essay online from his departmental web page.

You can also view Ken Wilber's remarkable looking website.

Photo is by Flickr user UIC Digital Collections and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Truly human?

2010-08-03T12:57:00.000+01:00

In my last post I explained how Ecclestone and Hayes (2009) see the rise of therapeutic education and its focus on 'personal relevance' and 'soft skills' to be a grave threat to established liberal notions of education. Indeed, they deem it to be profoundly 'anti-educational'. Such techniques, they claim, turn young people's worlds inwards and instead of broadening their horizons cause them to see themselves as fragile, vulnerable and 'diminished' selves. Ecclestone and Hayes make it clear that they do not see this as a predicament facing education alone, as the idea of the diminished self has now come to permeate our entire culture and they attempt to chart why and how this has come to be the case. The withdrawal from subject based teaching to what they dismiss as 'faddish innovations' such as 'learning to learn' reflects an anti-intellectual climate in which confidence in the potential of human beings has tumbled. This view they make startlingly clear in perhaps one of the most controversial sentences in their book. Regarding the decline of the ideal of liberal education they state:

"Part of the reason for its loss is that many educationalists and teachers see children as incapable of education because they are no longer seen as truly human: there is no point offering an education you do not believe in to children you believe cannot benefit from it." (Ecclestone and Hayes, 2009: 143)

So as well as being anti-educational, it would seem that modern trends in education are also anti-human and reflect the misanthropic sentiment that humans are no longer masters of their destinies. Ecclestone and Hayes cite Bookchin (1995) as identifying this problem over a decade ago, in his contention that human society was suffering from a 'failure of nerves', a waning belief in our 'uniquely human attributes' and a general decay in our self-confidence as a species. The decline of traditional subjects in schools mirrors this large scale trend. The outcome of all this, for these authors, is a disastrous paradox: despite the rhetoric of empowerment and increasing happiness, the incursion of therapeutic education results in a population that is unconfident and unsure of itself and which turns to the state in order to receive instruction on what to value and how to behave. They claim that this is why the New Labour government has been so eager to adopt these ideas into its educational policy. All in all, the current drive towards happiness and well-being looks to be authoritarianism by another name.

Now, surely most if not all educationalists can agree that education should enable those educated to become confident and happy individuals, even if this is not the foremost aim they have in mind. If Ecclestone and Hayes are right then there would seem to be a strong argument here against the variety of techniques they group together as 'therapeutic education'. But despite adding a whole section of their book subtitled 'a response to our critics' I still remain unconvinced in a number of areas. For a start, throughout the book the evidence for the case remains at a very anecdotal level, usually consisting of short interviews with friends and colleagues and their children! In addition, there seems to be something very arbitrary about what they choose to bundle together under the 'therapeutic' label. Of course, any teaching practice whose sole focus is on instilling proper attitudes, values and behaviour into children is really rather undesirable, as is any practice that instills a feeling of vulnerability and weakness. But do all of the diverse pedagogical methods that these authors put under this banner really have this insidious effect? With such anecdotal evidence I really find myself with no way of knowing.

Their arguments remind me of these put forward by the philosopher and one time French Minister of Education Luc Ferry in his book The New Ecological Order (1995) which I read whilst researching my MA dissertation. In this book, Ferry mounts a case against deep ecology, which he considers to be threatening human culture and self-confidence in the same way as Ecclestone and Hayes think the therapeutic ethos is. According to Ferry, the entire world of reason and the mind is endangered by the emergence of radical ecology. This dangerous theory papers over all that is truly special in human culture and jeopardizes our democratic societies and institutions. For Ferry, deep ecology is fundamentally undemocratic and as a fundamentalism it has arisen to fill the void left by the demise of other ideologies. It represents a new ideological order that, left unchallenged, would seize the hearts of those battle hardy militants who have been 'left in a state of shock' by the 'death of communism and leftism'. This is somewhat similar to a point made by Ecclestone and Hayes to the effect that therapeutic culture has replaced the gap left by the passing of collective forms of working class organisation and the consequent 'absence of politics'.

In both these cases, the opposition depicted seems to be one of human reason and autonomy against looming and sinister forces that would undermine that hard won reason and autonomy. These forces might take the form of peculiar ideas about humans as mere parts of a living, interdependent system called the Earth or they may be more general doubts about our ability to reason, tackle difficult areas of knowledge and to cope with our emotions. These are big claims and all I am doing at the moment is setting out the scene. These are issues that I will be confronting again and again in my work, and I feel sure that some reconciliation can and must be made. Ecclestone and Hayes state with conviction that 'the majority of young people are not damaged'. On the contrary, based upon my own (anecdotal!) school experiences and from conversations with my partner who takes yoga into schools, I see that there are a lot of young people out there needing some healing. I am also unafraid to acknowledge that the Earth itself is desperately in need of healing.

The big question is, what kind of humanity do we aspire too? As the Ecclestone and Hayes are at pains to point out, we are not going to get very far if our human capacity for self-belief and self-will are reduced to such a level that we come to consider ourselves as inherently flawed beings, who can't even lift a finger without harming the Earth. In order to stand a chance of changing the world, we first need the requisite confidence to do so. We also need the requisite knowledge, and for me that's exactly where geography education comes in...

References

Bookchin, M. (1995) Re-Enchanting Humanity. A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Anti-Humanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism and Primitivism. New York: Cassell.

Ecclestone, K. and Hayes, D. (2009) The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. London: Routledge.

Ferry, L. (1995) The New Ecological Order. Volk, C. (Trans.) Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Photo is by Flickr user Cold Press Publishing and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Has the geography curriculum become self-obsessed?

2010-07-27T13:25:00.000+01:00

In recent years we have seen a number of pedagogical interventions that claim to make learning more 'engaging' and 'relevant' to young people. From 'personalised learning' to the ubiquitous 'personal, learning and thinking skills' we have seen a noticeable drift of emphasis away from the teaching of subject knowledge to the development of these generic personal skills. As we enter a time of change, with a new Government in office promising a return to 'traditional' subjects, it is perhaps time to take stock and consider if the pedagogical adventure might not have indeed gone too far. In this piece I am going to take a look at the claim that education in general, and geography education in particular, has become preoccupied with the self and with making itself relevant to young people, all at the cost of emptying itself of substantive intellectual content.

In a book entitled The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes (2009) chart the escalation of therapeutic principles and techniques in all phases of the education system and in the workplace. Such an approach to education has become possible, they argue, because of a wider shift in popular culture towards a therapeutic ethos. According to Ecclestone and Hayes, 'populist therapeutic orthodoxies' reflect and reinforce the concept of 'a diminished self'. That is, a fragile and vulnerable self with a diminished sense of human potential. Therapeutic education invites children and adults to see themselves as inherently flawed and at risk, and to lower their educational and social aspirations accordingly, the upshot being that therapeutic techniques, paradoxically and despite claims to the contrary, actually create more unconfident and unhappy individuals. Overall the authors judge therapeutic education to be 'profoundly anti-educational' and an abandonment of 'the liberating project of education'.

I am not going to present here a fully fledged critique of the book but instead want to focus purely on the implications of what the authors categorise as 'therapeutic' approaches to teaching and learning on the structure and content of the school geography curriculum. I think there can be little doubt that we have seen a marked shift in recent years away from the teaching of subject disciplines and towards more generic pedagogical techniques such as 'learning to learn', 'personalised learning' and 'building learning power' (see Claxton, 2008). These approaches are usually defended as offering an 'engaging' and 'relevant' curriculum for all learners, including those who are 'turned off' by traditional academic subjects. They focus on providing children with the skills they need to think and learn for themselves, whilst content (that is, subject knowledge) tends to take a back seat role. In general, they also emphasise 'soft outcomes' of learning such as emotional literacy and well being, as opposed to the cognitive knowledge and skills that subject disciplines have customarily favoured.

The chief critique that Ecclestone and Hayes direct towards these methods of education is that they are increasingly 'turning young people's worlds inwards'. Pedagogic methods that encourage and even compel young people to disclose their innermost worries and anxieties are portrayed as innovative ways of engaging disaffected youth with schooling. Yet, their real effects are more insidious. According to the authors of this book, such pedagogic adventures are sidelining the cognitive and intellectual dimensions of learning for a preoccupation with one's own emotions and feelings and an obsession with one's own self. It is at this point that teachers of geography should really take note, for what is geography if not a sustained study of the world outside of our self and of the many places, processes and interconnections that comprise that world? If Ecclestone and Hayes are correct in their perception of an increasing self preoccupation within education, then this might seem to spell the end of geography as we know it. Extending this trend into the future, we might imagine the subject eventually being replaced by therapy sessions, such as group reflections on places that seem emotionally significant for example.

Recent developments in geography education would seem at first glance to support this hypothesis. To take just a few examples, a recent issue of the journal Primary Geographer had a focus on 'the geography of happiness' and carried articles on children's attachments to 'special places' and ways of 'incorporating happiness' into the geography curriculum. A recent edition of Teaching Geography, a journal aimed at secondary geography teachers, carried an article about students involved in a project called Young People's Geographies in which they were able to 'choose what they wanted to study' and another one all about young people's personal experiences of fieldwork, in which the focus of the fieldwork seemed to be not so much the objective, physical features of the landscape, but on how that landscape made them feel. These examples are no longer unusual and indeed they represent the general zeitgeist that underlies most cutting edge geography education in the UK as promoted by the Geographical Association. I suppose that Ecclestone and Hayes would consider these examples to be perfect illustrations of the dangerous 'inward turn' that education has taken.

I believe that the real picture is actually less dismal than these authors portray. On the whole, I actually support the 'turn' towards feelings and experience that the examples above display, on the grounds that they provide a much needed balance to earlier versions of geography curricula that have over-emphasised objective, detached and analytical ways of knowing the world. Subjective and emotional ways of knowing are equally valuable, and a good teacher knows how to integrate these disparate 'ways of knowing'. I do nevertheless recognise that there is an important message in Ecclestone and Hayes's claims. There is a profound difference between reflecting on one's emotions during an educational experience and more insidious attempts to engineer well-being and happiness. It is this latter scenario that geography teachers must avoid and be vigilant for. The critical role of geography education in broadening young people's horizons is another ground for vigilance. Engaging and relevant geography that begins with young people's everyday experience is one thing, but it would be indulgent and irresponsible, to say the least, to limit their learning to that everyday sphere. As Michael Oakeshott once said, the ultimate reward of education is precisely "emancipation from the mere 'fact of living', from the immediate contingencies of place and time of birth." (Oakeshott, 1998) Sure, let us take time to explore and acknowledge our emotions and feelings about a place, but let us not dwell there.

I think that there is a wider issue to be discussed here about the balance between self-knowledge and world-knowledge as outcomes of the educational endeavor. I truly believe that both are essential and, moreover, that they are certainly not mutually exclusive. Though my spiritual practice of yoga and my readings in this area, I am confident that striving to truly know oneself is a most worthy goal in a human life. However, I also happen to believe that such self knowledge cannot be sought in total isolation from knowledge of the world that exists outside oneself. In this way, I find it hard to accept that classic ideal of the ascetic soul, meditating in isolation, away from all worldly concerns. In the same way, in the field of education, I suspect that coming to an understanding of oneself goes hand in hand with an understanding of the wider world. In coming years I hope to devise a sound and positive argument that geography, partly due its holistic and integrative nature, plays a crucial part in advancing both of these sorts of understandings and in their integration. In brief, I want to argue that geography enables the learner to come to an understanding of themselves as an authentic, emplaced, knowing and feeling self in a world of human and non-human others with whom they are fundamentally and inevitably interrelated.

And a final point on the so-called 'geography of happiness' mentioned earlier. The nagging problem I have with this, and other similar instances of 'happiness education', can be expressed in the following query: should education aim to make us happy and is there not rather something inescapably difficult about this journey we call education? In this world in which we all find ourselves, it is almost certain that we will feel unhappiness, pain and suffering at some point and to some degree. To me, it seems counterproductive therefore to insist zealously on happiness and instead it seems that a better tactic (and here I borrow from Alain de Botton (1997) who himself borrows from Proust) is to learn how to 'suffer successfully'. To bear the capricious fortunes of a human life, and to realize and accept that, after all, we will not always be happy and that our being may not always be well.

References

Claxton, G. (2008) What's the Point of School? Rediscovering the Heart of Education. Oxford: Oneworld.

