OU Associate Lecturer research day

The OU Oxford region arranged a first: a one-day conference to discuss, present or display research that ALs had undertaken. It was worth the effort to get there.

There were poster presentations on:

• bilingual learners
• competitive advantage, organisational learning and the computer
• culture as in issue in knowledge sharing
• using the web for research dissemination, team building and project management

and there were seven half hour presentations. All the topics were fascinating, despite most being PowerPoint presentations. The real teachers of course had only a few words on each slide. The most professional had more slides, but used pictures to illustrate the words that he spoke about flood management and risk. One guy stimulated heated debate on practitioner based enquiry, generating arguments about the need for ontologically understanding before researching, and using the literature. Someone else described a sombre experience of tutoring prisoners, when she took in a lemon in the expectation of using it to debate its existence. But the lifer didn't debate; he took it, said nothing, held it, smelt it. Then he said, "I haven't seen a lemon for 12 years."

The presentation on a Vygotskian mediated, linguistic phonics programme, reminded me of when I taught reading to infants. My mother would have been interested in this too because she used to be involved in a scheme to teach reading using just five colours to help identify the 44 sounds of the English language.

The presentation on using Foucauldian genealogical analysis to explore discourses of widening participation was perhaps the most difficult to follow, but I wonder how to explore accountability using Foucauldian genealogical analysis.

Someone spoke on gender & linguistic competence from an analysis of the linguistic census in Catalonia. A surprise revelation was that the language used in a family tended to be that of the father. On language again, someone showed how little identification and documentation done in schools of linguistic competencies of bilingual learners. Bilingualism is not appreciated by the mainly mono-lingual English. I liked the playground insult from the 6-year old:
"You wouldn't understand; you're only mono-lingual!"