https://youtu.be/tnjrDxt6ZTs?si=9Nx7jDkt8xE65Amv

Here’s one of our partners (Adam Dwight from CoWC) showing that full current AI can assess hand written work and provide feedback in a much more consistent and detailed way than any teacher could feasibly manage.  This is alarming to many for all the wrong reasons: the point surely is that if you want to persist with this reductive performative model of education validated by unsatisfying forms of assessment then AI will allow you to do it more and more consistently and reductively. Here is hand-written work impeccably marked and could easily replace those charged with exam marking AND provide relief for all teachers from largely pointless marking of largely pointless homework.

However that is not the point. The point is to see this as the ultimate confirmation of a monstrous mistake! We should never have asked students to PERFORM these kinds of manoeuvres because this simulation of learning was always going to end one way (like VAR) in increasingly forensic examinations of the structural mechanics of texts: a reduction to absurdity. This is the event horizon: the readiness is all!

As Rory used to say:

"Time slips by
Like grains of sand
Just put your future
In my hands.."

This is partly an extended reply to the Anonymous respo0nse to my last post:

Marking, which I’ve always felt was largely a waste of time, can in the interim be done by machines leaving teachers with one last chance to prove that left to their own devices they can be educators.

The more sophisticated the feedback is the less meaningful it becomes.  Once it flies out of orbit offering  definitive word-, sentence and text level analysis of both text and response the more it meets Baudrillard’s ‘promised end’: “…the emergence… of an equivalent force of inertia, of an immense indifference and the silent potency of that indifference.”

As JB used to say

“We are liberated in every sense of the term, so liberated that we've taken leave of a certain space-time, passed beyond a certain horizon in which the real is possible”

And prophetically:

“Every set of phenomena whether cultural totality or sequence of events has to be fragmented, disjointed so that it can be sent down the circuits”

Moreover:

“No meaning can withstand acceleration.  No history can withstand the centrifugation of facts or their being short circuited in real time (to pursue the same train of thought no sexuality can withstand being liberated, no culture can with stand being hyped, no truth can withstand being verified etc”

And I think most pertinently:

“This inert matter of the social is not produced by a lack of exchanges, information or communication but by the multiplication and saturation of exchanges. It is the product of the hyperdensity of cities, commodities, messages and circuits.”

Assessment was once the icing on the cake: now no need for cake just the sugar-rush of achievement!.  Education now like the internet archive offers everything on short term loan (and less productively).  Students can’t be trusted with knowledge or indeed be expected to take any interest in it so they’re just asked to feel the weight of it for a moment (referred to as ‘the assignment’) and then quickly hand it back (ironically the moment that their ‘grasp’ of it is validated is precisely the moment they let go of it.  AI will of course make this process of domestication ever more efficient unless we can use it to f**k it over

Your beginnings or the outline of a chapter or idea.

Who are your others? Young people? Other teachers? Older staff? New teachers? People outside of education? Parents?

Work alone or team up with someone else in the group. See if you can hone your idea into an overview of 150-200 words and share it on here.

Here's mine as an example:

I was fortunate to travel to a Critical Pedagogy Congress in Medellin last October. From there and a conference in Birmingham I met up with three other English teachers and our (online) conversations since are going to be the core of the chapter.

Abstract

This chapter presents a critical commentary on decolonising English (both as a ‘subject’ but also as a language) and originates in an ongoing online transnational charla (chat) between four teachers of English based in four different countries (Colombia, Cuba, England and India). Interweaving dialogue and theoretical ideas derived from decolonial thinking, the chapter begins by detailing the origins of the group before exploring how English is implicated in what it means to be an HE scholar in today’s globalised education systems. It touches on how current Englishes assert their dialectal distinctiveness as culture and meaning-bearing varieties often embedded in diverse historical struggles and associated with past and present imperialisms. Finally, it considers how international charlas such as the one the paper draws on, while inherently decolonial, need to translate critical dialogue into communicative action, and the prospects and promise of that.

So Rob, Pete and I had a productive meet up to touch base after what feels a long time to converse about 'Conversations' which i hope has been bubbling away for some/all of you over this past year and since the last time we met. Unlike Rob, my chapter doesn't feel quite so well formed yet but ive been thinking a lot this year about a new module i'm writing and (hopefully!) delivering in the new year on critical digital pedagogies, and i think i'd like my chapter to explore. her's some intial thoughts:

How can (student)writing/ text production be a space of invention where machines (currently...yet...) have no dominion? Rather than surveille for the use of AI in 'proof of knowledge' or 'proof of skill' assessments at the end of modules, how can experimental/ speculative texts produced by students be created to enable them to think-with encounters/integrations with technologies or as networked humans in professional educational spaces? How might these be formulated and presented using 'other' forms of experimental, speculative and contemporary writing to invite conversations/ collaborations between authors/readers/texts to draw meaning?

How does play, re-mix, experimentation open new conversations about being an educator (and a citizen) in contemporary society, and about the purpose of education to repsond to our collective futures?