De Botton, A. (1997) How Proust Can Change Your Life. London: Picador.

Ecclestone, K. and Hayes, D. (2009) The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. London: Routledge.

Oakeshott, M (1998) [1971] ‘Education: The Engagement and its Frustration’ in Hirst and White (Eds.) Philosophy of Education: Major Themes in the Analytic Tradition, Volume I: Philosophy and Education. London and New York: Routledge.

Photo is by Flickr user blueiii and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Geography as holistic discipline

2010-07-22T11:39:00.000+01:00

In a previous post concerning the need for continued justification of geography as a school subject I suggested that one possible route towards such a justification is to call attention to geography's holistic nature. What evidence do we have that geography has such a nature, and why might gaining a holistic understanding of humans and their environment be of any use to a young person growing up in this century? I didn't have the room to delve into this issue in that post, and I don’t believe it is one that can be dealt with hurriedly. However, I will begin my investigation with a look at the work of Alistair Bonnett (2008), who has written a very impressive introduction to geography, one that should be read by all with an interest in the subject.

Bonnett shows how in the nineteenth century geography was primarily an integrative and synthesising tradition. Leading figures such as Humboldt, Ritter and Mackinder saw connection to be at the very core of this tradition. This profoundly influenced the subsequent evolution of the academic discipline. "For many years and well into the last century, Humboldt’s ambition to approach the human and natural world as one, interconnected and whole, was at the forefront of academic geography." (Bonnett, 2008: 34) This puts geography very much in contradistinction to other disciplines, whose tendency throughout this time was to move towards ever finer specialisation. This continues to be the case today. Bonnett writes that geography is both "a reflection of and a rebellion against" the modern age. Its rebellion lies precisely in its propensity to work with a unified portrait of human and natural worlds and its tendency to cross intellectual boundaries.

Bonnett asserts that 'we moderns' have trouble making connections as we live in an era of specialisation. Yet the holistic, pre-modern roots of geography may contain some vital wisdom for our times. The environmental crisis shows us that a renewed understanding of our relationship to the Earth is of no small importance. Indeed, Bonnett writes that "unless we take an integrated view of the relationship between human activity and nature the world will become uninhabitable." (Ibid: 87) In order to show that this fear of a disconnection between the human and the natural is not a completely new phenomenon, Bonnett quotes the geographer Halford Mackinder (1861-1947):

"One of the greatest of all gaps lies between the natural sciences and the study of humanity. It is the duty of the geographer to build one bridge over an abyss which in the opinion of many is upsetting the equilibrium of our culture." (Quoted in Ibid: 88)

These words are evocative and still sound highly relevant today. Unfortunately, as Bonnett points out, many present day undergraduate geography textbooks fail to bridge this abyss and still treat human and physical geography as entirely separate disciplines that rarely meet. I think we can add that school geography curricula and exam specifications at all levels also treat the two geographies in this way, with many being divided into two parts that deal with the human and the physical discretely. Obviously, there are overlaps, but it seems that there is much scope for taking some inspiration from these early geographical luminaries and figure out a way that we could devise a less rigidly divided geography curriculum, one which is more integrative and focuses on the connections between physical and human worlds.

These days, we keep hearing that children are increasingly disconnected from nature (for example, in the work of Richard Louv, who calls this phenomenon nature-deficit disorder) and that this causes all kinds of emotional and cognitive imbalances. It might not be so wild to suggest that geography might have a substantial contribution to make in improving this state of affairs, due to its synthesising approach to studying the Earth, and its tradition of fieldwork and other out of classroom experiences.

Bonnett, A. (2008) What is geography? London: Sage.

Photo is by Flickr user timailius and is made available under a Creative Commons license

A poem

2010-07-08T12:49:00.000+01:00

Closing

I opened, unaware of this world.

Naïve, a patient hand nurtured me from the soil.

I transformed, took leave of the trellis

That had been erected to support me.

I found my freedom, reached out with

My thin, tender stems to feel the sun.

I grew, looking everywhere for that light.

With the passing seasons I became bolder,

Put on a passionate display. Violent floral reds.

But inside me, in my roots and cells,

I felt empty. I witnessed foliage to the

Left and right of me dying, shriveling up.

I felt feeble. Then I came to acknowledge

My impermanence. I was a fragile being,

Just a straw, not even that. Then began my

Laughing days. I laughed as the leaves

Turned brown and the days shorter. Laughing,

As I knew I was dissolving, returning to

The soil. Now I am folding.

I am closing.

I'm here.

Benjamin Major

No new post this week as I have been working on writings that I hope to see published. The collection from which this poem comes, along with several older essays that will never see the light of day, can now be found on my brand new Scribd account.

Photo is by Flickr user hepp and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Nature as a teacher

2010-06-30T15:46:00.000+01:00

The 'organic concept' as developed in the writings of the early German romantics is perhaps not as well known as it might be. In brief, the concept, a fusion of the philosophies of Fichte and Spinoza, sought to unify the natural, physical world and the mental world into an organic whole (see Beiser, 2003). In this model, nature is the absolute and the mind is one part, the most highly developed part, of that whole. There is only a difference in degree and not a distinction in kind, between the mental and the physical. According to this theory, the mental activity of the genius (the artist or the philosopher) is but nature coming to its self awareness. Nature remains indeterminate and inchoate without humanity. But as plenty of Romantic poets have demonstrated through their work, it may also be true that humans can discover or reflect on their own self through exposure to nature.

There can be little doubt that humans have transformed their environment to a far greater degree than other species. This capacity for transformation and rapid change lend to humankind a somewhat precarious destiny. We may use our extraordinary capacities of imagination and love to live in friendship with and amongst human and nonhuman others, or we may continue to believe that the earth serves man and remain 'masters of the mystery that the earth breathes'. As the most complex manifestation of nature, the romantics understood quite well that humans bore a heavy burden. With the benefit of an aesthetic and moral education that taught the individual how to truly love what is not of themselves as a family, as community, we might at least approach wholeness. Friedrich Schlegel once wrote that to 'follow nature' is the only precept of a moral education. (See Beiser, 1996: 152) Why did he say this? Because Schlegel thought that despite humanity's elevated position, nature may remain the best teacher of all. Nature can teach us how to live well…

"Follow nature therefore means: just as nature is organized, so organize yourself."

If humans are only a part of nature, albeit a uniquely complex part of it, can humans also be free? The romantics certainly thought so, though they could not allow freedom in the radical sense posited by Kant's spontaneous freedom or Fichte's concept of self-positing, in which the self acts without any determination by a prior cause. The romantic conception of freedom was one in which the self was free only in its identification with nature. Freedom and necessity are not opposed but are truthfully one. As part of divine and absolute nature, which is indubitably free, true human freedom arises from "sharing or participating in divine necessity, in seeing that in all my actions the divine acts through me." (Beiser, 2003: 151) To put this another way; considered as merely an isolated part, the human being (or any other being) may seem determined, but because the whole is free, all of us as parts share in this universal freedom. Because we share in this freedom, ethical actions make sense in so much as they tend towards preserving and indeed advancing that freedom. By acting ethically we not only respect other beings but we are respecting that whole of which we are an expression.

Although the German romantics did not explicitly have an environmental ethics in the sense that we recognise today, there is no harm in thinking through what all this might mean from an environmental perspective. As we know, the Earth has been likened by many ecologists to an organism in itself, as is the case in James Lovelock's Gaia theory. This organism is itself comprised of many parts of varying sizes and complexity. Considered as a part, a single human being seems hopelessly determined, dwarfed by the Earth and leading a tiny existence that is little more noteworthy than that of a blade of grass. When the whole is taken into account, however, in place of determinism we find a glorious and creative and imaginative freedom. Considered in gargantuan time scales, the Earth has continually thrown up surprises; forests, oceans, entire species and other expressions that were once not there and someday will cease to be. We humans are an expression and manifestation of nature that happens to display remarkable aptitude in the acts of imagination and love, as well as in acts of incomparable cruelty, and as such our acts are neither spontaneously free nor utterly determined.

In a sense, all of our actions, including the development of technologies, the enclosing of the land and the extraction of minerals for our buildings, could be seen as an extension of nature's freedom. Nature is here simply throwing up even newer surprises, via us as intermediaries. This is really a consistent view if one accepts the premises of the organic concept. However, as lovers, as well as creators and destructors, it surely behooves us to preserve those human and nonhuman others that accompany us and share our great journey; our beloveds, who suffer pain or even die as a result of our actions. To do this, we should probably do as Schlegel says and 'follow nature'. This isn't the same thing as submitting to nature or returning to a primitive, 'natural' state. Rather it means to look to the rest of nature as a teacher, as a propaedeutic for our correct and healthy development, and to organize ourselves accordingly. Shelley, in his wonderful text, A Defence of Poetry, penned the following lines:

"The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own. A man to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own."

In the quote, Shelley seems to restrict this 'great secret', this act of imagination and love, to members of our own species. An even more daring act of imagination might extend this gesture of love and empathy to members of other species. That Shelley specifically mentions the word 'place' here is significant. To put ourselves in the place of another we must first know what it is to be placed. But as I hope that I have begun to show elsewhere in this blog, this is a basic experience we can all relate to.

References

Frederick Beiser is a highly knowledgeable and reliable author on the German romantics. Here are two of his books:

Beiser, F. C. (2003) The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press

Beiser, F. C. (1996) The Early Political Writings of The German Romantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Photo is by Flickr user ivoryelephantphotography and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Geography and educational aims

2010-06-24T12:12:00.000+01:00

This post follows on from the previous one on Justifying geography.

The kinds of aims we should have for the living of a fulfilling human life are clearly highly debatable, as is the idea that we can provide any kind of objective list of aims in the first place. However, I am not delving into this particular issue here (see White, 2005 for more on this). In this post I am more concerned with examining how we might go about justifying geography in light of the kinds of aims which actually have been enshrined in the latest version of the KS3-4 National Curriculum (and I assume here that these have been decided upon after lengthy and painstaking deliberation). I must also add that at the time of writing a new government has just taken office that holds some very different conceptions of education from its predecessor, and so it could be that these aims are revised again in the not too distant future. Nevertheless, the aims as they stand are not overly contentious, and they provide a good starting platform from which to begin our justification for geography. I see this as an unavoidably slow and meticulous task that really requires empirical evidence to back it up. However, we can at least make some headway here.

It is fairly widely accepted that the aims of education for young people should include personal well-being aims, such as ensuring they become knowledgeable, healthy and confident individuals, and more extrinsic interpersonal aims to do with respecting and caring for others. (Though see the work of Ecclestone and Hayes, 2009, for a view highly critical of harnessing subjects too closely to well-being aims). These latter are often framed in terms of good citizenship as they are in our National Curriculum, one of the aims of which is to create 'responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society'. There is little doubt that these two broad kinds of aims are interconnected - a sense of personal worth and fulfillment would seem desirable, though maybe not strictly necessary, in order to foster a spirit of friendly civic cooperation in an individual. Anyway, it seems as though our task would now seem to bifurcate in these two general directions. How can the study of geography contribute to both personal and social well-bring aims? More specifically, how does the subject enable individuals to become the 'successful learners', 'confident individuals' and 'responsible citizens' specified by the National Curriculum?

These aims are, however, still a little on the broad side. We need to unpack them further and thankfully the most recent revision of the National Curriculum does elucidate further how these aims might be met. For example, successful learners are said amongst other things to 'have enquiring minds and think for themselves to process information, reason, question and evaluate'. Responsible citizens, on the other hand, 'appreciate the benefits of diversity' and 'understand their own and others' cultures and traditions'. Now we are getting to some real nitty-gritty. If geography can be shown to help meet just a few of these requirements, and more successfully so than other subjects that feasibly could take its place, then there is surely a strong argument for its place on the curriculum. This investigation in full could take up an entire book. Let us take just a brief look at the few subsidiary aims mentioned above for now, and then we may at least have an idea of how we may proceed.

