Focussing firstly on a video by Lindsay Jordan as an intro to ‘Love and Belonging in the Educational Realm’ – the philosophy of Anna Julia Parker
Realm’.https://moodle.arts.ac.uk/mod/url/view.php?id=557657
Quoting from the lecture: ‘Focussing on those who are on the margins of dominant systems and structures which can suppress. How can these be dismantled – its not enough to passively recognise them‘
This quote acts as a call to action rather than passive acceptance of the status quo. To challenge and assert the need to change/redesign the current structure in education and elsewhere, wherever possible. Awareness of how these repress is paramount. If the re-invention of the dominant systems and structures is to come about, then highlighting and making common knowledge of what is broken is essential. These systems have been honed and deeply held/embedded through centuries of learning – oppression on many levels has enable them to continue unchecked.
This relies on radically different perspectives being applied which are in tune with today’s society. Bringing to light the nature of this machinery will hopefully bring about fundamental change to benefit future generations. New structures should also include regular over-hauls to inhibit stagnation, making sure that evolution is taking place when and where it should. The price of peace is constant vigilance (to quote Leonard H. Courtney), the price of an equal and fair education system is regular and rigorous monitoring.
Figures who have lived on the ‘margins’ but have managed to infiltrate the bastion of learning can offer profound insights into the effects of suppression include Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964).
She was born into slavery but became an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black- Liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African American scholars in United States history.
Education at that time was a chance to achieve personal liberty and security, although difficult to access. Cooper managed to learn how to engineer an educational strategy for herself, manoeuvring her way through the dominant systems and becoming familiar with the conventions of a Eurocentric education system which catered only for men.
Cooper’s thesis, from the Sorbonne, addressed attitudes on slavery and racism and how these affected rights and freedom in the Haitian and French Revolutions.
Interestingly, it sounds as if she did ultimately feel a sense of belonging and is said to have felt nurtured, sheltered and protected by her education, particularly at Oberlin College. So the system that had excluded her became her realm and she flourished in what must have seemed extremely daunting territory. This sense of belonging comes as a surprise then, but also illustrates the importance of individuality and of finding one’s own way through the learning systems. These systems are at their best when they encourage growth and adaptability with individual skill-sets and how to make use of what is on offer. How to make and use tools from the materials you are supplied with. The ideal might also centre on a nurturing but also challenging environment such as Cooper describes at Oberlin College.
The class system also reflects that of education. People from low income backgrounds will have a different criteria for opting to study at HE level than others with more choices, which is likely to be affected by projected earnings. This article by Laura McInerny in The Guardian from July 2020 talks about inequalities in education: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jul/21/cuts-to-university-targets-in-england-are-blood-boilingly-insulting-to-people-like-me.
McInerny writes: “The purpose of offering more access to university was to ensure that people like me, growing up in towns decimated by low employment – thanks to Conservative government decisions in the 1980s – still had something to do with our lives. The purpose was to ensure that working-class people in Britain, one of the richest countries in the world, were no longer locked out of a snobbish university culture that in 1990 educated less than 20% of people and admitted women at significantly lower rates than men”
This was also my experience. I remember reading Hardy’s: Jude The Obscure and identifying with the frustration of not getting any real sense of how to work the system even when you’ve managed to get as far as enrolling into it! For the most part this seems like a self-perpetuating well-oiled machine operated by and largely for the benefit of the wealthy and entitled.
There are many issues with the current system and there can be few people who don’t accept that rigorous de-colonising of Higher Education is essential and long overdue. It is hard to even comprehend how much of a detrimental effect this has had on generations across the years. Having worked in Museums where attempts to highlight BAME issues seem tokenistic. I always wondered at Black History Month not being Black History Year or that the resources were not made available to at least begin to address such a huge deficit in our cultural awareness. Its symptomatic of this tokenism that Boris Johnson cut funding for BHM quite early on in his leadership. This article, also from The Guardian, talks about this: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/feb/17/boris-johnson-slashes-events-funding
“Johnson was accused of “subsidising wealthy Americans” after the Guardian reported earlier this year that the development agency, the mayor’s economic arm, had allocated £75,000 to USA Day. It emerged yesterday that the mayor has agreed to top this up with a further £25,000 from the Greater London Authority (GLA), bringing the total to £100,000. Johnson has previously defended the move as part of a drive to attract more American tourists to the capital.
Other events to benefit from a cash boost include St George’s Day which increased from £100,000 to £136,000, courtesy of the GLA. Simon Woolley, director of Operation Black Vote, and recently appointed race commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said the decision to cut Black History Month funding was symptomatic of Johnson’s failure to “effectively re-engage” with London’s black organisations”.
So education aimed at highlighting Britain’s history specifically, becomes a political football and in this case funding was given instead to events to boost financial connections with the US.
I find it interesting that many significant writers at the time were, through lack of funds, reliant on being heard through writing letters and papers rather than being published.
Quoting from the lecture: Its important to respond to the immediate needs of students, this is our immediate duty of care.
How am I putting this into practice in my own field?
My current post is 3 days per week working as a studio technician in Sculpture and Photography. I’m Grade 4, I don’t have any managerial responsibility but what we’ve studied so far on the PGCert makes me determined to have any impact that I can on improving UAL’s offer and to make it as accessible as it can be. I would like to focus on specifically what I can do.
