dismantling the curriculum in higher education

Professor Richard Hall

@hallymk1 rhall1@dmu.ac.ukrichard-hall.org

Bishop Grosseteste University // 22 June 2015

1. The curriculum amplifies crises of sociability

2. The curriculum reinforces relations of production and therefore power

3. Is it possible to enact #educationalrepair?

1. Technological and organisational forms of production, exchange and consumption.

2. Relations to nature and the environment.

3. Social relations between people.

4. Mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs.

5. Labour processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects.

6. Institutional, legal and governmental arrangements.

7. The conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction.

Harvey, D. (2010), The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism. London: Profile Books.

Value emerges as a form of sociability (as capital) from the unity of three circuits. It is formed of moments of the circulation of money, of production, and of commodities. The self-expansion of value is “the determining purpose, as the compelling motive.”

Marx, K. 1885. Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 4. London: Penguin.

Accumulated value, and the power that flows from it, means that other forms of human or humane value in the production of commodities are marginalised.

Jappe, A. 2014. Towards a History of the Critique of Value. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. 25(2): 11

Without radical changes to how universities were financed however it was going to be difficult to change their behaviour. Now there is an opportunity to use our funding changes to push a real cultural change back towards teaching

Willetts, D. 2013. Robbins Revisited: Bigger and Better Higher Education. London: Social Market Foundation. http://bit.ly/1mhl2By

substantial cuts to departmental spending – even in areas of previous policy priority such as science or education – may be needed in order to deliver the level of fiscal consolidation required under the government’s current plans.

Crawford, C., Crawford, R., and Jin, W. 2014. The Outlook for Higher Education Spending by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Institute for Fiscal Studies, Report R86, p. 30.

personal tutoring; peer mentoring; internationalisation/MOOCs; learning

analytics; teaching excellence framework; learning gain/the HEAR; NSS, and assessment

and feedback; DSA; employability/the FEER; scholarship/REF; and on; and on; and on; and

on; and on.

without considering pedagogical design and delivery rooted in: communities of practice; social learning theory; assessment for/of learning; autonomous learning; student-as-producer; constructivism or connectivism; or whatever tickles us.

c.f. IFS. 2015. Reforms to student finances will have complex and far-reaching effects. http://bit.ly/1QATgFA

Zerohedge. 2015. The Treasury's Worst-Case Scenario: Over $3.3 Trillion In Student Loans In A Decade. http://bit.ly/1JREBlf

“At the heart of it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future”.

Mason, P. 2011. 20 reasons why it is kicking off everywhere: http://bbc.in/hSZ3Ak

• counter-measures cannot resolve the underlying problems of the system, rooted in expansion and accumulation

• counter-measures undermine capitalism’s legitimacy

c.f. Krugman, Roberts, Summers

Cleaver, H. 1993. Theses on the Secular Crisis. See: http://bit.ly/1Bfywwl

“a new disease… technological unemployment.”

“This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”

J.M. Keynes. 1930. Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.

http://read.bi/1iWbTkW

A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity.

While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds.

Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions.

US Joint Forces Command. 2010. Joint Operating Environment. http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/joe2010.pdf

USA Energy Information Administration, International Energy Outlook 2013. http://1.usa.gov/1i7iyWn

USA Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2009. http://bit.ly/1hSKa01

our prediction of small further increases in world oil production comes at the expense of a near doubling, permanently, of real oil prices over the coming decade.

This is uncharted territory for the world economy…

the macroeconomic effects of binding resource constraints could be much larger, more persistent, and they would extend well beyond the oil sector.

IMF Working Paper WP/12/109. 2012. The Future of Oil: Geology versus Technology. http://bit.ly/Qy4EoO

IPCC. 2014. Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. http://1.usa.gov/1hR6qr1

are our curricula simply making us more efficiently unsustainable?

the curriculum and the reproduction of power

Education markets are one facet of the neoliberal strategy to manage the structural crisis of capitalism by opening the public sector to capital accumulation.

