Tag Archives: teaching

The Right to Education

28th February 2017education, Ideas, Inequality in Education, insight, Researcheducation, Education for All, FutureLearn, Glasgow University, Inequality in Education, MOOC, Research, teaching, The Right to Education, UnescoInequality in Ed Team

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The University of Glasgow – a ‘mooc’ point in the making…

Glasgow University have a new massive, open on-line course (MOOC) under way, courtesy of the FutureLearn network. It seeks to engage educators, adult learners and those broadly interested in the countering of inequity in the provision of education.

Entitled The Right to Education: Breaking down the barriers, there is much to support the aims of IETT within its modules. Particularly useful is the course delivery of international perspectives from educators, policy makers and other contributors to the on-line debate around the globe.

The work of the Univerity lead educator, Dr Margaret Sutherland (Senior Lecturer: Social Justice, Place, and Lifelong Education), and her team, delivers this pan-global perspective to help contexualise the relative educational riches and the deficits whch we enjoy in the UK.

The Unesco Education for All programme had promised that all children would have access to school by 2015. This progress had halted by 2008, as can be seen from the UNESCO video below…

Today there are, it is estimated, some fifty eight million children not in school. That is one in ten of all children who are denied access to schooling, with that earlier target of universality extended now to 2030.

Half the educationally deprived children live in sub-Saharan Africa. They are predominantly poor, female, already at work whilst young or are excluded by a disability. The supply side of the educational equation has equal paucity, as some 27 million teachers will be needed, it is estimated, to fill a new full demand by 2030.

So we are able to see that, despite the constraints and inequalities, both social and economic, that dog education in the UK, in the global, aggregate view conflict, caste, faith and gender can all drag a child away from life affirming educational experiences.

You can take a look at the brief programme details here, or you can register with FutureLearn to be notified when the next iteration of the course from The University of Glasgow is available. See more here.

On this evidence, there is by 2030, perhaps, still much for all of us to do globally?

Google and Computer Science

2nd February 2017education, Ideas, news, Researchcoding, Computer Science, education, Google, Innovation, news, Research, teaching, technologyInequality in Ed Team

Flotsam: an occasional series of good educatinal ideas from other places.

Google, in pursuit of developing pathways to Computer Science education, have just released a new Google CS Education portal.

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Computer education and the imagination engaged…

The web pages contain new resources for CS education, including prgrammes and resources for learners, as well as programmatic resources for teachers. The educator material offers the visitor free online courses, as well as access to software programs like Pencil, in order to grow basic practical skills.

The coding and tools section of the web site makes available open source resources like Blockly, IDE’s for Chrome apps and practical collaboration techniques to explore coding through drawing art, playing music and creating games.

The research, diversity and scholarship sections of the new site are, perrhaps narturally coming from Google, very heavily influenced by U.S. curriculum and learning opportunities. However, the Open Source and collaborative software elements of the coding platform are universal.

If you have a laptop, a well motivated CS teacher and a school network then you should be able to benefit from the Google CS Education Platform wherever you are located.

Discover more about this Google initiative here.

Forty Years On – Callaghan and education

5th January 2017education, Education reform, Ideas, Inequality, Inequality in Education1976, education, Fiona Millar, IETT, Inequality in Education, reform, Ruskin College, teaching, The GuardianInequality in Ed Team

Prime Minister James Callaghan made a speech to an audience at Ruskin College in Oxford on the 18th October, 1976. A speech that, some would argue, launched the Great Debate about education.

James Callaghan - Prime Minister image — See his biography on Wikipedia…

Certainly some of the issues and challenges, that James Callaghan raised that day at Ruskin College, remain as pertinent and telling as ever today. Callaghan emphatically stressed, in his speech, the value of the Trade Union movement, not a view often embraced by a Prime Minister today for sure, but also lucidly saw children as delivering an endowment for a future society.

Speaking on that day in 1976, a detailed reading of the full text saw Callaghan giving long credit to Trade Union education energy, highlighting the role that unions and social activists play in energising human capital, often sailing against the pre-dominant elitist and exclusive educational cultural wind.

Callaghan saw the wide and emphatically important debate abroad in the country in his time about the economy, political or otherwise, but ventured to say ‘…not as important in the long run as preparing future generations for life. RH Tawney, from whom I derived a great deal of my thinking years ago, wrote that the endowment of our children is the most precious of the natural resources of this community. So I do not hesitate to discuss how these endowments should be nurtured‘.

