Past seminars

Histories of Education and Childhood

Thursday, January 15 2009

The Pedagogy of Martyrdom: Moral and Theological Education in the Baroque Society of Jesus.

Paul Shore, Professor of Educational Studies at Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri and Visiting Scholar in the Faculty of History at Cambridge, and Hughes Hall.

The seventeenth century Jesuits sought to perpetuate the values of their baroque Society through narratives and illustrations that glorified dramatic self-sacrifice and spectacular martyrdom. Yet their relationship to the physical world was far from simply adversarial. While calling upon their own members to risk their own physical bodies, the Jesuits simultaneously elevated and valued material creation, thereby leaving a complicated legacy for their students and for later educational theorists.

Thursday, February 19 2009

Fostering Institutional and Professional Health and Well Being: Student Culture in Australia's First Rural Teachers' College 1945-1955.

Professor Anthony Potts, Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Education, La Trobe University, Bendigo, Australia. Visiting Scholar, Wolfson College,Cambridge. Visiting Professor Newman University College, Birmingham

Despite the popular image of Australia as a country shaped by the inland the country's identity has been shaped by the fact that the majority of its people live close to the seaboard. However, a sizeable minority have always lived in rural areas. It was not until 1926 that Australia's first non-metropolitan teachers colleges were established. Both teachers' colleges were closed during the Great Depression and reopened in 1945 at the end of World War II. This paper examines student culture at Bendigo Teachers' College from its reopening in 1945 till 1955. It especially concentrates on the programmes of professional socialisation which set out to regulate trainee teachers' conduct and activity and produced an institutional climate more like a school, of which the college was seen as a senior extension, as opposed to that of a university.

Thursday, March 19 2009

English in a post-war 'experimental comprehensive school': constructing a history, 1946-63.

Dr John Hardcastle, University of London Institute of Education. Dr Peter Medway, King's College London

Using oral history methods along with data from other sources, we have been trying to uncover the reality of English teaching in the first 15 years of a London Country Council school that was set up as an experimental comprehensive in 1946 and became noted for innovatory teaching. On the basis of some 16 interviews with former teachers and students and a body of other evidence including emailed accounts, we will describe what is emerging and discuss the methodological challenges that confront us

An invited seminar-Tuesday, 30th June 2009

'Designing for 21st century learning and teaching: back to the future school'.
Short 'visual' stories of three post-war primary schools.

Speakers: Catherine Burke & Peter Cunningham (University of Cambridge), Rob Walker (UEA), Dominic Cullinan (SCABAL), Rachel Sayers (FCB studios), Alison Clark (Open University)

Schools are seldom designed and built today with reference to what can be learnt from the past half century.This seminar will consider the outcomes of recent research, funded by the University of Cambridge, that has looked closely at pioneering post war primary schools with their original designers in order to understand how a common vocabulary of design was forged by educators and architects in the past and how the design of school, with education as the starting point, was achieved.
Three schools were visited in the early months of 2009 – each designed by Mary and David Medd between 1949 and 1959. At each school, pupils, teachers and other adults closely associated with the schools discussed their views and experiences of the building and grounds. Changes over time in the interior and exterior landscape of the schools were revealed in the context of changing emphases in the primary curriculum.The seminar will focus on what contemporary architects and educators can learn from past achievements in primary school design. We will consider how we can make education the starting point for today's primary school designs and what we can learn from the histories of schools about how buildings can permit or promote rich and varied experiences of learning and approaches to teaching.The speakers will present 'short stories' from the research highlighting issues that have emerged from the data collected during the visits to these schools. The data consists of drawings, plans and photographs made by pupils, photographs of spaces and places that were originally significant or important today and filmed tours and conversations with David Medd who died on April 7th, less than a week following the final visit.

The aim will be to bring these rich stories of continuity and change to bear on current plans to address the re-design or new build of the primary school building stock in line with the government's Primary Capital Programme.

Arts, Culture and Education

Thursday, January 15 2009

The Arts Manifesto 2009/10

Consultation Seminar for the National Campaign for the Arts.

