Education Heresies colloquia 2011–2012
The Educational Heresies series featured leading education scholars and practitioners, speaking out on how education research, policy and practice need to be challenged and transformed.
Contemporary education is a contested field, influenced by agenda that go beyond quality teaching and learning, community building and equality of access and outcomes. The place of education in the national and international marketplace; standardisation of education materials and standards in the face of increasing cultural and linguistic diversity; 'choice' in public and private schooling; and institutional taming or liberation of the transformative potential of digital and online technologies; are among the issues traversing and disrupting Australian education.
Historically, challenges to the deep grammar of prevailing orthodoxies have been branded 'heretical'. This colloquium series invites leading educators to release their inner heretic. It presents opportunities to debate and challenge the prevailing orthodoxies as they are realised every day in policy, curriculum, pedagogy and research in and out of educational institutions. It is a forum in which we acknowledge that recognising deep disagreement on big issues is a necessary accompaniment to developing productive ways forward.
The page dedicated to each colloquium contains a news report of the lecture, a copy of the full text, and a play-in-place podcast. The presenters and their topics were:
- Colloquium One, September 15 – Geoffrey Sherington, "You don't know what you've got until it's gone: moments in time for public education"
- Colloquium Two, September 22 – Peter Reimann, "Testing times: how to kill school spirit"
- Colloquium Three, October 13 – Susan Groundwater-Smith, "Systems failure: social inclusion as remedy or why global policies fail disengaged young people at the local level".
- Colloquium Four, November 10 – Professor Johanna Wyn, "Schools not fit for purpose: new schools for the times".
- Colloquium Five, March 15 – Professor Raewyn Connell , "Are markets good for education?"
- Colloquium Six, March 29 – Professor Georgina Tsolidis, "Does the new doxa of integrationism make multicultural education a contemporary heresy?"
Still to come in the series ...
The following Education Heresies colloquia are scheduled for coming weeks.
- Colloquium Seven, April 26 – Dr Karl Maton, "Knowledge-blindness: how educational research neglects the basis of education"
- Colloquium Eight, May 10 – Associate Professor Carol Reid, "Public diversity; private disadvantage: schooling and ethnicity"
- Colloquium Nine, May 31 – Professor Anthony Welch, "Evidence-based policy, or is it?"
- Colloquium Ten, June 7 – Professor Peter Freebody, Dr Helen Proctor and Patrick Brownlee, June 7 – "Plenary: heretical propositions, academia and educational change""