In May I worked on a seminar as part of the Transactions work bringing together different perspectives on Learning Lives. We are now trying to develop this into Book proposal. Click here for a more detailed account of the the event.

This is the name of the 4 year research proposal I am working on as part of my work with the Transaction research group at the University of Oslo. We have just heard that we have received 4 year funding from the Research Council of Norway. More here as it unfolds

I have completed two pieces of work for Beyond Current Horizons. managed by Futurelabthis is a DCSF programme trying to imagine the future of Education through a series of research-based activities.

The first essay is located within the theme of Markets. It explores the relationship between the IT industries and the education system with a view to understanding how the mix of private sector interests and public provision might influence one another in the future. It considers the issues involved in looking at the role of markets in education and theorises the relationships of IT industries between and across education sectors. It draws the shape and structure of the IT marketplace in education looking at current trends. It then examines market drivers and looks at the implied teacher/lecturer; models of technological control versus aspirations for technological transformation; issues of supply and demand and tensions created by the relationship of capital versus revenue funding considering questions of market failure, key policy drivers and some of the issues relating to the differences between the development of open source and commercial growth. The final section explores questions for policy offering levers for change. These include evaluations of and responses to change models, the meaning of our interest in private and public relationships as a binary opposition, the role of the techno-elite and questions of market growth, failure, saturation and normalisation. A concluding section lays out possible directions for future scenarios focusing on the tensions between diversification and integration in the marketplace and an understanding of how this model impacts upon change within the education system.

The second essay is located under the theme heading “Creativity, Culture and Education. It considers the role of context and site in common understandings of learning in general and describes models of learning that exist as complement, supplement or remediation with ‚Äòstandard‚Äô versions of schooling especially those invoked by the idea of informal learning. It then looks at the ‚Äògeo-social‚Äô relationships of learners, homes, communities, non-formal learning spaces, regions, schools, nations and the globalised economy trying to tease out what may or may not change in future scenarios to offer different kinds of learning processes, experiences and activities in all of these domains. The essay concludes by reflecting theoretically on how our dominant paradigm of learning -socio-cultural frames – both constitutes and is constituted by the idea of space, contexts, and sites.

I spoke last week at an event run by Some Other Way Forward which is a network of Arts Organisations based on the South Bank in London. The event brought together Schools in the local borough of Lambeth and Southwark to develop ways of continuing to work together in the face of possible cuts to the Arts/Education interface.

I am just off to the University of Oslo for a seminar with the research group Transaction. The programme aims develop common insights into learning across different social sites and brings together a diverse range of research interests.

Creative Partnerships have just published a booklet I edited about creative learning. The booklet takes the idea of creative learning at face value. Although the term is perhaps not widely used, perhaps like the idea of creativity itself, it is a kind of common-sense summing up an aspiration if not a precise scientific understanding. Whilst the essays interrogate the idea of creative learning seriously, the authors also acknowledge a necessary looseness to the term. My contribution tries to bring together three traditions:first, are the distinct and conjoined traditions of learning within discrete Art forms (Drama and Visual arts mainly) and how such separate traditions have become entwined in a more general notion of Arts education; secondly, is the current attention to the presentation of the self in schools and how creative learning supports the making of a different kind of students; and thirdly are those psychological traditions which focus on developing the mind.

Earlier this month I spoke at The Media Education Summit 2008 . reflecting more on the wider role of Media Studies as a subject/discipline and its ‘effect’ on developing particular kinds of subjectivity. The talk first looks at early Media Studies as the product of an activist teacher-workforce racially exploring questions of contest and pedagogy. This approach received formal (if contradictory) mandate by societies concerned with the effects of mass media and I also looked at current attempts to define media literacy as a form of self-regulation in concert with the current educational-isation of media culture. Finally the talk will consider the paradox of how media studies works along with other creative industries subjects to produce forms of precarious labour -the defining feature of the creative workforce. Final directions reflect of the politics of this ‘incorporation’.

At the turn of this year I wrote an essay commissioned by the London Development Agency exploring how the Non-Formal Learning Sector (NFLS) (what used to be called community arts), has played a particular role in the ecology of educational provision across London. The essay tries to situate the work of the NFLS in relationship to changes in further and higher education as well as in respect of training and vocational education in the creative industries. The NFLS has also played a lead role in social inclusion policies.

The full paper is attached here.What Future for the Non-Formal Learning Sector?

At the end of May 2008 I will be participating in an international seminar on Cultural Studies and Education at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

My paper is based on experiences and research at virtually all levels of the English education system and argues that we can observe the ‘impact’ of Cultural Studies on the forms and practices of Education as a system and as institutions as well as at the more micro-levels of individual learning and even theories of learning itself. These ‘impacts’ are analysed along 3 dimensions.: the institutionalisation and/or incorporation of school subjects (like Media Studies); the way Cultural Studies has been used to frame an offer of schooling to resistant and disengaged youth; and the ways in which practical and informal forms of pedagogy have supported identity-based theories of learning. I use use examples of each type of impact to explore each level of effect

My interest is in reflecting on how transformative these impacts have been. Do they pose lasting types of change or have they been incorporated by the status quo given the imperviousness of schooling to successive waves of educational reform? How have the more radical kinds of critique contained in Cultural Studies methods, thinking and approaches been absorbed at the different levels of the education system and at what cost and to whom?

The final section of the paper considers practical and theoretical prospects for future versions of Cultural Studies and Education. I end by considering whether the destiny of Cultural Studies is to repeat its marginalised academic status as critique or ‘system-irritant’ or whether we can could envisage a theoretical way of scaling up and mainstreaming how Cultural Studies works.

Last month (February 2008) I talked at the Scottish Cultural Summit in Edinburgh. I talked about how it might be useful to question current uses of the idea of participation in the Arts. I also ran a workshop reviewing the impact of Creative Partnerships. I used the opportunity of being in Edinburgh to try to develop an initiative comparing creative education initiatives across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales looking at how such ideas have been imagined and implemented at policy level and in practice. Hopefully more on this soon.