I recently discovered a fine article from the journal Geography written by a (then) newly-qualified teacher called James Cameron (2005). Having correctly identified the need to justify geography as a core subject, Cameron begins by claiming that geography has the notion of 'enquiry', or the search for questions, at its very heart. Though not unique, this makes it unlike many other disciplines, particularly in the sciences, which are based on "a reductionist quest for answers or a unifying theory" (Cameron, 2005: 80) Geography has commonly been seen as a content heavy subject, filled with lots of facts to learn about capital cities and longest rivers, but Cameron points out that geography is also largely about asking questions and gaining an understanding of ideas like space, interactions and diversity. There are enormous educational consequences that come with this. Regarding what a student of geography might actually learn from their time as a student, Cameron has this to say:

"I would hope that they would develop a range of skills that would serve them well in their future lives, be they in a geographical field or otherwise. The most important of these would be a questioning mind. Learning facts does nothing for the sense of enquiry; realising that there are no easy answers to complex questions does." (Ibid: 80)

Personally I think it incorrect to say that learning facts does nothing for the sense of enquiry. I do not think that there is anything wrong with facts per se and actually I believe that many young children are fascinated by them. Rather, I think they can spur on and add significance to enquiry. That point aside, and assuming Cameron is largely correct, we have an example which suggests that geography may well have something substantial to contribute towards the 'enquiring minds' aim that we saw above. Certainly, there is plenty of evidence to support the view that geography does indeed help to create enquiring minds, and a good starting point here is Roberts (2010). In addition, Cameron believes that geography is about recognising and understanding differences and similarities, and that one of the chief outcomes of a geographical education is an interest and passion for diversity. The study of geography, according to Cameron, develops:

"a cultural awareness of societies, by wondering how people interact with their environments, by considering how the actions of an individual can have consequences beyond the individual, and by standing on top of a hill in the rain, wondering why the view is the way it is and loving it." (Ibid: 80)

Here too we find some obvious links with the statutory National Curriculum aims, which, you will recall, look to produce responsible citizens who 'appreciate the benefits of diversity' and who 'understand their own and others' cultures and traditions'. True, there is little mention here of enjoying the view from the top of a hill and it might be worth pondering why such an aim is omitted, but in general we are now starting to see clearly how geography can play an important part in meeting these well recognized educational aims and outcomes. Of course, I have only scratched the surface here and it should be clear that we could go on, taking each curricular aim individually and determining, ideally with the help of careful empirical research, how various aspects of geography can contribute to meeting them. As I have noted, this could be a book length endeavor, but I hope I have made clear why this procedure of justification is crucial and how we can proceed in this matter.

References

Cameron, J. (2005) 'A Personal Rationale for the inclusion of Geography in the School Curriculum', Geography, 90, 1, pp.79-83
Ecclestone, K. & Hayes, D. (2009) 'Changing the subject: the educational implications of developing emotional well-being', Oxford Review of Education, 35, 3, pp.371-389
Roberts, M. (2009) 'Geographical Enquiry', Teaching Geography, 35, 1, pp.6-9
White, J. (2005) [1986] 'The problem of self-interest: The educator's perspective', in The Curriculum and the Child: The selected works of John White. Abingdon: Routledge

Photo is by Flickr user crnewbedford and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Justifying geography

2010-06-17T09:43:00.000+01:00

In the last post we saw that subjects cannot simply appeal to tradition to justify their place on the curriculum. Each subject has, instead, to continually justify its place by examining itself against the set of aims and principles that have been decided in advance as being core to a good education. By doing so, we will not have proved that initiation into the subjects is in fact the best method of education but we will at least have demonstrated that learning a particular subject contributes to our wider educational goals. This is perhaps the best we can hope for.

This process of justification may be easier for some subjects than for others. It is my view that when it comes to geography the justification seems, initially, relatively easy. Not only does it seem intuitively important to understand human and physical worlds and their interconnections, but in addition it is hard to image a time when such an understanding wouldn’t be important for a life worth living. Indeed, we might feasibly conceive of a scenario in which we needed no such understanding, for example, one in which we were all pre-programmed to behave, like robots, in a particular way according to an extrinsic plan. But even in this case, which after all is not too dissimilar to some theological worldviews that have held sway over the centuries, some minimal world knowledge might still seem desirable. Such knowledge might consist of some downloaded information that enabled us to orientate ourselves, perhaps a kind of personal Geographical Information System (GIS) wired into our heads for instance. The important point is that so long as life is considered not to be so controlled, and ourselves to be autonomous beings, some understanding of the physical and human world in which we live out our lives seems essential.

So, our task of justifying geography in the school curriculum seems fairly painless so far. However, no matter how nifty they may be, there is only so far we can get with platitudes such as 'geography helps children to make sense of the world around them'. Our robot friends, in the scenario pictured above, might argue (if beings without autonomy can argue) that they have made sense of their world, at least to their satisfaction. A juxtaposition of previously random lines, arcs and shapes has now, thanks to the wonder of their GIS implants, coalesced into a meaningful grid of reference which means they can get from A to B without endlessly bumping into walls all the time. To such a being this might be all the sense that the world needs. But what do we make to such a minimal model of what sense requires? 'Making sense' seems to need something more than merely knowing coordinates and being able to get from A to B effortlessly. Making sense, and having what we would call an understanding of the world, would seem to embrace more broader considerations such as why those lines, arcs and shapes are positioned as they are. Why are there walls here? Am I excluded from that place, and if so why? What the hell is a place anyway?

The kind of sense or knowledge that satisfies us is to a large degree a reflection of the kind of being we are. Human knowledge is distinct precisely because it asks questions and this alone makes it poles apart from the kind of GIS data that might satisfy a society of commuting robots. Of course, this is not to say that such data might not prove useful when it comes to finding answers for our questions. Before I diverge from the point too far, let me say that all of the preceding argument has been presented to show that justifying the kinds of knowledge that geography proffers is not an easy task and it depends vastly on the sort of being we are and the kinds of aims we have. We are humans first of all, with human bodies and human desires and ambitions that are unlikely to be fully satisfied by data transmitted into our heads. Our aims are invariably contested, but most of us think that leading some sort of fulfilling human life, however that may be defined, is desirable. Educational aims for young people usually make reference to this aim as well as to the aim that they should become responsible citizens who care about other humans. Our aims are intrinsically human, and pre-programmed robots would care little for them.

Particular subjects, along with the knowledge and skills they convey, must be justified in so far as they contribute to meeting these very human aims. Imagine that someone has come along and demanded to know why geography should not be replaced by 'GIS skills' for, after all, we do live in the 21st century and such skills are of paramount importance. We would have to have recourse to aims, and not just any old aims either. We are humans and not pre-programmed beings whose sole purpose is to get ourselves or our commodities from A to B with maximum efficiency. For sure, the notion of efficiency has taken on a huge importance in recent times, but when we take stock, it rarely comes out at the top of our lists of what the good life entails. I claim that such an aim does not suit us. A subject called 'GIS skills' could not self justify itself without reference to a broader subject that did meet that our human need for understanding and making sense of the hows, whys and wherefores of the world. We can make a good case that such a subject is the one that goes by the name of geography. This is a subject that makes sense of the world, but it 'makes sense' in a very human way.

As we have seen, justifying is not always an easy task, and the extent to which any aspect of geography, from GIS to glaciers, contributes to the educational aims we have set for ourselves is largely a matter for serious research and not for conjecture. In fact, educational research that does not take into account and engage with such aims is likely to be rather meaningless in the long run. Discovering the best ways to teach about 'place' or 'GIS' will tell us little about why learning these things are important to ourselves as human beings living in a world along with others. As a final point, it seems to me that any notion of education without aims is ultimately futile.

A traditional fallacy

2010-06-15T11:39:00.000+01:00

In the previous two postings I have attempted to demonstrate that school subjects still matter. I have done so largely in response to arguments to the effect that 'traditional subjects' are irrelevant in the information age and also to trends, particularly in academies, that see such subjects undermined in favour of vocational training.

At this point I wish to first single out the rather emotive use of the word 'traditional' as it is used by both critics and ardent supporters of a subject-based curriculum. When a critic adjoins the word 'traditional' to 'subject' they are surely referring to content heavy, fact rich subjects of the grammar school style. Yet we can cannot overlook the clear and well-documented fact that subjects can be other than traditional, so certainly no effective arguments against a subject-based curriculum can be made simply on the grounds that they are too traditional (assuming that the critic has shown beyond reasonable doubt that the tradition is in itself a undesirable thing).

Supporters of subjects, such as our new Education Secretary Michael Gove or Prince Charles for example, also frequently have recourse to the word 'traditional' for very different reasons. 'Tradition' is usually appealed to in this and similar cases to stress that something is time honoured, firmly rooted in our culture and has shown at least some effectiveness in the past. Yet as the critic amply shows, there is no reason to think that just because a tradition served us well in the past that it must continue, and will continue in the future, to do so. It may do this, and the traditional way might be shown convincingly to be the best way, but we cannot assume that this will necessarily be so.

The word tradition is thus a rather inadequate word when it comes to discussing the curriculum. It is used mostly emotively (search for the phrase 'traditional subjects' on the internet and see how many news articles appear announcing the shocking imminent decline of such subjects) and has little place in serious educational debate. Either a subject can be shown here and now to provide young people with the kind of education we have decided as a society is best suited for them, or it cannot, in which case it is unclear as to why it should have any place on the curriculum.

It is therefore up to advocates of each subject to justify its place in the curriculum by relating it to aims that have been clearly and rationally decided upon in advance. Of course, these aims may themselves be disputed. The advocator is therefore best placed if they have a variety of different justifications that can be deployed (and these do not necessarily have to be mutually exclusive and can even strengthen each other). This should also be a continuous justification, for what might have counted as a beneficial and valuable skill or knowledge just a few decades ago may no longer be considered so in the near future.

In short, robotically repeating that 'traditional' subjects should be returned to the classroom (with the implication that they are traditional being the only seeming justification) just doesn't cut it when it comes to educational debate. Moreover, deploying the word traditional tends to unhelpfully polarise the debate, leading us to believe that the only two options available to us are either 'a traditional subject-based curriculum or a topic-based, skills led curriculum with no options in between.

Academies and curricular freedoms

2010-06-08T12:03:00.000+01:00

The UK's new Department of Education's first bill is to give thousands more schools around the country the opportunity to become academies. One of the often asserted benefits of becoming an academy is increased curricula freedom, but freedom from what exactly? Freedom from overly rigid curriculum constraints is, from the perspective of most, a good thing. But when exactly does the much welcomed freedom to foster innovative and response approaches to teaching and learning become freedom from the responsibility to give our children a broad and balanced education? How can we facilitate the former whilst avoiding the exceedingly unfortunate scenario that the latter presents? How are we to react when we hear of schools dropping entire subjects at whim solely in order to improve league-table performance?

These are the kinds of questions stimulated by a report published by Civitas last December called 'The Secrets of Academies' Success' by Anastasia de Waal (2009).
In this report de Waal finds that academies' exemption from the Freedom of Information Act, and their general reluctance to make known their GCSE and equivalent results by subject, means that it is actually very hard to determine why and how academies have proved the success story they have been claimed to be. I would also question how, without such information, we can be sure that the education that academies provide can in any way be said to be 'successful' by the usual liberal yardsticks: that is, a comprehensive and balanced education for all young people that enables them to better understand themselves and their world? As we saw in the previous post, many educationalists have argued that being initiated into the disciplines provides the surest way to such an understanding.

On this score, data collected by de Waal and in another study by Titcombe (2008) do show some cause for concern. Out of the 16 academies that were prepared to release their results for de Waal's study, one did not have a single entry for GCSE geography, and many other academies in the study show considerably low entry rates for both geography and history (de Waal, 2009: 46). Titcombe presents us with one academy that offered no GCSE science at all in its curriculum, with just 1% of pupils gaining an A*-C in history and only 6% in geography, despite of which an OfSTED investigation managed to find that the curriculum was 'sound' and the school 'improving rapidly'! (Titcombe, 2008: 54) There is no reason to suppose that this state of affairs is restricted only to the academies who agreed to take part in these studies and indeed I have heard that there are many academies that do not offer geography as a GCSE option.