Wednesday, January 28 2009

Keeping time and learning to read': From Psychological Theory to Primary Classroom Practice.

ACE Research Seminar given by Dr. Marion Long.

Monday, February 9 2009

Moving from Stillness

Presenter: Filipa Pereira-Stubbs has worked as a creative practitioner for twenty years; she develops, leads and teaches on movement and creative projects – working with the very young to the elderly. Her background in movement therapy has allowed her to work in psychiatry and mental health, the palliative community, and children. Her work is based in health, education and the community. She is an artist and trustee with the artist-led organisation CCI, based in Cambridge.

'Moving from Stillness'. Before we begin to plan a creative project, at some point amongst all the information and considerations, a point is reached where there is a pause, a stillness, before planning begins to fall together into structure and purpose.
When we embark on creative projects, how do we reach the point of beginning? To what extent do we ensure we create a safe-enough environment in order to achieve risks and strive towards the unknown? How do we work constructively to destruct the familiar and the known?
How do we creatively hold the paradoxical concepts of trust and unknown when we collaborate with others who do not view themselves as creative professionals?
Planning and delivering creativity is a very personal process - we will be sharing our individual experiences, and experiencing creative practices.

Wednesday, February 11 2009

The Chamber of Horrors: Art Education and Mass Culture

ACE Research Seminar given by Dr. Malcolm Quinn, University of the Arts, London.

Wednesday, February 18 2009

MPhil/MEd in ACE Students' Research Seminar
Teacher-Researchers' Reflections on the Dilemmas of Researching Classroom Practice

Presenters: Anna-Marie Higgins and Alex Baxter.

Presenter 1: Anna-Marie Higgins
Title: The Glories of a Blank Screen: Investigating Electroacoustic Music in the Secondary School Setting Abstract: This presentation reflects on a series of scoping studies which sought to develop an approach to teaching electroacoustic music (EAM) at secondary school level. The challenges, issues and concerns of conducting research will be discussed. Emergent findings will be discussed which include: (a) the composition of musique concrète by students with, and without, formal musical training; (b) the development of a CD-ROM to facilitate focused listening; (c) the attempt to discover an aesthetic that might be applicable to EAM; and (d) the modelling and re-creation of works as a catalyst for creative thinking with EAM. Bionotes: Anna-Marie Higgins is studying for a PhD which focuses on the teaching and learning of electroacoustic music in secondary schools. Under the supervision of Dr Pamela Burnard, she is presently completing the Educational Research Training course work in the Faculty. She is a graduate of the National University of Ireland in Cork, the National University of Ireland in Maynooth, the Dublin Institute of Technology and Trinity College Dublin. Her website may be accessed at http://www.clubi.ie/amhiggins

Presenter 2: Alex Baxter
Title: The Mobile Phone and Class Music: A Teacher's Perspective Abstract: This presentation focuses on a research study which took the form of action research, setting out to discover any perceived motivational effects upon students engaging in music making when there is the potential for musical transactions (made within a classroom setting) to exist outside of the classroom. Data was collected from student questionnaires, teacher observations and informal conversations with year 9 students who were engaged in a project where they were offered the opportunity to send their musical transactions to their mobile phones. In a concurrent project year 9 students were given access to ICT in an attempt to inspire and re-engage them. The research investigated whether such an activity has a place within the school music curriculum and whether using something of personal relevance to students can generate a positive outcome. Bio Notes: Alex Baxter is in charge of Music Technology at the Windsor Boys' School and is a lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire where he is programme leader for the Postgraduate Certificate in Music Technology. After following conventional courses in music, he studied Electronic Music at the University of Hertfordshire, specialising in acoustic and electro-acoustic composition and sound recording before developing an interest in music software design. His main research interests now lie in developing innovative uses of technology within music education. Email: a.j.baxter@ herts.ac.uk

Wednesday, June 17 2009

Inquiry in the Arts Classroom: Applying Empirical Method to Musical Experience.
Professor Steven Morrison

