Subjects and tradition

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

Education: a journey into the unknown?

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

Bringing geography home

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

Justifying geography

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.

A traditional fallacy

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).

Academies and curricular freedoms

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).

Do subjects still matter?

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)