Hello, I’m so grateful to be invited to share with you in your Spirit of Inquiry. As soon as Danielle told me the title of the day, I knew that we would be having a wonderful time together.
What is so lovely is that we have people here today at different stages in their research journey. Speaking personally, becoming an FE researcher has transformed my career because it has been the opportunity to really believe in myself as a thinker. In fact, if I am to be even more personal about this, I was a bright working-class girl who got the chance to go to university and blew it, because when I got there it was so far out of my comfort zone. Nobody at uni was clear and kind enough to reel me back in and I failed my honours degree (which was, frankly, quite difficult to do back in the day) and spent my twenties with a very low impression of my own worth. The circumstances of my life reflected this too and it was only when I had my son at 30 that I pulled myself up and restarted my education. I was lucky. I worked for the NHS at a time when they were funding Masters degrees in Public Health and my colleagues pulled strings to get me on the course. I found it hard. I didn't believe in myself as a thinker and I had to resubmit my first few assignments. But then we got to the research module 😊
The practicality of actually doing something, rather than just writing about stuff ignited something in me. I was working in FE by this time, at Northern College near my home in Yorkshire which is a social purpose college for adults. I was training community activists and my research was around the health impacts of being a volunteer. I loved it. I loved everything about it, including the reading! It was tough, I was a single-parent, working full-time and money was tight. But it reminded me of who I really was - a thinker.
Twenty years later, during lockdown, I wrote up my PhD. I didn’t do it for ego - I’m not interested in that - or because I wanted to work in a university, I didn’t and don’t. It cost me a fortune and that twelve grand is still sitting on my credit card. But it was worth every penny. I was ready to step into my own potentia as a thinker. There will always be a part of me that is that 18 year old kid who daren’t walk into a classroom on campus. I can hardly believe that I did it.
What I’ve learned along that road is even more powerful. That story was about me. The rest of the story is about us.
Research means inquiring about anything that we are curious about. What makes it research is that we set some parameters around the inquiry to make sure it’s ethical. For much of my FE career, ‘research’ was something we had to find funding for and of course that meant there was never time to go looking for that. There were opportunities, as you have opportunities here. I was feeling slightly jaded maybe ten years ago when I got the chance to be part of an action research project funded by the Education and Training Foundation, who are the professional development agency in England. It reignited me all over again.
Now, in my freelance work, everything I do is a live dataset. We learn something from every project, and because it’s set up as ‘research’, it has ethical parameters around it. I have become a bowerbird, and I would love to introduce him to you today. Here he is.
The blue satin bowerbird lives in South East Australia, in forests and wetlands. When it comes to mating season, the male bird you see here creates a gorgeous bower - not to live in, just for show - and he decorates it with blue shiny things - bottle tops and straws, the detritus of human life. Blue flowers too and, so the story goes, the occasional sapphire. The female birds come along and they choose a bower and a male bird to mate with. The bowers get kicked over and the shiny blue things litter the forest floor until they are chosen again next mating season. Being an old bird myself, I particularly love that the younger females go for the best bower and the older ones pick the best dancers! Love that as a metaphor for life!
You are all bowerbirds, picking up the blue shiny things of your research. Like the bowerbird, you have parameters. He only chooses blue; you select evidence according to your research methodology. Yet we encounter blue shiny things every day of our practice and so many of them don’t make it into the research. They also don’t make it into the ‘data’, which guides how we all work in FE.
The Education and Training Foundation whom I mentioned before recently completed a big piece of research. They set out to inquire about FE as a ‘self-improving system’, looking at our sector as a whole, in the context of the huge changes we are all facing, not just in FE but globally. Climate change, the emergence of AI, and the political-economic situation all play out in our organisations, leading to the mental health crisis we see in students and ourselves, migration, teacher retention, fake news, poverty and all the rest. Systems thinking starts from the premise that everything is interconnected, what happens here has an impact there. Systems thinkers sometimes use engineering metaphors for this - the system as an engine with cogs and wheels and levers. Or the system as a body - the heart doing what it does, until the kidneys get sick and impact on the blood flow. The original concept came from the work of an environmentalist, Donella Meadows, who presented it as an ecosystem. So, pick your metaphor. I’m going to stick with loops and levers for today
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The ETF research discovered two key factors that impact heavily on FE. The research was based on England, but I’m not sure we differ much in the important stuff. Firstly, that FE has a divided purpose, both halves in tension with each other, like opposing magnets. They call this FE’s North Star. Do we exist for a social purpose, enabling citizens of the future to flourish? Or do we exist to serve the system, delivering qualifications and data for inspection and audit? The truth is, of course, that we have to do both. We come here for a social purpose and get entangled in the rest. We feel that tension when we walk into work every day. No wonder we are exhausted.
They also discovered a ‘doom loop’, which is a negative feedback loop. The purpose of systems thinking is to notice where doom loops occur, and fix them so that they turn into ‘joy loops’ - positive feedback loops. There is a doom loop in FE about how society (not just the governments, but public perception) views us.
We do all the things to be better, with all the constraints we face, and yet the perception doesn’t shift. We are like Wallace and Gromit, going round in circles on that toy railway, throwing the tracks down but never able to pull that lever to go in the direction we want. For us in FE, research is that lever. How can we evidence the things that matter, when the only evidence we are asked for doesn’t point in that direction? My personal outcomes ‘data’ back in the day - not that we collected it then - would have shown a failure of the education system. For most of my twenties I worked in jobs you didn’t need a degree for - shops, care homes, admin temping. All valuable and necessary jobs by the way, but society doesn’t think like that, does it? And yet, I know that I have gone on to create change.
