Robin Small
NEOLIBERALISM AND EDUCATION WORKSHOP
BISA IPEG/BLT Workshop and Film Screening: Education Meets Neoliberalism and the Political Economy of Precarity
Location: University of Middlesex (MDX), Hendon. Town Hall, Committee Room 3
Date and time: 14 February, 2014, 10.30 – 19.00
Co-sponsors: BISA-International Political Economy Group (IPEG, Convenor Phoebe Moore) and BISA- Learning and Teaching Working Group (BLT, Convenor Steven Curtis, London Metropolitan University, Higher Education Academy)
Local organisers: Phoebe Moore (MDX Law), Elizabeth Cotton (MDX Business), Merilin Nurmsalu (MDX Law)
All welcome. Please email Merilin Nurmsalu merilin.nurmsalu@gmail.com with interest in attending for catering purposes.
This workshop will critically examine the political economy of current changes in education policy in the United Kingdom and internationally as it has impacted and impacts marginalized groups as well as educators. Discussions will touch on the political economy of precarity and ask difficult questions about the flexilisation of the labour market and how it is reflected in every level of education from early schooling to adult, community, higher and trade union education and training. Participants will look at changes to education in all levels of education from secondary to University, adult, community and trade union education including the depoliticisation of pedagogies and curricula. Further challenges are brought about through introduction of new technologies including distance learning, online administration and new performance indicators, all of which we will argue can be appropriated for critical use.
The changing role of educators will be assessed as we look at critical pedagogies, the seen purpose for private involvement in education and the concept of ‘employability’, internships and possibilities for critique and intervention. In that light we invite educators, public intellectuals and trade unionists who look at the need for specific absences to be revisited. This also includes critical investigations around the understanding of the dangers of precarity for mental health, the costs of precarity for educators and students, political trade union education and the waning of working class and disability representation in recent education policy as well as the classroom.
This event is intentionally set to run the day after a very important event on similar themes run by Maureen Spencer, Heather Clay and Alan Durant entitled ‘The state, the university and liberal education: a complex relationship between piper and tune’ on Hendon campus on 13th February. Please email Christiana Rose for more details about this c.rose@mdx.ac.uk .
14th February programme:
10 – 10.30 Coffee/tea, registration
10.30 – 11.30 Plenary speaker: Matthew Watson University of Warwick, ‘Taking the Classroom into the Community’
Chair: Phoebe Moore
11.30 – 12.30 Plenary speaker: Mike Neary University of Lincoln, ‘Pedagogy of Excess: an alternative political economy for student life’
Chair: Steven Curtis
12.30 – 1.15 Lunch. Over lunch, Steven Curtis, Politics and Economics Lead for the Higher Education Academy (HEA) will take the opportunity to chat to participants about the support that the HEA offers university educators.
1.15 – 3.15 The Future of Trade Union Education (Workshop one)
Plenary speaker: Jo Cain, Head of Education for Unison, on the future of trade union education: perspectives from Unison
Chair: Elizabeth Cotton
Participants: Ian Manborde, Elizabeth Cotton, Martin Upchurch, Education for Action (Phoebe Moore, Kirsten Forkert, Miguel Martinez Lucio), Industrial Officer PCS, NUT, organiser for domestic workers
3.15 – 5.15 Community Education and beyond (Workshop two)
Plenary speaker: Joyce Canaan, Birmingham Radical Education (BRE(A)D) on critical thinking and practice and countering capitalist ‘realisms’
Chair: Steven Curtis
Participants: Annabel Kiernan, Dave Hill, Johnna Montgomerie, People’s Political Economy (Laura Hill and Sarah Kunz)
5.15 – 7.00 Film screening We will screen, and Director Luke Fowler will lead a discussion about his incredible 61 minute film ‘The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott’ which is a beautiful documentary about the Marxist historian Edward Palmer (E. P.) Thompson, who was employed by the Workers’ Education Association (WEA) from 1946, aged 24, to teach adults in the industrial towns of the West Riding. These WEA classes were open to people for whom university education was not previously available.
See: http://lux.org.uk/collection/works/poor-stockinger-luddite-cropper-and-deluded-followers-joanna-southcott
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