Teaching itself: a mythology of learning in theory and practice

Abstract

What I attempt in this dissertation is to make coherent sense of a body of work produced with others over a period of ten years. This was a decade in which the progressive principles that inform my work were being progressively pushed back by an increasingly nihilistic neoliberalism across the Western world and a peculiarly retrogressive manifestation (The Govist turn) in the UK. In the most extreme case a book that was conceived as creatively and playfully reimaging Media Studies ‘after the subject’ turned out almost to be the subject’s epitaph as its survival at A level turned out to be a close run thing. I hope in passing to consider the impact of this context but also to argue that the context of writing this commentary, at the time of a global pandemic, has probably added more significantly to its value, which I measure only pragmatically, of ideas being produced in a way that is useful to other people. As the pandemic has exposed our flawed models of education far more powerfully than I could myself, indeed have myself, so it has also provided an imperative for affirmative critical action. I hope this work can make a small contribution to that process in suggesting ways in which we might fundamentally perform the educational ‘act’ differently. For that reason there is a more heavily weighted focus on the ways in which my more recent publications constitute a hardly intended deconstruction of the dominant educational paradigm and tentative presentation of an alternative in four steps. As this has been an interpretation of the work inspired by this process alone, I have tried also to make the creation of the commentary an active element of the final version. In this I am partly acknowledging the influence of Barthes’ famous book lengthy critical study of his own work, ‘RB by RB’. I would like to think that the structures, fluidity and playfulness of the commentary also convey something of the whole project.