Jenni Carr, Jennie Osborn and Natasha TaylorTeaching forward: the future of the Social Sciences 21 – 22 May 2014

Connecting with creativity to (re)articulate ‘professional values’

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UK Professional Standards Framework

Areas of activity

Core knowledg

e

Professional values

• Respect individual learners and diverse learning communities;

• Promote participation in higher education and equality of opportunities for learners;

• Use evidence-informed approaches and the outcomes from research, scholarship and continuing professional development;

• Acknowledge the wider context in which higher education operates recognising the implications for professional practice.

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UKPSF: Professional Values

Narrative analysis

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“our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories” (Bateson, 1994, p.110)

“Metaphor has the power to change our reality: words affect concepts and “changes in our conceptual system do change what is real for us and affect how we perceive the world and act upon those perceptions” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, p.146).

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Metaphors

“We always live with multiple subjectivities, but we generally conceal the multiplicity behind a few predictable and typical guises. Poetry invites us to explore the plural identities of human be(com)ings constituted in the play of language.” (Leggo, 2004, p. 12)

“teachers, both beginning and experienced, should learn to know themselves as poets in order to foster living creatively in the pedagogic contexts of classrooms and the larger pedagogic contexts outside classrooms.”(Leggo 2005)

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From narrative to poetry . . .

Jenni Carr, Higher Education Academy

Discourse, Power, Resistance 2014 8 – 10 April 2014

Interpretative repertoires, ideological dilemmas and subject positions

• What is forum theatre?

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Forum theatre

“ a lexicon or register of terms and metaphors drawn upon to characterise and evaluate actions and events”

(Potter and Wetherell, 1987)

• Language itself is a form of practice. We do things when we talk.

• Placing an emphasis on agency within the flexible deployment of language.

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Interpretative repertoires

“lived ideologies…composed of the beliefs, values and practices of a given society…they are not at all coherent or integrated…[but] characterised by inconsistency, fragmentation and contradiction”

(Edley, 2001)

• Overlap with interpretative repertoires, but here the focus is on what we do when we negotiate conflicting repertoires.

• A negotiation that reflects relations of power.

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Ideological dilemmas

“All discourses, then, construct subject positions from which they alone make sense.”

(Hall, 1997)

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Subject positions

Edley, N (2001) ‘Interpretative repertoires, ideological dilemmas and subject positions’ in Wetherell, M. Taylor, S. and Yates, S. (eds.) Discourse as Data, London, Sage

Hall, S (1997) ‘The work of representation’ in Hall, S (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London, Sage

Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour, London, Sage

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References

• Reviewing clip from forum theatre

• Rich pictures and metaphor of ‘the parade’

• Using poetry for critical reflection

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Choice of activities

Question:

Are our analytical approaches useful in terms of evidencing that these activities provide opportunities for people to reflect on their professional values?

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Analytical approaches

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Where is the subject?