Both of these authors think that the cause of these dwindling GCSE subjects lies in a greater emphasis in academies on vocational or, as they are sometimes derogatorily referred too, 'soft' subjects. According to Titcombe, vocational courses on the NVQ model offer no more than "training in how to respond to the circumstances required in a specified job application" and that "such teaching is carefully structured to make minimum possible cognitive demands and is unconcerned with general intellectual development." (Titcombe, 2008: 57) To put it bluntly, as Titcombe himself does, the relatively unchallenging nature of these qualifications and the high level of student success are what ultimately enable academies to shine in the league-tables. It would be unfair to suggest that it is only academies that display such worrying trends and it is rather symptomatic of a zeitgeist that is affecting school curricula as a whole. Titcombe stresses that he does not mean to devalue vocational education outright, and I second this. However, we should surely be disturbed by this overall trend, for there are good grounds for supposing that every young person's opportunities should remain as broad and comprehensive as possible, and this includes having access to subjects such as geography and history.

It sometimes feels as though there is an implicit assumption these days that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds will be necessarily better served by a 'relevant' and vocational curriculum, and these reports suggest that academies risk limiting the curriculum that these students get to experience in just such a way. This is a rather chilling thought for me. I myself grew up and was schooled in one of the 10% most deprived wards in the country. The schools I attended sadly failed to provide me with a satisfactory education in the humanities (the secondary school has since become a 'Business & Enterprise College' so I doubt the matter has improved). Meanwhile, I spent many happy hours as a kid with a pack of educational picture cards displaying the kings and queens of England and according to my mother I could chronologically recall the monarchs of our country from 1066 to the present day. At the end of every school day I would rush joyfully to the library where my 'real learning' could begin, where I could pour over books and learn fact after glorious fact about distant countries and their ways of life.

This was all very far from the world of local and immediate circumstances and premature worries about filling in job applications. I summon up all of these memories not because I hold the rather reactionary belief that everyone should know the kings and queens of England off by heart, or that children ought to be all as enraptured by books and the knowledge contained therein as I once was. The plain fact is that a great number of people just aren't interested by these things and it seems unclear as to what purpose is served by forcing anyone to engage with such knowledge beyond the age of 14. However, what I do argue passionately for is our responsibility to keep open a space in which the opportunity of accessing such knowledge exists. How can one know that one is 'turned off' by academic study unless one has had a significant and prolonged chance to discover whether or not this is the case? It seems absurd to have to make such a philosophically simple point, but it seems as though it is one that can be all too easily forgotten.

The knowledge I acquired from reading my books, and learning by rote my kings and queens, has not necessarily served me materially by landing me a better paid job then my peers. Nor is it likely that it has made me more healthy or happy or provided me with any kind of flawless character. But I would nevertheless not want to swap it for either material advantage, nor for perfect health, happiness and well-being. For me, education is far too important to be utterly reduced to questions of 'competence' in dealing with immediate circumstances and to supplying children with the technical skills required to merely 'get along' in life or improving their health and well-being. This is precisely why the trends reported above in our academies are such cause for concern. The prospect of a curriculum centred purely on these concerns is unnerving. For all who believe in real curricula freedoms - the freedom that a young person has to decide who they want to be without being hastily co-opted into vocational studies - this cut-rate curriculum must be resisted with all our strength.

I need to make it clear, if it isn't so already, that what all of this amounts to is not an argument against academies. My conclusion, as is de Waal's, is simply that our new government needs to ensure that there is more transparency on the part of the academies. We also need to make sure that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are at least given an opportunity to study subjects such as geography, history, science etc. This has to be the case if Michael Gove is to avoid contradictions with what he has said very clearly elsewhere about the essential place of what he calls 'traditional' subjects.

I am not saying that I would necessarily see eye to eye with Gove's idea of what a subject should look like, but at least I can say that we would share some common ground here...

References
de Waal, A. (2009) 'The Secrets of Academies' Success'. Civitas. Available at http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/secrets_success_academies.pdf
Titcombe, R. (2008) 'How Academies Threaten the Comprehensive Curriculum', Forum, Volume 50, November 1, pp.49-59.
Available at http://www.wwwords.co.uk/rss/abstract.asp?j=forum&aid=3194

Photo is by Flickr user Thomas Hawk and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Do subjects still matter?

2010-06-02T16:40:00.000+01:00

In my last post on education and wonder I upheld the thesis that all learning begins in our emplaced and embodied experience of the world. In particular, in the experience of wonder, in which the startling fact of encounter itself comes to the fore – the fact that we are in the world, belong to the world, and are compelled to therefore question and comprehend that world. I am aware that this may lead some readers to enquire whether I am thereby arguing for a kind of education that is guided solely by the dictates of experience and relevance. For example, do I take the position that subjects or disciplines, those traditional conduits of knowledge that hitherto comprised the form and content of education, are misguided and outdated? I must declare straight away that I do not subscribe to such a view. Let us reflect for a moment on Kant's acute remark in his first Critique:

"But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience" (My italics)

The question of whether the disciplines disconnect us from the world of experience and thereby from the 'feeling' of being within the whole, has been debated for some time. There was a particular illuminating exchange of views on this topic in the mid seventies, between R.K. Elliot and Paul H. Hirst. This exchange has been since republished in Hirst and White (1998).

R.K. Elliot begins by putting forward the relatively uncontentious view that education should help a child to understand him or herself as a human being in the world together with others, a claim that I can hardly disagree with. If all goes well, the child arrives as at an understanding of Man [sic], history, and the natural world as a totality to which he himself belongs. That is, "he holds them all together in a primitive synoptic unity, and is at home within the totality." (Elliot, 1998: 113) Elliot holds that education in the disciplines can result in the loss of this sense of primitive unity and an estrangement that leads to the child no longer feeling at home within the whole:

"Obtaining breadth within the disciplines is of little value to the individual if this primitive sense of unity is lost, for no such unity is either available or possible within the disciplines. Without it, and estranged from common understanding, the man who possesses breadth within the disciplines is merely possessed by seven disciplines instead of one." (Ibid: 113)

There are a couple of points to draw out from this with regards to my own thinking on this matter, which is still developing. First, though I can concur with Elliot’s rendering of education as an enterprise that seeks to enable the child to better understand their being in the world and others with whom their share that world, previous posts of mine have problematised the notion that coming to 'feel at home in the world' and the sense of totality that goes with this is the most attractive route to achieving this understanding. It comes down to that standoff between Heidegger and Levinas again. Is there not violence inherent in a totality? May it not be the case that a certain amount of estrangement from the world can be a positive thing when it comes to gaining understanding of ourselves and others? These are the important questions that I am trying to investigate, and they are in no way 'airy-fairy'.

So my first point concerns whether or not the cosy and 'primitive' sense of holism that Elliot advocates here is really the best road towards understanding. My second point is less fundamental but no less crucial. Even if we accept that a primitive and synoptic unity is what we are after (and perhaps, in the end, it is, even after the reservations I have just raised) is it reasonable to suggest that subjects always and necessarily remove us from the world of experience and that sense of totality and unity? This is certainly not the case, in my view. It may indeed be correct to say that historically subjects in the grammar school vein, overloaded with information and facts, can and do cause this estrangement. But there are good reasons to suppose that these subjects can be thought otherwise, and can be partly, even largely, rooted in the lived experience of the child.

We do not need to simply imagine what this kind of a subject would look like because there are already some terrific examples of such 'living' subjects in action. To take the example of geography, a subject that I am most closely acquainted with, there are many examples of lessons and schemes of work that draw from and build upon real life examples that will be familiar to students from their day to day experience. For instance, see the Living Geography book (Mitchell, 2009) recently published by Chris Kington and the Geographical Association's recent manifesto, A Different View (GA, 2009), particularly Section 3. What I am trying to establish, through providing these examples, is simply that subjects do not necessarily have to operate in utter isolation from and with absolute disregards to the vicissitudes of experience and the 'primitive synoptic unity' that such experience supposedly leads to.

Of course, this assertion is not sufficient in itself to show that subjects are the most favourable means by which to educate young people in accordance with Elliot’s view of education. It could be that there are methods that are yet more satisfactory when it comes to maintaining that sense of 'being in the whole' and bringing students to understand themselves and others in the world. But if there are such methods, I do not believe that we have as yet found them. For this reasons I cannot help but agree with Paul H. Hirst in his rejoinder to Elliot's essay:

"That those disciplines be used so that they retain their connections with common understanding is precisely what we want in general or liberal education and I see no reason why with suitable teaching it should not be achieved. But I cannot see the disciplines as breaking any valuable unity to common understanding… Rightly used, it seems to me the disciplines can contribute to a continuous development and sophistication of understanding. If thereby unsatisfactory elements of common understanding and false synopses within it become despised, so much the better." (Hirst, 1998: 123)

References

Elliot, R. K. (1998) [1975] 'Education and Human Being' in Hirst and White (Eds.) Philosophy of Education: Major Themes in the Analytic Tradition, Volume II: Education and Human Being. London: Routledge.
GA (2009) A Different View. Sheffield: Geographical Association.

Hirst, P. H. (1998) [1975] 'Education and Human Being: A Response to R. K. Elliot' in Hirst and White (Eds.) Philosophy of Education: Major Themes in the Analytic Tradition, Volume II: Education and Human Being. London: Routledge.

Mitchell, D (Ed.) (2009) Living Geography. Chris Kington Publishing.

Photo is by Flickr user aurelien_s and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Education and Wonder: What calls for learning?

2010-05-25T12:35:00.000+01:00

"It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize" Aristotle

In our times, education continues to be justified by a myriad of extrinsic aims and purposes. Goals such as economic prosperity, good citizenship, sustainable development, and let us not forget, health and well-being, all vie to resolve the question of what education is good for. I am not going to discuss the desirability or otherwise of these aims here. My interest in this post is not with such extrinsic aims, but with the question of what lies at the other end of the educational endeavour. That is, what lies at the origin of learning? Or, more precisely, what calls for learning?

It is undoubtedly true that much of what we learn in a place or course of education has been purposefully selected, for one reason or antother, from the large corpus of human knowledge, beliefs, sentiments etc. that have been handed down to us. But regardless of this, learning is not in itself some arbitrary human invention. Rather, it appears to me that there is something about learning that is intrinsic to human being.

I wish to show, following the philosopher Jeff Malpas (2006) and his excellent essay 'Beginning in wonder: Placing the origin of thinking', how it is that much learning begins in wonder. I am not saying that all learning begins in wonder, for there is much to be learnt also from other experiences such as sorrow, anger and surprise. But I think Malpas puts forward a good case that wonder, and the kind of thinking produced by it, has a quality that sets it apart from these other experiences. There is something about wonder that returns us to the world of our experience and to the primal fact of our 'being in the world' and illuminates this world for us. Malpas himself is writing specifically about philosophy in this essay, but I believe that much of what he writes can be applied to all genuine learning and thinking that is not mere training or transmission.

We are each of us surrounded by a world of things, or phenomena that seem to call out for a response, that call for our care. This is what Heidegger and many other phenomenologists mean by the expression 'being in the world'. We are inescapably part of the world and any idea that we can think of ourselves as thinking, knowing creatures without recourse to the world of emplaced and embodied experience is quite false. We can follow Malpas and recognise our experience of the world as composed of encounters. Sometimes, these encounters can be quite exceptional, and yet they might to point to something quite ordinary – the very fact of encounter itself.

"The encounter with the extraordinary that often gives rise to wonder – the encounter with the wondrous in its most strikingly immediate forms such as the sublime or the beautiful – brings suddenly to our attention the very fact of encounter. Yet in bringing such encounter to the fore, what is brought forward is not itself something that is extraordinary or unusual, but rather something that is itself 'ordinary' and everyday."

Though it is typically rare and exquisite things, such as rainbows for example, that cause us to wonder, what Malpas is saying is that it is experience of these kinds of encounters which bring the very fact of encounter itself to the fore. That is, such experiences cause us to realise that we are always already emplaced and embodied beings, given over to other things in the world. Imagine for a moment the first time you witnessed a particularly fantastic and picturesque vista. Did it not, in some inexplicable way, transport you back to the world, engage your senses, and compel you to remember that you are in fact a part of that world?

So though it may be the sublime and the beautiful that first cause us to wonder, what this brings forth is actually something very ordinary and everyday indeed - the fact that we are experiencing and corporeal beings who are always already 'in' and related to the world. Malpas goes on to argue that, although the experience of wonder may also involve a certain strangeness, this strangeness lies not in estrangement from the world but precisely in the startling recognition that we belong to that world. This wonder, this strangeness, this sudden and sheer sense of belonging, is what leads directly to questioning. As Malpas writes, "it is just such belonging that makes such questioning and explanation significant, that makes it matter."

