28/06/2011 by lizit.

Time spent over the last couple of days reviewing my thesis outline, plus a supervision session and reading a couple of Inger Mewburn’s thesiswhisperer blog posts (PhD Grief and 5 ways to kill your darlings) has got me thinking.

It must be a couple of years now since my supervisor suggested I draft an abstract for my thesis, written as though it was done and dusted and I had achieved what I wanted to achieve. Having a tendency to do as I’m told, I followed the advice and I found it a useful exercise, not only in enabling me to sort out my focus, but also as a document which I could review and revise as my ideas developed. While reviewing my thesis outline over the past couple of days, I realised that I needed to revise the abstract yet again. Having done so, I then looked back over the last year and realised that ideas which were central to the abstract a few months ago, are no longer there, but other ideas which either were not present, or were peripheral are taking centre stage. I am seriously beginning to wonder if rather than me owning my thesis, whether it actually has somehow acquired a life of its own.

In some ways, this follows on from my previous blog where I responded to Jeffrey Keefer’s question about there being no space for communities of practice in my research. It can only be 3 months ago that I was arguing that communities of practice were central to my research and my thesis. Where has all that thinking and work gone? It is clear my thesis is rejecting it as part of itself - I’m sure it wasn’t my decision to put that whole chunk on one side.

Not only does my thesis seem to have decided that things that are meaningful to me have no place in it, but it also seems to have replaced them with things which are more theoretically complex, though possibly ultimately more interesting. And I’m sure it has done this without any assistance on my part!

What I have realised is that the areas that getting chopped are not being chopped because they are not of interest, or are not important, but because they are not central to my research question. They are currently in suspended animation, waiting to be revived and acquire their own lives. The areas that remain and are taking over, are not triffids, but are emerging as I allow myself to look into some of the deeper reaches of the iceberg. They are challenging because they are forcing me to think in ways that don’t come naturally to me. I’m a pragmatist and problem-solver - what am I doing getting caught up in theoretical concepts and philosophy? Come to think of it, why on earth am I doing a DPhil - no let’s not go there today!

I think perhaps it is time for me to take thesis in hand and threaten it with the pruning sheers if it doesn’t stop growing and developing interesting side shoots. Hang it all surely I should be in charge of my thesis and not vice versa!

Posted in experience, personal rant, empowerment, reflections, ownership, learning | Print | 1 Comment »

24/04/2011 by lizit.

Following on from the Identity memo 1, I want to explore another area which is important to my research and which also has a long root in my life, namely my interest in disability and related areas.

I suppose my first conscious interest in disability was in 1966, when as a 16 year old I went on a working holiday to a Leonard Cheshire Home and met people who had quite severe impairments for the first time. At the time, I can remember being impressed by the ethos of the establishment - the concept of family and not referring to disabled people as residents or patients. It made enough of an impression on me, that I returned the following year and began to look at possible career options that might involve working with disabled people.

However, my awareness of health and illness goes much further back than that. Before her marriage, my mother had been a nurse and she retained an active interest in her profession, acting as secretary to the local branch of the Royal College of Nursing. She had done both mental and general nurse training, but her interest was in mental health and she would speak of her experiences and about how difficult it had been to enter her chosen profession - she encountered a lot of opposition from her family because of the low status nurses were perceived as having in the early 1930s when she commenced her training.

I would guess that my mother’s stories had quite a lot to do with me choosing to join the Junior Red Cross and undertake basic training in first aid, home nursing and child care.

I can’t claim that I thought much about disability again until about 1980 when I was working for a local authority as voluntary organisations liaison officer. I was involved in the planning of our response to 1981 - International Year of Disabled People - which led to two specific projects - developing an access guide for the borough together with the head OT and involvement in establishing a local disability association. I also got involved in setting up a parent support group. At a personal level, the spin off from this was taking a postgraduate Masters degree and doing a research project on local disability associations and the implications of them being run by and for disabled people or by able-bodied for disabled. This linked to the thinking of the Wolfenden Report on the future of voluntary organisations and the role of intermediary bodies and to the changes within the disability movement more generally that recognised that disability was not an obstacle to being able to run organisations, engage in social and political action, etc. I can remember being shocked by some of the attitudes I heard expressed by people then responsible for the voluntary/charity organisations and also being impressed by what I saw disabled people doing.

My next career move was to leading a multi-disciplinary social services team with a focus on disability and older people. As described in identity memo 1, a key element of my work there was enabling our ‘clients’ to have as much control as possible over the services made available to them.