Will the chapter have conversations between me and the students, or willl it have conversations with the texts as produced by students? Will it explore the conversations made within texts between technologies/ forms/ authors/ readers? All for me to think about now i've committed this to this digital page!

Looking forward to hearing where others are at with your thinking! Lou

I'm feeling this at the moment as once again in the usual unexpected and or roundabout way I find something both in front of me and yet equally connected to places I’ve been intellectually and things I've done and thought.  I think my contribution to the discussion about a working title for this second phase project (better than Murder 2: this time it’s personal) was ‘the other place’ which I quite liked (probably liked more than ‘conversations with others’ )but that was before this new coming together got me at the right angle or the wrong one.  I think this is a result of the conversation the three of us had about kicking back off and either Rob or Lou pitched the question of who the others were, indeed who the others might be. 

This immediately connected to a theme of mine which is the place of theory and theorists in all the work I do.  I often pitch this approach as a kind of fandom admitting at least to myself that the thinkers I'm most engaged with are essentially my favourites, my taste, much as I might listen to or talk about musicians or poets.  I guess I wanted immediately to say that in my practice (which is both a good and bad word for it) the theorists would always be part of the ‘others’ with whom I am conducting conversations.  Also they would not be authorities, just muckers in!

This then started to get interesting because I started to consider what kind of role/ position/ status these theorists had and lo and behold I found the thing that I need to write about: the issue I have been considering wrestling with and living out for pretty much all of my career.  This is because thinking about how theorists participate in these conversations meant for me returning to the fundamental question for me as a teacher and also an essential part of my altogether less convincing showboating as a teacher educator.  This latter role I fell into because my college closed and I needed a job but it was odd at first to be presenting lesson planners and schemes of work as someone who'd never seen much use for either. What I did have though was nearly 20 years experience as a teacher of many subjects (largely at A level) but also a decent feeling for the craft of teaching which seemed to me to be much more to do with heart than brain and sensibility rather than skill.  It was also for me about commitment and feeling: it was also something you could never take for granted.  Thus my best and most abiding advice for all the would be teachers who I supported and encouraged was that they must regularly (preferably while in the classroom in the heat of it) ask the fundamental question "what the fuck am I doing?" ( to me the expletive is entirely necessary because this question is pressing and personal) and I've always been caught in two minds about the degree to which you need to have a fully worked out answer.  It functions rather as a provocation and  contrary to Brookfield’s critique does maintain a bit of mystery when it comes to teaching.

Now if the general proposition is stark my experience specifically of being an English teacher doubled down on this question and in this case demands perhaps a clearer answer.  I think in college I taught 11 different subjects and most of them involved to a greater or lesser degree what is now called knowledge transfer: they had specific content and largely the students didn't have it so it needed to be provided to them.  I was never comfortable with this: my teaching approaches discursive and interactive, I was very much engaged in what Barthes calls ‘excursions’.  In all of the other subjects I taught, I had work to do to adapt the requirements of the course to my teaching style (rather than vice versa) but it always seemed to be that English was the exception.  Reading the Ignorant Schoolmaster much later as a university teacher I realised that I had always shared Rancière’s suspicion of (though in my case it was simply lack of interest in) explaining and understanding.  Rancière wrote later that the point where everything goes wrong in instruction is where reading and interpreting becomes explaining and understanding.  English thus has no reason ever to go wrong (though obviously many have tried to nail it down!)

Pretty much my whole career is an English teacher was concerned with this fundamental and joyful reality that  a) the subject I wasn't really a subject and b) wasn't about anything.  Rather like Klee’s brilliant description of visual art, English does not make things visible it's simply makes visible!  I may be ready finally to have a go at thinking this through to explore the premise that if you want an answer to the fundamental question, the ontological question, ‘what is English?’ maybe that ‘conversations with others’ is about as good as you get.

In the late 80s when I was teaching a lot of literature I had a stab at this working on a staple of my work that lesson when you take in a poem or two.  In fact pretentious twit as I was (I can hear the voice of Tony Harrison’s Skinhead from V: “I bet you wrote a poem you wanker you”), I wrote a series of poems, archly entitled ‘At least three versions of the second coming’ about what I thought might be going on when me and some kids got around the Yeats’ piece and began ‘turning and turning in the widening gyre’.  My approach was to firstly try to pitch the ideal (what on earth was I trying to do?) and had it gone perfectly what would it look like and then to try to represent what did go on.  This may be an approach worth pursuing though not as a series of poems!

Anybody else interested in turning this one over?

Lou, Pete and I are going to meet to discuss how to take things forward. We have heard ideas from around six people. We do need more and a reminder email will be coming round shortly.

We are living in a very stressful time. There are glimmers of hope that we have to cherish. These conversations may constitute a way of doing that. But they may also feel like a luxury in our enormously pressured worlds of intensified and accelerated work.

If you have read through these ideas and have a germ of one you want to share, please do add a post. If not, you could ping the idea to any of us. If you want to base your work on research but are not sure how to go about that, there are many of us here who can offer guidance!

Hope to reconvene a meeting before Xmas, but will be in touch via email before then.

State school pupils struggle to read long books, Oxford professor claims (msn.com)