Latest posts

Education, Educational Research

Does Philosophy have a role in the New Curriculum for Wales?

Posted on 19 August 2019 by Kevin Smith

In today’s post, Darius Klibavicius writes about research he undertook as a postgraduate student in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff Univeristy. I had the pleasure of supervising Darius’ Masters thesis and hope you enjoy this short summary as much as I do. “In schools … we probably steer away from it [philosophy] because maybe
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Personal Reflection

Let’s talk about race.

Posted on 15 August 2019 by Kevin Smith

This is a spontaneous post. I usually spend quite a bit of time planning what I want to write, and how — but recent events have prompted me to jot down some quick thoughts on how we react to conversations about race, the terms we use, and how we use them. If you haven’t heard,
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Education

Priorities, purpose and efficacy: How identifying aims/purposes in education can make us better teachers.

Posted on 5 August 2019 by Kevin Smith

In a previous post, I discussed teachers’ responses to the question “what is your top priority as a teacher?” The most common response included variations of the phrase “to help pupils achieve their potential,” a priority I believe is essentially unachievable. It’s a nice sentiment, but we need to conceptualise more distinct and concrete priorities
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Education

Best Practices vs Enacted Values

Posted on 20 July 2019 by Kevin Smith

“…rather than empowering teachers when we claim to offer them “best practices” for the 21st century classroom, we are, in fact, disempowering them. First, it makes them “objects” of other specialists’ research and reduces them to mere consumers of pre-packaged products that someone else in the edutocracy created and will profit from. This perpetuates a cycle of consumerist desire, a constant and regenerating market for education consumption. Second, it also fails to equip teachers to live fully into their calling and, especially, to do the very things we so often say we value, namely to improve the lives of the young people in our charge.”
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