Transformative Teaching
Abstract
In our presentation, we engage with an ongoing dialogue around what it means to be student in an H.E. setting ‘post-Covid’, apparently after a period of ‘lost learning’. We work at an English university but this discussion is global. The call for abstracts refers to the ‘world outside’, which is in itself a moot point. Do we return to an education which Berardi pointed out pre-pandemic was “being transformed into a space of mere acquisition for specialised knowledge a space where individualism and competition are cultivated to the detriment of solidarity and consciousness” (Berardi, 2019: 210)? Do we simply return to our classrooms or repurpose them? We seek to problematise relations of power in the context of module and course assessments, to re-enter and re-think the dialogic space of teacher and student, and to move again to consider just what education is for and what is it that we do? From Level 7 modules to Foundation Learning we are interested in rethinking issues of access and of discourse that levels (through learning outcomes, assessment alignment etc.), that privileges attendance over participation, that legitimises some talk and denies other talk. Yet for all of us, our world/s are shifting and unstable, are in flux perhaps more now (climate change, global pandemic) than they have ever been. How have we been returned/ can we return/ are we returning to spaces we previously inhabited? And how does all this work within the dialogue of ‘transformative’ and emancipatory education?
Dr. Victoria Wright holds a Doctorate in Learning and Learning Contexts from the University of Birmingham. Her thesis was titled ‘An autoethnographic account of giving lesson observation feedback’. Her research interests centre on further and higher education, autoethnographies, narratives of self, care of self, literacy practices, assessment and feedback practices, arts based methods.
Pete Bennett has over twenty years’ experience teaching A-Levels at an open access sixth form college. He has written textbooks and academic readers for Film, Media and Communication and Culture. He is the co- editor of the Routledge Research in Media Education and Literacy research series. He has spent the last fourteen years teaching F.E. teachers and writing and editing in the fields of media, education and culture including Barthes’ Mythologies Today: Readings of Contemporary Culture (Routledge 2013), Doing Text: Media after the Subject (2016) and Identity and Resistance in Further Education (2018).