Education research must both adhere to accepted standards of academic rigor and inform our understanding of teaching and learning. Within the context of arts education this challenge is enhanced by the largely invisible and personal nature of arts-related experiences. Specifically for this session, how might questions about learning in the arts evolve into presentations of substantive data? How might these data then be sensibly applied to the practice of teaching? Issues ranging from design and methodology to application and dissemination will be examined within the context of sample studies relating to informal arts learning among adults and children, music memory and performance ensemble teaching. Intended as a forum for discussing issues of arts research, attending students will be invited to contribute their own questions about or solutions for challenges posed by the research process.
Steven Morrison is Donald E. Petersen Endowed Fellow and Associate Professor and Chair of Music Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. An instrumental music specialist, his research investigates neurological responses to music listening, perceptual and performance aspects of pitch-matching and intonation, and use of expressive gesture and modeling in ensemble teaching. His research also includes music preference and the relationship of musical responses to diverse cultural contexts. Prior to joining the UW faculty, Morrison served as Lecturer of Fine Arts at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. During 2009 he is serving as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge.

Children's Literature Seminars

Wednesday, February 11 2009

Cultural Identity and Greek-Cypriot Picturebooks

Seminar by Louiza Mallouri.

Wednesday, February 25 2009

Artists' Choices: Materiality and Multimodality in Picturebook Creation

Seminar by Professor Maria Nikolajeva

Wednesday, March 4 2009

Designing a picturebook for a practice-based PhD

Seminar by Katherina Mannelessou

Thursday, April 23rd 2009

Eliza Fenwick (1766-1840): Eliza in America
Lissa Paul of Brock University, CanadaLissa is the author of READING OTHERWAYS and is the keynote speaker at Morag Styles Bristish Library conference on Poetry and Childhood.

Thursday, July 9, 4pm in 2S10
Visual Texts
Seminar with two renowned international guest speakers, Lawrence Sipe (University of Pennsylvania, USA) and Margaret Mackey (University of Alberta, Canada). For information please contact Morag Styles ms104 or Maria Nikolajeva mn351.

Second Language Education

Tuesday, May 26th 2009

Equality before the law, irrespective of language and culture?

Ann Corsellis OBE.JP, Vice-President, Chartered Institute of Linguists Globalisation and movement of people are producing increasing numbers of individuals who cannot communicate adequately in the language of the country in which they are living. Higher infant mortality and miscarriages of justice are among the risks affecting other-language-groups when essential public services, such as health, social and legal services, cannot be delivered effectively because service providers and clients do not share a language. This new social reality has starkly exposed how, despite warnings from the professions involved, existing language teaching, systems and practice leave countries ill-equipped for the C21.

This seminar presentation looks at the issues raised in the criminal justice system, with particular reference to language factors, in order to meet domestic and European legal requirements to support the principle of equality across Europe and judicial co-operation between member states.

It is a summary of what is being done, including by five successive international projects supported by the EU Commission, to find rapid, reliable solutions in the following areas:

Monday, June 8th 2009

Innovation and Reform in Language Teaching: Legacies from the Past
Richard Smith

Although change in language teaching theory can appear relentless, lasting reform for better practice appears very difficult to achieve, in particular in cases where the 'better' ideas in question are imported ones. Within the field of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), the last fifteen or so years have seen a helpful critical turn, involving heightened awareness of needs to develop contextually appropriate methodology or 'post-method pedagogy'. However, in this talk I argue that for a long-lasting improvement to occur what is required is enhanced historical and not just sociological or political awareness. Specifically, I indicate the value of understanding the benefits and limitations of a continuous European tradition of progressive theory going back to the late nineteenth Reform Movement. Equally, an awareness of local pedagogical traditions, including traditions of resistance to innovation and reform in different local contexts is needed, while there may need to be a new focus on identifying positive values within such traditions. I illustrate all these points with reference to original research into the roots and early development of ELT, and in relation to post-war reform efforts involving the export from the UK of situational, and, subsequently, communicative language teaching.