Lipman, P. 2011. Neoliberal Education RestructuringDangers and Opportunities of the Present Crisis. Monthly Review,

63(3). http://bit.ly/qDl6sV

1. Networks of power and affinity, that enable the re-production of ‘geographies of social relationships’.

2. Networks form shifting assemblages of activity and relationships that reinforce hegemonic power.

3. Transnational activist networks consisting of:i. academics and think tanks;ii. policy-makers and administrators;iii. finance capital and private equity funds;iv. media corporations and publishers;v. philanthropists/hedge-funds interested in CSR.

Aim to regulate the state for enterprise and the market.

Ball, S. 2012. Global Education Inc. London: Routledge.

the sociability of academic work is altered:

1.for exchange > use

2.university reorganisation = efficiency + productivity

3.a structural adjustment policy that reshapes the relationships between academics and students

Lord Young, adviser to the Prime Minister on small business and enterprise: http://bit.ly/1l5iY3Z

The Coalition government has quietly put in place a series of measures designed to support a new performance metric: repayment of loans by course and institution. It could become the one metric to dominate all others and will be theorised under the rubric of ‘human capital investment’.

The Small Business, Enterprise and Employability Act received Royal Assent at the end of March 2015. Section Six of the bill is titled ‘Education Evaluation’…:

[The measures] will also help to create an incentive and reward structure at universities by distinguishing the universities that are delivering the strongest enterprise ethos and labour market outcomes for their students.

McGettigan, A. 2015. The Treasury View of HE: variable human capital investment. Political Economy Research Centre.

At Pearson, when we ask ourselves how we can help to achieve that goal of doubling the amount of really high value learning, we think about four things:

being more global; being more mobile; thinking holistically; being absolutely obsessed with learning outcomes

“building an ever-wider range of bigger and more complex standalone products and services to participating in more open, interoperable educational ‘ecosystems’, centered around learners”

Pearson’s Five Trillion Dollar Question: http://bit.ly/1iaRaMp

Bain and Company (2012, http://bit.ly/11h3YsD):

• seize opportunities to use exportable services to increase revenues and profits [MOOCs; accreditation; student support]

• upgrade low-tech products into premium consumer goods and services [curriculum content; learning analytics]

• services bound by physical geography made portable [mobile]

• leading universities in the advanced economies can accelerate the training of home-grown specialists in emerging economies

• by importing the talent of highly-skilled professionals from companies in developed markets, businesses in the emerging markets will not need to wait a generation for their own education systems to produce a skilled workforce

Curriculum innovations sold to higher education as personalisation, or retention, or employability, or whatever:

•in response to the development of a world market;

•making previously marginal sectors of the economy explicitly productive, including the family;

•as a way of leveraging the ratio of the total surplus-value produced in society to the total capital invested; and

•as a revolutionising of the means of production.

the colonisation of the soul:the curriculum and anxiety

The difficulty of living in a society dominated by value necessarily leads to the creation of all sorts of ideologies to explain the suffering caused by such a society and that enable the subjects of labour to project onto others the qualities that they are forced to expel from themselves.

[e.g. uncreative, luddite, poorly performing, failing, coasting, disruptive, troubled, whatever]

Jappe, A. 2014. Towards a History of the Critique of Value. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. 25(2): 11

Culturally acceptable self-harming acts or activities

Turp, M. 2001. Hidden Self-Harm: Narratives from Psychotherapy. London: Jessica Kingsley

the University’s functions now are being redesigned so that they reproduce a sense of anxiety as a permanent state of exception inside teams and individuals

Hall, R. 2014. Notes on the University as anxiety machine. http://bit.ly/1vK36sN

#educationalrepair

Dismantling the Masters house: http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk c.f. Why isn’t my professor black? Why is the curriculum white?#rhodesmustfall #educationalrepair

Canonical curriculum... gives rise to a very narrow and particular epistemology designed to maintain control of information, of knowledge, of history, of society, and of self.

