Saturday, April 29, 2017

Education From Brexit to Trump ... Corbyn and Beyond?



EDUCATION FROM BREXIT TO TRUMP … CORBYN AND BEYOND?

Marxism and Education: Renewing Dialogues (MERD – 19) Seminar

This coming Wednesday 3rd May 2017
10am-4pm
University of East London
Stratford Campus
Cass School of Education
Room ED4.02

At this 19th MERD seminar on Wednesday, we will review the emergent contemporary crises of capitalism. In this context, we will focus on education and educating across the social spectrum of institutional and wider social formation to progress class struggle, critique and action. Our four speakers have provided the following blurbs about their presentations:


Tony Green (UCL Institute of Education)

Educating the Educators and the Emergent Secular Crises of Contemporary Capitalism: From Brexit to Trump and Corbyn … to Snap Election … and Beyond?

The introduction aims to draw attention to a collection of issues and themes likely to occupy us during the day.  The broad and open-ended agenda is intended to be suggestive of potentially ‘educative’ contexts about how exchange values dominate use values, and where systemic shifting of value and power upwards in support of structures of global oligarchy and plutocratic elite class hegemony, is concurrent with ongoing secular crises of capitalism.   Is the apparent ever-rising tide of ‘prosperity’ contributing to human emancipation and flourishing?  We need to address the global capitalist system, and metabolism in its, tensions and contradictions, with complex and dynamic ramifications at local, regional, national and international levels.  The aim of these introductory remarks is to remind ourselves of current events and possible underlying dynamics that set analytic, strategic and tactical challenges... not least, the performative ... during these ever-interesting times. Huge and urgent questions have to be addressed in specific and local contexts: Are all the cards being thrown into the air?  Are there inbuilt legitimation crises playing out across the institutional forms of politics? What are the prospects for the anthropocene? Time to act ... now! What is to be done...?



Hillary Wainwright (Red Pepper Magazine Editor)
The importance of practical knowledge to the possibility of a new politics from the left

I'll draw on themes associated with socialist humanist work of Gramsci, Williams and, Thompson, and against a background of recognising that evocations of the organised working class were thwarted too many times, including by leaderships that did not actually believe in the capacity of the supporters, to convince me. Radical social change is surely more than workplace organisation, radical leadership and a conventional political party of the left.  



Terry Wrigley (Visiting Professor at Northumbria University, editor International Journal Improving Schools, and co-coordinator of the Reclaiming Schools network)

England is an epicentre and laboratory for neoliberal education policy in advanced economies, with a unique mix of neoconservative ingredients. It has the tightest accountability framework (tests, league tables, Ofsted, performance pay etc.), extensive privatisation, a curriculum which systematically excludes critical social knowledge, and hegemonic discourses around 'choice', 'standards', 'leadership' and 'social mobility'. 
For critical educators, the pressing challenges include:
·         Making critical theory and research knowledge available to a teaching profession increasingly restricted to short-term pragmatics;
·         Rethinking curriculum, assessment and pedagogy beyond binaries of 'academic / vocational' and 'knowledge / practice';
·         Protecting spaces for critical understanding and creativity; 
·         Critiquing the distortions of 'social mobility' and 'closing the gap' in socially just ways;
·         Finding educative responses to the social futures facing young people (Austerity, precarity, migration, militarism). 


Richard Hall (De Montfort University)
On the alienation of academic labour and the possibilities for mass intellectuality
As one response to the secular crisis of capitalism, higher education is being proletarianised. Its academics and students, encumbered by precarious employment, overwhelming debt, and new levels of performance management, are shorn of any autonomy. Increasingly the labour of those academics and students is subsumed and re-engineered for value production, and is prey to the vicissitudes of the twin processes of financialisation and marketization. At the core of understanding the impact of these processes and their relationships to higher education is the alienated labour of the academic, as it defines the sociability of the University. This paper examines the role of alienated labour in academic work, and relates this to feelings of hopelessness, in order to ask what might be done differently. The argument centres on the role of mass intellectuality, or socially-useful knowledge and knowing, as a potential moment for overcoming alienated labour.

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Organised by Tony Green and Alpesh Maisuria

The seminar is free and open to all, no registration required. Please circulate widely and feel free to attend as much of the day as you possibly can.

Stratford campus is walkable from the nearest stations: Stratford (TfL line) / Stratford International, and Maryland (TfL line).
More travel information can be found here: https://www.uel.ac.uk/About/Finding-us

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Posted here by Glenn Rikowski
Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski 
Ruth Rikowski @ Academia: http://lsbu.academia.edu/RuthRikowski


The 4th International Conference on Critical Pedagogies and Philosophies of Education



THE 4th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES AND PHILOSOPHIES OF EDUCATION
27th - 28th July 2017
University of Winchester, UK 

Conveners: Dr Alex Guilherme (PUCRS, Brazil) and Dr Emile Bojesen (Winchester, UK)


Keynote Speakers:
Professor Ruth Irwin, University of Aberdeen.
Professor Marc Depaepe, University of Leuven.
Professor Aislinn O’Donnell, University of Maynooth.
Professor John Petrovic, University of Alabama.

Building on the successes of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd International Conferences on Critical Pedagogies and Philosophies of Education, this conference will bring together international scholars in philosophy of education to consider the significance of critical pedagogy and philosophy of education to international contemporary debates across educational theory and practice.

We welcome proposals for 20 minutes papers (plus 10 minutes discussion) on any aspect of critical pedagogies and philosophies of education from any discipline, including, Philosophy, Ethics, Educational Studies, Cultural Studies, Social Theory, Theology, Sociology and History.

The deadline for receiving abstracts is 27th May 2017
Please send proposals for individual papers (250 words) and a short CV to Alexandre Guilherme
(alexandre.guilherme@pucrs.br)

Costs:
£150 conference fee without accommodation.
£270 conference fee with two nights of on-campus accommodation.

To book your place, copy the link below:
http://store.winchester.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/academic-conferences/faculty-of-education-healthsocial-care/the-4th-international-conference-on-critical-pedagogies-and-philosophies-of-education

Enquiries:
emile.bojesen@winchester.ac.uk
Poster available here – or here: https://gallery.mailchimp.com/884bd4ab8bd9964e2855c7409/files/71949ca4-3ef5-4a1b-b3fd-81d9a3d8fe59/4th_International_Conference_poster.01.pdf

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski
Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski 


Monday, April 3, 2017

Autogenous Theories of Education Crisis


New College, Oxford

AUTOGENOUS THEORIES OF EDUCATION CRISIS

A paper prepared for the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB) Annual Conference, New College, Oxford, 31st March – 2nd April, 2017

Glenn Rikowski, Visiting Fellow, College of Social Science, University of Lincoln, UK
Abstract: ‘Crisis’ is a concept increasingly used in media reports on education. This paper argues that philosophers of education have a unique contribution to make regarding the nature and constitution of education crisis. Thus, they have a responsibility to take up the challenge of developing perspectives on education crises. Following examinations of the concept of crisis and The Marxist-oriented Classical Theory of Education Crisis (where education crises are derivative of economic ones), the paper forges an autogenous theory of education crisis through Robin Barrow’s (2011) prĂ©cis of R.S. Peters’s concept of education. Some education crises are crises of education; not necessarily crises in education with origins elsewhere in society. For these forms of crisis, the concept of education itself should be the starting point for analysis. The paper opens up a new field of enquiry for educational philosophers by indicating how education crises can emerge from within education institutions and settings.


Glenn Rikowski at ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski at Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski