Some thoughts following sessions on Day 1 of the Conference, from Russ Law
It was fascinating to see how quickly the different workshops and presentations began to be linked by chance and by some process that somehow seemed inevitable.
In her workshop on interactive conversations, Penelope Best engaged us in a variety of highly mobile physical interactions, in which numerous constructive learning conversations took place. It was notable that the theme of “safety” emerged repeatedly, in the context of “safe space”, or of our sense of increased self-confidence created by the boundaries and limitations set by the facilitator whilst she also motivated us to be truly personally creative and self-expressive. Her role was influential, without being didactic.
There was scope for several days’ worth of discussion and exploration, but in the short time we were together we also touched upon such tantalising notions as:
- the overlap between our personal and our professional identities
- the ways in which we influence each other subtly by the ways in which we phrase things - the words we choose
- the fluidity of identity for the purposes of belonging
- the ambiguity and multiple meanings of images
The role of the teacher was powerful, but as a quiet authority, rather than as one in authority, since we were effectively being liberated by her.
This idea was central to the session that followed, where Lewis Elton talked us through the importance of Wilhelm Humboldt for British universities today. His approach to the session was quite different – we sat in rows – but what we learned about was utterly consonant with Penelope’s session.
Essentially, the radical proposition of Humboldt was that the teacher and the student shared a duty to explore the solutions of as yet unsolved problems. We looked at reasons for not educating the young too specifically, but rather fostering an approach that could be termed (as it was by Professor Elton) “Constructive Anarchy”.
Shaping the metaphor “herding cats” to make it even more powerful, Professor Elton came up with “herding ants”. In other words, a society of individuals with no apparent ruling force can proceed in such a way that they all move towards the same ends. This self-creating system was the purposeless community that Humboldt envisaged. We might connect it to complexity theory today.
The session concluded with a flourish that seemed tailor-made to illustrate one of the aspects of explorativity, namely the serendipitous connections that can inform and illuminate our experiences and our thinking. In his case, the story of Humboldt was brought into strong and colourful relief when Professor Elton was on holiday in Vienna, and encountered the extraordinary architecture of Hundertwasser. This highly original artist’s work was dubbed “anarchitecture” – remember, you heard it here first, from Professor Lewis Elton at the SCEPTrE Conference! The key image was of a building complex that conformed to few expected norms in terms of structure, inhabited by people who amicably occupied it without any sense of need for externally imposed systems, with such traditions as flat floors or well-defined walls.
This rejection of the usual boundaries was to arise again, later, when I was struck by the links between George Allan’s work at Portsmouth and the encouragement we had had from Kevin McCarron to embrace a pedagogy akin to the performance of the stand-up comedian. The specific connection seemed to be the ability to do away with excessively detailed preparation and rigid scripts, in favour of a much more flexible, responsive and two-way process that recognised the essential co-active roles of both teacher/comedian and student/audience. George's Portsmouth paradigm, together with the Manchester Steps that he presented on behalf of his partner Norman Powell, who was kept from the conference by adverse weather, serve to engage the student more fully by going beyond the customary boundaries of session timings, and use inter-session opportunities to support the sharing and reflection processes that deepen understanding, recall and results.
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