The school of Education blog – one year on
Jonathan Firth and Allan Blake reflect on the first year of the School of Education’s blog, and consider how it can best contribute to discourse around Scottish education in the coming months and years.
A year ago, Strathclyde’s School of Education launched a blog. We have released new posts roughly once per month, with contributions from both students and staff. The topics featured so far have been diverse and incisive:
- Transfer of learning
- Feminist representations in HE
- The role of memory in learning
- LGBTQI+ representation
- School attendance and the poverty-related attainment gap
- Storytelling
- Practitioner enquiry (for example, this post)
- Learning myths (for example, this post)
As we look ahead to the next year of blogging, we took a moment to reflect on the purpose of the School of Education blog, its strengths, and what we would like to see more of in the coming months.
Jonathan: For me, the blog is a terrific way to kick off discussions with the broader education community in Scotland and internationally. By sharing blog posts via the SoE Twitter account, we hope to inspire the broader education community, including our current and former students, to comment on them.
It can also help to raise awareness of opportunities such as courses and events that we offer, as well as informing people about new research findings. As someone who worked as a school teacher for many years, I know it wasn’t always easy to keep up to date with research. I hope the SoE blog helps with that issue.
In the coming year, I’d like to see more of the same, basically! We have spoken to a number of colleagues who are keen to write blog posts sharing their work, and we are also going to keep producing briefing-style posts on contemporary educational issues.
Allan: For me, the blog conjures something of the spirit of Laurel Richardson, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Ohio State University. Alive and well and waspish, Richardson has long argued that writing is part of the process of inquiry, that writing is an opportunity to lay claim to knowing something, and that the predominant push for publication after publication in academic work has led us all to yawn our way through numerous supposedly exemplary studies.
Freed from the constraints of academic capital, the blog is an opportunity for interesting people to say interesting things in interesting ways (Jonathan, my post is two thirds of the way there!). As an alternative to academic publishing in social research, the blog offers engagingly lean (and occasionally keen) discussion of contemporary issues in education. To paraphrase T. S. Elliot, another arch-disturber of literary convention, here then is a forum from which we in education might dare to attempt to disturb the universe. Rather than measure out our lives in coffee spoons. If all this sounds a bit much, then perhaps I can kaleidoscope our intentions for contributors into two glimpsed truths: one, say something useful; two, one of the curators maintains a collection of empty craft beer tins.
If you are a member of staff or a current or recent Strathclyde student, we would love to feature your voice on the blog in the coming year. Do you have a research or teaching speciality, a course or an event that you'd like to feature? If so, please email your suggestions/proposals to hass-courses-edu@strath.ac.uk
You can see all of the posts from the past year here
Image - Pixabay