Serendipity

Mark Smith

There is something about writing – the more I write the more I seem to get ideas for what I might write about. Most months I can pick from two or three topics that have caught my attention. Conversely, when I stop writing the ideas seem a bit harder to come by. For the past couple of months I haven’t managed, due to other pressures, to write this column. Not having produced for a couple of months you’d think I might have ideas to spare, but I haven't; I’ve been struggling with what to write. I thought I might have to recycle some old stuff, or get on my high horse and have another pop at the child protection industry. But I am worried that this might become a bit tiresome. So I spent yesterday morning, which I had set aside to write the column, responding to e-mails that didn’t need being responded to and even went so far as to make a pot of soup, all to avoid putting pen to paper. I then set out for an overnight seminar in Glasgow.

On the train journey, I played about with some ideas I had on redesigning our social work programme at the University, still struggling to focus on writing the column. I arrived at the seminar, the themes of which were social capital and professional identities. One of the presentations was on how academics at Glasgow University had redesigned their teacher training programmes, which, given my own interest in changing our own degrees, was very apposite. Serendipity... the art of making useful discoveries by accident. And I might even get a column out of other peoples” presentations....

My Glasgow colleagues based some of their course design around what they called “troublesome knowledge" and “threshold concepts". Essentially, they identified that knowledge was not readily transmitted from teacher to learner – as was perhaps our experiences of education (experiences that many academics replicate in their own teaching). Rather, knowledge is something you have to grapple with and some bits are more troublesome than others. The notion of threshold concepts is one that applies to just about every discipline. In every discipline there are certain ideas that many students get stuck on. Yet these are ideas that really need to be grasped before they can move on in their learning. Once grasped students take a real leap forward.

A piece of research undertaken by my Glasgow colleagues around these threshold concepts identified that they were more often ontological than epistemological, that is they involved a changed state of being, rather than just a changed state of knowledge. I began to think of the moments when I began to believe I could be a residential care worker after all “those moments when kids started to respond to my requests and when discipline became more natural and involved less conscious work. Those breakthroughs happen not because you learn some new wonder technique of how to deal with kids, (although this is often how policy makers think these things occur). They happen because there is some fundamental, often irreversible, change in the way we are in relation to kids. We feel it and they feel it; the relationships change.

This I think has fundamental implications for the way we teach. It requires that we teach less content and provide more opportunities for reflexivity. In some ways this should not come as news to Child and Youth Care workers. We say that it’s all about “me” but we often continue to teach as though we can give students an array of abstract knowledge and facts that each of them can apply universally across the range of situations they find themselves in. And we wonder why it doesn’t work.

If we really mean that it is all about “me”, “you” or whoever, then perhaps the focus of our teaching should be on building character and self-awareness rather than transmitting knowledge. We also need to be letting students know that notions of “best practice” are a conceit, and generally one that is peddled by those who don’t actually do practice. If there is no “best practice” then what is left and what is important is wise judgement within a range of competing possible ways of acting in a situation. And there is no certainty that, however wise our judgement, it will lead to a desired or predictable outcome, although there is more chance that it will than if we rely on the ever expanding technologies of care that are increasingly foist upon us.