I think this is the really significant point for learning - this notion that it is the sudden awareness of our being in the world and our prior belonging that calls us to question and make sense of that world.

Put in such a way, it seems unfortunate that the experience of wonder is usually such a fleeting one, which soon passes as we give way to the pressing concerns that life demands and withdraw back into ourselves. It would seem that one of the roles of a teacher may, therefore, be to nourish and sustain this sense of wonder for as long as possible. This kind of a teacher would point to the world, open up spaces for encounter, evoke wonder and to bring forth that feeling of belonging that leads to genuine learning. We might say that learning begins, first of all, in the very places in which we find ourselves, a point which we can see clearly made in the following quote, if we substitute 'learning' for 'philosophy'.

"[Learning] does not begin in something out of the ordinary, but in the bringing to awareness of the most ordinary; it does not find its limit in something that transcends our everyday experience, but in the very 'being there' of that experience; it does not find its 'end' in a space or time beyond, but only in this place."

A last word on wonder. It seems to me that wonder accompanies us at every step upon the educational odyssey. It is what spurs us on at the beginning and, at the end (if there can be said to be an end) when we come to behold the world as our mutual and accommodating home we cannot help but feel wonder again. Indeed, if we were to look upon this world and feel no sense of wonder, then I would suggest that we cannot be really looking.

Reference
Malpas, J. (2006) 'Beginning in wonder: placing the origin of thinking', in Kompridis, N (Ed), Philosophical Romanticism. London: Routledge.

Photo is by Flickr user magols and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Education for Uncivilisation - Part Two

2010-05-17T12:51:00.000+01:00

"In the west, particularly with the growth of post-Enlightenment humanism, the dominant stance has been uncompromisingly anthropocentric, placing a certain largely economic-materialistic conception of human welfare as the underlying goal of our everyday intercourse with, and explorations of, the natural world." Michael Bonnett, 2004

This quote, and the one from John Dewey in Part One of this posting, serve to remind us of that modern mode of thought that Martin Heidegger termed 'enframing', in which the earth is ordered and challenged to stand forth as a resource or 'standing reserve'. According to Heidegger, this enframing is the very essence of modern technology. It is the modern way of revealing truth. This revealing in itself is not a bad thing, as to bring forth the essence of things from concealment into unconcealment, (that is, the pursuit of truth) is what makes us human.

However, it would seem that the modern epoch of enframing has sent us down a wrong, if rather inevitable, path. It seems to me that an alternative way of revealing truth, an alternative way of relating to the earth, is now needed more than ever. A mode of revealing which does not have as its primary aim an ordering of things so that they are at hand for further orderings. This would be a way of revealing and a way of dwelling that lets things shine forth in their essence - a poetic way, if we understand poiesis in the way that Heidegger did, as a 'bringing-forth'.

Despite the notorious difficulty of his thought and the charges of romanticism, mysticism and worse that have been levelled towards him, I believe Heidegger presents us with what I personally see as a very compelling insight into our modern condition and the possibilities of moving beyond it. I want now to see what happens when we think about education as a way towards 'dwelling poetically' on the earth. What if we were to foster a more receptive, accommodating and caring response towards this earth, and how might we go about this? One core question that keeps asking itself to me is this: Should we, can we, ever feel totally at home in the world? Towards getting a hold of this question by the horns, I have been engaging not only with Heidegger but with the thought of that other 20th century philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. I will not repeat these musings here but direct the reader to the posts Learning as response and What do we talk about when we talk about home?

Sustainable development as we know it is but the latest in a long line of stories that we keep telling ourselves, to reassure us that we can make ourselves fully at home in the world. But what kind of a home-maker, what kind of a dweller, perpetuates the kind of wholesale destruction of that very home to which recent centuries have borne witness?

Has we have seen, to be a barbarian is to be a stranger, a foreigner, and we must come to realise that we are all truly barbarians in this sense. For despite all our attempts to classify and order and account for the world, there is always an excess from which we are estranged and that remains partly concealed and hidden from our gaze and which lies always beyond our authorship, analyses and management.

Poets, storytellers and other artists have traditionally been the ones who have gestured towards the ineffable and drawn it out of the darkness. But there is a sense in which everyone can be an artist in what he or she does. Perhaps there is something to be gained from thinking of the teacher as artist who gestures towards the ineffable, but not in a way that delivers it to us for consumption or exploitation. Rather, such an artist would sing the earth in a way which allows us only to catch a glimmer, a mesmerizing flicker, of this hidden beauty and truth.

Let me repeat our main question. What would an education for uncivilisation look like? I imagine that it would certainly not be judged purely in terms of its efficiency, output and contribution to either economic prosperity or good citizenship. Rather, it would have to speak to the barbarian in us. It would decentre us; help us reconsider what it means to be human, and to look outwards beyond the city walls. No, it would have to do more than make us merely look. We would have to scale those walls and tread on the bare earth; cast away the urbane illusion of being safely at home, and to sing the wild places. Upon this earth we are a bit like strangers sojourning at an inn, yet we have come to treat it as unscrupulous landlords. An uncivilised education would disclose the world to us in a way that fostered responsiveness and appreciation towards what is Other.

At this time in which once seemingly permanent edifices are breaking down before our eyes, we need new stories in schools, not ‘functional skills’. A myriad of well meaning but clumsy and disjointed government initiatives only manage to cloud the elemental underlying question. This is nothing more or less than the question of how we should henceforth dwell on this Earth. Are we going to insist on sending our children along the crumbling precipice of progress, to cling onto the shattering walls of the citadel for dear life? Or are we going to encourage them to look down? It may be well for storytelling to be at the heart of education; storytelling that has origins in place, in the day to day geography of the child. I must stress that this does not exclude global learning. Rather, we might conjecture that place is our doorway to the global... Though this is a point that needs further working on.

At this point, and with the awareness that this is the kind of suggestion that isn’t going to be taken up in any education policy documents any time soon, I suggest that a less conceited kind of education is needed. One in which we are daring enough to go beyond the gates and be prepared to stand still in awe and incomprehensibility at what we meet and then to keep that sense of awe alive in art and language. This will be an education in and of, but certainly not bounded to, place.

There must always remain a degree of ineffability in what we teach and learn. We can no longer labour under the vain illusion that we can master everything. To do so, it may be that we need not dispense with the ideas of humanism, civilisation and ‘being at home’ completely. But it may be that we have to put some work into re-thinking what being human means, to dig deep and reconsider the idea of civilisation and to open up the concept of home along the Heideggarian and Levinasian lines I have begun to trace here. This is indeed precisely what I intend to do.

Education for Uncivilisation - Part One

2010-05-10T12:21:00.000+01:00

Photo by Flickr user hfrank71 and made available under Creative Commons

"Children... Start off in the position of the barbarian outside the gates. The problem is to get them inside the citadel of civilisation so that they will understand and love what they see when they get there.” R.S. Peters, 1965

Education has historically been allied with the project of civilisation, that flight of humankind away from a primitive and savage state of nature. Such a view has been expressed many times, and this quote from Richard Peters, a philosopher of education, is an almost archetypal statement of such a view – children begin their lives as barbarians, in a state of nature, and it our task to initiate them into all that is good, just and beautiful about civilisation. In another quote, the conservative thinker Michael Oakeshott puts forward a view that is not too dissimilar. Education, he writes, "is not learning to do this or that more proficiently... It is learning how to be at once an autonomous and a civilized subscriber to human life..." (Oakeshott, 1971) Here is an argument for education that sees its purpose not as a means to any particular, extrinsic ends. Rather, being educated is here understood as the process of becoming an autonomous and civilised human being, highlighting in addition what has always been a constant source of tension in educational philosophy: how to lead a child towards becoming a responsible citizen whilst still retaining their autonomy.

I want to step back a little bit in this two-part article and ask what may seem a rather peculiar starting question. If these previous quotes have begun to elucidate what an education for civilisation might look like, what, then, would an education for uncivilisation look like? Or is this in fact a contradiction in terms?

The notion of 'uncivilisation' that I am engaging with here is one that is currently being expounded by a new arts and literary movement that calls itself The Dark Mountain. This movement aims to reassert he importance of storytelling grounded in a sense of place and time, and with this to move beyond the stories and myths of progress and human centrality that we have been hitherto been telling ourselves. Their idea of exactly what 'uncivilisation' means, and why we need it, is made a bit clearer by this quote from their manifesto:

"We tried ruling the world; we tried acting as God's steward, then we tried ushering in the human revolution, the age of reason and isolation. We failed in all of it, and our failure destroyed more than we were even aware of. The time for civilisation is past. Uncivilisation, which knows its flaws because it has participated in them; which sees unflinchingly and bites down hard as it records—this is the project we must embark on now. This is the challenge for writing — for art — to meet. This is what we are here for.” From Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009)

I want to be clear from the start that this paper is a thought experiment of sorts. My purpose here is not to propound a theory of primitivism, with which there exists many theoretical and practical problems. It is simply that, as I see it, so many people have thought so long and hard about education as a civilising and humanising project that it seems appropriate, in the spirit of open-minded exchange of ideas, to think once in a while outside of this particular box. Sometimes it befits us, anyway, to take a line of thought that challenges our entrenched beliefs lest we continue to walk a wrong road.

Recall that Peters said that children start off in the position of the barbarian. But let us ask, what is a barbarian? A quick glance at Wikipedia reminds us that the term originates in the ancient Greek civilisation, and literally means 'anyone who is not Greek'. A barbarian is really a foreigner, a stranger, someone who is 'not us'. It is a derogatory term given to those whose world-view is so different, so apparently backwards compared to ours, that we simply cannot understand them. Whilst we live comfortably in the citadel of civilisation, they live in the uncultivated wilderness of ignorance. But, as a first step in the thought experiment, let us ask: Is being a barbarian really so bad? Would it hurt us to take a long walk outside of the gates, amble amidst the uncultivated, and feel our bare feet upon the earth? What would education look like if we were not so afraid of what lay beyond the gate, if we embraced the strange and the stranger and moreover found that we are the stranger – each and every one of us?

We live in a time in which we are facing ecological devastation. I'm not dwelling on this point – we’ve all picked up newspapers, logged on to the internet, and seen this message staring us depressingly in the face over and over again. There are many who argue that this situation has been caused by a wrong relationship with nature, a relationship in which nature is seen as a mere resource to be exploited by humans. The hubris inherent in such a view, and the way it has been perpetuated through education, is perfectly captured by this quote from the progressive educationalist, John Dewey, writing in the early 20th Century:

"Nature is the medium of social occurrences. It furnishes original stimuli; it supplies obstacles and resources. Civilization is the progressive mastery of its varied energies… From the standpoint of human experience, and hence of educational endeavour, any distinction between which can be justly made between nature and man is a distinction between the conditions which have to be reckoned with in the formation and execution of our practical aims, and the aims themselves." John Dewey (1916)

So, nature supplies 'obstacle' and 'resources'. Civilisation, and hence, education, provides a means of mastering these. Humans set practical aims and nature provides the conditions that we have to overcome to achieve those aims. This 'overcoming' is precisely what we call civilisation, or education. Perhaps as a result of this conception of things, 'nature' and the 'environment' have hitherto been presented in the school curriculum in a very particular way with privileged access to them being seen as gained chiefly through science. As Michael Bonnet (2004) has noted, the dominant stance has largely been an anthropocentric and economic-materialistic one, with little attention being turned towards the value of nature in and of itself.

Even the much vaunted idea of 'Education for Sustainable Development' sustains this conception. Talk about sustainable development typically carries with it the assumption that we can, bar a few lifestyle changes, keep calm and carry on as normal in the face of impending ecological devastation. Furthermore, it implicitly conveys the notion that we ought to, and indeed would be insane not to want to, carry on in this manner. Thanks to science and innovative thinking, we are told, we can fix our way out of this mess. This is the culture of ‘solutions’ and it is as present in school as anywhere else.

If the time has come for new stories, as The Dark Mountain Project proposes, then they are perhaps needed, above all, in the school.

To be continued...

