Visions and values #EEVV351

One of my students @sophiefownes developing an essay response

Someone, somewhere in the mists of time - possibly a genius (so it couldn't possibly have been me) - wrote a final year teacher education module called Visions and Values. It's genius, because it focuses on the purpose of education, and with deceptively simple essay questions such as 'who should define the curriculum?' it exposes students to the delicious complexities of pedagogy and schooling. It's a timely module that taxes their intellect and academic skills like no other module, just at the point they are about to leave to take up their first teacher posts in the big bad world outside. The module is designed to get them thinking more deeply and critically than they have ever done previously, and it helps them to develop their academic writing and arguing skills to a very high level. It also encourages them to revisit their own motivations for becoming a teacher, and challenges them reappraise their personal and professional beliefs, values and attitudes. I believe it's the toughest thing many of them have had to face in all of their time at the Plymouth Institute of Education. I'm very fortunate to be the module leader of this presentation, and although it was initially a daunting prospect to manage a final year module for 200 students and an excellent team of around 15 lecturers and seminar leaders, I'm really warming to the task.

This past few months we have seen several lectures and seminars that have explored the nuances, implications and impacts of a variety of curricula, philosophies, ideologies and cultures. The students have been highly engaged, and have paid the price, often leaving the sessions saying 'my head hurts' or 'I'm really confused now', and other hearty expressions of deep learning we lecturers just love to hear. This week we also had a BBC Question Time style panel, where several courageous lecturers from the team sat on a panel and took questions from all angles, around politics, the media, cultural and historical issues, philosophy (both personal and general), societal and psychological perspectives, teacher roles, and a whole host of other, unpredictable questions that are hard to answer and even harder to articulate in short sentences (it's the supplementary question that's the killer!) Questions came from both inside and outside the lecture hall, as educators around the globe joined in and eavesdropped on the conversation through the module Twitter hashtag #EEVV351. I have been pleasantly surprised and gratified by the level of participation of those from outside the group, but of course, with tools like Twitter, the community of learners can be widened significantly beyond traditional boundaries. So much so, I believe, that the live webstreaming next year's delivery of the module (including the lectures and discussions) is an absolute must. More on the plans for this in a later communication.

Student mind map

Here's just a sample of some of the questions that were tackled during the panel session: If you each had the power to design a curriculum, what would you put at the core? How would education change if it were free of political influence and control? How much respect do you think teachers have in society? Is the answer maybe the reason why we are not defining the curriculum? Does education really change? Does a curriculum define the most important things children learn? Do we need a curriculum at all? Would there be chaos or creativity? What are the worst (and the best) changes you have seen in schools over the past decade? Who should not be allowed to define the curriculum? and finally the most pithy: If children are our future and the reason for education, how far should they be allowed to define the curriculum?

Debates around the tension between traditionalist and progressive education methods, the political implications of education, comparisons between international education systems, and the influence of media, industry and local communities on children's education raged continuously throughout the module. My students now have to unpick all of this. They need to make sense of it. They will struggle, and they will agonise about what to put in their 5000 word assignments, and what to leave out. They have already learnt a lot. But their biggest lesson will come when they attempt to follow one particular line of reasoning, only to realise that there are multiple layers of explanation, a whole host of lines of reasoning and an entire spectrum of ways of understanding the business of learning. I wish them every success and hope their heads hurt just a little bit more as they try to make sense of all this.

Photos by Steve Wheeler


Visions and values #EEVV351 by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.