Dr Carol Azumah Dennis is a lecturer in education and co-director of post-graduate taught programmes at the University of Hull


SOCIAL MEDIA


Blogging – a chance for teachers to create a public pedagogy


Social media can be such an important, liberating forum for teachers to have their say


about being a post-16 professional. It is where they can shape a response to public policy By Carol Azumah Dennis


While social media is often dismissed as being, on the one hand, trivial or, on the other, a space for the global academic, there are a few extremely interesting examples of particular blogging spaces used by further education teachers and trainers, and a community that has coalesced around them. I think these are important spaces,


particularly at a time when we lack policy recognition of the value and purpose of post-16 education and training. These spaces matter. They are fun, anarchic, dissenting, punk spaces that help shape what it means to be a post-16 professional. These spaces are pedagogic spaces.


Their explicit intention is pedagogic. Those who coalesce around them learn how to survive a global neoliberal policy environment, in which the belief in education as enterprise marginalises education as a public service, accompanied by the unrelenting pursuit of more for less (see Simmons 2010). I’d speculate that such spaces might be an unanticipated, unintentional outcome of austerity. I borrow here from Spours & Hodgson (2012) and Keep (2014): if governments no longer wish to pay the piper, can they still determine the tune? So tightly bound by government policy


are teachers, trainers and managers that creativity, flexibility and, some would argue, even professional judgement become very dificult. An experience that defines so many educational professionals is one that Shain & Gleeson, writing in 1999, define as ‘strategic compliance’. Those who participate in public pedagogy choose to create alternative professional spaces in which they can collaboratively and actively shape a


response to public policy. In resisting strategic compliance, public pedagogues cultivate the ‘critical agency’ of education and training professionals. Such spaces do more than allow


practitioners to vent their emotions, or comment on things they do not agree with, or present their own idiosyncratic view of the world. They create alternative educational understandings of what it means to be a professional, to be part of a professional community, and how professionals should best orient themselves in relation to policy, pedagogy and the purposes of education. What is distinct about such spaces is that the subjects considered worthy of exploration are not driven by an external agenda. In these public pedagogic spaces, teachers and trainers define and pursue their own agendas. They are also spaces in which lecturers enact the educational futures they envisage. The sheer act of writing about our


professional experiences, through blogs, micro-blogs and an online staff room is performative. In other words, we accomplish something by engaging in an act of writing with interested others. Performative writing does more than


describe reality; it intervenes in it, in part contributing towards creating a new reality. Public pedagogic spaces are implicated in the construction, presentation or performance of a particular form of further education professionalism; a collaborative inter- subjective, dialogic professionalism. As Spours & Hodgson pointed out in


2012, dual professionalism is no longer enough. What we need is a triple professionalism: one in which teachers and trainers talk publicly and democratically about pedagogy.‘


References • Dennis, C. A. (2015). Blogging as public pedagogy: creating alternative educational futures. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 34(3), 284-299.


• Harju, V., Pehkonen, L., & Niemi, H. (2016). Serious but fun, self-directed yet social: blogging as a form of lifelong learning. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 35(1), 2-17.


• Keep, E. (2014). What does skills policy look like now the money has run out? University of Oxford: Association of Colleges.


• Nonesuch, Kate (nd) Working in Adult Literacy. Accessed February 2017


• Shain, F., & Gleeson, D. (1999). Under new management: changing conceptions of teacher professionalism and policy in the further education sector. Journal of Education Policy, 14(4), 445-462.


• Simmons, Robin (2010) Globalisation, neo-liberalism and vocational learning: the case of English further education colleges. Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 15 (4). pp. 363-376.


• Simons, Sarah (nd) #UKFEchat. Accessed February 2017


• Spours, K., & Hodgson, A. (2013). Why IfL should promote ‘triple professionalism’. InTuition, 13, 16-18.


• TES (nd). Accessed February 2017 • Walker, Ann (nd) Lifelong Learning Matters Formerly “WEA Director for Education’s Blog” Accessed February 2017


Useful links • Tutor Voices goo.gl/mtf7XL • UKFEChat goo.gl/vsZf0z • Society for Education and Training (SET) communities of practice goo.gl/K7COR4


• SET blogs goo.gl/yA0dFB • Times Educational Supplement online community goo.gl/Tt3Fp1


• Anne Walker, director of the WEA, blog Lifelong Learning Matters goo.gl/wgTsog • Kate Nonesuch’s blog goo.gl/EJVqIp


INTUITION RESEARCH • SPRING 2017 3


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