Trivium21c

Pretty much every subject studied in school requires the teaching of knowledge and skills. It would be mad to set up the two areas in opposition. Yet it happens. Why? Because some people think that skills work in the same way, as the old story goes, as teaching the starving villagers how to fish rather than provide them with some fish to eat. In other words, teach them skills then they will be…

In my book Athena vs the Machine, I explored how some schools fall into managerialist thinking and how the systems that are imposed are ‘knowledge limiting’ rather than knowledge rich. These schools might describe their curriculum as knowledge rich but, in practice they mean, some or all of – don’t teach skills, focus on the list written down on a ‘knowledge organiser’, memorise it and recall it…

Curriculum, Assessment and the Arts

Substantive and disciplinary knowledge have become the words around which curriculum is being organised in some schools. Pro forma’s are filled in enthusiastically, or not so, to justify curriculum choices to line-managers. And whilst these terms seem to work well in some subjects I’m not so sure the distinction works so well in the arts. There tends to be a ready made distinction in the arts…

Teachers Should Not Teach Opinion as Fact

“Nothing has changed,” Theresa May was fond of saying, just as it was clear that things, in fact, had changed. The Dept. For Education in England has felt the need to release new guidance on how to tackle politically sensitive topics in an ‘impartial’ way. Teachers’ Unions are uncomfortable saying this guidance might impinge on what schools might teach and, indeed, this is very much a curriculum…

Rousseau, Romanticism, Education and Play

Toby Young: “The idea that somehow children want to be left to their own devices to run wild and play and discover the world for themselves, and any interference in that romantic process is cruel, is just rubbish…” Rousseau gets blames for a lot of things in education and is often cited as ‘where it all went wrong’. Romanticism, mainly in the form of Rousseau’s book ‘Emile’, gets mentioned by…

Schools Should Ditch Creativity

The problem with the word ‘creativity’ is that it conjures up such a wide range of possible interpretations that it ends up serving no-one except those who wish to peddle it as a pedagogical aim and charge thousands of pounds for their talks in Dubai or Davos, or a school hall near you on an inset day. Creativity finds itself being associated with imagination and originality; it is peddled as a…

Lord Digby Jones and Cultural Capital

Good Lord, a Pygmalion of a row has exploded across social media and beyond, Lord Digby Jones, as he calls himself, set up a little culture war all by himself, with Alex Scott the ex-footballer and now commentator for the BBC: She responded: The Good Lord took umbrage at that: Ah, the elocution word. Elocution and Deportment used to be on the curriculum of certain schools, designed to knock…

Cultural Capital The value teachers place on the activities children engage in outside of school.

The value teachers place on the activities children engage in outside of school. In Lawrence Stenhouse’s wonderful book ‘An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development’ there is a list of pupils’ interests and activities ranked by how their teachers approved/disapproved of them. It is quite an interesting, in some cases extraordinary, list. It was part of a study entitled: ‘Values and…

Antonin Artaud Video + Slides

The Video. Can be used in sections or in one hit (if you can bear it!) artaud-talk Slides:Download Howl, by Ginsberg can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2ela… The Seashell and the Clergyman: https://youtu.be/ypseXIQVaF0 Marat/Sade: https://youtu.be/RJc4I6pivqg De La Guarda: https://youtu.be/ks-DFvklR0c Circus Archaos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSekQ… Forced…

A talk and slides about:

‘Making Meaning in the World’.

A look at some of the themes in ‘Athena vs the Machine’

1.Conversation of humankind (culture) the way we do things here vs (who are you calling we?) – experience. 2.Culture: Developing taste, opinions, values – finding meaning… truth, beauty, care, relationship to things, others – knowledge. 3.Perspectives, subjective/objective,…

Here are my slides and an accompanying YouTube video of me chatting away about Bertolt Brecht. Some of it might be of interest to those currently teaching and/or studying Brecht’s theatrical theory and practice.

I hope some of you find it to be of use!

Plus if you spot any “deliberate” mistakes please alert me in the comments below…

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DBsdvemx5M&w=776&…

Organising Knowledge: On Triangles and Ts and Russian Dolls.

A curriculum can sometimes seem like one damn thing after another, especially if taught in blocks or thought of as a journey connecting different topics as you go from A to Y with Z being an exam. In an A level course with a syllabus demanding certain topics be studied, end of term exams, a mock or two and the final exam, maybe coursework, the focus on ‘stuff that needs to be studied’ is huge. In…

It’s what you do, not how you label it that matters.

What is ‘disciplinary’ and ‘substantive’ knowledge and what other ways might there be of organising knowledge? In this excellent article Christine Counsell explains that:

“Substantive knowledge is the content that teachers teach as established fact – whether common convention, concept or warranted account of reality. You might want pupils…

“[educationl is in fact one of the most effective means of perpetuating the existing social pattern, as it both provides an apparent justification for social inequalities and gives recognition to the cultural heritage, that is, to a social gift treated as a natural one.” (Bourdieu, 1974, p. 32)

Education maintains inequality.

Bourdieu argues that in the ‘higher class’ or bourgeois family…

Stormzy or Mozart, Who Knows?

There has been a stormzy brewing for some time about curriculum content. The National curriculum says we ought to teach ‘the best’, I don’t agree, we each have our subjective tastes and sensibilities, I think it is better to teach children to enter into the conversation about what the best might be. That is not to say that all is equally good or valuable, just because someone tells me the Big Mac…