6 February: final session.

First, I must apologise for not having put this post up on the blog--not sure how I forgot. Still, here it is...

The William Blake quotation:

He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particular
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer:
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars

Jerusalem, ch. 3 plate 55.

Lesley and Emma on the child care front raised some interesting issues about when "inclusion" (as a "General Good" turns into its opposite by the law of unintended consequences.

Similarly Jackie, Laura and Louise did a good job on the practice of inclusivity among themselves, by managing to explore adjusting to meet individual needs in quite disparate settings, and finding common themes across them, including the utilitarian question of when such adjustments disadvantage other members of the class.

The discussion turned at one point to the medical and social models of disability, and the different approaches which follow from them. This link is to a short piece from Leicester University, on this, and this one from the OU with some more links. We also discussed the use of language in the session--I think the OU piece may be stepping over into Political Correctness--comes back to Blake again.

And of course, the real test for inclusivity policies is how they engage with issues of assessment, as you discussed.

Sam Shepherd blogs on ESOL teaching--he has just vented his spleen at the funding regime which is imposing unrealistic targets on his learners, here. He's is certainly on the same page as those of you working in similar areas.

And for the outcome on discussing the "rhetoric of inclusivity" you may be interested in this.

Incidentally, Wordle is here. But there are other variations, too--see here.

I'll continue to post items of potential interest, but all the best with units 7 and 8, and do get in touch over the assessment.

Update

From the TES on the more serious end of inclusion and post-16 SEN students. And here is a summary of the Green Paper on it.

30 January; presentations and (my) misleading information.

My apologies for some misleading information in discussion. I stated that it was illegal to devote federal funds to prison education in the USA. As I thought about that, I thought it sounded extreme even for as reactionary a penal system as the US, so I tried to check my sources (as of course one does). And I couldn't find my note, so I had to look again.

Funding for prison education has long been controversial. Private citizens often oppose prison education, because they assume that the government, and thus tax money, is solely responsible for finding prisoners' educations. Private charities and even inmates can fund prison education, however. Educational establishments also can help with funding...

"Governmental support of education for inmates and ex-inmates can be limited by law. In the United States, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 prohibited those convicted of felonies from receiving Pell grant assistance. The Federal Pell Grant Program offers less than 1 percent of its budget to the education of inmates. Other laws can, in fact, support the education of inmates. For example, the Higher Education Act’s Grants for Youthful Offenders program allows the U.S. government to spend $17 million US Dollars on inmate education, provided that inmates seeking to participate in educational programs are younger than 25 and have sentences that are less than five years in length.

From here--not a particularly good site itself, but compact enough to quote. If you are interested enough, here is the horse's mouth, as it were.

Many thanks to Rebecca, Becky and Lucy for the presentation--if you'll send me the link I'll post the Prezi. We did, as ever, get rather caught up in the practice of offender education itself, but it did raise some more general issues about inclusion which you might want to note for your submissions;

• The trade-off between the needs of the individual and those of the rest of the group. At what point does inclusion of one or two disturbed/disturbing individuals effectively exclude others?

• And the issue of targeting scarce resources--which is important but we did not actually get round to discussing in this context, although we have touched on it lightly, previously. There are two main strategies in this situation--and for managing all kinds of scarce resources, in health or aid or of course education in general;
• Direct resources to the place of greatest need. Which is many people's intuitive position, but can result in losing them down a bottomless pit.
• Direct resources to where they can do the most good, a strategy known as triage, which of course admits the possibility of "writing people off", but which ensures the greatest utilitarian return.

23 January: Seeing classes from a group perspective

As I said at the end of the session, most of the material on groups is covered on the site. The page with links to all the others is:

• www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/usingthegroup.htm

In relation to inclusivity and practice, the dominant liberal Western assumption is that you should not discriminate against people for anything they "can't help"*. In the jargon, that means their "basic roles": the link is to a page on Banton's venerable but still useful angle on this.

I've tried to address some of the underlying principles and issues here.

We talked briefly about different kinds of comunication in groups; I try to explore the content and process forms here. It's one of those ideas which is simple enough when you get it, but it's not easy to explain, so get back to me next week if it doesn't make sense.

