infed.org: space to explore education, pedagogy, community-building, and change.
New and updated
Ruth Kotinsky on adult education and lifelong learning. Ruth Kotinsky made a number of important contributions to thinking about lifelong learning and welfare. Of particular interest was her exploration of education as an aspect of everyday life and working together to build a life in common. [new]
What is education? A definition and discussion. Education is the wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning and change undertaken in the belief that we all should have the chance to share in life. We explore the meaning of education and suggests it is a process of being with others and inviting truth and possibility. [updated]
Basil Yeaxlee, lifelong learning and informal education. A key, but overlooked figure, Basil Yeaxlee wrote the first book on lifelong education; argued that informal education was as significant as formal; and explored the spiritual nature of education. [updated and extended]
Marie Paneth – Branch Street, The Windemere Children, art and pedagogy. Paneth was a talented painter, art therapist and pedagogue. Her book, Branch Street (1944) is a classic exploration of community-based work with children during the Second World War – and the healing use she made of art both with TheWindemere Children (2020) and in later practice was pioneering. In this piece, we explore her work – mostly in the 1940s – and continuing relevance. [updated and extended]
Rethinking schooling
A series of articles exploring the changes we need to make in schooling.
What is teaching? A definition and discussion. In this piece, we explore the nature of teaching – those moments or sessions where we make specific interventions to help people learn particular things. This is set within a discussion of pedagogy and didactics and demonstrates that we need to unhook consideration of the process of teaching from the role of ‘teacher’ in schools.
What is pedagogy? Many discussions of pedagogy make the mistake of seeing it as primarily being about teaching. In this piece, we explore the origins of pedagogy and the often overlooked traditions of thinking and practice associated with it. A focus on teaching as a specialist role is probably best understood in other ways. Pedagogy needs to be explored through the thinking and practice of those educators who look to accompany learners; care for and about them, and bring learning into life. Teaching is just one aspect of their practice.
Animate, care, educate – the core processes of pedagogy. Pedagogy can be viewed as a process of accompanying people and bringing flourishing and relationship to life (animation); caring for, and about, people (caring); and drawing out learning (education). Here we explore these core processes.
Samuel A. Barnett – Practictable socialism. New in the archives. “Facing, then, the whole position, we see that among the majority of Englishmen life is poor; that among the few life is made rich. The thoughts stored in books, the beauty rescued from nature and preserved in pictures, the intercourse made possible by means of steam locomotion, stir powers in the few which lie asleep in the many. If it be true, as the poet says, that men ‘live by admiration,’ it is the few who live, for it is they who know that which is worth admiration”.
Acknowledgements: Picture: Dessiner le futur adulte by Alain Bachellier. Sourced from Flickr and reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/alainbachellier/537180464/
The image of the school stairs is by Jérémy Lelièvre | flickr ccbyncnd2.
The image of Henrietta Barnett and Samuel Barnett was sourced from Wikipedia and marked as being in the public domain.