Tag: debate

The Antithesis of Mercy

I have been relatively silent amidst the turmoil that has arisen out of the collective deep-breath forced upon us by the pandemic. Where I initially saw hope for change, it was quickly cancelled by an onslaught of rhetoric on both sides of the aisle that left no room for mercy, compassion and tolerance.

Race, gender, religion, wealth: All topics fraught with difficulty at the best of times and I have struggled to fully form the words I would use to express how I feel about any of these issues in the current climate. However, Nick Cave has come to my rescue responding to questions about ‘mercy’ and ‘cancel culture‘ on his blog…

Mercy is a value that should be at the heart of any functioning and tolerant society. Mercy ultimately acknowledges that we are all imperfect and in doing so allows us the oxygen to breathe — to feel protected within a society, through our mutual fallibility. Without mercy a society loses its soul, and devours itself…

As far as I can see, cancel culture is mercy’s antithesis. Political correctness has grown to become the unhappiest religion in the world. Its once honourable attempt to reimagine our society in a more equitable way now embodies all the worst aspects that religion has to offer (and none of the beauty) — moral certainty and self-righteousness shorn even of the capacity for redemption. It has become quite literally, bad religion run amuck.

And there it is…

We cannot and should not deny our history, nor should we try to remove it as if it never happened. If society is to be equal, we must work openly to build a wider more honest narrative about our histories – good or bad. We must ensure that education provides the opportunity for people of all cultures and backgrounds to learn and debate ideas free from persecution.

But if we seek to simply cancel out the pieces of our past that we are angry about or not proud of, we will replace one biased view of the world with another. You can only redeem yourself when you are able to acknowledge your mistakes. As humans, we are more likely to do that, in a society that is open and merciful.

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N.B. None of this is to say that I don’t appreciate the deeply held anger felt by so many people due to the way their gender, race, religion, sexual preference, et al, has been and continues to be treated. The struggle is real. However, we must strive to be better than those who came before us and not allow our baser instincts to drive our actions and decisions as we seek to make society a more fair and equal place for generations to come.

Independence & Community (The Purpose of Education)

purposed-badgeSince contributing to the original #500words campaign, my thoughts about the purpose of education have become less cogent. I still want to “bust a hole in the wall”; wishing to place learner independence and preparedness for life long learning at the heart of the debate. However, as I have continued teaching, researching, discussing, debating, I have found that my advocacy for student centred learning is paralleled by a growing belief that schools should be placed at the centre of the community. At times it feels as if these ideas should contradict each other, but I believe that they actually compliment each other. Here, I offer a list of connected (and disconnected) assertions, ideas and questions that are currently resonating with me. I hope that in sharing them, I can begin to form a more coherent thesis.

  • Learning needs to be student centred. Education should offer choice and provide opportunity, not limit it.
  • Schools need to offer a personalised curriculum. One that is adaptive, malleable… designed by learners themselves.
  • There should be parity between subjects. But, should learning be structured in subjects?
  • All learning needs to be encouraged – gaming, exploration, trial & error (when did we decide that getting things wrong was no longer part of learning?). Moreover, I’m concerned that the school system appears to be geared up to remove play, creativity and individuality as learners get older.
  • Schools should be able to acknowledge and accredit all learning (formal and informal). Badges?
  • We need to better prepare young people for the models of learning they will be engaged in after school. This means encouraging learner autonomy as well as co-dependence. The era of ‘sage on the stage’ is dead. It’s time to establish ‘guide on the side’ in all classrooms.
  • We need to stop labelling students; and we need to stop allowing them to label themselves. A learners ability is not genetic; it is not pre-determined by us or anyone else.
  • Education is not about grades or league tables. They are a meaningless, extrinsic motivator; and are detrimental to fostering effective learning.
  • Learning is not linear. Learning is messy!
  • School is not a bubble. Boundaries between learners and the real world need to be removed
  • Libraries should be at the heart of schools and their respective communities. Libraries should be like this one. And in the 21st century, they are about much more than books.
  • Schools need to recognise that Online is ‘now’ NOT the future. Technology should be seamlessly integrated in to the learning experience. There needs to be overlap between physical and virtual spaces – opening up further opportunities for a personalised curriculum.
  • Education needs to be wrestled out of the hands of governments. Communities need to take ownership of learning… freeing education of the fads and whims of politicians. Learning needs to be open/democratised.
  • Schools should be charged by their communities to provide education that is relevant and creative.

This post is my contribution to #500words – Take 2; the latest Purpos/ed campaign, asking the question: What is the purpose of education. Check out purposed.org.uk to see how you can join the debate.

Clarifying where I stand on ‘Kony 2012’

I have posted and tweeted a lot about ‘Kony 2012’ today and felt that it would be pertinent to provide an overview of where I stand.

I am neither for or against ‘Kony 2012’. I am however, fascinated by the way the video has gone viral, turning into a living, breathing ‘Internet Meme’. I am currently teaching a unit in Postmodern Media to my A2 Media students; the video and evolving debate provides an excellent case study.

In discussing this with my students, I wanted to encourage them to approach the video with the same criticality that we apply regularly to media texts. From the outset it was clear that many of them were already doing that. I wanted to remind them that before they buy into something, it is important to verse themselves in the facts and as many opposing perspectives as possible. Then they can make ‘informed’ choices.

I am in no doubt that Joseph Kony is a bad person.

I am in no doubt that ‘Invisible Children’s’ intentions are sincere.

I do have some concerns about them though, most significantly how they use the money that is donated. And I am skeptical of the video they have produced. As a media artefact it is an excellent lesson in framing, editing and mediation; having been exceptionally well constructed. It is easy to see why so many people have been moved by it.