Moves followed into voluntary organisation management and motherhood. It was as my son began to develop that disability became a much more personal concern. It was very clear that my son was exhibiting different behaviour from other children of his age, and though I put some of this down to the effect of living in Germany and being between cultures, concern was also expressed by the Kindergarten he attended. I was subjected to a very difficult discussion with the Kindergarten staff when I was effectively told that it was probable my son would never live independently and would probably not be able to attend a normal school. To say this was done clumsily and without warning is an understatement. The fact that the conversation took place in German made it all the more difficult - was I really understanding what I was being told.

Following initial assessments with a German paediatrician, we learned we were returning to the UK. My hope was that my son’s behaviour would settle once he no longer had to cope with two languages and different cultural expectations. The reality was that very soon his school were making referrals to the school nurse and we ended up with CAMHS and the start of the long journey to finding out what lay behind my son’s differences and getting appropriate support for him. That journey also led me, together with others, to set up a parent support group and convinced me that it was essential for parents to be adequately informed and supported so that they could obtain the support their children not only needed, but had a right to.

I could unpick those personal experiences a great deal more - the attitudes of the different professionals I encountered, the lack of knowledge some professionals had of the support infrastructures, the journey to getting a statement for a very able and intelligent child who just was not coping in school, the encounters with mental health services and the failures of services to address needs appropriately. Elsewhere I have documented the roller coaster of emotions I experienced and the details of that journey.

Now I am able to step back a little. My son is now an adult and is doing very well. But I am still actively involved in parent support groups and my personal experiences are very much the driver for my research. Sometimes I feel I am too close to what I am researching and too influenced by my own experience. At other times, I recognise that even when going through the worst of times with my son, I was operating both as parent and professional and maintaining a level of professionalism and objectivity which I did not feel.

A further aspect of disability is now impinging on my life and consciousness. My own health and fitness has deteriorated, to some extent because of my failure to care for myself appropriately, and I am having to recognise there are things I cannot do that I might want to do, but my energy levels are inadequate.

So throughout my life, I haven’t been very distant from issues of health, illness, mental health, disability, and SEN.

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18/04/2011 by lizit.

A colleague on #phdchat has drawn my attention to a chapter in Maxwell (2005) on conceptual frameworks. I found this an interesting, informative and challenging read, particularly enjoying the use of diagramming techniques to understand the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of a research project. This reflected some of my experience in refining my ideas and I will return to using mapping in the near future. As interesting, and in some ways more challenging, was the recognition of personal experience being an important part of a conceptual framework. Maxwell cites a number of writers including Reason (1989) and C. Wright Mills (1959) to support the view that life experience is valid. Reason’s introduction of the term “critical subjectivity” lends weight to the view that it is possible to be both subjective and objective.

Amongst the many suggestions made in the chapter is one of writing a note, or identity memo, reflecting on the development of ones own interest in the research topic, or aspects of the research topic. This seemed a helpful notion to me as a couple of aspects of my research are tapping areas which I have had a long term interest in. This posting reflects on the first of these, the whole area of what I have referred to as ‘ownership’ but which in academic speak seems to be ‘agency’ - but it may be that ownership is just a facet of agency - let’s see.

I am not sure whether my thinking about ‘ownership’ belongs initially to undergraduate days or first employment. My first degree was a combination of academic and professional education, leading to a degree in Applied Social Studies and a Certificate of Qualification in Social Work. There was a strong emphasis on psychodynamic psychology, which I realise now was focusing on ‘deficits’ in people with problems, rather than their strengths. I reacted quite strongly to this approach, being unable to reconcile it with the real world people were living and struggling in. Perhaps fortunately, one of my placements was more concerned with societal change than with changing individuals, and when I graduated, it was perhaps inevitable that I gravitated towards community development. It seemed to me that the basic tenets of community development - not doing things for people, but working together to achieve change - made more sense and also fitted better with my personal faith position as a Christian.

Through a series of community work posts, I became more increasingly convinced that it was important for people to both own their problems (wherever they came from) and also to own the means of tackling those problems and resolving them. I was influenced by the disability movement and the insistence that disabled people were not to be pitied but were perfectly able and capable of doing more or less anything given appropriate resources and removal of the attitudinal and physical barriers which restricted them. As a social services team leader in the early 1980s, I insisted on holding meetings bringing together people, who were our clients only because of age or impairment, and the service providers, from my own organisation and others, to agree together on appropriate ‘care packages’ - if somebody wanted to use the 3 hours a week home care service we could offer to get their house cleaned rather than their shopping done, that was their decision and right and we did not have the right to tell them what they needed. I did not see why professionals should make decisions for adults who were capable of making their own decisions if given the opportunity to do so.

