BECOMING AND NOT JUST KNOWING- A FUNDALMENTAL ATTUNEMENT

High level skills or practices: a new lifelong learning

curriculum?

The Higher Education Background

People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.

The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based notions of IT support are decentralized.

The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student projects are structured.

The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators and learners.

Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning, and collaborative models.

There is a growing emphasis of learning for economic purposes and political intervention.

The dark shadow of current policy is problematic for ontological education

The idea

Placing learning collaborations through practices centrally in our worlds

Helping put realised practical (but not in a technological or managerial) sense of identity through a will to be responsibility through (lifelong) practices

Develop a diversity of provision which is relevant, accountable and life long for all by realising practical identity - a complex jumble of concepts which ‘give rise to reasons and obligations’

Forgoing truth as correspondence or representative in favour of the authority of the community (after Rorty)

How effective is our current system?All individuals aged between 16 and 64 in England

Highest qualification

% In employment

% with award in graduate level jobs

(SOC 1-3) %Higher Degree 88 78

NVQ 5 87 48First Degree 85 66

Foundation Degree 82 50

HND/HNC 83 50In Europe 83.9% with higher skills are employed, 70.6% with medium and 48.1% with low level skills (EC, 2020)

The EU labor market sends a strong skills message

A recent EC Expert Group report (New skills for New jobs; Action now, 2010) identifies four priorities for action:

(a) investing in skills requires the right incentives for individuals and employers;

(b) the worlds of education, training, and work need to be brought together;

(c) the right mix of skills needs to be developed (job-related as well as transferable); and

(d) future skills needs have to be better anticipated

Practices not skills

Our communities are where practices are enacted; the form of the community creates a background for action and learned functional skills are only the price of entry

Practices act to socialise us into ‘what it is to be a human being that is already contained in social practices (Dreyfus, 1992: 23

Practical Identity

The practices and rituals we adopt are central then to our being and are realised through our practices.

These practices can be developed to higher levels where capabilities are present and where mastery can flourish.

To reveal higher levels of knowledge, techniques and skills in practice does not need a university classroom or academic disciplines but a way of acknowledging higher levels of skill in practice

AgencyI, WE or Deferred

Community of Workers’ University

The proposed entity for practice based ontological education

The Community of Workers’ University, Disciplines no longer provide legitimacy, and

knowledge is created in and through competences, capabilities, practices and judgement,

Shifts the focus away from the epistemological hegemony of disciplinary knowledge to the justified belief of a pragmatic ontology of praxis.

A FOCUS which seeks to edifying, emancipating, democratic and economically relevant

A FOCUS for ontological education

The Community of Workers University

What is proposed is a reappraisal of what a university might be.

Knowledge is not located outside the community to be taken into it, rather a flourishing learning space that blurs boundaries between theory and practice in ways directed as social action and self-fulfilment

A place where the will of social justice can be realised in a practical identity

The edifying conversations serve to make it easier for the community to accommodate each of our edifying projects and to root those projects in the shared tradition from which they initially drew their resources

The Community of Workers’ University

The audience would be defined in wider terms that previously; the university tutors would be within, rather than external to the arrangement, and the burden of funding would fall more on the student and the community perhaps with access to government grants and loans.

The University would not be for profit and the localized provision by tutors acting as facilitators of learning, based on real life situations,

It takes as its premise that all learning, not just that which can be codified, is important to the transformative development of individuals

The edifying conversations serve to make it easier for the community to accommodate each of our edifying projects and to root those projects in the shared tradition from which they initially drew their resources

The phenomenology of practice: A currere for

practical identity

This phenomenological analysis of practice leads to a proposed a curriculum to support a self-constituted willed understanding and identity or currere for practice in the becoming of; specifically, here, the practice associated with university level education.

Cureere

A phenomenological understanding of how a currere reconceptualises curriculum from a course outline to what Pinar calls “a complicated conversation” (ibid, p.47).

A conversation within self and with others as an on-going project which creates a discourse through practices which recognise the differences between the university and the spaces within which practice exists and functions.

The conceptual development

Curriculum of Practices for transfomation

Currere

In a developmental senses is taken specifically to be:

Specifically a currere reflects the embodiment of being through practice in any social setting but specifically the workplace and as such it can inspire curriculum practice that creates a lucid and legitimate thinking of the potential of humans

(i) A currere of practical identity

The separation between workplace and educational institution is dissolved into a new practice that spans the provision of capabilities, address the relationship between joint and personal agency.

It would be constituted using contextualise and conceptual knowledge through a historicity of practice

The conceptual knowledge requirement to engage in professional practices are scaffolded to match the needs of emerging of the practices and the Practice

(ii) Pedagogy

A move from an exclusive didactic dominated conceptual form to a broader pedagogical base

The pedagogical tempo and the relationship between conceptual and contextual knowledges are delivered as an integrated whole to encourage participation in professional practice and to subsequently support professional becoming.

Not add on but integration

Quality (iii)

The responsibility for quality to be the degree awarding institution’s jointly with the professional body, employer association or relevant body;

The duration of the professional practice degree to be a function of the professions need, not a pre-set time period for all degrees

The ontological stance of the professional would be supported through continued professional development which would inform practice and conceptual knowledge revealed through practices.

As

Assessment (iii)

The assessment to be commonly assessed against a set of agreed criteria by all stakeholders in respect of the contribution made to the practice degree in terms of learning outcomes.

This “shifts the emphasis from the duration of learning and the institution where it takes place to the actual learning and the knowledge, skills and competences that have been or should be acquired through the learning” (CEDEFOP, 2011)

Final thoughts

This presentation envisions all high level vocational education as professional.

It suggests ways of radically restructuring the barriers between work and educational institutions by dissolving them in the phenomenological furnace of professional practice.

This requires a special understanding of professional higher education and is an addition to the conceptual notion of university and the skills version of vocational education.

An argument has been made for this to be progressed through a radical revision of the higher education professional and vocational curriculum along the phenomenological lines of a currere, an ontological education for becoming.