Dancing in the FE SectorStories from the other 11

Maire Daley & Kevin Orr1st May 2015

Metaphors

Cinderella 12 dancing princesses

“We have enjoyed summoning our twelve dancing princesses as an antidote to the dreary metaphor of FE as Cinderella waiting for her dreary prince. But the playfulness of the dancing metaphor is deceptive because this book is also about resistance.”Orr

Chapters: 12 dancersPrefaceIntroduction: How Grimm is FE?

1) Why Teach? Not Afraid to Dance 2) Teaching and ideology, or why aren't we all dancing? A personal vie3) Critical pedagogy in FE 4) Frivolity as resistance? What do the dancing princesses and their shoes that were danced to

pieces tell us about risk taking and the potential for pedagogic bungee jumping in FE classrooms?

5) Spaces to dance: community education 6) Breaking free from the regulation of the State: the pursuit to reclaim lesson observation as a

tool for professional learning in FE 7) Building Colleges for the Future: what the Ugly Sisters have to tell us about FE8) Reframing professionalism and reclaiming the dance 9) ‘The soldier danced with them unseen’: Managerial resistance and collusion in FE 10) Dancing in Plain Sight 11) Action for ESOL: pedagogy, professionalism and politics 12) Beyond the Metaphor: Time to take over the castle

Conclusion: Leading a merry dance through times of change and challenge Coda: Writing as resistance

FE Professionalism

Parts of the same story • Negative: what gets in the

way?• Positive: what do we have

to draw on?

negative

positive

The Optimism of Activism

• “The struggle over the coming years will be to ensure that these positive images, proposals and practices prevail over those that are currently creating such harm. The task is to turn moments of resistance into a mass movement (Horn, 2014).” Coffield

Resistance and professionalism

• “FE is threatened by the introduction of competition in place of local planning; it is threatened by measures of quality that ignore what is meaningful when what is meaningful is difficult to measure; and it is threatened by encroaching privatization of the hitherto public provision of education.” Orr

Chapter 1: Why teach?

• What brings us into teaching and keeps us going as teachers?

• “Teachers are dangerous people.”

• Paulo Freire, There is no such thing as a neutral education, education acts either as a process of domestication or liberation.

Research:

• At interview for a place on our teacher education courses we ask, “Why do you want to become a teacher?”

• Responses:• Love of teaching (love of learning and making

a difference)• Love of Subject (share passion and share skills)• Career development (natural progression)

Chapter 9: Managerial resistance and collusion in Further Education

Interviewer: Do you ever say no to any of these requests?Carol: Sometimes I don’t do them and see what happens [laughs]… I just think ‘that is just going to use too much of my time and I don’t think it’s probably where my time is most valuably spent’.Interviewer: What does happen if you ignore some of these requests?Carol: Nothing usually [laughs], that’s my experiment. I would like to be able to identify more accurately what is really valuable.

Chapter 9: Managerial resistance and collusion in Further Education

“Keith: [Head of department] has asked us to make a retirement present for the principal – any suggestions? Lecturer 3: What do you call that wooden frame that has a length of rope hanging from it? Lecturer 2: Give him a picture of [the college] and say ‘you arranged for this shit hole to be built’. Keith: What about a picture of us showing our arses? Lecturer 2: Give him one of the tree seats that have gone wrong – it’ll remind him of this place.”

Chapter11: ESOL

Chapter11: ESOL

Seeing the dance

• Hillier identifies four lenses that bring into sharper focus what she calls the complex and truly chaotic FE sector:

• identity, • agency, • tension,• deliberative spaces..

The role of Teacher Education in the development of resistance and optimism

• Lets dance• Freire education

(educationalists and teacher educationalists) act as a process of domestication or liberation

• Ideological choices – education to educate

What else is going on?

• Other examples of resistance and optimism

Writing as resistance

• “Writing can also be a form of resistance and writing this book has in its own way involved a broad coalition to challenge dominant, damaging ideas about education. Our hope is that it may also embolden others to defy and then encourage them to organize and to dance.” Orr