Moving on, I held senior positions in 2 voluntary organisations. In one of those, the primary focus was on negotiating a contract for the provision of services - a notion which has become normal, but was then being trialled by a few local authorities with a few voluntary organisations. My concern was that this would lead to a commercialisation of the voluntary sector, removing some of its scope for innovation and challenge of the state, but also an awareness that underpinning the transfer of services from the state to the voluntary sector was an economic imperative to save money and I was not prepared to engage in fund-raising in order to do the work of the statutory sector. In the second organisation, the situation was more complex. It was a pan-London, church-based organisation with a network of projects throughout London. Funding was a mixture of local authority grants, money given by churches and a diocesan grant. Over the years, the projects had become more professional and local church groups were questioning why they should fund these activities, especially when they were unable to gain much information about what was being done in their name because of client confidentiality. Although the work was of high quality, it was removed from the churches with the unintended consequence that local churches neither owned the work nor felt any obligation to engage in social action themselves as they were already funding the projects to do this on their behalf. My view was that it was essential to return ‘ownership’ to the local churches and to enable them to identify what was appropriate social action in their areas, if necessary reconfiguring the professional projects. It was a very difficult time as it felt as though I was dismantling rather than building.

Time moved on. I became a mother and spent a few years living abroad. When I returned to the UK, I knew I could not realistically return to my previous career. I retrained, gained new interests, and developed an interest in educational technology. But my personal life was taking me in a different direction as it became clear my son had SEN. I was able to use my knowledge and skills to gain an understanding of the system and to ensure my son got the help and support necessary for him to achieve his potential - I owned the problem and exercised my agency. I knew other parents were not necessarily able to do this - they were effectively disabled - and became involved in voluntary initiatives to enable other parents to act.

I am not anti-professional - I have been involved in professional employment of one sort or another most of my adult life. I am against professionals disabling others when they could be informing and enabling people to take control of their own lives and own their problems and difficulties so as to engage in action to become the people they want to be. I still remember the amazement expressed by a social worker on a holiday project when she saw ‘inadequate parents’ organising activities and taking responsibility for large groups of children. By focusing on the positives, the difficulties can be overcome, albeit with struggle.

So my perspectives on ownership/agency are a mixture of personal belief, gut feeling, work experience, observation…

Maxwell, J. A. 2005. Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach, Sage Publications, Inc.

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31/03/2011 by lizit.

Last evening’s #phdchat session on Twitter focused on academic writing. As always, it was a wide ranging discussion, but one aspect that got me thinking a bit more was my writing voice.

When I started my DPhil journey, I remember saying to my supervisor that one of the things I needed to do was to find my voice. At the time, I had just co-authored an article with her on a project we had been involved with and it was the first serious writing I had done for several years, and my first venture into academic writing as such, in the sense that this was something that might be read by other than my teachers and supervisors. I was used to presenting stuff in all manner of contexts, but writing and a writing voice was somehow different.

A further, personal complication was my longstanding reaction to much academic writing and language. As an undergraduate, way back when, I had found myself virtually struck dumb in seminars and other discussions because I just did not understand half of what was being said, and there was no way I could actually write such impenetrable stuff.  I more or less made a promise to myself that anything I said or wrote should be in accessible English.

It is now about two and a half years since that conversation with my supervisor, and I realise I have found a voice - in fact I have found three different voices, all of which I will be expressing in my writing and my thesis.

First, there is the impersonal, authoritative voice. This is the voice most present in the theoretically based parts of my writing. It is the one that reports on what I have read, provides a context, discusses methodological frameworks and the like. From time to time it may use formal, academic language, but it aims to be accessible and clear. It is also the voice that identifies some of the issues and conflicts between theoretical perspectives and enters into debate with them.

Secondly, there is another voice which also discusses ideas and concepts, but not as impersonal researcher, but as ‘I’. This is the voice that makes observations on what the impersonal has written and brings a ‘real world’ perspective. When the impersonal talks about the number of different specialists a child with a disability might have seen, the ‘I’ voice talks from experience. This voice has a different type of authority from the impersonal voice. The impersonal is speaking from the body of research and professional experience which has been subjected to peer review and the like, but the personal voice is sometimes saying, that is the theory, but this is how it was for me in reality.

