Widening Participation in the Neoliberal University

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…

Constructing Resilient Education: Social Practices Which Form Community

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.

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Learning Artifact (Prototype): Drew Whitworth The Book as a Technology

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.

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Experiments in Education: The Possibility of the 19th Century Auditor Today

As a series of independent experiments on how educational activities and trajectories can be formulated ‘in the wild’ – that is outside of enrollment in a formal institution of education – I became interested in examining what coalescent interactions can be tuned into to serve these purposes.  The guiding compass for the focus is to exclude finance as a fundamentally problematic thing for the greatest number of people; at the same time, points on this compass are to explore symbiotic relationships with those who manifest education within formal institutions. Read more…

Human Beings as Polymathic and Specialisation: Solve et Coagula

What follows are a series of basic notes exploring the nature and problems of specialisation in fields of knowledge. This writing has developed from a series of conversations over the years with people who see as a problem interdisciplinary modes of working instead favouring the strategy that people should compartmentalise their interests and range of intellectual practice to a given area. Read more…

Education as Pre-Political and The Living Curriculum

If we think of politic as involving the recruitment of support for a particular perspective, idea or project amongst a group of people – a polis – then the state of education can be understood as pre-political. This is in juxtaposition to indoctrination – the use of intrigue through rhetoric, eristics, misinformation and peer pressures. For the learner not having the sufficient knowledge on a given matter may be understood as in a pre-political state – undecided, uninformed, unaware. Read more…