NEOLIBERALISM AND
EDUCATION WORKSHOP
BISA IPEG/BLT Workshop and Film Screening: Education
Meets Neoliberalism and the Political Economy of Precarity
Location: University of Middlesex (MDX), Hendon. Town Hall,
Committee Room 3
Date and time: 14 February, 2014, 10.30 – 19.00
Co-sponsors: BISA-International Political Economy Group
(IPEG, Convenor Phoebe Moore) and BISA- Learning and Teaching Working Group
(BLT, Convenor Steven Curtis, London Metropolitan University, Higher Education
Academy)
Local organisers: Phoebe Moore (MDX Law), Elizabeth Cotton (MDX Business),
Merilin Nurmsalu (MDX Law)
This workshop will critically examine the political economy
of current changes in education policy in the United Kingdom and internationally
as it has impacted and impacts marginalized groups as well as educators.
Discussions will touch on the political economy of precarity and ask difficult
questions about the flexilisation of the labour market and how it is reflected
in every level of education from early schooling to adult, community, higher
and trade union education and training. Participants will look at changes to
education in all levels of education from secondary to University, adult,
community and trade union education including the depoliticisation of
pedagogies and curricula. Further challenges are brought about through
introduction of new technologies including distance learning, online
administration and new performance indicators, all of which we will argue can
be appropriated for critical use.
The changing role of educators will be assessed as we look at critical pedagogies,
the seen purpose for private involvement in education and the concept of
‘employability’, internships and possibilities for critique and intervention.
In that light we invite educators, public intellectuals and trade unionists who
look at the need for specific absences to be revisited. This also includes
critical investigations around the understanding of the dangers of precarity
for mental health, the costs of precarity for educators and students, political
trade union education and the waning of working class and disability
representation in recent education policy as well as the classroom.
This event is intentionally set to run the day after a very
important event on similar themes run by Maureen Spencer, Heather Clay and Alan
Durant entitled ‘The state, the university and liberal education: a
complex relationship between piper and tune’ on Hendon campus on
13th February. Please email Christiana Rose for more details about
this c.rose@mdx.ac.uk .
14th February programme:
10 – 10.30 Coffee/tea, registration
10.30 – 11.30 Plenary speaker: Matthew Watson University
of Warwick, 'Taking the Classroom into the
Community'
Chair: Phoebe Moore
11.30 – 12.30 Plenary speaker: Mike Neary University
of Lincoln, 'Pedagogy
of Excess: an alternative political economy for student life'
Chair: Steven Curtis
12.30 – 1.15 Lunch. Over lunch, Steven
Curtis, Politics and Economics Lead for the Higher Education Academy (HEA)
will take the opportunity to chat to participants about the support that the
HEA offers university educators.
1.15 – 3.15 The Future of Trade Union Education (Workshop one)
Plenary speaker: Jo Cain, Head of
Education for Unison, on the future of trade union education: perspectives from
Unison
Chair: Elizabeth Cotton
Participants: Ian Manborde, Elizabeth Cotton, Martin Upchurch, Education for Action (Phoebe Moore, Kirsten
Forkert, Miguel Martinez Lucio),
Industrial Officer PCS, NUT, organiser for domestic workers
3.15 – 5.15 Community Education and beyond (Workshop two)
Plenary speaker: Joyce Canaan,
Birmingham Radical Education (BRE(A)D) on critical thinking and practice and
countering capitalist 'realisms'
Chair: Steven Curtis
Participants: Annabel Kiernan, Dave Hill, Johnna Montgomerie, People’s Political Economy (Laura Hill and Sarah Kunz)
5.15 – 7.00 Film screening We will screen, and Director Luke Fowler
will lead a discussion about his incredible 61 minute film ‘The Poor
Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott’
which is a beautiful documentary about the Marxist historian Edward Palmer (E.
P.) Thompson, who was employed by the Workers’ Education Association (WEA) from
1946, aged 24, to teach adults in the industrial towns of the West Riding.
These WEA classes were open to people for whom university education was not
previously available.
See: http://lux.org.uk/collection/works/poor-stockinger-luddite-cropper-and-deluded-followers-joanna-southcott
**END**
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