The third voice, which is a function of the type of work I am doing, and which in other circumstances might be part of that second voice, is me as participant in my research. Although, I am not taking an autoethnographic approach, my story and experiences are part of my research.  Last summer I blogged on some of the ethical dilemmas I was confronting. I have now found a resolution to these in writing and analysing my own story in such a way that I can use it as data, the same as the stories others are sharing with me. This voice is not recognisable to the reader as being my voice, but nevertheless, it is allowing me more directly to introduce perspectives on my research topic which are not readily available through any other source and is reflective of the very different experiences of different participants in my research domain.

Somewhere along the line, I probably need to do more work on this, and even to find some theoretical framework to hang this approach on, but for the moment, I do know that my voice is very present and real in my writing, and that voice is not a whisper trying to be heard, but is vibrant, strong, objective and authoritative - and it has a story to tell.

Thanks #phdchat for helping me to articulate this.

Posted in voice, writing, empowerment | Print | 1 Comment »

19/02/2011 by lizit.

One of the questions I have been considering is the extent to which the practitioners within the autism domain can be considered a single community of practice, or whether there are a number of different communities of practice. My thinking has led me to consider inter-agency working and inter-disciplinary teams and has led me to various studies considering what happens at the boundary between organisations, professions, etc. It would seem that the boundary area can be seen as a place of opportunity, but also a place if disjunction and threat as it requires practitioners to see things from different perspectives to gain a common understanding. It has been suggested that one of the reasons why parents can feel side-lined from professional discussions is that the professionals are so busy sorting out their boundary issues, there is no room for the parental voice. In fact, the informed parent might even be seen as a threat to professional practitioners who are feeling vulnerable as they sort out their identities in an inter-disciplinary context.

The current issue of Sociology  includes an article discussing boundary objects (Fox, 2011). Although the focus of the article is on the adoption of new technologies and innovations, the concept of boundary objects could be of relevance in looking at the relationships that exist at the boundaries between communities of practice. Indeed, the context of the article is one of interdisciplinary working between different communities of practice. Fox suggests that boundary objects enable communication across boundaries and “empower members of different communities to transfer their own knowledge” (p 72).

In the AS domain, and SEN more generally, there are a range of artefacts which are shared between members of different communities of practice. These might include diagnostic reports, IEPs, Statements, etc. Boundary objects are said to allow different communities of practice to learn about each others perspectives and share meaning, but Fox also recognises that if they are inappropriately introduced, the may exacerbate difficulties rather than ameliorating them. He uses the example of Lister’s work in introducing asepsis, showing that originally Lister’s ideas were rejected by the medical establishment as by linking doctors with the introduction of germs to the patient, the doctor was perceived as part of the problem. Once the doctor was seen as part of the solution, with a shift of focus to the benefit of the patient, asepsis became acceptable, and it fitted the spirit of the time which was geared towards greater cleanliness and personal hygiene.

Putting this into an AS context, very often parents are anxious to receive a diagnosis for their child. The diagnostic report provided by the medical team is prized and is perceived by parents as a key to having their child’s needs addressed. However that same report may be seen in a different light by those responsible for educating the child. It may be that the education professionals do not share the medical perception of the child’s needs, or it may be that in order to meet the needs of one child might involve reducing support to another child (all too common a scenario in a world of scarce resources). Further, the formal diagnosis and recognition of a child’s needs might be the first step to the time and resource consuming process of a formal assessment of the child’s SEN and negotiations with the local authority to ensure appropriate provision is put in place. The parent might experience the school as obstructive rather than enabling in responding to the diagnostic report and addressing their child’s needs.

No doubt other artefacts could be similarly considered.

The question is, how can these artefacts, or border objects, be used to facilitate addressing the needs of children with SEN rather than as problematic.

Fox, N. J. (2011). Boundary objects, social meanings and the success of new technologies. Sociology, 45(1), 70-85.

Posted in struggle, boundaries, community of practice, empowerment, adoption of technology | Print | 1 Comment »

16/10/2010 by lizit.

For a whole series of reasons, some personal, some environmental, some miscellaneous, I have been finding it very difficult to get myself focused enough to do any constructive work. I can understand why I am feeling as I am, but have been finding it difficult to do anything very much about it.

