Session 1 Pedagogy (20 January)

Question 1: How does Gloria Dall’Alba’s account of teaching development in universities correspond with your own thoughts and experience?

Our very ‘being-in-the-world’ is shaped by the knowledge we pursue, uncover, and embody. [There is] a troubling sense in which it seems that we cannot help practicing what we know, since we are ‘always already’ implicitly shaped by our guiding metaphysical presuppositions. (2001, p. 250)

Quoting Heidegger used within the paper, I try often to encourage this amongst my learners, which requires a little bit of stepping back to see how they approach a project/problem intuitively while during the feedback sessions really point/call it out. Usually along the lines of note the difference in approach between so and so, ie X uses thinking through experimenting while Y ideates through thinking. I also try to encourage them to consider that creative abilities are innate within all of us (don’t underestimate their own ability) and I hope tutor is facilitator for learners to tap into abilities.

“Active involvement of participants through collaboration is necessary to ‘let them learn’. This means that a pedagogical relationship, whose purpose is to facilitate learning, is established between teacher and course participants, as well as among participants themselves.”

The idea of teaching as to let learn is perhaps much easier to think than accomplish. I agree in active involvement through collaboration as an approach of letting them learn and will try to encourage the habit of peer feedback and discussion even in the absence of teacher. Often where perhaps the difficulty is that some learners come with the traditional notion of teacher-student dynamic and then with expectation to fulfill those roles, often I’ve seen that’s driven by culture.

In contrast, Martin Heidegger (1968, 1998) and Ronald Barnett (1997, 2004, and in preparation) argue for heightened attention to ontology as a way forward for higher education. Highlighting ontology in the course on teaching means placing emphasis on enhancing ways of being university teachers.

Absolutely agree with this statement, attention to ontology is the way with which skills and technique can be applied with consideration. However if students subscribe to art universities such as UAL with a pre-assumption of conventional student-teacher models where teachers themselves (like myself) do not agree with, then the ‘service’ that learners subscribe to for an education is not fulfilled. This commentary in line with the beginning part of the essay where higher education is moving forward in ways of a large bureaucratic system which puts the technologising of education at the center.

Question 2: To what extent are individuals personally responsible for their success?

Through the privatisation of higher education and neoliberal attitudes the individual is responsible for their success. For example, my undergraduate studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia was an example of this. Lecturers/professors were very much facilitators of the learning journey, and luckily I felt that my professors did a lot to help students in an art school, but the emphasis was still very much on the individual learner’s efforts in realising ‘success’.

From this perspective, the idea of decolonising a neoliberal university is redundant because the impersonal processes of the market recognise only legitimate differences in the capacities of individuals.

From Holmwood which I thought was worth thinking about

access to UK universities was equalised in formal terms, at least for those students who sought places and were ‘qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them’

Of course but yet again by who’s criteria of qualification by ability? The rich get richer and the poor get poorer holds truth as where and how you were born restricts or gives you access to resources with which you have better competitive advantage in being qualified.

This is a critical point in the argument. I am suggesting that universities in the UK and US were embedded in social structures that derive from histories of colonialism and Empire (internal in the case of the US and external in the case of the UK).

This is most certainly true, those who are in power write the narratives for social and governmental structure and there is hardly any evidence in history of people in legal positions of power that are not from a non-white upbringing nor perspective within the UK or the US until perhaps most recently.

Question 3: What is the justification for some people earning more than others?

The paradox of neoliberal ‘credentialism’ is that it makes participation in higher education necessary for any job beyond those paying the minimum wage, while, at the same time, the increased stratification of higher education makes place of study as important as a degree as such.

Going by Holmwood’s studies the justification of selective higher earnings come from a merit-based system. In the example of US higher education high school grades, SAT scores make impact on access to funding and entry into higher education, which in turn puts value seen from an employer’s perspective as someone more ‘valuable’ and ’employable’ that justifies said persons income.

It is in this context that we can ask questions about the position of ethnic minority students within English higher education and their prospects in the neoliberal university.

Interesting point indeed! Again through own experience as an ethnic-minority EU ‘Home’ student studying at the Royal College of Art here in London my only options of funding and financial support was through, you guessed it, Barclays bank.

Increasingly, the diversity of higher education is secured by the recruitment of overseas students from elite social backgrounds (i.e. those able to pay high fees), while domestic students from ethnic minorities remain disadvantaged.34

What to do? The diversification from international students are just as valuable, providing others opportunities of working with others from completely different cultural and social frameworks. To learn is to collaborate, and to be and embody is to experience and with that it is crucially important to experience other ideas and approaches that are not similar to yours.

Question 4: What does solidarity mean to you?

Personal responsibility is the ideology that maintains the status quo, not the means of challenging it.

Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity the motto as part of the French constitution which has now become a part of the country’s national heritage. I start here because I have always been curious about the selection of the three words in representing a nation. The word Solidarity in some historical political instances was preferred over the word Equality – as equality suggested a levelling of society which perhaps is very relevant to the texts we have been reading about inequalities with access and attainment to higher education/liberal arts degrees. I give that context in how I am coming to think of what the word Solidarity means to me and I’d say it’s towards a common social purpose….but this of course is often for discussion to who’s common social purpose and for what common social purpose. Gilet Jeunes was readapted here in London for a pro-Brexit protest.