Ultimately, I think that ‘Kony 2012’ is an important reminder of the changed world we are living in. Social Networks and New Media Technologies are having a huge impact on society. As such, digital literacy (IMO) should be an integral part of the school curriculum.

Learning Taxonomies: Why ‘creating’ is a cognitive skill

This post is a response to Doug Belshaw’s post: Learning Taxonomies: Why ‘creating’ is not a cognitive skill.

While I do agree that ‘creating’ does not belong above evaluation and that there is room for some revsion of Bloom’s Taxonomy, I do believe that ‘creating’ is a cognitive skill. In fact, I believe that it should be an integral part of all learning taxonomies; that you can’t be fully literate until you have created something.

You can’t create something without some prior knowledge. It is from this knowledge that you can make decisions and by it’s very nature ‘decision making’ is a cognitive skill. Moreover, all creation is a result of our experiences. Arguably, there is no originality in creation any way (Strinati, 1997). When we create we make both conscious decisions and unconscious decisions, based on our learned experiences.

To take Doug’s son creating his first piece of art as an example: Yes he can paint a picture without having learned to analyse, synthesise (consciously) or evaluate. However, his behaviour is not ‘original’, it is learned and is born out of memory, therefore he is replicating learned behaviour. The way he holds the brush, the choice of colours and so on, all represent decisions, some more conscious than others, but decisions none the less and therefore show a cognitive process in action.

I think that the SOLO Taxonomy that Doug referenced actually comes close to acknowledging ‘creating’ in its more rightful place. In this taxonomy the phrase ‘Do simple procedures’ is used right near the beginning and I would argue that ‘simple procedures’ can be interpreted as ‘creating’. If I were to adapt Bloom’s Taxonomy to incorporate creation, I would suggest something like this.

As you can see I also partly agree with Doug about the placement of Synthesis being wrong although I would see it as equal to evaluation. As cognitive processes the two directly effect each other. Your ability to synthesise something is often based on your judgement but your judgement can be altered as you synthesise something.

My initial involvement in this debate arose after Doug tweeted this:


Rather than this one that started the debate in the first place:

I include this as I think that it reveals a key feature of my thinking in this debate. I don’t believe that Media Literacy is neither ‘passive’ nor is it ‘consumption driven’. To be ‘Media-literate’ you need to have created your own Media.

I have had many conversations in my time with colleagues about the merits and drawbacks of coursework in the Media Studies syllabus. I always come back to this: Can students truly understand the Media if they don’t create it for themselves? They already do in their daily lives but I want them to create texts more critically. I want them to unpack that process of creation. This undoubtedly improves their skills of analysis and their ability to evaluate.

After all, you wouldn’t teach Maths by having students read the sums and then the answers; you make them work through the problems, learning how to solve them for themselves. You wouldn’t teach students to play football by doing nothing more than watching Manchester United on the TV. Without the doing (the ‘creating’) the learning is meaningless.

So perhaps Blooms should look  more like this with creation featuring alongside every stage of the taxonomy, after knowledge. As ‘creating’ as a cognitive skills is imperative on the path to becoming literate.

My thesis: You can’t be literate if you have never created. To be fully literate you need to create throughout your learning journey, only then will you be able to make meaningful judgements based upon fully informed analysis. Creation can help you piece it all together, what’s more cognitive than that?

Busting a hole in the wall (the purpose of education)

purposed-badgeWhen Sugata Mitra put a computer inside a hole in the wall of the NIIT building in New Delhi, he took the first step in proving beyond a shadow of a doubt, that education was a universal connector craved by people the world over; and that the traditional notion of classroom education was by no means the only way to do it. Now, more than ten years on from the beginning of the HITW experiment, the lessons remain unheeded by many of the people involved in mainstream education. In fact, concepts such as ‘self-directed learning’ and ‘the student voice’ are still scoffed at as Dawn Hallybone was reminded this past week, attending a debate on the National Curriculum review.

Are there still that many people connected to education that truly believe, we, the adults know what’s best for the next generation and the one after that? Nick Dennis spoke of the need for us to focus on principles in this debate and at first I disagreed, as principles like ‘purposes’ are rarely universally shared. However, I now see where he was going, and while I appreciated Doug’s question about whose “better” was Nick referring to, I think Nick’s conviction was what was most important. He asked the big questions about what we want education to be and what we are doing for each other as a community, not as definable roles but as human beings.

It is make or break time for humanity and we have a responsibility to draw a line in the sand, admit our mistakes and create a system of education that can begin to undo the harm that we have done to the world. For all the talk over the last twenty years of the ‘global village’, it has not stopped us continuing to destroy our planet, to wage wars and to continue to ignore the inequalities in society. What is the purpose of education? Surely, it is to create unity by helping future generation to recognise the values that humanity share.

Fred Garnett grapsed this when he argued that new (social) media can foster “collaborative, discursive learning, the kind of learning that creates a healthy, open and participative society.” Is this the extension of Mitra’s experiment? Is social media the natural evolution bringing learners to the stream rather than the well? Some of us embrace change, recognising the merits of experimentation and creativity; others fear it, seeing new as dangerous. I’m not suggesting that we should plunge head first into wildly unstructured models of learning but if it were not for people who dared to be creative, who dared to experiment, we would not be able to stare into the vast ocean that is our solar system, or be able to listen to Mozart on a device, so small, it can fit into the palms of our hands.

When Mitra began his experiment he was giving education back to the people and his observations of the children showed happy, creative, collaborative learnings, the sort of learning Tom Barrett hopes his son will continue to experience. I’d intended to say that education is about more than opening doors; it’s about what you do once the door is open. Now I’m asking who needs doors? Why not work together and bust a hole in the wall instead?