Yesterday I met a colleague for coffee. Turned out that for various reasons she was also feeling fairly disengaged.

Recipe for disaster and mutual descent into depression? Well no, it actually was an extremely positive meeting. Perhaps because we were able to be honest about how we we feeling, we were able to help each other to see it wasn’t just us being middle-aged and pathetic, but our feelings were valid - and what was more, we could do something positive that might even be helpful to others.

We all know from the books and from experience that the DPhil journey is a lonely one, but yesterday reminded me that I am not on my own. There are other people around with similar doubts and anxieties and we can not only support each other but we can be creative and revitalised by sharing and exploring.

Today is a new day with new ideas, new opportunities and loads to think about and do!

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23/07/2010 by lizit.

This is probably going to be one of my incoherent blogs, but may be good opportunity to play with some ideas.

Although my topic is around the learning of carers of different types within the autistic spectrum domain, a key element is the place of parents. I am exploring learning journeys as I want to understand better how the learning of lay people varies from that of professional, particularly given so much learning is on the job and the workplace of parents is the home. I am not interesting in diminishing the professional contribution, but I guess I am interested in the balance of power, knowledge, influence between the different players in the domain - and I am very conscious that the person central to the domain is all too often the one with least voice, i.e. the child.

Two thoughts are chasing around my head today:

• many of today’s major charities had their origins in the post-war period. Although the specifics of each varies, there was often a perceived need recognised by parents or others, for example see the history of Mencap  which was initiated by a parent inviting other parents to join her and grew from there. Part of the function of these organisations was to give a voice to parents and carers and to ensure the future well-being of the children with different disabilities as they grew up and the parents were less able to provide the same level of care.
• A major interest and concern of mine in the past has been that of ownership or control - the posh word for this seems to be agency. A key part of what I was observing in the early 1980s when working in the disability field was the change from primarily a care agenda for disabled people to a recognition that people with disabilities had views of their own and were capable of living full lives. My focus was on who owned disability organisations and I was seeing a change from philanthropic ventures to organisations of people with disabilities with a voice and purpose.

In the autistic spectrum domain, there continues to be a sense of struggle and fight to get needs met, with parents acting as advocates on behalf of their children. Is this part of a similar movement in the development of specialist organisations and ownership issues, or is it different, and in what way is it similar and in what way different.

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25/01/2010 by lizit.

Thought it was about time I posted a catch up on what I am actually doing!

The focus of my DPhil is now the learning journeys of the various participants involved in the support and care of children and young people on the autistic spectrum. There are many different people involved from parents and carers to support staff in schools and residential establishments to education, health and social service professionals - and probably a few others as well. Although there is a notion of partnership in the provision of care and support, this partnership can be uneven because of the different levels and types of expertise different partners bring to the table, the way this expertise is or is not valued by other partners and the relative power of the different partners in providing access to resources.

I am planning to focus specifically on learning - which in practice means how people develop knowledge and expertise about autistic spectrum conditions/disorders (the terminology is currently in flux).

I have written an outline of what I hope to cover in my study and am in the process of re-drafting and getting this into a format appropriate for applying for the appropriate ethical clearances.

Another strand I am working on at the moment is trying to clarify what I understand by learning and which learning theories and ideas inform my understanding. This exploration has taken me through formal and informal learning, situated learning, communities of practice and currently metaphors of learning, as well as along a number of interesting side turnings.  I have read lots of interesting stuff and am slowly learning to sift out the things that have less relevance to my proposed study, however interesting they may be. Other posts in this blog summarise some of those explorations.

The other area I am beginning to explore is that of how disability is seen by society and the effect of disability on a family. This is not a major focus for me, but there is a fair bit of evidence showing that families with a disabled member are disadvantaged in lots of different ways and there is other evidence pointing to people with disabilities forming an underclass. If it can be shown that parents caring for children and young people on the spectrum have a great deal of knowledge and expertise in a number of different areas, this might challenge the power structure and also empower parents.

At the moment it feels as though there are a lot of different threads in something of a disarray and my task is to try to identify them and put them in some sort of order so that I can progress. A bit like sorting out lace bobbins and threads after the cat has knocked the lace pillow on the floor yet again. I’ll be more than happy if I can get these threads organised and begin to make something of them.

Posted in lace, ASD, empowerment, research ideas, concepts, learning, reflections, creativity, planning | Print | 1 Comment »

10/01/2010 by lizit.

