Every now and again, I meet some special people who remind me in the most delightful of ways why I have spent the greater part of my life involved in education. Such people somehow manage to take me back to why I chose to go into teaching almost four decades ago rather than try to become the songwriter […]
Continue reading →This post belongs to an occasional series on teacher professional development. Previous posts include The Reflective Teacher as Reflective Learner and Teacher Professional Development in the UK: North & South. If philosophy is the quest for wisdom then every teacher who respects the import of their vocation needs to be a philosopher as well as a teacher. The two […]
Continue reading →This is the fourth in an occasional series of posts highlighting some of the books that led me into education or that have greatly influenced me as an educator over the years. In this post, I want to look at the book that first excited me about the possibilities offered by the ‘microcomputer’ in education, an interest that has […]
Continue reading →A number of years ago, I gave a talk entitled ‘The Joy of Learning’ to the Australian College of Educators in the impressive setting of Geelong College, a few miles south-west of Melbourne. In my presentation I spoke about Convivial Learning, an idea that I had derived from just a few short phrases offered by Ivan Illich in his […]
Continue reading →…..and gets it completely wrong! Peter Wilby, whose Guardian writings on education I usually have some respect for, seems to fall heavily into the trap of believing that right can only be distinguished from wrong in education through academic research. On Sugata Mitra and his work (the Hole in the Wall Project and now his School in […]
Continue reading →Pedagogical theory is not only technical but cultural, ideological and political. If it is to have any impact, it must be self-consciously all of these. So wrote Jerome Bruner in his book, Relevance of Education. He died last weekend, on 5th June, aged 100, in the same city in which he was born: New York […]
Continue reading →The teacher has a place of honour in human history; there is an inherent nobility in teaching that persists even today when perhaps the teacher’s true worth is not adequately acknowledged by some parts of modern society. The core purpose of teaching, at least in the Western democracies, should be to produce free and creative citizens capable of balancing the desire for personal independence with a recognition of […]
Continue reading →The makar has been an exalted component of Scottish literature and culture for more than 600 years. The makars were the makers of poems, the ancient poets and bards of Scotland. It is a term still in use here today. Skilled poets, we know, do not simply write poetry: they build and shape and rebuild and reshape poems, carefully constructing every syllable, […]
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Education is a debate! It is (as I wrote here in 2013): …an intense and constant battleground of crossed swords, conflict and contention… And long may it continue to be so. Education is not a science. There can be no fixed set of absolutes for every context, culture or classroom with respect to what education is for, […]
Continue reading →This is the second piece of a 2-part post. Part 1 can be found here. In my M-Learning post from August 2014, I wrote that: …providers of content, courses, and programmes of study, both free and paid-for, will increasingly customise and configure their products for the mobile learning market – many are already doing so, of […]
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