Your research presents the blue shiny things of your practice in FE. The scale of your research doesn’t matter. My work today is about changemaking, working with changemakers and if we know one thing, it’s that change is in the small things, many of them, tributaries running into a river. The sudden shift comes from the sum total of all the tiny things that went before reaching a tipping point. I read a lovely book a couple of summers ago by the Australian broadcaster Julia Baird. She’d been visiting a suffragette exhibition at the Museum of London and what moved her was not the banners and sashes, but the boxes upon boxes of hand-written minutes, from meetings all across the country. The patient admin, the painstaking detail of what had worked - and what hadn’t worked. The blue shiny things.
Your research contributes to the change we need, to secure a fair and just future for ourselves and the people we serve. But only if you tell people about it.
In recent years, I’d say over the past ten years or so, FE has not waited for the ETF, universities or any other government agency to take notice of FE research. FE has been organising itself through the FE Research community, a grassroots-led movement which - thankfully - doesn’t have to stick to political boundaries and where Wales has had as big a part to play as any other country. This is a open-bordered community of different constellations of practice, where FE researchers use social media - usually LinkedIn these days - to find one another. Where people meet up where they can, on and offline. I use the word ‘constellations’ because it isn’t a fixed group, people don’t go around in a gang. There’s no formal membership, people’s engagement ebbs and flows and whoever’s there are the right people at any given moment. And because we are all stars. As the philosopher of hope, Rebecca Solnit, says, “the stars we are given, the constellations we make.
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We find each other through the hashtag #FEResearch (and I’ve been using that on social media about our time together today) and through a project called #AmplifyFE which exists to help FE people find each other
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If you want to go further than simply connecting on social media, there are loads of events you can go to, on and offline. These range from book on and turn up events, hosted by the FE Research Network, the Research Colleges Group and LSRN, to FE research focused conferences such as ARPCE, which runs in Oxford every two years. Down the road, there’s Coleg Ceredigion/Coleg Sîr Gar’s ‘Culture of Curiosity’. There’s an FE Research podcast and events where people get together on and offline to write. Even the Bowerbird has his own Writing Rooms on Zoom every Sunday morning! This is a pro-social, anti-competitive community, completely free of charge, where it’s actually great to find that people are researching the same thing as you, because the context is different and you can learn from each other. It only costs you your time and agency. Even residential conferences like ARPCE work hard to get sponsors so that bursaries are available. If you’re into social purpose digital, the ALT-C and OER conferences have bursaries too, especially for FE.
And there are loads of places to publish your research, no matter how small-scale it is. People love reading this stuff! Side-step the academic journals (unless you really want to) and look out on social media for opportunities. Last year, LSRN ran a conference in Birmingham and the Association of Colleges sponsored a publication for researchers who wanted to write up their presentations. I’ve put a QR code link to it here. It’s called ‘Staying with the Troublemakers’ and it’s brilliant. Your own Layla Pearce was on the organising committee for that event and Luke here had an unofficial role giving the best hugs, as I remember. It’s where we met for the first time and if it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t be here now. I also edit an Instagram magazine for teachers, called Fusion - we’d love you to write for us. And FE News are always looking for writers. Let me know if you’re up for any of this.
I know this is a lot to take in. You can always contact me if I can give a little direction and I’ll publish this talk on my blog with as many links as I can find. Everything contributes to the growing profile of FE research
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And something bigger is happening. What this community grows and shares is potentia. I promise you this is the last unfamiliar concept I’ll hit you with today. When I was doing my PhD, I read all sorts. And I came across the work of a long-dead philosopher called Baruch Spinoza. He wrote in Latin about power. And he had two words for it at his disposal. We only have one in English - the concept of power he called potestas. That’s what we recognise as power - power-as-usual, hierarchy, clout, invested in the individual. His second word, potentia, means something different. It’s a changemaking power, an energy - the energy, in fact, that we feel in the room today. It’s collective and it’s joyful - it’s community. I have never come away from an FE research event without buzzing with new ideas and connections.
That word, potentia, has been lost to us for centuries. Research has brought it back to us. My hope for you today is that you recognise that changemaking energy in yourself and in each other, because when we share it, it grows. Potentia people are golden unicorns - an actual business term - and together we are changing things. I see it and feel it, everywhere I go. And we have to. Because no other unicorn is going to come along and fix the mess this world is in, if we don’t do it for ourselves
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My final thought is around impact. Impact, as we use it in FE, is energy-draining. We are asked to account for the impact of every potential new idea, before we’ve even begun to figure out the first step. When we’ve done something, we are expected to account for its impact before we’ve had chance to take a breath. And that anchors us to the short-term, in a world which desperately needs long term solutions. Through the work of the Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation - also in Australia! - I came across the concept of the ‘long now’. I leave you with the words of the musician and producer Brian Eno, who founded the Long Now Foundation:
“‘Now’ is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes.”
He goes onto say that it’s ironic that when our civilization is at the peak of its technical powers, most of our social systems are geared to increasingly short nows. As FE researchers, we are the lever that can and will change that. Your research and the research of many others is helping us to increase the length of our ‘Now’. I hope to leave you with a sense of how important you are.
Thank you.
A beautiful piece! Totally inspiring 🙌
This sounds fabulous 👌 Enjoy 💚