Title of talk:

Confessions of an FE Lecturer: what happened to the community? From Further Education to Factory

Bullet points of what you would like to talk about:

• The ups and downs…
• Real Education – Community Learning, Adult Literacy
• Critical thinking, teacher activism & professionalism
• Mini pen portraits of events / incidents and memories

A few paragraphs on your subject:

Reflections on teaching…The highs included firstly community learning and secondly higher education – So firstly, community learning was a time where access to education for adults was vast across Liverpool – so widespread as to be organised by both the local FE college (Then called the City of Liverpool Community College) and the Council (The Adult learning Service). I started teaching employed by both.

The highs included collectivism…teachers arriving at spaces and venues willing to object, reject and collectivise against the moronic, the banal and pay/conditions

A few paragraphs about you:

I was a lecturer at the City of Liverpool College and UCU Trade Union activist and rep. I am currently on the UCU NEC as UK FE elected rep. (I also studied for my A’ levels at the college that I worked at for 30 years.)

What free internet knowledge resources would you recommend?

Journals that inspired me to make better use of reflections included

“Critically reflexive practice embraces subjective understandings of reality as a basis for thinking more critically about the impact of our assumptions, values, and actions on others. Such practice is important to management education, because it helps us understand how we constitute our realities and identities in relational ways and how we can develop more collaborative and responsive ways of managing organizations. This article offers three ways of stimulating critically reflexive practice: (a) an exercise to help students think about the socially constructed nature of reality, (b) a map to help situate reflective and reflexive practice, and (c) an outline and examples of critically reflexive journaling.”

Ann L. Cunliffe California State University—Hayward

Click to Download Paper

“Reflection and the promotion of reflective practice has become a popular feature of the design of educational programs. This has often led to learning being more effectively facilitated. However, alongside these positive initiatives have grown more disturbing developments under the general heading of reflection. They have involved both misconceptions of the nature of reflection which have led to instrumental or rule following approaches to reflective activities, and the application of reflective strategies in ways which have sought inappropriate levels of disclosure from participants or involved otherwise unethical practices. The paper examines the question: what constitutes the effective use of reflective activities? It argues that reflection needs to be flexibly deployed, that it is highly context-specific and that the social and cultural context in which reflection takes place has a powerful influence over what kinds of reflection it is possible to foster and the ways in which this might be done. The paper concludes by exploring conditions in which reflective activities might appropriately be used in professional education.”

David Boud, University of Technology, Sydney and David Walker, The Educational Centre, Randwick

Click to Download Paper

What are your weblinks?

Twitter – @DoranNina

Facebook – Nina Doran

Public Email – [email protected]

This event took place in association with Trentham Productions on Tuesday 18th October 2022 at Liverpool Arts Bar (22 Hope St, L1 9BY) between 7 and 10pm. It was organised by Joel Petrie