3 years in the making...

I have finally published a selection of essays written during my study (between 2011-14), including the all important dissertation in which I investigated school councils and the notion of democracy in education.

You can view them and/or download them from my Academia.edu site - enjoy!

Oh, and I graduated in January 2015 with a distinction - I can be seen below enjoying a pre-graduation coffee (it was a cold, cold day!). Cheers!!

On theory and language

Oh dear, a little shamefully, I admit it - some time has passed since the last post. I've been conducting research for my final piece of MEd work - *the* dissertation. On searching for some guidance on interpreting exploratory interviews, I came across the following:

"To reduce all to the signifiers and signifieds of a language is thus to enter a lifeless realm. But only by entering this lifeless realm can individuals meet in communion, think about themselves and their worlds, create knowledge, develop tools and transform the material world about to meet their hopes of fulfilment, their hopes, if any, of reconciliation, community, freedom to live, act and build creatively. Language is both the condition for entrapment and emancipation."

(Schostak, J.F., 2006. Interviewing and Representation in Qualitative Research Projects, Conducting Educational Research. Open University Press, Maidenhead, England; New York. P. 162.)

Pointers for contemplation on: Theory vs practice, the academic pursuit, research motivation, and of course, learning.

Paulo Freire - His last interview

A way forward?

"the objective of ideological struggle is not to reject the system and all its elements but to rearticulate it, to break it down to its basic elements and then to sift through past conceptions to see which ones, with some changes of content, can serve to express the new situation."
(Gramsci interpreted by Mouffe, 1979, 192)

Reference:
Mouffe, C. (1979). (Ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge.

A slice of philosophy

In the absence of posts, have been reading around issues of leadership in education for my new module. Have also finally ventured into my Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education, from which I bring you this snippet of wisdom, which seems obvious until you really think about how we form opinions about the world around us:

"to see something in one way – to reveal it in a certain way on a particular occasion – is always at the expense of other ways of revealing it. There are always sides of the thing to which we will not be attending or are out of view."

Perhaps it also explains my constant inability to make decisions....

Reference:
Bonnett, M. and Cuypers, S. (2007) Autonomy and Authenticity in Education, in 'The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education' (eds N. Blake, P. Smeyers, R. Smith and P. Standish), Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK.

Democracy and education

Democracy. A word often banded around in describing a system to aspire to, that other nations should strive for. But when it comes to organizing education reform, Michael Gove is discarding the accountable, democratic approach of statute law for privately negotiated contract law, as observes Graham Clayton in this article from the guardian. 


If democracy is a system we all appreciate and wish to pass onto our future generations, what kind of message is this sending? This would probably not be the first example of the current government preaching one thing and practicing another.

In the meantime, I'm continuing my studies into the presence of democracy in schools today. An inspiring example comes from the Swedish Preschool Curriculum, which can be downloaded in full from the Ministry for Education website.  

Why is this all important? More on that soon.

For now, I'll leave you with John Dewey:

"Democracy cannot flourish where the chief influences in selecting subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived for the masses, and, for the higher education of the few, the traditions of a specialized cultivated class."
(Dewey, J. (2004) Democracy and Education.  New York: Dover Publications: Page 8)

Oh, and I can't get this song out of my head today. 

I like this quote.

"Childhood shows the man, As morning shows the day."

John Milton (1671) Paradise Regained, Book 1, Line 220.