Education for the public good?

Another key theme that came out of the Reshaping Learning anthology, has been that thinking about learning spaces actually demands engaging with the whole 'shape' of education. At the post-compulsory level this is first about re-thinking what, where and how we learn, teach and research. Second it is about how space (conceptual, physical, virtual, social, personal)  matters in these processes. And, third, it is about generating creative and critical networks beyond the university so as to interact with other ideas and types of adult education, such as museums and other forms of public culture.


Many of the contributors to this book start from a position that higher education is under threat from pressures towards an over-riding emphasis on employability. And they look to re-valuing education as an important public service. 


I noticed that the upcoming American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting in New Orleans is called "Inciting the Social Imagination: Education Research for the Public Good." As Kris D. Gutiérrez and Joanne Larson write: "We are in the midst of a vibrant and troubling education paradox. On the one hand, it is a time of remarkable interest in education, with increased attention to reform policies, unprecedented educational legislation, and money from all sectors devoted to these efforts. In public discourse, education remains foundational to opening up a range of opportunities: to achieve social and economic mobility, to gain and secure employment, and to develop future life skills. Politicians refer to the knowledge society, economists write about the new economy, and the proliferation of innovative technologies demands new forms of learning in an unparalleled knowledge economy. Yet the path or shape that these efforts take is toward technocratic and market-driven solutions to the everyday issues schools, teachers, and students experience."


The conference will therefore explore how educational research might help deal with these challenges, particularly in enabling us to better re-imagine what an education for the public good might look like.

So ... I typed 'education for the public good' into Google and found a whole lot of stuff.....

The image here is of the Checkland Building, Falmer Campus, University of Brighton and is taken from a webpage advertising an upcoming pubic debate at the University entitled The future of university education? to be held on Saturday 30th April 2011.

As the two main CETLD learning spaces researchers, Hilary and I have been talking a lot recently about what is already available, in terms of appropriate conceptual frameworks, research methods and taxonomies. Hilary has been reviewing the many good practice case studies of contemporary learning spaces in post-compulsory education. There are lots of interesting examples but also some on-going problems: potential citation distortion (where the same examples are referenced again and again without much checking on the validity of the data proffered); difficulties of finding out what is happening across the sector, intersecting with varying degrees of promotion by individual universities and projects; and – because of the recent focus on technology-rich and informal learning spaces – a tendency to ignore (or fail to effectively classify/compare and contrast) the range of developments taking place across the variety of learning spaces from lecture theatres, to labs, to studios to research centres.

In the latter area, for example, Woods Bagot have done an interesting ‘study tour’ of advanced learning institutes, aimed at bringing together researchers from different disciplines; of which the MIT Stata Center (pictured above), designed by Frank Gehry Associates, is probably one of the most famous/infamous.

These are very relevant to CETLD because it brings together HE institutions with non-university partners. Who, for example, is analysing and comparing museum education spaces with HE versions? Well, us I hope!

Adult learning beyond the campus

In response to its Learning Revolution white paper, the Government has a £20m Transformation Fund to support informal adult learning - learning for pleasure, self-development and community development - which has been awarding money to a wide range of projects "all with the objective of seeing creative learning flourish across the country." These funds are enabling collaborations between museums, galleries, universities and colleges to offer particular schemes for adult learners. The emphasis, I guess, wil be on social empowerment and cohesion, which is already central to how museums (but not so much universities) think about their role.

In fact have recently been re-visiting the Museum, Libraries and Archives (MLA) Inspired Learning for All website, which lists the various learning frameworks put together by different quangos for schools and adult education; why do I feel that these groups - rightly or wrongly - are much more willing to give explicit definitions of what learning is than any university academic...


Image of Turner Contemporary, designed by David Chipperfield Associates and currently under construction in Margate, which has won one of the transformation awards for a project bringing old and young people together under the title Teenage