Source: ‘A rational debate based on the facts’ James Callaghan, Ruskin College Oxford,
18th October 1976 (Full text) – http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/speeches/1976ruskin.html

Fiona Millar, writing in The Guardian in December 2016, has revisited the 1976 Callaghan postulation and has teased out many facets of the Callaghan analysis that often leaves the contemporary liberal, educated, education-aware reader in despair, when education is viewed down the long telescope of history.

‘Do we have a curriculum that promotes basic standards while allowing a child’s personality to “flower in its fullest possible way” as Callaghan put it?’

‘Would he (Callaghan) have envisaged systems of oversight so fragmented and convoluted that some headteachers can become proprietors of small business empires from which they directly profit?’

‘Would Callaghan have wanted good heads and teachers suffocated by hyper-accountability, wrestling with what is best for their schools against what is best or their pupils, while the less scrupulous boost performance by weeding out the most challenging pupils?’

Millar has chosen a good time to revisit this educational clarion call from a Labour Prime Minister who, on a detailed reading of this speech, represents the gold standard of education analysis and is deserving of perhaps a kinder view from history than he was previously afforded.

Source: Forty years after the Ruskin speech, education needs another moment
Fiona Millar, The Guardian 13th December 2016 – https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/dec/13/ruskin-speech-education-jim-callaghan-reforms?CMP=share_btn_tw

The great debate continues, we would argue…we commend the Callaghan speech to you and we await our ‘Millarenian moment‘ too!

Computer Science Education Week

6th December 2016education, Education reform, Ideas, Inequality in Education, news2016, code, Computer Science Education Week, computing, gender, Hour of Code, Inequality in Education, Research, STEM, teaching, technologyInequality in Ed Team

This is Computer Science Education Week. Across the globe, and in the UK too, children and young people are taking part in the Hour of Code.

An attempt to harness fresh interest and excitement, as well as understanding, of the basics of web and code literacy. Important knowledge to have in the skills basket, as the world moves ever more closer to technology.

Whilst such initiatives do not address the core issue of access to this technology, for those who have a route to a point of contact with a keyboard, the enthusiasm is evident.

The lack of women entering STEM continues to be part of the science and education debate. That there are gender role-models for young wormen is celebrated in a recent on-line article from Microsoft.

‘17 for ’17: Microsoft researchers on what to expect in 2017 and 2027‘ – this article focuses on a recent OECD report on gender equality Where are Tomorrow’s Female Scientists? Despite the paucity of female scientists and engineers coming forward, Microsoft argue that with the right recruitment and professional development policies, companies can allow female science graduates to prosper…once the engagement and recruitment hurdle has been crossed.

…women and girls who, while representing roughly 50 percent of the world’s population, account for less than 20 percent of computer science graduates in 34 OECD countries,

17 for 17 allows seventeen female computing professionals, from a variety of academic backgrounds and interests, the opportunity to express their vision of how the world of computing and code will change society by 2027.

Microsoft in Cambrdidge, UK has members of its team illustrating the future advances in biological computation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, human centred computing and accessibility, as well as security and privacy forecasts.

Despite some pessimism about the political landscape of education, it is always welcome to see gender affirmation and success in an often difficult, male dominated arena.

The barriers may be coming down at last.

Best wishes to our readers for the forthcoming festive holiday…

Dollar Street, humanity on display!

Flotsam: Our occasional series of pieces about ideas and views from other places.

Dollar Street

We weren’t quite sure what to make of these web pages at first. Built by Gapminder in Sweden, they show two hundred and forty families, across forty six countries, and link a series of images of their possessions and homes to their average monthly income.

Was it voyeurism that made us uncomfortable? Was it the notion of ‘economic tourism’? Or simply the discomfort of being shown a stark reality, illustrating how individuals and families, often precariously, cling to hope, aspiration and dignity?

For the team at Gapminder the proposition for Dollar Street is clear. These are the facts and they should temper all discourse about the other – other people, communities and culture.

Was it our imaginations, or did the preponderance of families with incomes of less than five hundred dollars a month across the globe decline to smile in the photographs? Of course this could be a cultural thing, rather than a crude measure of some sort of economic level on an imagined ‘happiness index’.

However, the wealth of Creative Commons images on the site and the short biographies of the people photgraphed make for an interesting comparative study.

To counteract litanies of fear, prejudice and racism can be no small aim. Rendering global ignorance redundant by illuminating the world with facts. No small ambition for a small Swedish independent Foundation.

