CREEW seminar schedule 2004
June 11th
Rob Steventon: Early experiences of conversational analysis
June 25th
Susan Owen: Situativity theory and teacher professional development
July 30th
Annie Campbell, Bruce Johnson and colleagues: Project management in research
August 5th
Mike Newman: Teaching for sustainable, vigorous and defiant societies
September 3rd
Helen Raduntz: Intellectual property issues in educational research: A Marxian dialectical critique
The presentation discussion seeks to highlight why the ownership of intellectual property is an important and contentious
issue among researchers, including education researchers, as big business becomes increasingly dependent on the commercial
exploitation of potentially lucrative education services, in particular higher education.
The paper discusses: 1) why intellectual property, especially in the current phase of capitalisms' evolution, has a market price on its head; 2) the dynamics underlying the capitalist market's economy's incursions into the field of education; and 3) the implications of the corporate takeover of intellectual property for the quality of education and research in particular, and the quality of social life generally.
Helen Raduntz is an Adjunct Research Fellow attached to CREEW who completed her doctorate in 2001 in which she developed a Marxian dialectical critique for her thesis study on contemporary trends in education and teachers' work. On the basis of her thesis critique she is now pursuing research into various aspects of the impact, currently and in the foreseeable future, of the capitalist market penetration into the field of education and research not only on a global scale but also at national levels.
September 17th
Peter Willis: Mentorship, transformation and compassion: adult education approaches to research supervision
Humanistic Adult Education theory has tended to highlight the autonomy of the adult learner and the reciprocal relationships
embedded in adult education pedagogy. Postgraduate research supervision, although patently a relationship between adults, has
tended largely to focus on ways of expediting and deepening the knowledge work of the thesis project and, possibly to a lesser
extent, on ways of fostering the skills, confidence and maturity of the research student.
What has not had the same exploration is the nature of the learning relationship between the researcher and the supervisor. This seminar looks at some ways in which adult education theory can illumine some of the learning exchanges in postgraduate supervision.
October 15th
Tom Stehlik: Beyond communities of practice
This is a continuation of the discussion started in August when a number
of colleagues met to plan an edited book around current thinking on
communities of practice and what they might look like in different contexts.
The seminar will begin with a presentation of some theoretical
considerations before turning into a workshop to discuss various case
studies and approaches to writing about communities of practice.
October 22nd
Judith Peters and Rosie Le Cornu: Leaders in transition: Living with paradoxes
Educational leadership in contemporary schools has become a serious
challenge for educators seeking to encourage professionalism among teachers
in a time of differing expectations from the state, parents and the students
themselves.
This paper explores the experiences of school leaders who moved from one school to another, part way through their involvement in the Learning to Learn Project. The transition from schools in which they were acknowledged leaders of learning, to schools where they had to forge this role anew, proved so challenging that some leaders formed a network and met regularly. During 2004 a study was conducted to capture the insights of these leaders about transition and strategies for managing it positively. This paper presents the findings of the study which revealed that for these leaders the challenges of transition were related to paradoxes created by the disjunction between their experiences of leadership in Learning to Learn schools and the expectations of leadership held by some members of the school community in their new schools. Living with these paradoxes over the first year in the new school was emotional and difficult work that required each leader, and the group as a whole, to employ a range of strategies to maintain positive engagement. These strategies, together with the five identified paradoxes, are discussed in this paper.