Third Field Hybridity?

I’ve just returned from AERA 2012 Vancouver with a mind full of ideas and thoughts that will take several lifetimes to untangle. However 2 things I have learnt.

Firstly having gone to AERA quite a few times I have always been frustrated about missing out on some key papers and once again with thousands of excellent papers this year I decided upon a different strategy. This year I let the papers come to me! I stayed on the same floor of the Vancouver West Convention Centre for most of the week and listened to as many Division K Teacher Education papers that I could. 

The second thing that I have learnt is that there is a global paradigm shift taking place in Teacher Education and there is no stopping it! In an age of hyper connectivity – news travels fast and whether it is good practice or bad practice it still travels and like any virus – how you deal with it is what counts.

Trying to summarise what was said is not so straightforward – but I have titled this post as Third Field Hybridity as may way of capturing both the direction of travel and my way conceiving of the likely changes ahead. Ultimately it would seem a theory and practice divide is caricatured as a binary unable to be bridged. This is of course nonsense! In fact the lack of bridging was often as a result of  policy makers failing to recognise how theory and practice are interlinked.

However new spaces are offering new fields of contested spaces (Third Field) where practice and practitioner and theory and theorist meet to identify the common ground – where practice takes place and theory also takes place. In many ways theory in the ‘Third Field’ will thrive and practice will be enhanced. So I view the virus in a positive way – but there is a lot of thinking still needed. However I have  put my notes from AERA into a ‘wordle’ to try and make sense of what I was thinking and although it may not make much sense to others it does make some to me!

Premature babies offer new challenges.

I read something fascinating the other day which really has got me thinking. It was about the increased survival rates of premature babies that have increased dramatically with advances in science and medicine. As such there are two parts to this.

Firstly is the extended syndrome of summer born child. I have always had an interest in this anyway as being a boy (of course – but the conisderable disadvantage in being a boy in learning terms), a twin, a summer born child (Mid August) and having been born slightly premature. The point with this is that cognitively and physically I was approximately 13 months younger than the oldest pupil when I started school – which is almost 25% behind at age 4 or 5. Given if the oldest pupil had been a girl, then given girls early  and stronger development in terms of language and social skills then you can begin to see how this can have a detrimental impact on  some. However  much of this is well documented.

So secondly going back to the point of babies surviving who previously wouldn’t then it is not inconceivable to have a child who is 15 or 16 months  months physically and cognitively behind some of their peers in the same school year. Add in gender  and class and the disadvantages get greater and greater.  Malcolm Gladwell has documented the effects upon both sport and academic success in being the oldest in the school year and it seems Basketball, American Football and Football all have have a concentration of those that were amongst  the oldest in their year. Clearly there are exceptions but a pattern is clearly there.

However the really interesting part (for me) is that the last two months of a brains development in the womb are pretty important and whilst we have significantly  improved the physical medical advances for premature babies the cognitive advances may not be as advanced. As such we now have around 80,000 children a year who miraculously are surviving but  who may have prefrontal regions of the brain (which are essential  for numerous  functions, including attention, planning and social functioning)  and other parts which are underdeveloped. There  are always exceptions to this but increasingly there is an interest in the link between premature babies and special educational needs particularly forms of autism.

As part of this many teachers will be teaching children who may have underdeveloped pre frontal regions of the brain who behave and learn differently,  whose brains are ‘wired in a different way’ and who may present challenges to how they teach. Such challenges need to be acknowledged through better training and awareness for teachers and increased understanding of the needs of such children. There is also a further interesting dimension to this for parents and their needs who may have already been through the trauma of a premature birth but also potentially have to deal with some of the neglect and disadvantage built into the education system!

The wisdom or stupidness of crowds?

