Education is about healing and wholeness. It is about empowerment, liberation, transcendence, about renewing the vitality of life. It is about finding and claiming ourselves and our place in the world “
Parker Palmer via bell hooks
Time is squeezed, parts of me are divided into fractions. Working as a Stage Lead, being a mum of a young child and also trying to make space for my own artistic practice. There isn’t enough to go around and when you add them up they don’t make a whole.
An educational dimension has been very much part of the work I do for the past 20 years, although only more recently in a HE setting. But it’s been a while since I thought about the question posed at our opening workshop, ‘Why are we teaching?’
As I begin my PGCert course, my daughter also begins her journey into the UK school system, having started at Reception this September. We run in parallel. I would like to reflect on the idea of ‘learning and teaching in the everyday’ as a parent as well as in my professional capacity, and explore my own beliefs about the social purpose of education.
I was struck by the exercise we did on the first day, collectively mapping a timeline of milestones in British Education; the visual zoom out highlighting how policies are shaped by political, technological changes, world events, and in turn how this has impacted the everyday processes we encounter as teachers in 2024.
It made me think of Jeremy Deller’s A History Of The World 1997 – 2004, which visually maps the social, political and musical connections between acid house and brass band music. I wonder if there is a way to draw on my personal experience in the education system as both a teacher and a learner, to build my own cultural map?
How have my own formative experiences in education shaped my creative trajectory, and how have these been defined by the educational agendas of the time?
At my first tutorial, Tim suggested an auto-ethnographic approach which really resonated with me. I would like to infuse my learnings and readings with slices of my everyday life, memories, pop cultural references and observations. And to see where the research takes me, what new images and ideas it generates. Instagram has come to feel like a performative space rather than the expressive, connecting, spontaneous space it used to be.
I wonder what kind of collection of Class Pictures I can build? I am hoping this course and blog space will be a way to help me integrate my multiple roles, and find the will to learn and teach running through it all.
…..
Does this fit the brief? Yesterday I told one of my students; don’t make work you’re not into to fit the brief. Make the brief work for you, use it to enable you to make the work you want to make. (Was I giving helpful advice or was I projecting?)
I am discovering, drawing in from the outside, and making that which is drawn in a real part of me”
Freedom to Learn, Carl Rogers
Bibliography
Hooks, B. (2003). Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. Routledge.
Rogers, C. R., & Freiberg, H. J. (1994). Freedom to learn (3rd ed.). Merrill/Macmillan College Publishing Co.