Currently my working pattern looks like this: I focus on connecting with students who are new to me and on maintaining and enriching the links that I have with others with whom I’ve had tutorials/induction sessions. Writing to them individually and sending resources and research materials, I’ve also been running online practical demonstrations. These show particular skills and techniques whilst incorporating as much resource material as possible showing these in the context of work by other artists.
I also have one-to-one tutorials which allow me to get a sense of how that person’s work is developing in lockdown. My main aim being to encourage and enable students to continue to develop learning literacies, for the most part, in a domestic setting with often very limited making options. Helping them to access what is available to them online, I put them in contact with other specialist technicians and also alert them to talks and lectures. I aim to be as supportive as I can and work with them to find work-arounds for projects that they are working on during lock-down. This can relate to technical issues associated with making but also to suggest as wide a resource base as possible. I choose to show the demonstrations from a desk in a bedroom to demonstrate that we are all working with the same constraints.
I try to maintain what would normally be my role as studio technician; having daily contact – This would usually be informal as I walk around the spaces, so I try to make the tutorials quite light-touch and friendly. Talking to students face-to-face on a screen is a very different prospect to talking in front of a piece of their work so we often look at their padlets whilst I am offer as much encouragement as I can paired with critical feedback.
McInerny writes: “The purpose of offering more access to university was to ensure that people like me, growing up in towns decimated by low employment – thanks to Conservative government decisions in the 1980s – still had something to do with our lives. The purpose was to ensure that working-class people in Britain, one of the richest countries in the world, were no longer locked out of a snobbish university culture that in 1990 educated less than 20% of people and admitted women at significantly lower rates than men”
This was also my experience. I remember reading Hardy’s: Jude The Obscure and identifying with the frustration of not getting any real sense of how to work the system even when you’ve managed to get as far as enrolling into it! For the most part this seems like a self-perpetuating well-oiled machine operated by and largely for the benefit of the wealthy and entitled.
There are many issues with the current system and there can be few people who don’t accept that rigorous de-colonising of Higher Education is essential and long overdue. It is hard to even comprehend how much of a detrimental effect this has had on generations across the years. Having worked in Museums where attempts to highlight BAME issues seem tokenistic. I always wondered at Black History Month not being Black History Year or that the resources were not made available to at least begin to address such a huge deficit in our cultural awareness. Its symptomatic of this tokenism that Boris Johnson cut funding for BHM quite early on in his leadership. This article, also from The Guardian, talks about this: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/feb/17/boris-johnson-slashes-events-funding
“Johnson was accused of “subsidising wealthy Americans” after the Guardian reported earlier this year that the development agency, the mayor’s economic arm, had allocated £75,000 to USA Day. It emerged yesterday that the mayor has agreed to top this up with a further £25,000 from the Greater London Authority (GLA), bringing the total to £100,000. Johnson has previously defended the move as part of a drive to attract more American tourists to the capital.
Other events to benefit from a cash boost include St George’s Day which increased from £100,000 to £136,000, courtesy of the GLA. Simon Woolley, director of Operation Black Vote, and recently appointed race commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said the decision to cut Black History Month funding was symptomatic of Johnson’s failure to “effectively re-engage” with London’s black organisations”.
So education aimed at highlighting Britain’s history specifically, becomes a political football and in this case funding was given instead to events to boost financial connections with the US.
I’m not familiar with the term ‘dialectic’. On Researching the meaning of the word I found these definitions:
• the art of discussing the truth of opinions.
• Discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation
• Contradiction becomes a starting point.
I find it interesting that many significant writers at the time were, through lack of funds, reliant on being heard through writing letters and papers rather than being published.
Quoting from the lecture: Its important to respond to the immediate needs of students, this is our immediate duty of care.
How am I putting this into practice in my own field?
My current post is 3 days per week working as a studio technician in Sculpture and Photography. I’m Grade 4, I don’t have any managerial responsibility but what we’ve studied so far on the PGCert makes me determined to have any impact that I can on improving UAL’s offer and to make it as accessible as it can be. I would like to focus on specifically what I can do.
Currently my working pattern looks like this: I focus on connecting with students who are new to me and on maintaining and enriching the links that I have with others with whom I’ve had tutorials/induction sessions. Writing to them individually and sending resources and research materials, I’ve also been running online practical demonstrations. These show particular skills and techniques whilst incorporating as much resource material as possible showing these in the context of work by other artists.
I also have one-to-one tutorials which allow me to get a sense of how that person’s work is developing in lockdown. My main aim being to encourage and enable students to continue to develop learning literacies, for the most part, in a domestic setting with often very limited making options. Helping them to access what is available to them online, I put them in contact with other specialist technicians and also alert them to talks and lectures. I aim to be as supportive as I can and work with them to find work-arounds for projects that they are working on during lock-down. This can relate to technical issues associated with making but also to suggest as wide a resource base as possible. I choose to show the demonstrations from a desk in a bedroom to demonstrate that we are all working with the same constraints.
I try to maintain what would normally be my role as studio technician; having daily contact – This would usually be informal as I walk around the spaces, so I try to make the tutorials quite light-touch and friendly. Talking to students face-to-face on a screen is a very different prospect to talking in front of a piece of their work so we often look at their padlets whilst I am offer as much encouragement as I can paired with critical feedback.