A Book of Migrations

2010-01-19T12:40:00.000Z

This is a very nice book I am reading full of reflections on landscape, identity, migration, belonging and exile. It intertwines these musings in amongst accounts of Solnit's journey along the west coast of Ireland, in a narrative that is almost as winding and unhurried as the country tracks that this landscape itself contains. Strangely, although I was aware that Solnit is a good writer, this is one of those books that has been sat on a shelf for ages, ever since I picked it up cheap at a festival a two or three years ago. I'm glad I finally delved in. What follows, for example, is one intriguing reflection on home and attachment that she offers whilst discussing the rather ordinary and faceless suburb in which she grew up and the wild and beautiful Californian landscape that surrounded it:

"Home, the site of all childhood's revelations and sufferings, changes irrevocably, so that we are all in some sense refugees from a lost world. But you can't ever leave home either; it takes root inside you and the very idea of self as an entity bounded by the borders of the skin is a fiction disguising the vast geographies contained under the skin that will never let you go. It is, if nothing else, the first ruler by which everything else will be measured, the place by which other places will be found hot or cold, bustling or serene, lush or stark. When I think back to my formation, it seems that landscape shaped me, made a home in the truer sense than the centerless house in the subdivision and an identity surer than the vague hints of familial and ethic history that came my way. I am even literally made of the California landscape, of all the produce, water, wine I have been devouring since I was four." (from pages 66-67)

Over nostalgic? I'll leave that for you to decide. However, the sentiment is one I am sure that we can all identity with to a greater or lesser extent, even if we are sceptical about landscape's purported power to shape us. Take a look at the publisher's website if you want to find out more about this thought-provoking and well researched book.

All geography is homesickness

2010-01-14T13:44:00.000Z

Photo by Flickr user ☻mrhappy☻ and made available under Creative Commons

We could say of the study of geography, as the German Romantic philosopher and poet Novalis once said of philosophy, that it embodies a kind of homesickness; "the urge to be at home everywhere in the world". It was observations of an escalating divorce of humans from nature, our original home, which partly accounted for the emergence of Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a recent study of the rise of the 'geographical imagination' in this period, Tang's (2008) intriguing thesis is that the origin of modern geography as it arose in the work of Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter can partly be found in the Naturphilosophie and landscape aesthetics of the early German Romantics. This rich body of thought provided much inspiration for these early geographical luminaries but most pertinent for our theme is that in their search for a "deeper, pre-reflexive unity" the Romantics "contributed, knowingly or unknowingly, to the making of the modern geographical imagination that was predicated on the fundamental unity of man and nature." (Tang, 2008, pp.12) Although theories of the close interrelationship between man and the earth can of course be found much earlier than the nineteenth century, it is arguably only in this period that such theories moved substantially beyond a rigidly deterministic stance represented in a somewhat encyclopaedic fashion. With the emergence of geographical science, this interrelationship was now seen as altogether broader and more complex. Indeed, for the most optimistic it suddenly appeared possible to

"understand mental disposition, culture, history, indeed, all aspects of the human world by explaining the spatial structures and operations of natural forces, which combine to constitute the dwelling place of humankind – the earth." (Tang, 2008, pp.42)

Of course, the notion that we are able to gain a complete and integrated understanding of this dwelling place and the interrelations between its many parts has fallen out of favour in recent times. As Alastair Bonnett (2008) asserts in his recent monograph written in response to the question 'What is Geography?' the integrative project was always "both a reflection of and a rebellion against the modern age" (Bonnett, 2008, pp.34). That is, it is a reflection of modernity in terms of its vast scale and ambition but a rebellion in its refusal to fit into neat academic boundaries. As Bonnett goes on to say, we in the modern age "have trouble making connections. It is not the modern way. Ours is an era of specialization." (Ibid, pp.87) The post-modern turn, moreover, has witnessed a bleak challenge to the very possibility of achieving objective knowledge and truth, including knowledge of nature. As Michael Bonnett explains, these influential views, at their extremes, "claim that there is nothing more to nature than its human construction; it is simply a cultural artifact." (Bonnett, 2004, pp.59) This view clearly undermines the idea that we can study the earth as a 'dwelling place' or 'home'. In fact, the very presupposition that we have a home is thrown into doubt; instead we seemed destined for a homelessness and rootlessness in which all that is solid turns to air. The consequences of post-modernism for geography education have been pointed out by Alex Standish (2008), who condemns the post-modern turn, arguing that it empties subjects such as geography of any intellectual or moral basis and opens the gates for a dehumanised and ultimately illiberal curriculum made up of 'pet political and social projects'. I tend to sympathise with Standish's viewpoint. However, his apparent alternative, a re-establishment in the curriculum of a clear-cut objective body of knowledge that must be assimilated, is too reactionary to be given serious consideration. Indeed, I would argue that such a conception of the curriculum is in fact in itself dehumanising and illiberal.

Ultimately, what the extreme post-modern view neglects in its stark condemnation of absolutes is that the search to find a home, that homesickness described earlier, has always been precisely a search, carried out with love, hope and imagination, for harmonious concord in a world that to us often seems so very discordant. Despite the unbridled confidence of the age of Enlightenment and the more reserved optimism of the Romantics, we have never been able to attain a full and complete knowledge of the world and to thereby feel totally at home on it. As Bonnett concludes, the post-modern assertion that we cannot know a reality that lies outside of our sensibility is actually otiose; of course "we can only know – or imagine – anything from within our form of sensibility” (Bonnet, 2004, pp.59). He continues as follows:

"the issue now becomes a matter not simply of whether there is 'empirically' an independent natural order that has its own properties – for us there manifestly is, this is simply unavoidably how we experience many aspects of the world – but of the meaning of this order, the quality of the space in which it presences… the value and the implications for thought and action that we attach to it, are." (Ibid, pp.60)

The urge for an earthly home, and to live in a world that has stability, meaning and value, is, I would argue, another deeply engrained part of human sensibility. The likelihood that this stability, this meaning, at least partly originates in the human imagination does not make it any less real to us. The prospect of unity, of a harmonious home in nature, serves as a lodestar towards which humanity infinitely strives. Thus, talk of an earthly home is defensible on these grounds, for how many of us really wish to be adrift, homeless and rootless? Taking this further, I believe that studying the earth and our interrelations with it can also bring us to a fuller understanding of ourselves and our place as global citizens who share this home with each other. There is no other subject on the school timetable that contains the intellectual resources to bring about this understanding more than geography does, and this, for me, is where the subject’s inestimable humanising potential comes in. It must be added here that, contra Standish, it is when learning geography takes the route of questioning, investigating and enquiring, as opposed to learning by rote, that it comes closest to fulfilling its potentiality for realising and enhancing our humanity. Although these claims of course need unpacking, examining and qualifying, it is this tendency of geography to make us appreciate and understand our shared home which it its greatest contribution to the lives of young people.

References

Bonnett, A. (2008) What is Geography? London: Sage

Bonnett, M. (2004) Retrieving nature: education for a post-humanist age. London: Wiley-Blackwell

Standish, A. (2008) Global Perspectives in the Geography Curriculum: Reviewing the Moral Case for Geography. London: Routledge.

Tang, C (2008) The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism. California: Stanford University Press.

The future of geography

2010-01-07T14:09:00.000Z

Photo by Flickr user United Nations Photo and made available under Creative Commons

25 years ago, Ron Johnston made an appeal for the future of geography...

"Geographers have disengaged themselves from studying and promoting the uniqueness of place, and consequently have contributed to a general ignorance of the world as a complex mosaic. This disengagement must be corrected... and geographers must once again take the lead in portraying the complex variability of peoples and environments" (Johnston, 1985)

It seems to me that in academic geography we have seen this 'correction' occur to the extent that the positivist approach to geography seen in the 60's and 70's now seems to have withdrawn into the background. In the last quarter of a century we have seen Marxist, feminist and post-structural approaches, alongside a renewed interest in phenomenology, and many more. These may all have their differences but common to them all is the commitment to recognising the variability of place (even in those cases where place is seen to to be no more than a social construction) and to penetrating the 'real mechanisms', as Johnston put it, as opposed to that tendency that positivist approaches have to generalise and observe only the surface of things.

But has school geography followed in the wake of this diversification of approaches?

In many ways, being an employee of the Geographical Association, and one who barely leaves the desk at that, it is not so easy for me to tell as one might think. For I am indeed faced with the many admirable and exciting approaches to teaching and learning geography that are showcased in our journals, on our website, and in our recent manifesto, A Different View (GA, 2009). But to what extent does this represent the geography education landscape as a whole and not just a small band of particularly inspired and energetic individuals? From my place here at the desk I can not tell. I wonder, are there still children sat in boredom, filling in the missing words on handouts and colouring maps, as I once was?

As should be fairly clear by now, I am particularly interested in creative and imaginative approaches to understanding place, not exactly as a replacement of more purely descriptive approaches, but as a necessary complement. As my reading of Proust keeps reminding me, there is a reality that exists away from the exterior one we see only with our eyes, a multi-faceted and kaleidoscopic reality that lies within each of us and which ensures that none of us sees exactly the same world. Writing is one time honoured way we can express this hidden world, but I am open to the possibility that new technologies can offer us yet other ways. One interesting event that is happening on Saturday is Urban Tweet Day, which could potentially result in a fascinating collage of varied perspectives on the urban life.

The potential for teachers to do similar activities with their students is quite vast, and for me, there has never been a more crucial time for us to find these new ways in which to make sense of our world and to appreciate our responsibilities in and for it...

But that is enough dreaming, I should get back to colouring in that map!

References

Johnston, R. (Ed.) (1985) The Future of Geography. London: Methuen.

GA (2009) A Different View: a manifesto from the Geographical Association. Sheffield: Geographical Association.

Thinking about 'things'

2009-12-23T11:02:00.000Z

Photo by Flickr user neil-san and made available under Creative Commons

Christmas day is almost upon us and the more sceptical part of me is brooding upon the vast mountains of plastic and electronics that will be awaiting many children throughout the land on Friday morning. I confess, I was one of those children who awoke to a rather large sack stuffed full of toys, most of which spent the remainder of their lives in the drawer under the bed, emerging into the light perhaps once a year. Now, it is not the purpose or aim of this blog to rant about and bemoan the age of rampant consumerism but rather to contribute, in some small way, to the wider debate that is taking place about ways we can re-envision and re-articulate our relationship to the Earth, and in particular to the places upon that Earth.

While I am on this subject, I would like to point those who are not yet aware of it to The Dark Mountain Project - a new literary and artistic ‘movement’ conceived of and curated by Paul Kingsnorth (a leading green voice of his generation) and a friend of mine called Dougald Hine. The journal will showcase literature and poetry that is firmly grounded in a sense of place and time (in the tradition of Thoreau, John Berger and Alan Garner). Despite the odd hint of pretentiousness here and there, I nevertheless have a little feeling that, come 2020, this movement and the journal that is accompanying it will be looked upon as one of the defining, though resolutely alternative, voices of the next decade. We need some geographers writing for it!

Coming back now to the real reason why I was writing about these aforementioned 'mountains of plastic and electronics', I have been thinking in the past week about how we might get pupils to reflect on some of the more hidden facets of Santa’s seemingly endless generosity. No doubt there will be many an environmentally aware teacher who will start the new term with an activity based around mapping the hidden connections that link our gifts with other places and people around the world, and this is all good. However, there may be yet another, more phenomenological, approach to take which could also result in some inspired creative writing efforts. This approach involves thinking carefully about how our new belongings have an impact on the very way we experience and engage with the world.

It’s Heidegger who’s got me thinking about this; specifically his fairly well known description in 'The Origin of the Work of Art' of van Gogh’s painting of the peasant's shoes. In this example, the painting of these rather innocuous looking items conveys to us not merely the shoes themselves but the entire world of the peasant and their relation to the earth. As Heidegger puts it, in his characteristically poetical way:

“From out of the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth… In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.”

It is of course his frequent use of these conspicuously rural examples that have led to the charges of anachronism, romanticism and anti-modernism that have been levelled at Heidegger over the years. However, there seems to be no reason why we cannot undertake a similar analysis with markedly modern objects, which Heidegger himself did in his account of the autobahn. This is what led me to consider how we could take a piece of equipment such as an I-Pod, mobile phone or a pair of trainers and write about how it shapes the way we engage with the world – the way we observe it and interact with it on a daily basis. Indeed, might it not be of great interest to write an account of an urban walk from the imagined perspective of a pair of trainers?

