My grandfather, the late Fred Robertson, influenced how I think about and write history. He died years before I decided to become a historian and he was not an academic, but he was a historian and an intellectual in his own way. He was a master storyteller. Read more…
The text following this potted biography gives an account of the educational system of the Gaels written by Alice Stopford Green who lived from May 1847 to 28 May 1929. She was an Irish historian, nationalist, and member of the first Seanad Éireann – the upper house of the Oireachtas (parliament) of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1936. It has also been known simply as the Senate.
This piece of work was written for an assignment for Anthony Schrag’s teaching in the area of ‘Practice as Research’. All the work I have been producing for the course I operationalise in the world outside of formal academia, in particular relating to the social practice I have been doing through Ragged University which ultimately got me invited onto a Masters course on the basis of the work I did and continue to do in the community.
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This is the fine edit of a learning artifact generated as a part of a project exploring methods by which the production of a work can structure a curriculum for active learners in their own lives. Read more…
George Platen could not conceal the longing in his voice. It was too much to suppress. He said, “Tomorrow’s 1 May. Olympics!”
He rolled over on his stomach and peered over the foot of his bed at his roommate. Didn’t he feel it, too? Didn’t this make some impression on him? Read more…
This is an extended version of an article I wrote for an assessment in the MSc I am doing at Queen Margaret University. As a part of Public Sociology, I chose to write about the conflicted messaging of the university in terms of administration, bureaucracy and policy. Whilst many people in the educational sector act with values consonant to equating education to human development and as a public good essential for a society to function, the administrative structures seem captured by market driven, profit oriented values delivered increasingly by multinational companies. Read more…
This is presentation is about constructing resilient education in the fractured environment examining social practices which form community. It was given to the National Education Union conference on Friday, 3rd February 2022 which was staged at The University Centre West Anglia, King’s Lynn. Participants were invited to reflect on the theme of communities of practice. This is a copy of the presentation along with the written article which has been annotated with multimedia resources and verbatim excerpts from original sources in the grey boxes.
This is a learning artifact created as a part of a project which has the aims of examining how the world around can be used to generate a living curriculum by an individual wanting to generate and engender their own education. This is in keeping with the exploration of the Ragged University project to research the means to develop education which can function beyond the enclosures of finance and exclusive cultural configurations.