‘For the first time in human history reliable statistics exist. There’s data for almost every aspect of global development. The data shows a very different picture: a world where most things improve; a world that is not divided. People across cultures and religions make decisions based on universal human needs, which are easy to understand.

The fast population growth will soon be over. The total number of children in the world has stopped growing. The remaining population growth is an inevitable consequence of large generations born decades back.

We live in a globalized world, not only in terms of trade and migration. More people than ever care about global development! The world has never been less bad. Which doesn’t mean it’s perfect. The world is far from perfect’. Source: https://www.gapminder.org/about-gapminder/

Exploring Gapminder:

For teachers Gapminder has a proliferation of resources and toolkits available to explore the world through data.

Gapminder World offers access to a series of global trends and an on-line/off-line toolkit to explore them. A teacher’s guide to 200 years of world developmental history and change. A Life Expectancy PowerPoint, with background information and a teacher’s guide.

Having wrangled with the intrusive nature of the Dollar Street image index, and having read the Gapminder mission statements, we felt their argument that the world is indeed ‘a better place’ to be much needed in troubled econo-social and educative times.

Explore the Gapminder site here and decide.

A matter of life and death?

26th August 2016education, Education reform, Ideas, Inequality, Inequality in EducationBill Gates, education, Gates Notes, Inequality in Education, Nate Bowling, reform, social inequality, State Teacher of the Year, teaching, Washington State USAInequality in Ed Team

Flotsam: an occasional series of ideas from other places…

Bill Gates is in conversation with Nate Bowling, the Washington State Teacher of the Year for 2016 in the US. In the dialogue, the teacher tells Bill Gates that for many students learning ‘…is a matter of life and death’.

“If my students are not successful in school, they end up in the prison-industrial complex.”

Source: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Education/A-Powerful-Conversation-with-Nate-Bowling Accessed: 26.08.2016

The conversation reveals that in the US public school system, half the students enrolled live in poverty. With more than 70 percent of students qualifying for ‘…free or reduced price meals’.

In a separate publication Nate Bowling had published a blog article which has garnered a lot of attention. In it he declares that ‘…America does not care what happens to poor people and most black people‘. The article, entitled The Conversation I’m Tired of not Having, Mr. Bowling goes on to decry the lack of simple political will, in the US, to effect change and re-balance equity in educational opportunity and achievement.

‘Polite society has walled itself off and policymakers are largely indifferent. Better funding for schools is and will remain elusive, because middle class and wealthy people have been conditioned over the last 35 years to think of themselves as taxpayers, rather than citizens’.

Source: http://www.natebowling.com/a-teachers-evolving-mind/2016/1/24/the-conversation-im-tired-of-not-having Accessed: 25.08.2016

In both the conversation with Bill Gates, and in his own article, Nate Bowling has some profoundly strong and supportive comments to make about teaching as a profession and the nature of the role his professional colleagues play, in the disenfranchised school system he works in.

The narrative has a strong resonance in the UK, with the laborious ebb and flow of educational policy, coupled to outcomes that continue to widen, not alleviate, the inequality gap for the many.

Bill Gates conversation with Nate Bowling originally appeared in Gates Notes. Nate Bowling’s reflection on teaching and the development of his profession originally appeared in natebowling.com .

Read both articles to get insights into the US public shool system from the perspective of a black teacher. It is interesting, and provocative, to those who would press for the continuance of the status-quo.

Savvy Teaching?

3rd March 2016education, Ideas, newseducation, Inequality in Education, Innovation, learning, on-line, one to one, Savvy, teachingInequality in Ed Team

Flotsam is our occasional series of ideas on education from other places. We discovered Savvy yesterday.

This is a platform for teachers to find students, around the world, for one to one sessions. Booking and sessions are easily accessible once signed in and the Savvy system takes care of all payments and cancellation protocols.

This short film shows how the service works…

Teachers can set up their own unique web page on the service, affording them the opportunity to layout their specialist offer, as well as setting their fees for teaching.

Learners can search for teachers by theme, across a variety of subjects. These range from the usual academic subjects, to business coaching and support and life skills.

We liked the simplicity of the process with Savvy and can see how a busy education consultant might extend their range and client base with the Savvy system.

Savvy are not charging teachers for the service at the moment. Remitting the full session fee at this time, whilst the service is in development. A good time to trial a new market perhaps? You can see details on service pricing on this Savvy web page.

This is like Skype on adrenaline, but without having to don your ‘techy’ hat to get started.