We only touched on the weirder manifestations of the "group unconscious" (if it is a useful idea at all), but the way into it is introduced via group cultures here. Certainly it does help to account for some of the disproportionality of feeling which can be generated in groups, and the notion of projection, including the idea that "there's always one (whatever)" in every group or class. (Not yours, of course!)

I hope this gives you enough to be going on with, I'll deal with any matters arising at the start of the next session before we proceed to the first presentation.

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*  Of course, the educational system violates this all the time, because we assess people and fail them, even when they are trying their hardest... You could argue that this makes it all the more important to be as inclusive as possible in other respects.


Incidentally--in preparation for Unit 7, this page is a one-stop shop for all the recent reports and policy initiatives in FE.

Pecha Kucha

Thanks for the note, Emma.

As requested, the template (actually it's simply a powerpoint file; just add to it and "save as") can be downloaded from here. (The timer bar is there simply as an aid to pacing the spoken commentary--you can delete it when you've got that to your satisfaction. It's on the slide master--access that with Shift+the normal view icon.)

There's more about the format here. I first encountered it at a conference in Dublin in the summer, where a whole strand of the parallel sessions was delivered that way. It's a bit like a PowerPoint version of Twitter--it really makes you distil your material and, as someone mentioned last week--practice!

16 January: Curriculum continued

 I've now up-dated this post in the light of yesterday's session: new stuff in this colour.

Happy New Year, and welcome back!

I'm writing this in advance on the off-chance some of you may want to refresh your ideas before class. At the end of last term I did say that we had effectively finished with curriculum issues, but on thinking about it, I realise that without complicating things too much, there are some more points which are worth making.

These revolve around evaluating the curriculum. In no particular order:

• If you can, please read Graham Gibbs' report Dimensions of Quality prepared for the Higher Education Academy. It may be all about HE, but it's got a lot of distilled wisdom in it. You might also be interested in my notes on Gibbs' possibly last public lecture.

• Last term, I hope you remember the Simple Minds video, which discussed how teaching science sometimes resulted in students knowing less after teaching than before. Carl Wieman (recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 2001 and the Carnegie Foundation’s U.S. University Professor of the Year Award in 2004), makes similar points very trenchantly in this article from 2007.

• Going back through the blog, I see rather to my surprise that there is no mention of Hattie's meta-analyses on "what works best". I'm not sure how that has slipped past us, but I'll mention it again just to see if we have covered it but somehow I haven't mentioned it.

• We shall refer to Brookfield's "four lenses" for evaluation: there's a good micro-site on them from the University of Sydney here. 

• ... and to the Kirkpatrick four-stage model. This is the official Kirkpatrick site, and here is a critique.

This is an earlier version of the presentation--annotated:

In the second part of the session we shall be setting up the groupwork on working with people with distinctive needs (which is not confined to traditional "special needs").

So please give some thought to how you would like to work on this--I shall interpret the brief very flexibly. I suggest working in twos/threes, to form three groups. You do not have to stick to what you know--this is all about developing perspectives rather than finding answers.

The principles underlying current practice are those of inclusion. Jim Crawley has a useful links page on this, with reference to the official publications and guidance from various interested organisations.

It is not easy to find material subjecting the idea to critical review, but look at;

• Inclusive Education; Knowing what we mean from the OU. 

• Topping K and Maloney S (eds) (2005) The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Inclusive Education Abingdon; Routledge Falmer (I confess I haven't read all of it! Part VI explicitly addresses post-school issues.)

• "Art for inclusion's sake: Cultural diversity policy substitutes political goals for artistic standards" by Josie Appleton (It's about cultural policy rather than education, though)

• Ecclestone K and Hayes D (2009) The dangerous rise of therapeutic education Abingdon; Routledge  Link is to library record--a more general polemic but thought-provoking.

• Lindsay G (2003) "Inclusive Education: a critical perspective" British Journal of Special Educational Needs vol.30 no.1 pp 3-12 (available electronically from the library; try pasting the link once you have accessed e-journals. But it is specifically about children with SEN and disabilities)

• Knight T (1999) "Inclusive Education and Educational Theory: Inclusive for What?" paper from BERA conference

• And here's an angle from me (in devil's advocate role).

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Points arising from 16 January session:

The origin of standardised methods stems from the "Scientific Management" approaches of F W Taylor. Using Brookfield's "hunting assumptions" approach, it is interesting to note that there is almost no research base for all this.

