Professor Michael Fielding

Professor Michael Fielding

Emeritus Professor of Education, Institute of Education,

University of London

 

‘Democracy is not only something to fight for, it is something to fight with.’

The power and promise of intergenerational learning

 

Abstract

Democracy is not primarily about voting or about parliament; neither is it about the consumerist idolatry of the market. It is about a way of living and learning together.

This presentation argues, firstly, that whatever approach we take in schools questions of human flourishing must underpin, not just the intentions we have, but the means we adopt. The pressures of performance and targets must never distort or betray the deeper human purposes they seek to serve.

Secondly, it suggests that in a society that takes democracy seriously, promoting learner engagement must involve both adults and young people in schools learning what it means to co-create a democratic learning community.

How we might go about doing this is developed through my ‘Patterns of Partnership’ typology that explores different ways in which adults and young people can learn with and from each other in schools. In large part this is about freeing up and re-imagining roles. However, as importantly and as interestingly, it is also about new kinds of relationship that both underpin and flow from these new forms of interdependence. Now, perhaps more emphatically than for a long time, the nature and importance of intergenerational learning demands our attention.   

 

Biography

Michael Fielding taught for 19 years in some of the UK’s pioneer radical comprehensive schools and for a similar period and with identical commitments at the universities of Cambridge, Sussex and London where he is currently Emeritus Professor of Education at the Institute of Education.

Widely published in the fields of student voice, educational leadership and radical education, some of his innovative research work (he coined the term Joint Practice Development) is currently influencing professional learning in schools. His latest book, co-authored with Peter Moss, Radical Education and the Common School – a democratic alternative (Routledge 2011) seeks to reclaim education as a democratic project and a community responsibility and school as a public space of encounter for all citizens. It was nominated Best Book of 2011 by the Society for Educational Studies.

Michael has recently Guest Edited a Special Issue of the Oxford Review of Education (Vol. 38, No. 6, December 2012) entitled ‘Learning to be Human: the educational legacy of John Macmurray.’ With contributions from Peter Cunningham, Keri Facer, Michael Fielding, Raimond Gaita, John Macmurray, Nel Noddings, Richard Pring, and Julian Stern it seeks to reaffirm the centrality of persons in contemporary education. Betrayed by the language and ideology of the market, we too readily forget what education is for. Too often our daily preoccupations are reduced to the covert mendacity and myopic misery of performance.

 

For a copy of his presentation, please click this link: Presentation by Professor Michael Fielding