I have been thinking about crowds recently not least because of the London riots, wall street and St Paul’s protests, Hillsborough enquiry, stock markets falls, the capture of Gaddafi and the Life of Brian (how shall we go away master).
The reality is we all belong to crowds, sometimes deliberately we join a crowd, sometimes involuntarily, sometimes we are assigned to a crowd and so on. What I am most interested in is the decision making of the crowd and how decision making in the crowd is informed (sun some of the links to fun theory elsewhere in this blog). For example the discussions that surrounded the London riots were that social media were to blame, however the decision to share, read and act or not act is the critical point. At what point do you become embedded in the crowd so that your own decision making is distorted?
One perspective on this derives from the wisdom of the crowd theory which rationalises that the collective wisdom of a group is greater than the individuals within it? This theory seems to work on some law of averages and clearly has some merit. However two issues that I am interested in are both hierarchical nature of crowd decision making and the ‘mob mentality’ of the crowd. In particular I am interested in the weightings of individual decisions within a crowd and the extent of influence. So a crowd led by a leaders is one thing but a crowd where individual decisions are much more equitable is another matter. Therefore within the latter scenario individual decisions are aggregated to form a collective which would seem to make it almost impossible to anticipate the decision making of any crowd.
What is fascinating with new social networks and new technologies is that collective wisdom of the crowd becomes matched by the stupidness of the crowd. For instance if you now wish to buy a DVD, book a hotel, download a song, buy a book you become part of the collective and immediately have subtle influence on the next person making a similar decision to you. So going against the collective wisdom of the crowd to make a decision against their collective wisdom requires significant willpower and perhaps a form of stupidity? This is where we look for others to counterbalance our decision making against the crowd – perhaps in the form of celebrity endorsement, an anti group or a faction. In doing so we become part of another crowd through our alignment with a different set of values.
In his book – Everything is Obvious’ – Watts asks is the Mona Lisa really the best picture, Harry Potter the best book and so on. The answer is they are the best fit in being what they are whilst their popularity is the result of complex, subtle influence within crowd decision making. If only we could find what that is!

Over medicated and under educated on the right side of the brain

How much of a child’s education should be considered creative? In England recent talk of the  English Baccalaureat would suggest not much. Whilst the subjects within the EBacc can be and sometimes are creative  - they are not your usual creative subjects (I know there will be disagreements with this). So the government would probably be indicating that about 20% should be given over to creative activities – perhaps one or two ‘ creative subjects’? Traditionalists may already be thinking that 20% is too generous and perhaps we could squeeze in a little more on the recall of facts, facts, facts.

But why the opposition to creative education – why isn’t there a massive call for more creative education and a reversal of the ratio with 80% creative education?

Well one reason is fear of the unknown – reproduction of existing privileged knowledge is much easier to conceptualise, manage, measure and be accountable for. If you want to measure and manage something then for goodness sake make sure it measurable and manageable – which is exactly what the EBacc is.

The problem with creativity is it is ill disciplined, difficult to manage, difficult to measure and difficult to conceptualise – particularly if you are not particularly creative. Creativity requires a leap of faith, it has to be risky and the returns from it can be  low as well as high. So  an education minster who stakes his reputation on Pisa and performance has to be back to basics even if that means an impoverished experience. And this is the same message that is translated through every school – why take a risk in providing a broad educational experience when a ‘schooling culture’ mitigates risk even if it is benign.

So as someone who believes in creative education I understand the reasons but don’t accept them as legitimate.  Oliver Sacks talks about using music and the arts ( http://bcove.me/5yae5611 ) transforming lives and the medicating of notionally hyperactive children. In an education system (not a schooling system) that valued diversity, creativity, risk and uncertainty – would they still need to prescribe medication and exclude so many children?

Finally I mentioned in an earlier post that Churchill was asked to cut Arts funding during the war effort to which he replied : “Then what are we fighting for?” The same has to be said about education  - if you cut creativity out of the curriculum – what are we educating for?

Wordle of Blog…

I just did a Wordle of my blog and this is what came out – pretty accurate representation I think….

Fun to change driving behaviour

Direction of travel?

I am currently at American Education Research Association (AERA) 2011 – this year being held in New Orleans (I am told it is pronounced ‘norlEans’). As always with any conference it is often through listening to other presentations that helps you crystalise your own thinking.

So what have I been thinking?

It would seem that England’s education system is not alone in going through a period of radical (although mostly reckless (see below)) change. The financial crisis was a global one  and may countries have decided they cannot afford to invest in education in the way they have in the past. This is particularly true of the USA and England. However the financial crisis appears to have legitimised wholesale change at a time of significant political change.

The response in England has been to suggest a movement away from a highly prescribed and technicised view of teaching and the curriculum towards a conservative (small c), traditional knowledge orientated curriculum. The issue with this is that the change does not support the need and whilst a relaxing of the curriculum and instruction may be apparent the direction of travel is towards established principles rather than engaging with new directions.   As a consequence we have direction without purpose or at least without justified purpose. So my thinking on leaving ‘The Big Easy’ is that I haven’t heard much to suggest that the new directions are correct – quite the opposite – but movement in the system may however be a positive one if those in education can identify new ways of thinking within the new frameworks now being created. So whilst it may appear that we are being told where we are are going it is up to us to define how we get there.