Category: Uncategorized

East is a Big Bird

I watched ‘Moana‘ the other night. Artistically beautiful but debatable cultural politics (for example see here).

I note this because it reminded me about ‘East is a Big Bird’ by Thomas Gladwin that I read ‘back in the day’ (It was published in 1970).

I just picked it up again after the film. A book of its time. It begins with a question that was hot then (in the 1960s): why do schools “…keep penalizing children for the poverty into which they have unwillingly been born…” He investigates this with a ‘study’ of the lives and seafaring expertise of pacific islanders while living among them.

How does this answer the queation … ? … read the book!

It’s a relevant question for educators today. The rise of endemic homelessness (which really began to take off under Thatcher) and widespread food and energy poverty is visible to all yet denied by politicians. Food and warmth – in a rich society such as ours everyone has some right to expect these.

In education, however, we seem to continue on basically the same path as Gladwin had observed (as did many educators at the time). While too many of today’s children endure the misery of poverty, national policy in education has been devoted into ensuring that the ineffective becomes more efficient, i.e. educating kids (and adults) in the same old discriminatory manner. We had hoped that was on the way out at the the end of the 1970s …

How wrong we were … *sobs quietly*

Postscipt: don’t take tis the wrong way. Terrific work is done all day and every day by thousands of teachers fighting the circumstances that constrain both them and their charges are in …

EdTech and Social Control

Sorry the post title is a bit OTT, but it’s direct (until I find a better one)!

  1. Starting point is Basil Bernstein who said, ,to paraphrase, ‘all society is pedagogical’. Something like that. There used to be a word in common use in the 70s: ‘socialisation’. Not much now.
  2. It is useful because it implies an active process on integration. It is therefore pedagogical because it involves the transmission of social and cultural mores. However, the word ‘socialisation’ alone does not imply any particular character of the integration. It is simply a process, how we become participants in any kind of community no matter how good … or how bad, as large as a nation, or smaller than a household.
  3. Socialisation is ongoing, lifelong. It never stops so that over time, for example, values that were once held true can become transgressive.
  4. There is no clear boundary, nor can there be, between daily life in a community and the place that technology plays in enabling, disrupting, ‘nudging’, or sometimes blocking activities.
  5. This is a dynamic process for all technologies which can be both a result of earlier social situations as well as a cause of social change.
  6. Change is usually incremental (or ‘normal’ in a Kuhnian sense) and occasionally revolutionary (‘extraordinary’ in a Kuhnian sense).
  7. Edtech is intimately woven into the lifelong socialisation of all members of a society

Notes:

Thomas Hillman (@thomhillman) tweeted at 7:05 am on Fri, Apr 01, 2022:

People often ask me how the platformization of education is different from educational technology in general. The big difference is that the center of coordination changes. We’ve moved from technology in classrooms to classrooms in technology. (https://twitter.com/thomhillman/status/1509773871901196289?t=dAIoKvfwLYYkQP_dCAEhXQ&s=03)