An even more imaginative and empathic leap may entail one then comparing how the everyday items of distant countries and other eras reveal quite different worlds to our own, and quite different ways of experiencing it. let us say... ‘sandals treading gently on the bare earth’ as opposed to ‘thick air-cushioned soles pounding against the firm concrete’ to take two admittedly rather stereotyped examples!

I suppose what I am really trying to argue for here is an approach to geography that really focuses on our everyday engagements with the world and puts them to question, through literary methods. Not so as to displace other approaches, I hope you’ll understand, but as a valuable perspective that has for too long been seen as the domain only of the English classroom. Putting it in a more Heideggarian way, such an approach may help teach us how to ‘dwell’ with greater care on the Earth, and to open ourselves up to those aspects of this world that refuse to be conceptualised by an analytic, scientific method.

And leaving you with these thoughts I will now wish you all a very merry Christmas and happy new year. I will return to posting in January...

The absence of place

2009-12-17T16:00:00.000Z

Photo by Flickr user stevec77 and made available under Creative Commons

In Alan Garner’s novel Thursbitch (Garner, 2004) the reader becomes acquainted with the life story of the valley of the same name and the powerful affects it has on those who dwell in it or visit it. The book evocatively interweaves the stories of two temporally distinct moments in the valley’s past and vividly captures the way that the narrative of an individual life, or of an entire community, is not only temporal but is also marked out in respect to particular places.

One of the novel’s two temporal strands is set in late 18th century rural England, and these parts of the narrative revolve around the life of Jack Turner, a ‘jagger’, or packman, who brings back to his family and community the foods, gifts and ideas that he has encountered upon his travels. After arriving back from one of these many jags, Jack is informed by his father that whilst he had been away the mysterious ‘land man’ had made an appearance. The land man, “one of the best of the worser kind of folk”, had been about with an eye for certain “improvements”, namely, the enclosure of the land, “walling right up Tors”, and using the sacred high stones as field lines and gates. What is worse, the ‘land man’ has an eye for improving the valley of Thursbitch itself, the very centre of Jack’s world, and to “make it a farm and build a house there.” Jack’s response to this threat is a blend of grief, fear and anger, and what he says is telling:

“He can’t, Father. Never. He can’t. If he does, it’ll be a land of great absence.” (my emphasis)

Despite his status as a wanderer, as one who travels far from home from county to county buying and selling goods, the disturbing thought of losing that home, that centre, drives him into blind panic. It may be that, for an outside observer, the valley’s physical presence may remain relatively unaltered- but for him, and his community, this desecration of a place is tantamount to replacing this place (with all its richness, its meaningfulness) with a ‘great absence’.

We all know that the loss of a home-place, or of any place known well, can be traumatic and harrowing. If places are, as Proust wrote, “like people, rare and wonderful people, of a delicate quality” then is it any wonder that the thought of the loss of a place can fill us with as much fear and anxiety as the loss of a loved one? Of course, there are always exceptions, in some cases it may be that the loss of a home-place is experienced as a relief, as liberating, or even exhilarating. But even so, this latter prospect is surely more likely to occur when an individual has voluntarily left a still-existing home place; that this experience can be liberating is without doubt as anyone who has ever left their parental home well knows! But it is harder to imagine anyone being invigorated by the thought of their homeplace having being obliterated utterly and completely. The more sudden the severance of people from place, the harder it is to come to terms with. Places are indeed rather like people in this respect. The philosopher Edward Casey writes that “we mourn places as well as people, and as part of the process we must decathect from both.” (Casey, 1993: 198)

As it is for individuals and communities so it may be for humanity at large. Novalis once wisely stated that philosophy is “really homesickness, the urge to be at home everywhere in the world.” Humans strive to be at home wherever they may be. The prospect of complete separation from history and nature, of being lost, rootless and without a true home is, for all but the most Abrahamically minded individuals, like some terrible nightmare. As we have seen in previous posts, most philosophers (and geographers) have been more like Odysseus than Abraham. The object has been to place human beings; to discover their place, their home, in the great scheme of things. For example, Tim Creswell names Yi-Fu Tuan as one geographer for whom the discipline is all about studying Earth as the home of people and David Seamon as one for whom the home is an intimate place of rest away from the hustle of the outside world. (Creswell, 2004) In this blog, these are ideas that I will keep returning too.

References
Casey, E. (1993) Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press
Cresswell, T. (2004) Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing
Garner, A. (2004) Thursbitch. London: Vintage

Learning as response

2009-12-09T13:40:00.000Z

Photo by Flickr user daveblume and made available under Creative Commons

"I must feed my body and arrange my house in order to receive the foreigner knocking at my door; if I posses a home, it is not for me alone." (Peperzak, 1993, pp.24-25)

There are many who would argue that in order to develop an ethical relationship, an empathy, for others, one must first acquire knowledge about them. The thinking goes something like this... "how can we expect children to care about people in such-and-such a country if they cannot even place it on a map?" There is something initially reasonable and compelling about such an argument, not least because such thinking (knowledge before ethics) is, as we shall see, entrenched deep in the Western tradition.

As our reading of Levinas in the last posting began to make clear, the history of Western thought has been long dominated by a tradition which sees consciousness as preceding, and having priority over, my encounter with the world. We might call this an 'egocentric' philosophy, one in which the Self comes first, and in which Others appear literally as an after-thought, that is, once they have been submitted to the integration, the 'violence', of thought. What Levinas proposes instead is a philosophy in which ethics, or our relationship with the Other, becomes fundamental. For Levinas, we have a primordial and unchosen responsibility for the Other, which comes before knowledge. Importantly, this is not to deny the Self. Rather, it is to say that the self comes into the world in relation to Others. As Peperzak writes,

"To realize my responsibility for the Other, I myself must be free and independent; but the sense of my selfhood is my being-for-the-Other... it is the needs of the Other who, as a foreigner, disrupts my being at home with myself." (Peperzak, 1993, pp.25)

We see, therefore, that the encounter with the Other can be thought of as a disruption. The face, the speech, of the Other calls out to us, pleads to us to open up our doors and be hospitable. It calls for a response, not an objectification in knowledge. And if this responsiveness, this unchosen responsibility, is indeed more 'fundamental than knowledge' then does this line of thinking not have some powerful implications for education? It puts into question any idea that the central aim of undergoing an education is to acquire and accumulate knowledge. Instead, it would suggest that the purpose of education is to provide opportunities to encounter others who are not like us, not with the express aim of acquiring knowledge about them (though we will surely do this anyway) but of learning how to live amongst others- learning how to live the responsible, ethical, life. It calls for a classroom with its doors opened to the outside, as it were.

Alex Standish argues passionately that 'values' and 'attitudes' should be kept out the geography curriculum, which should instead focus on the attainment of 'geographical knowledge and skills' (see this article). Yet, for me, he never successfully justifies why his conception of geography as an 'objective body of knowledge', or as a 'spatial science', is the one we should accept. Why should our aim be to fill young people's heads with facts, least of all in a world where such facts are anyway readily accessible on the internet? The thinking of Levinas would seem to support a view of geography (and other subjects) as a way of seeing, a way of openly encountering and responding to others (other people, other cultures, other places) that does not reduce them to objects to be forcefully integrated into knowledge.

If we dare to think of learning as response (as Gert Biesta has called it) in this way then it would appear that geography, by providing the space within which such encounters can appear, has a particularly distinctive and invaluable contribution to offer.

Reference
Peperzak, A. (1993) To the Other: An introduction to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Indiana: Purdue University Press.

What do we talk about when we talk about home?

2009-12-04T13:54:00.000Z

Photo by Flickr user .jowo. and made available under Creative Commons

In previous posts I have been comparing education to a journey. One which begins in everyday and familiar places. One which turns us from this world of everyday experience precisely so that when we return home from our journey we will see that home in light of the larger place-world we have gained an insight into. This I called the educational odyssey. I cannot really claim any originality with regards to this line of reasoning. Although I shall not go into the details here, there is a strong, even dominant, tradition in Western thought that has seen philosophy and education as a homecoming, a coming-back-to-oneself, and we see this particularly clearly in Heidegger.

As you may know, Heidegger himself considered his work to be an answer to Western philosophy, which, since the days of Plato, has been based on a deep-rooted misunderstanding about the nature of being. See the introduction to this entry on Wikipedia, which isn't at all bad. However, it would seem that Heidegger's emphasis, in his later works, on ideas about 'dwelling' and 'homecoming' puts him more in line with the Western tradition than is usually admitted. Certainly, it is partly his use of such concepts that has incited the charges of romanticism, conservatism, or worse, that have been leveled at him.

The really crucial question here, and a central question for our times, is... can we, should we, ever feel totally at home in the world? Is there not something essentially exclusive, even oppressive, about the very notion of home? Or can we talk about home and still allow for openness and receptivity to what is other? I'm not going to be able to answer this important question right now, but during this blog's lifespan I will be offering some thoughts upon the question.

Emmanuel Levinas is one philosopher who has presented an acute and highly original criticism of Western philosophy's obsession with homecoming. According to Levinas, the history of this philosophy has been characterised by the determination to reduce what is Other to the Same, that is, to gain complete knowledge of the Other and make it into an object for the self. We could put it this way: the project of traditional philosophy has been precisely to make us feel at home. Or, as Adriaan Peperzak explains,

"Although it recognises to a certain extent that philosophy is a journey abroad or 'from here to there', on which one is surprised by strange and unsuspected events, the interpretation of philosophy as the conquest of autonomous knowledge sees it as an odyssey: by the integration of all his adventures, the traveler comes back to his point of departure. He has enriched himself but has not changed radically. The truth he found was already there from the outset. In opposition to Abraham, who went out to 'unknown lands', Ulysses remained the same" (Peperzak, 1993, pp.91)

So, Levinas's alternative to this tale of odyssey is that of exodus. Here, the journeyer sets out, not with the firm intention of returning back to the home that they know, but rather to voyage forth to encounter strange and unknown lands without the promise of a return. Although these reflections may seem rather abstract at first glance, their implications for how we think about educational aims and practices could be quite deep and far reaching. It is these implications that I want to work through in this blog.

What I have written previously would seem to suggest that the chief aims of an education are to enrich us, giving us knowledge and understanding of the world, and finally return us to that world as a home- bringing us back home to ourselves, as it were. But should our aims be more radical even than this? Given a world that is full of plurality and difference, should not an education send us out, away from hearth and home, our attachments, and aim to bring us to face to face with the unknown? A kind of educational exile?

Reference
Peperzak, A. (1993) To the Other: An introduction to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Indiana: Purdue University Press.

Why I am blogging

2009-12-01T12:35:00.000Z

Photo by Flickr user Pengster

There is a an outstanding moment in Proust's In Search of Lost Time where Marcel describes in detail the morning on which he opens the daily newspaper (I think it is Le Figaro) to find that his first article has, at long last, been published. I do not have the book to hand, so I cannot quote it directly. There subsequently follows one of Marcel's characteristically lengthy ruminations, in which he compares the arrival of this morning newspaper to the arrival of fresh bread, still warm from the press. He also describes the way in which, somewhat anxiously, he reads and re-reads the article numerous times, each time through the eyes of a different imagined observer. How favourably, or not, would he be judged by each of these scrutinising eyes? Hasn't every writer felt those piercing eyes?

These days, the arrival of this fresh daily bread has been replaced for many people by the world of ceaselessly updating 'breaking news', which is now often channelled straight to one's desktop or mobile phone. Aside from the distinct possibility that we might thus be receiving a lot of 'half-baked' news, there are nevertheless undoubted benefits to this era where we are fast approaching instantaneous communication. There is a very good reason why blogging has some appeal to me, typically a bit of a techno-sceptic, and this is its promise to enable a kind of 'thinking out loud' or 'thought in process' to exhibit itself. One of the limitations of the printed word is that once the book or article is off the press then it necessarily enters the realm of the 'said'. That is, of the static, the ordered and the immutable. It cannot be 're-said' or 'unsaid'. At least, not until a second edition appears.

However, there is in a blog the intriguing possibility to catch on the fly those changes, shifts and inflections of thought that move us from day to day. There is the potential to go back and re-say what you said the first time, based upon new the information, insight or comments you have received. Of course, actual face-to-face conversation is still clearly peerless for this, but for those of us who feel more comfortable with the written word, the blog becomes a valuable asset. It can, in a sense, keep thought and writing 'alive' - which is certainly not to say that it makes printed material and the synchronicity this represents superfluous. There is, after all, nothing like the texture and smell of a 'real' book.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is really to act as a prelude of sorts to the next one, in which I intend to return to the idea of home and to 're-say' it through the lens of displacement and exile. There are a number of reasons why what I have so far said about home could be seen by some as problematic. For starters, it could be remarked that I have treated home as a somewhat innocuous and even nurturing term, but there are fairly obvious reasons why some might not see home in such a rosy light. Neither have I touched on the issue of what 'home' might mean to those who have been displaced, exiled or have simply led a life of self-chosen itinerancy. I have in fact been aware of these issues as I have been writing and it has always been my intention to focus on them in due course. It may be that doing so will require some re-saying or even un-saying of what I have said previously. It is not that what I have said previously is incorrect. The problem stems from the simple fact that there is precisely always some things left unsaid. We can never say everything.

One thing is clear- we can never be sure where our thoughts are going to lead us, and as such there is an inevitable vulnerability inherent to thinking. This is a vulnerability that is actually increased in exposing thought in a blog in this way- raw, as it were. But I have always been of the opinion that there isn't much point in writing if nobody gets to read it...

The self in education

2009-11-27T12:39:00.000Z

Photo by Flickr user Robotography

The idea that to be educated is to come to know oneself and one's place in the world (and to be initiated into that privileged world of human being) has a long and distinguished history. From Bildung, through progressive and child-centred education, to the liberal, analytical tradition that flourished with the pioneering work of Peters and Hirst, it would appear that a conscious, rational and autonomous self is a sine qua non of educational philosophy. Even highly conservative theorists have been able to find common ground with progressives on this point.

Of course, the terms of such an education are hotly debated. A new book that pits itself against 'therapeutic education' claims that the new emphasis put upon personal relevance, inclusivity and the emotions in the curriculum contribute to a 'diminished' concept of the self that thereby provokes an accompanying "diminished sense of human potential" (Ecclestone and Hayes, 2009). I will no doubt offer my own views on this particular matter in a future posting. I mention it here merely to show that though the terms by which a self is to be initiated may lie in question, it still remains generally agreed that education, for its furtherance, requires successive generations of individual selves who will present themselves, willingly or not so willingly, to be tutored in the knowledge, skills and ethics that a successful human life requires.

But what is a self? One fundamental question, and one which has immense implications for educational practice, is whether the self is formed largely independently, that is, in virtue of some internal power or capacity that need only be kindled or coaxed along by some external tutelage, or if on the contrary, it is fashioned relationally, through its encounters with numerous other humans and non-humans. Jane Roland Martin seems to advocate this latter position when she writes thus: "An adequate theory of education needs to go beyond a conception of persons as autonomous individuals not simply because education ought to bind human beings to one another, but because it should bind us to the natural order of which we are a part." (Martin, 1998). Gert Biesta is even more emphatic about the relational nature of subjectivity. Following Levinas, he considers the coming into the world of individual selves to involve a primordial responsibility towards what and who is other. In such a view we seem to be inescapably entwined within the social fabric, we exist for the Other as much as for ourselves, and certainly possess no or little stable, enduring identity.

The question is, does either of these polarised views on self-formation present us with a sensible basis on which to build educational practice? One would seem to call for a classroom opened outwards, as it were, with endless opportunities to engage with other human beings, and with the world at large. The other seems to demand a classroom that favours introspection and a persistent searching for and exposing of one's own feelings and emotions (what I would class a literally self-centred education). Yet, common sense would surely suggest that an education, if it is to be balanced and well-rounded, should offer occasions both for interacting with the 'real world' and the innumerable encounters with other points of view that this entails, whilst also allowing a time and place for solitude, self-searching and self-expression.

In short, education must bring us to an understanding of ourselves at the same time as it allows us to see beyond ourselves, to that shared world in which we must, for all our sakes, learn to co-exist. It is my intention, as this blog progresses, to show that an underlying concept which grounds our experience of Self and Other, and through which we gain access to an interior and exterior reality, might lie (literally) underneath our feet. The concept in question is place. I wish to show how a curriculum built upon the underlying concept of place could initiate students into the rich mode of understanding of self and world that we are seeking.

To be continued...

References
Biesta, G.J.J. (2006) Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers.
Ecclestone, K and Hayes, D. (2009) The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Martin, J.R. (1998) 'Needed: A New Paradigm for Liberal Education', in Philosophy of Education: Major Themes in the Analytic Tradition. Volume 1: Philosophy and Education (eds. Paul H. Hirst and Patricia White). London: Routledge.

The educational odyssey

2009-11-24T12:09:00.000Z

Photo by Flickr user The Waterboy

Most of us have a view on the question of 'where is home?' We might well answer this question in the plural, maintaining that the house in which we presently live or the town, county or country in which we were born are all a sort of 'home' for us. Geography itself has often been described as the study of the earth as 'the home of humankind'.

Young people are also likely to come to school with a strong view on where and what home is for them. I sense that one of the most valuable contributions that geography can potentially bring to a young person's life is the broadening and diversifying of their idea of what a home can and might be. It has the power to take us beyond a provincial and exclusive identification with home or community that everyday experience might bestow to us, and refocuses our attention on that shared home in which we have to get along - Earth. It may also enable us to see our own literal home (our 'patch') from a new, expanded perspective.
It is in this way that I have elsewhere compared a geographical education to a journey. The following quote from philosopher Edward Casey really gets to the gist of the matter:

"The home-place I knew then was not the whole, or even the essence of the place to which I now return. The movement of such a journey of departure and homecoming is from part to whole and back to part. But the second 'part' is a part that directly reflects the whole, for now I know my home in the light of the larger place-world through which I have travelled. Had I remained at home and not left, I would never have come to see it in such a different and more complete light. The longest way around is the shortest way home." (Casey, 1993)

In this age when education is inundated with seemingly hundreds of well-meaning but often conflicting policy recommendations, it is sometimes easy to forget the underlying simplicity of the endeavour in which we are engaged. As Iain Thomson reminds us:

"[T]he goal of this educational odyssey remains simple but revolutionary: To bring us full circle back to ourselves, by first turning us away from the world in which we are most immediately immersed and then turning us back to this world in a more reflexive way." (Thomson, 2004)

These days a lot of attention is drawn to making learning 'relevant', to connect it with the world of the child's lived experience. I have no problem with this, indeed, I actively endorse it as previous posts should show. However, it would seem to me that although education can effectively begin by engaging with our lived experience, a meaningful education also has, paradoxically, a duty to turn us away from our self, our home, the world of our experience, no matter how demanding and unsettling an undertaking this might be. It has to turn our heads from the flickering shadows on the cave wall, as Plato's Allegory of the Cave so brilliantly illustrates. It has to do this because it is only by completing this odyssey that we call an education that we get to return home and this view this world as a complex and interrelated whole.

This is what it means, to me, to view 'the bigger picture'.

References
Casey, E. (1993) Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Thomson, I. (2004) 'Heidegger's perfectionist philosophy of education in Being and Time', Continental Philosophy Review, 37, 439-467.

Place as possibility

2009-11-20T13:10:00.000Z

Photo by Flickr user clazzi

Place has often been viewed as a sedentary, romantic and somewhat conservative concept and as such it is frequently regarded with great suspicion. The same goes for the notion of 'home'. In a recent thoughtful article on the matter, Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting writes,

"The politics of home have had a fraught and vicious history on the continent, and perhaps this explains how they have been set aside, and so deliberately ignored. But belonging can be reinterpreted and that's where a host of seemingly unrelated cultural responses to our predicament seem to be forging a new understanding"

The article highlights a set of ideas that are currently refocusing attention on notions of home and the 'geography of our lives'. New localism and environmentalism are both identified as key to this recent re-engagement with place. Bunting goes on to reinterpret home and belonging as 'ongoing projects', the continuous result of a 'shared commitment' and not an allegiance to an unchanging common identity or homeland.

The article's argument is one that would surely be embraced by many a geographer. As Bunting correctly implies, the relations between place and identity are precarious and multifaceted. Places certainly have a significant part to play in making us who we are. However, it is not so much the case that we are in a simple sense determined by any one place, for example the place of our birth, but rather that each place we pass through on life's journey leaves its indelible mark upon us. I am particularly fond of the work of Proust, because it constantly reminds us that our identity is, in a sense, a never completed project. I would argue that it is no less a mistake to reify place, to treat it as something finalised and concrete. Places, like people, have many sides to them.

As well as, in part, making us who we are, the places in which we live, work and tarry also have a bearing on who we will be. A child born into a placeless world would be sorely impoverished by such a dire circumstance. Places are part of the inheritance we pass on to future generations, yet as many a writer has noted, we have been busy in recent decades creating a world without places, or at the very least a world in which all places seem alike. I believe that asserting the importance of place, far from betraying an underlying conservatism, is to assert the future of possibility. Places are where the future germinates, where possibilities emerge. Jeff Malpas, a philosopher who has enquired extensively into our relationship with place, articulates this view very succinctly when he writes,

"the idea of place does not so much bring a certain politics with it, as define the very frame within which the political itself must be located." (Malpas, 1999)

This is spot on. Indeed, it is to put the horse back before the political cart.

Malpas, J. (1999) Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

From landscapes of neglect to landscapes of hope

2009-11-17T17:12:00.000Z

Photo by Flickr user Nicobobinus

In a recent interview for The Guardian, novelist Anthony Cartwright talks about ‘landscapes of neglect’, those mostly urban places which have seen dramatic decline in socio-economic fortune in recent decades and which thus become fertile breeding grounds for far-right extremism. Talking about the town in which he himself grew up, he explains,

"Even as a boy, I was aware of this landscape of decay as the physical fabric of the town was boarded up, and that fed into the psychology of the place… at times of economic collapse, people always look around for someone to blame."

It would seem that in the current climate, there are a lot of people looking around for someone to blame. This study funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2006 found that as many as 18 to 25 per cent of the UK population would consider voting for the British National Party and it is unlikely that this statistic has since dropped.
Significantly, the report finds that education, or rather the lack of it, is one of the key factors that contribute to high levels of BNP support. This would seem to support many a justification that has been given for education now and in the past. An education that nurtures tolerance, care and a sense of hope is as urgent now as it has ever been. I firmly believe that learning geography can help us here. A geographical perspective can help us to transcend narrow and provincial attitudes and cultivate a spirit of openness.

Alex Standish argues in this article on Spiked for a geography curriculum that shields children from the 'real world' of political responsibility. Now, I am not afraid to put my hand up and admit that I agree with Standish on some counts. Certainly, I am willing to accept that a geography that is pulled along solely by extrinsic political objectives is a diminished geography, and a classic case of tail-wagging-dog. However, that children should be shielded from the real world... I find this hard to grasp... how are children to form an understand of their place in the world if they are denied active engagement with it?

The question is one of relevance. It has been argued before that the curriculum lacks relevance to those from deprived backgrounds (see this report from the DCSF, especially section 6.2.4). It is unfortunate that it is those very areas that could hold claim to be ‘landscapes of neglect’, that is, inner city areas with a high level of deprivation, where young people are least likely to opt to take up geography after the age of 14. This is based on the findings of Paul Weeden in a paper which as far as I know is as yet unpublished. This is a somewhat cruel but not so surprising irony and the solution can only lie in reexamining the subject, to try and understand how we may rejuvenate its appeal for these young people.

I suspect that a truly place-based and community orientated education could improve the situation- an education that draws on, without remaining in, the sphere of localised knowledge and interests. At the Geographical Association we are envisioning a future where teams of ‘young community geographers’ will work with planners, shopkeepers and those in the cultural sector on a number of place-orientated projects.

Such a geography would act to enhance the capabilities of disadvantaged young people, their range of opportunities for engaging, doing and being. It would enable them to take part in conversations from which they are presently excluded, and give them the opportunity to re-think their existing notions of home, identity and belonging. This is the turning that a meaningful education can provide. It is to turn away from the everyday ways we look at and experience place, home and ourselves and to look at them askance, and to ask questions about them. It is real geography - writing and rewriting the world as we walk over it, touch it, smell it, delight in it and fear in it.

We cannot, and moreover, should not expect the study of geography to cure all of society’s ills, nor to magically resolve bigotry and extremism. But there is a place for geography. It can light our way, by challenging what we think of as home and in turn begin to transform our landscapes of neglect into landscapes of hope.