Work versus exams May 27, 2011
Posted by Mike Gulliver in post.Tags: DEAF history, exams, HEA, league tables, real academic work, surveys
add a comment
Last week, I attended a day conference run by the Higher Education Academy.
The day involved a trip to Nottingham, where I used to live – but don’t ever remember seeing in the sunshine, a night in a hotel with a ‘continental breakfast’ that included cornflakes and a bridge over a moat around the conference centre which was largely redundant, so packed was the moat with seasonally late frogspawn.
It also involved a number of sessions in which famous academics threw handbags at each other, and some networking over some very good food which left the Bristol posse wondering why we don’t boast that level of catering?
Anyway… the focus of the day was largely the way that league tables etc. are forcing HEIs into an unholy relationship with surveys like the NSS to guarantee their future recruitment of students.
It looks like league-table based surveying is a fait accompli… although it shouldn’t be… and was mulling that after a tutorial with one of the students that I taught DEAF history in the autumn term – who was asking about whether she could do a historically-based dissertation.
Yes… I said, and went through how we could work together to open up and explore information that’s never been brought to light… analyse it, and then work together to write a paper which she could then publish – new knowledge, informing the field.
Then we talked about the exams that she’s facing in less than a months time… 2 hours, to spew out everything that she can remember about DEAF history…
And it made me think that really, the tension between proper academic work, and the measures of success that we use makes the whole modern university system rather a farce.
A conclusion on publishing November 3, 2010
Posted by Mike Gulliver in DEAF history.Tags: Banquets, Community, DEAF history, Engagement, Historiography, Publication, Transformative publication
add a comment
From very soon, I’ll be making public my work on the translation of historical material linked to the DEAF community.
The first work that I’ll be doing is linked to the Banquets des Sourds-Muets (the Deaf-Mute Banquets) that originated in the Parisian Deaf community in the 1830s and that have been copied/contested in one form or another up to the present day.
I will be working on the translation of this entirely publicly… publishing the original, the translation and any commentary on it as I produce it.
The translation will be available for review and comment, and I’m hoping that these comments (and the body of work that will emerge) will form a part of the whole.
There are two primary aims to making this work public at this point, and in this way.
The first is that, if I wait until there is funding to publish the work formally, it will – likely – never happen. I can’t wait for that… so I’m going to do it transformatively, as previously discussed.
The second is that – in my experience – historical research carried out either on, or by the Deaf community and the Deaf Studies communities is something of a secret art that is often not open to public scrutiny. My plan is to make all of my work public so that the ins and outs of it can be seen, and – thereby – promote ongoing engagement with the historical process and not just with the historical material that it produces.
Watch this space…