A propos of the brief discussion of the effectiveness or otherwise of Assessment For Learning:

"There are very few schools where all the principles of AfL, as I understand them, are being implemented effectively [...] The problem is that government told schools that it was all about monitoring pupils' progress; it wasn't about pupils becoming owners of their own learning. [...] We have (DfE officials) saying: 'We tried AfL and it didn't work.' But that's because (they) didn't try the AfL that does work." Dylan Wiliam reported in TES 13 July 2012  

“we had a highly bureaucratised and ossified way of turning AfL into some kind of weird amalgam of formative and summative assessment where everything had to be recorded to the nth degree” John Bangs (Cambridge U.) ibid.

My page on Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is here (with references).

The issue of proxies is discussed here in relation to assessment (in no great depth, though) and touched on in relation to quality of provision here. The unintended consequences of targets are discussed here: it's pretty academic, but has the advantage of being relatively recent (2011) and well referenced.

"Working myths" are introduced and discussed in chapter 6 of a book of mine from my residential social work days. I wouldn't normally trouble you with Wolfensberger, whose concern was with care and education for people with learning disabilities, but in view of the unit's focus on inclusivity, his historical perspective on insitutional care is worth looking at--fortunately one of his essays is available on line through the Disability History Museum.

Argyris and Schön's ideas on espoused theories and theories in use are outlined here. My sceptical take on reflection (one of my party pieces) is here.

I made a mistake--the story of instant diagnosis was not from Gawande, excellent though he is: I've just wasted an hour obsessively looking for the source... Forget it!

Here are the categories of student whom we identified as potentially having distinctive needs (or resources) to which the inclusivity agenda applies:

 
(Incidentally, I just came across this short article on what it is like to have ADHD--in IKEA.)

The background to and a brief summary of the Moser Report on adult literacy and numeracy (1999) is here.

Next week, in the first half we'll look at some stuff on the class as a group which may give you some ideas related to the practical implementation of inclusivity. You can find some general material on teaching in groups here.

5 December: Curriculum (in draft)

Here is the annotated presentation--the other half (!) will be along shortly...

Incidentally, on smashing pots: Edmund de Waal here. (before I forget)

Prep. for 5 December

As I mentioned when I met you briefly yesterday, there are some things you might find it useful to look at for next week:

• What has this got to do with curriculum?

• I know we are not about schools, but try to read chapter 1 of Illich's polemic if you can; it's an interesting argument...

• From a similar stable, Friere is almost unreadable, but this page is a good introduction, from a brilliant site (and see below*)

• These people are talking about transformative rather than simply informative learning. 

• You may conceivably be interested (although it is unlikely!) in this paper, which touches on the argument from another side--some consequences of the banking model and the constraints we talked about on 21 November.

• ...which touches in turn on to Anna Sfard's two metaphors for learning.

• and from a different angle, related to the Becker article I mentioned last week, look at this page on situated learning, just as a reminder, because we did mention it very briefly in Unit 2. Do follow the link to the Infed page on this, too, for more detail.

Which sort of comes full circle to the first bullet point.

That's probably more than enough to be going on with, but please come with your questions and ideas arising from your reading for the next session, and we'll see where the discussion takes us... (Saying which is begging** some questions about the nature of the curriculum, of course.)

(PS --and also relevant is this excellent tirade by Frank Furedi in today's Times Higher Education, which I think I shall link to from my more moderate pages here and here.)

(PPS --possibly of some interest in relation to the diversity and distinctive needs component of this unit, an interesting NYT piece on employing people on the autistic spectrum. It only touches in passing on the issue of how they may best be helped to learn, but that is the kind of question you may want to address in the groupwork.)

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Friere and the "Banking Model" of education; the page I linked to does not spell out the characteristics of the banking model in detail, but Friere himself sets them out thus:

•  the teacher teaches and the students are taught; 
• the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; 
• the teacher thinks and the students are thought about; 
• the teacher talks and the students listen - meekly; 
• the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined; 
• the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; 
• the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher; 
• the teacher chooses the programme content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; 
• the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students; 
•  the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. 

(Paulo Freire, 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 59.) 

** Yes, it is "begging" the question, not merely "raising" or "posing" it--it's a nice point of usage.