Whiteness, in the singular way in which it was constructed, is itself an bastardization of a wide variety of European cultures; it is itself a distorted reflection. It can only give rise to a monstrous curriculum.

There is currently a movement on both sides of the Atlantic in which university students... are urging their institutions of higher learning to actually lead society in cultivating safe spaces for higher levels of conversation around racial equality.

Boyd, Z. 2014. Reflections on a #WhiteCurriculum. http://bit.ly/1MZkmAI

1. de-valuing diverse contributions2. mainstreaming a narrower perspective on the

world3. characterizing academic thought as not ‘for’

thinkers from other traditions

4. limiting classroom discussions5. fostering the myth of white epistemological

superiority6. cultivating false connections between

representation and superiority/inferiority7. silencing/alienating students that value concepts

and ideas not espoused by a white curriculum

Boyd, Z. 2014. Reflections on a #WhiteCurriculum. http://bit.ly/1MZkmAI

The universal power of education to transform lives for the better feels more urgent in Africa, too... In a PWC survey of 1,330 global CEOs, over half report concerns about finding the right talent to reach business targets.

Fallon, J. African Outcomes. http://bit.ly/1feY1E3

A critical question is whether the Western tradition has the intellectual resources within to transform itself and come to terms with the historical effects and traces of racism that are invested in our institutions and in our knowledge traditions.

we are only at the very beginning of this process of transformation and the UCL collective has initiated a student-led movement that has the potential to provoke and demand curriculum change.

Peters, M. 2015. Why is My Curriculum White?, Educational Philosophyand Theory, 47:7. DOI:

10.1080/00131857.2015.1037227

Adaptation•place and context specific•complementary actions across levels, from individuals to governments reducing vulnerability and exposure to present climate variability•contingent on societal values, objectives, and risk perceptions. Recognition of diverse interests, circumstances, social-cultural contexts, and expectations•sensitive to context and the diversity of decision types, decision processes, and constituencies•economic instruments can foster adaptation by providing incentives

but•constraints can interact to impede adaptation•short-termism or failing to anticipate consequences can result in maladaptation•limited evidence indicates a gap between global adaptation needs and funds•co-benefits, synergies, and tradeoffs exist between mitigation and adaptation

IPCC. 2014. Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.http://1.usa.gov/1hR6qr1

• academics and activists• a network of learning groups designed to promote

political-economic literacy• democratise discussion over how and why our

society is organised, and what can be done• to cultivate critical political economic literacy• concrete social action

• all knowledge is co-produced• no teachers or students: self-critical scholarly

communities• open, critical dialogue is foundational

• all feel entitled and able to teach• all feel safe, respected, and supported

to trigger and coordinate a global participatory process and immediate national application for the change of productive matrix towards a society of open and common knowledge in Ecuador

The conceptual, philosophical and economic process and the historical and socio-cognitive context framework, the organizational principles governing the process, collaborative and communicative digital tools and advance planning of the whole process.

FLOK Society. 2014. General Framework Document to implement the Ecuadorian National Plan for Good Living (2009). http://bit.ly/1pYHW7w

Might we build a curriculum that is engaged and full of care, and where we no longer simply learn to internalise, monitor and manage our own alienation?

That learning process comes easiest to those of us who also believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students.

To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.

bell hooks. 1994. Teaching to Transgress, p. 13.

[To be engaged] invites us always to be in the present, to remember that the classroom is never the same.

Traditional ways of thinking about the classroom stress the opposite paradigm—that the classroom is always the same even when students are different.

To me, the engaged classroom is always changing. Yet this notion of engagement threatens the institutionalized practices of domination.

When the classroom is truly engaged, it’s dynamic. It’s fluid. It’s always changing.

bell hooks. 1994. Teaching to Transgress, p. 158

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