teaching
Kwame Dawes - What is a decolonial curriculum?
Kwame Dawes, TORCH Visiting Professor, University of Oxford, gives a talk for the workshop, What is a Decolonial Curriculum? Held at TORCH on 28th November 2018. Decolonising the curriculum must mean more than simply including diverse texts. As Dalia Gebrial, one of the editors of the new book, Decolonising the University (Pluto Press, 2018) has written, any student and academic-led decolonisation movement must not only 'rigorously understand and define its terms, but locate the university as just one node in a network of spaces where this kind of struggle must be engaged with. To do this...is to enter the university space as a transformative force
Forward with Classics
A Book at Lunchtime seminar with Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson, Steven Hunt, Dr Mai Musie, Dr Peter Jones (Co-founder, Classics for All), Dr Alex Pryce (Head of Student Recruitment, Oxford), Chaired by Professor Fiona Macintosh (St Hilda's Oxford). Despite their removal from England's National Curriculum in 1988, and claims of elitism, Latin and Greek are increasingly re-entering the 'mainstream' educational arena. Since 2012, there have been more students in state-maintained schools in England studying classical subjects than in independent schools, and the number of schools offering Classics continues to rise in the state-maintained sector. The teaching and learning of Latin and Greek is not, however, confined to the classroom: community-based learning for adults and children is facilitated in newly established regional Classics hubs in evenings and at weekends, in universities as part of outreach, and even in parks and in prisons.
This book investigates the motivations of teachers and learners behind the rise of Classics in the classroom and in communities, and explores ways in which knowledge of classical languages is considered valuable for diverse learners in the 21st century. The role of classical languages within the English educational policy landscape is examined, as new possibilities exist for introducing Latin and Greek into school curricula. The state of Classics education internationally is also investigated, with case studies presenting the status quo in policy and practice from Australasia, North America, the rest of Europe and worldwide. The priorities for the future of Classics education in these diverse locations are compared and contrasted by the editors, who conjecture what strategies are conducive to success.
About the Authors
Edited by Arlene Holmes-Henderson, Steven Hunt and Mai Musie.
Arlene Holmes-Henderson is the postdoctoral researcher for the Classics in Communities project in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford, as well as an experienced teacher of Classics in both Scotland and England.
Steven Hunt is the Subject Lecturer of the PGCE in Classics at the University of Cambridge. He taught Classics for over twenty years in state comprehensive schools and is author of Starting to Teach Latin (Bloomsbury, 2016).
Mai Musie is a co-founder of the 'Classics in Communities' project and Knowledge Exchange Officer within the Knowledge Exchange and Impact Team, Oxford. She has recently completed her PhD thesis on the Representation of Persians in the Ancient Novel.
Contributors: Mary Beard, Arlene Holmes-Henderson, Steven Hunt, Mai Musie, Emma Searle, Lucy Jackson Michael Scott, Emily Matters, Paula Corrêa, John Bulwer, Barbara Bell, Jane Maguire, Rowlie Darby, Lorna Robinson, Xavier Murray-Pollock, Peter Olive, Olivia Sanchez, and Nicola Felton, Corrie Schumann, Lana Theron, Patrick Ryan, Francesca Richards, Evelien Bracke, Aisha Khan-Evans, James Robson, Emma-Jayne Graham, Kathryn Tempest and Edith Hall.
Bernard Crick Award for Teaching
During my recent time in Britain, I very much enjoyed attending and presenting at the 2016 Political Studies Association (PSA) annual conference, which was in Brighton this year. I was delighted to be awarded the main prize of the Sir Bernard Crick Award for Outstanding Teaching for 2015 by the PSA, which has been exceptionally chaired by Matthew Flinders in recent years.
One of the reasons that these awards are so important is due to the recognition they grant to the centrality of teaching in the modern university and the acknowledgement of the time and effort we all put into that role alongside and informing our research. It is an honour to be alongside the PSA’s past winners and I have been bowled-over by the goodwill messages from people since the news broke.
My approach to pedagogy embraces what Ian Angus in Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment has called a process of co-questioning: the teacher does not already have all the answers but enhances the ability to confront the questions, alongside students, in a dialogical process of co-questioning. Hence the social function of teaching is about “loving the questions”.
Over the years, across a range of courses, I have strived to deliver a whole series of teaching innovations in and beyond the classroom to enliven class and tutorial discussion and promote alternative cultural, national, and linguistic experiences. Most recently, my activities have focused on delivering new political economy courses at the University of Sydney, including my unit ECOP2613 ‘The Political Economy of Global Capitalism’.
This second-year course covers past classics in political economy, from Karl Marx to Karl Polanyi, Leon Trotsky to Rosa Luxemburg as well as contemporary classics in the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood, Charles Post, Jairus Banaji, David Harvey, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, J.K. Gibson-Graham, David Ruccio, and Yanis Varoufakis.
Among a series of innovations, one of my approaches to prompt independent student learning has been pursued through a series of ‘Piketty Digests’. With 2014 marked by the public popularity of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (selling more than 1.5 million copies), I have integrated my teaching on capitalist inequalities through such digests, which are chapter-by-chapter weekly summaries of the book in 800 words. These Piketty Digests have been introduced on ECOP2613 through my blog site For the Desk Drawer (and reblogged on Progress in Political Economy) and disseminated to the students through learning platforms. Such short interpretative digests have delivered an original form of engagement with the book that features on the course, intrinsically related to the learning outcomes of the unit of study taught.
As detailed in my #edtech talk to the Institute of Teaching and Learning at the University of Sydney, entitled ‘Blogging as Pedagogy’ (15 May 2015), these ‘Piketty Digests’ have been central to relaying the historical and institutional aspects of the development of the capitalist world economy before and since 1945, including analysis of international inequalities. The Digests have thus proven to be an invaluable learning platform supplementing additional innovations introduced in and beyond ECOP2613 across the whole of my teaching. They also, year-on-year, remain useful tools, accessible in a one-stop location: http://bit.ly/1HbARrC.
It was Antonio Gramsci that once stated that ‘the relationship between teacher and pupil is active and reciprocal so that every teacher is always a pupil and every pupil a teacher’. Every year the content and form of my teaching changes and my students challenge me to co-question and “love the questions” posed by political economy.
Indeed, the yearly cohort of students taking political economy—or ECOP—units never cease to amaze me with their knowledge, activism, commitment and high achievement. ECOP students are a privilege to teach and it was all the more rewarding to pick up the Bernard Crick Award and to feel energised by their enthusiasm in the classroom that has led to this prize.
Thank you!