Learning to Live Well Together: Free Introduction

A free introduction to our summer conference series investigating the shaping of education from ethics of relationship & listening.

Education in England, including early childhood education, is increasingly narrow, instrumental and technical, subject to a culture of managerial accountability obsessed with targets, testing and readying, and that sees nurseries and schools as ‘outcome factories’. In the words of Sir Ken Robinson, “we are living with a construct of education based on an outdated model of training for an industrial, growth economy…capacity for divergent thinking deteriorates with schooling…children alienated, not engaged, lacking aesthetic experience." Changing Educational Paradigms

Emphasis is on the individual and on an educational norm of transmitting pre-determined information and skills from educator to child.

But other types of relationship are available. Great educators, such as Reggio Emilia’s Loris Malaguzzi, have built their education on the importance of groups, of dialogue and listening, of creativity and research, and of children and adults working together to co-construct meaning and empathy. Instead of a pedagogy of transmission and conformity, they have chosen a pedagogy of collaboration, conviviality, democracy and enquiry: this is the heart which will be exploring in our June - September conference series. 

This session on 29th June is a free introductory session to the ideas which we will be exploring in the series. This introduction will be by Prof. Peter Moss, ioE; Robin Duckett, Sightlines Initiative; Greta Ellis & Cathering Reding, Kirkoswald Primary School; Louise Lowings, Madeley Nursery School; Rachel Oakshott-Evans, Growing Places Early Years Centres.

You can read full details about the series itself, dates, presenters and presentation focus - and register -  in the series Registration Section below.

We have choices to make about the future direction for education and what we want for our children, and to be able to make choices we need to articulate the possibilities. We have choices to make about the foundations we build our education on and what ethics should underpin these.

Education can continue down the path of transmission, control and individualism and the utilitarian values of growth. However there’s a growing social realisation that these mores are essentially damaging, and certainly not core to the way humans are born to learn.

Instead we can turn to richer foundations for questing for meaning and understanding, more participatory and more respectful of diversity and potential with the educational environment being designed to work with the natural ‘zests’ of humans to enquire, to make sense of the world, and to do so in relationship with others and the innumerous elements of the world we depend on and of which we are a part (See Sightlines Initiative Principles.)

Where this direction has been wholeheartedly embraced we see children eagerly engaged together in sophisticated and reflective project work, displaying a rich emotional, poetic understanding hand in hand with meaningful technical knowledge. Nurseries and schools become places of research, where educators and children are engaged together in co-constructing learning experiences.

There is much to be described and envisioned – from the language in which we speak, the ways we see and hear and relate, to how we do it and our valuing of time and recognition of the many competences both of children and adults.

Taking this path needs preparedness and intent. It needs good companions, new stories, new shoes, and new eyes.

We hope this series will bring together those intent on developing a new pedagogy.

You'll find full details of dates, speakers and their topics 

HERE

as well as conference registration.

Registration on this page is for the free introductory session only.