Four unrelated events have recently come my way :
One: I've recently been working to recover the website for the Sheffield Symposium on adult and continuing conductive education that was thought to have been 'terminated' (I'll let you know when it's back online);
Two: The report of the year long EU Erasmus Project on adults and conductive education is imminent. I'm looking forward to reading it;
Three: Paces Sheffield, working with architecture Masters' students from Sheffield University is undertaking a consultation to design new spaces for children and adults. I was pleased to be invited to the session for adults, with a second this coming Thursday.
Four: Judit Szathmary has a delightful new website and blog. She writes of "conductive movement pedagogy" which is challenging and instructive in itself.
Well, these four random occurrences set me thinking and sent me back to an academic article I first read years ago. We don't much talk about 'pedagogy' in the UK, except for those hardy folk who promote social pedagogy. Altogether too European for English tastes, I suspect.
The article was entitled "What is pedagogy? A radical view". You might like to check it out in full online, because I'm going to be fairly brutal with summarising the case the author carefully makes for taking a radical view of what pedagogy is.
So here goes:
- Education is not just schooling.
- Teaching is not just pedagogy
- In the same way that Education is more than schooling, Pedagogy is more than Teaching.
- Pedagogy is best understood through the thinking and practice of those educators who look to accompany learners; care for and about them; and bring learning into life.
Compared with the literature (and training of conductors) related to working with children, there is comparatively little on continuing conductive education into and during adulthood. One thing seems absolutely clear to me: whatever adult continuing conductive education is, most certainly it is not "big school". So what is adult continuing conductive education about? "to accompany learners; care for and about them; and bring learning into life" seems to me to get to most of the nub of it in very few words.
Dr Simon Duffy of the Centre for Welfare Reform, who spoke at the Sheffield Symposium about this time last year, has written about the goal for all of us being 'citizenship'. What he means by that is neatly visualised in this diagram: 'The 7 Keys to Citizenship'
Conductors are pedagogues, "accompanying learners; caring for and about them; and bringing their learning into life" and helping them turn the 7 keys to citizenship. In a single word, if you would like to sum it up like that, companionship.
So if you were an architect designing spaces for adult continuing conductive education spaces, what would companionable spaces for adult continuing conductive education look like? One thing is for sure, if the resulting spaces wouldn't look out of place in 'Big School', then we're on the wrong track.
If I'm thinking about Paces Campus at High Green in Sheffield that's because (i) it's currently a live project there and (ii) it's a gem of a large site used for all sorts of purposes by different people
The whole site – indoors and outdoors; movement and access in and around it.
The site in its landscape – physically and socially: the adjacent public woodland; the new (Olympic legacy funded) leisure centre with its swimming pool and fitness suite; Packhorse Lane that leads to and from the village of High Green, past the pub, the parish council offices, to three nearby churches, shops and homes - community, collaboration, communication.
Designing companionable spaces for adult continuing conductive education is a challenge to our imagination.
Everywhere will be different depending on specific assets and constraints.
What’s needed are spaces designed to be fluid and flexible, to be shared and inclusive; where companionship is caring for as much as caring by.
