Transcript - Society for Research into Higher Education

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Head in the Clouds and Feet on
the Ground:
Structuring Knowledge in an Age of Non-Structure
Ronald Barnett, Institute of Education, London
SRHE Higher Education Theory Symposium
Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 25-26 June 2012.
[email protected]
Centre for Higher
Education Studies
Aims
 Preliminary reflections on knowledge in the context of
higher education
 Exposing some problems
 Linking knowledge, curriculum and the student experience
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A recent episode
• St Mary’s Univ College incident
– What is a course of study in higher education?
– In a marketised age, another principle enters – that of customer appeal
• Bernstein – ‘recontextualisation’ (from discipline to curriculum; from K in
a field of discovery to K in a field of T; but also now to a field of Lng)
• & here, an intervening recontextualisation, from discipline to marketing/
projection/ presentation in the public domain.
• So a course of study is an amalgam; not simply K as such; but K put to
work through a range of operating principles.
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Epistemological assumptions
• That the requisite forms of knowledge can be identified in advance and segmented into bona
fide packages
• That that recontextualisation can undergo straightforwardly a further recontextualisation as the
curriculum is appropriated by the student so as to form a coherent educational experience
• But now:
• Knowledge is less characterized by structure and more characterized by spaces of meaningmaking (cf ‘Mode 2 knowledge) – a consequence of a new stage in the knowledge society, in
which the means, the nature and the ownership of the production of knowledge are decentred
(cf Michael P contrib)
• student learning is increasingly situated amid fuzzy ‘ethno-epistemic assemblages’ (knowledge
itself liquifies)
– [this is not to deny ‘knowledge’ – on the contrary]
• And students’ formal learning has its place among students’ total lifewide learning experiences.
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Some questions
• Can boundaries or anchorings be found for knowledge?
• Can boundaries or anchorings be found for curricula construction?
• Can anchorings be found for students’ experiences and their learning?
• Can some structure be found in situation that is triply complex and fluid?
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Bhaskar’s critical realism
• Three layers of knowledge
– Empirical
– Actual
– Real
This generates a significant difference between ontology and
epistemology: we can (and should be) ontological realists while
allowing for epistemological difference and creativity.
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The significance of the imagination
• We should add a fourth level of knowing in/of the world –
the imagination
• Through the imagination, our knowledge of the real forms
• But also, thro the imagination, we may identify ways in
which the world falls short of its possibilities, exhibits
‘absences’
– And could be other than it is.
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Forms of the imagination
The imagination does not possess a unity but exhibits many
forms:
- Ideological imagination
- Utopian imagination
- Fantastic imagination
- Self-indulgent imagination
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Imagination & ‘(not) living in the real world’
- the imagination faces the charge that it is not living in the
real world.
- but not the case that the imagination is necessarily
separated from the world.
-To the contrary: poets live in the real world! They engage
very directly with the real world.
- But, to some extent, they circumvent knowledge; and they
add to knowledge in the process.
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The curriculum – a project of the
imagination
• The forming of a curriculum is necessarily an imaginative
project
• It reaches out
• Its elements are choices
• And increasingly across fields of knowing and acting
(multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary)
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Learning – a further project of the
imagination
• Higher education – an entry into strangeness
• An encounter with/ initiation into symbolic forms/ structures
• But that calls for the exercise of the imagination on the
student’s part
• To see something previously seen as an x now as a y.
• (Hence, eg, a construct such as ‘the sociological
imagination’)
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The problematic exposed
Actually, a double problematic:
1 The calls of the world and of the imagination
• - are they opposed?
• To be a student: to have one’s head in the clouds and one’s feet on the
ground?
2 The educator’s dilemma: structure or openness? (Furrowing or
nomadism?)
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The play of the imagination
• To be effective, the imagination is highly structured
• Any creative act – even in art, writing, poetry, music – is not only
structured but has its place against a (moving) horizon of rightness
(which the creative act extends)
• Further, the exercise of the imagination – to see an x as a y – is to enter
a dialogic community; the x is a collective representation; the y is a
relational entreaty (a dialogue between the author and the audience)
• Imaginative play takes place against a horizon of boundaries, much as it
might (and should) break through those boundaries.
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Demands of the imagination
•
•
•
•
It follows that the exercise of the imagination is highly demanding
It takes place in a real community (part of the real world)
& within a horizon/ lifeworld of discursive assumptions and social facts
The commas matter (and their equivalent in all forms of shared
experience, understanding and imagination)
• (Is this not why there is hand-ringing over the state of students’ basic
linguistic and symbolic competences – their inability to connect with the
norms of the relevant community?)
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So smoothness and striations
•
•
•
•
Smoothness and striations
Nomadism among the trees
Multiplicities/ lines of flight - & rules of procedure/ velocity
The student is given space/ freedom even while being held
within the furrows of the field in question
• (again, these relationships will vary, depending on the field)
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Recap
Levels of the argument:
- The world (ontology)
- Knowledge (epistemology)
(these are not to be confused)
- Curriculum (ways into knowledge)
- Student and her/ his learning & becoming (personal authentic
understanding – ‘knowing’)
[NB: These relationships (1) hold for all disciplines; (2) are profoundly different
across disciplines (sciences/ humanities/ professional fields/ creative arts]
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And what of the student?
• The student has being in all of this;
• Her/ his being
• And unfolding/ becoming
– Lines of becoming, of ‘deterritoritalization’ of the student
• In higher education, is it to be constrained?
• Yes – but infinite possibilities for self-realisation
• The formation of the student’s (necessary) dispositions
• - but also his/her (variable) qualities
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(necessary) dispositions
•
•
•
•
•
•
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A will to learn
A will to engage
A preparedness to listen
A preparedness to explore
A willingness to hold oneself open to experiences
A determination to keep going forward
(variable) qualities
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
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Integrity
Carefulness
Courage
Resilience
Self-discipline
Restraint
Respect for others
Openness
Creativity
Independence
Collaborative
Dispositions and qualities compared
• Both dispositions and qualities are natural concomitants of a genuine higher
education (in which the student is stretched by the demands of a field)
• The dispositions are necessary
• There is optionality and variability in the qualities
• There is here both structure and openness (in the becoming of the student)
– A double structure in the presence of the world (even in the humanities
and creative arts) and in the presence of the intellectual field
– And a double openness in the increasing openness of the intellectual
field and in the student’s authentic becoming in the field.
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And what of the teacher?
• Is there a language for this person?
• A manager of voyaging amid turbulence
• The teacher is janus faced; actually, in professional fields, is looking three
ways at once
• Has a care/ concern in each direction
• (And these days for his/her institution as well)
• Is a guardian of standards (of the field(s)) but also of the student’s infinite
possibilities for flourishing/ becoming
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Conclusions
 A principle of structured becoming emerges
 A structuring at multiple levels
 But this is always as well an unbecoming
 And a new becoming (knowledge, curricula, the
student’s formation)
 Poets need structure! (Language is both structure and infinite openness.)
 The structures allow us glimpses of universality, even while opening
infinite options (for the student; for the teacher; for the university.
 The commas matter, even while there is an infinite options for
expression; for the imagination
 Both head in the clouds and feet on the ground.
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