Although I am aware that most of the parents I know in the various ASD networks I am part of are women, I haven’t really given any attention to the potential significance of this. Having read a report of a study of learning in social action organisations in Canada (English, 2005). English interviewed 16 women who were either directors or board members of women’s organisations and analysed their narratives using Focault’s analysis of power grid.

One of her observations was that the work of the organisations studied was often underfunded. Subjects reported that in general the funding deficit was made up for with voluntary work by members - people tended to be made to feel guilty if they didn’t participate, but at the same time were angry at having to pick up the tab. English suggests that there is an underlying assumption by government organisations that women will fill the gaps. One of the threads that runs through many ASD mail groups is the failure of the public services to respond to the needs of children and young people and their families in a timely manner. Although there are no doubt many different reasons for this, I do wonder of one of them is the assumption that women will somehow continue to provide whatever is needed however difficult it is to do so. Very often men appear to absent themselves from discussions about the care of their children with ASDs, yet it seems that when they are actively involved, sometimes things move more quickly.

I don’t think this is something I want to make a big thing of, but it may be that I need to keep in mind a possible feminist dimension when I come to look at data analysis.

English also makes the same observation that I have come across with many authors now of formal education being privileged over learning outside the institution, with an emphasis on accredited learning. She suggests that educators need to “attend to societal and cultural factors influencing learning” and points out that actual learning is “often non-formal and not infrequently spurred on by a disorienting dilemma or difficult situation.”  This supports my intention to use critical incident vignettes in my research.

English, L. (2005). Narrative Research and Feminist Knowing: A poststructural reading of women’s learning in community organizations. McGill Journal of Education, 40(1), 143-155.

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06/01/2010 by lizit.

These notes are based on Jean Lave’s 1996 article “Teaching, as learning, in practice”.

It is an interesting article as it clearly identifies the focus of most learning research is not research on learning but “research on instruction, on depersonalised guidelines for the teaching of specific lesson-like things in school settings in order to improve learning.” Lave draws on her research of the apprenticeship practices of Liberian tailors and on Timothy Mitchell’s observations of the training of Egyptian lawyers, to come to the conclusion that learning rather than teaching is the core concept.

Starting with Scribner and Cole’s (1973) paper drawing a clear distinction between learning in formal settings and in informal settings, Lave shows that a polarity has developed which values formal schooling. This, combined with a psychological model of learning, has led to an increasing marginalisation of those who do not succeed in the school system. Putting this into the 21st century UK context it could be hypothesised that the emphasis on achieving government set targets in schools and the emphasis on increasing the number of young people entering higher education could have had the unintended consequence of reinforcing the development of an underclass amongst those young people who do not meet the targets, leading to the development of the gang culture and criminal behaviours which are increasingly in the public eye.

Lave is clear that learning is about far more than knowledge transfer. In both her examples, the apprentices, or learners, did not only learn a skill or set of concepts, but were enculterated in a multi-layered system of cultural values with their implications. Particularly in the case of the Liberian tailors, the apprenticeship and its completion was accompanied by a strong sense of worth and self-respect in stark contrast to the poverty of the society the tailors were part of.

Lave’s work led her to three changes in perspective from those espoused in traditional education models:

1. a reversal of the polarisation that school and institutional learning is positive and other forms of learning are negative
2. a focus on learners and learning rather than the transmitters of knowledge - teachers, care givers, etc
3. learning is not individual but is socially situated

In her work with Martin Packer, a tentative model to underpin learning theories was developed:

1. Telos or the idea that learning involves some kind of change or movement
2. Subject-world or the relationship between the individual or self and the social world
3. Learning mechanism which focuses on how learning happens

Lave concludes by saying: “The conditions for the transformation of persons are the same whether the telos of learning is movement towards growing up from babyhood, or adolescence, becoming a craftsperson or a philosopher, and/or becoming a marginal person in a world where participation in and thus learning divisions of race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual preference, determine strongly who is consigned to the advantaged cores and disadvantaged margins of society.”

I found some the article resonated strongly with me. I have already given some thought to the marginalisation and dis-empowerment of parents of children and young people with autistic spectrum disorders and it may be that part of this stems from the fact that their knowledge of their children’s condition is situated rather than as a result of teaching. Empowerment implies a polarity as for somebody to be empowered somebody else has to be dis-empowered. In the current model, professionals hold the power (and the budgets). Would a recognition of parental learning and knowledge lead to empowerment, partnership and possibly more shared decision making?

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