Christian Beighton

Professionalism and Practice

If Deleuze’s innovation concerns how to live and create as much as any strictly philosophical originality, it develops a philosophical method which deliberately blurs the distinction between research and practice by making practice into an experimental research activity (Williams, 2003, pp. 1–3). So I want to focus critically on this question by examining the extent to which improvisation, chance and error are deployed to creative ends for the sector’s research and teaching. This prepares the ground for an ambitious reconceptualization of ethical action in teacher education.

Groundhog day? Nietzsche, Deleuze and the eternal return of prosumption in lifelong learning

This conceptual article examines George Ritzer’s concept of prosumption in the context of lifelong learning in the United Kingdom. Ritzer’s references to prosumption as a form of eternal return of a ‘primal act’, which draw on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze, introduce some ambiguity into the concept. This ambiguity echoes a certain polarization in the debate about co-creation, especially regarding the nature of consumer participation in the creation of value, but it is central to defining the limits of consumer freedom and agency. Critical analysis of UK lifelong learning discourse shows how prosumption can work as a tool of control in this context, producing docile subjectivities, compliant forms of creative co-production and disposable ‘nothing’ products through repetition and a return of the same. Where prosumption is able to challenge this repetition, however, it involves creativity and the return of difference. These examples show how eternal return, ultimately, underpins prosumption’s claim to offer a valid description of emerging practices of prosuming lifelong learners.

Closed circuit? Flow, influence and the liquid management of learning and skills

ABSTRACT A new discourse is being deployed by the English learning and skills sectors new professional body, the Education and Training Foundation (ETF). This discourse repositions learning within a specific vision of corporate expectations. With a focus on deregulation in the sector and employer engagement, this repositioning deploys the terminology and mindset of a particular type of industrial process. This repositioning involves an important change, replacing a culture of micro-management with more decentralised techniques of control following changes at the national level of policy and beyond. Here, learning is analogous to the management of liquid, a move which is naturalised in texts which present education as an unavoidable and unassailable process or closed circuit of flow. Paul Virilios work on the effects of speed is used to pinpoint ambivalence and incipient nihilism as central to this shift, critiquing the ETFs claims to represent the sector.

Implementing the ‘Prevent Duty’ in England: the semiotisation of discourse and practice in further education

ABSTRACT This paper examines the implementation of the Prevent Duty to actively promote fundamental British values in English Further Education (FE). After critically reviewing the history of Prevent and the 2015 Duty to identify evidence of radicalisation in FE, data from interviews of strategic decision-makers in two distinct cases is analysed. The identification, interpretation and recirculation of verbal, graphic and behavioural signs of radicalisation is highlighted. Pinpointing a ‘semiotisation’ of the Prevent agenda, practical and conceptual implications are discussed. First, we identify a practical preoccupation with signs, specific beliefs about how they work, and how decision-makers deal with them. Second, we divide these beliefs conceptually into univocal and polyvocal semiotisation, referring to the degree to which signs are understood as unequivocal indicators of meaning. We underline significant variations in practice in this context and implications which, we argue, link practice and research to inform the fields of (edu)semiotics and policy enactment.

Ethics and Expansive Learning

This final chapter follows the points made so far into the domain of ethical conclusions about practice, contrasting the widespread desire for rule-based ethical regulation with the claims of immanent ethical practice. I underline the ethical implications of epistemological choices which have been made in this connection and discuss the challenges of forms of learning which imply difference and change rather than application and repetition. The latter, I argue, are undermined by expansive learning, which informs a view of professional learning as a fundamentally differential activity.

Expansive Learning in Action

This chapter puts flesh on some of these theoretical considerations by considering some of the findings from a longitudinal case study of development in Police Firearms training. I describe the background to the project and the changes which were undertaken to develop learning practices in a more expansive way. The dynamic, situated nature of the relationship is emphasized, as are the difficulties and problems which arise in such situations. Research methods and strategies used are discussed as ways of demonstrating the validity and the impact of expansive learning in these contexts. Problems, such as the difficulty in capturing data, working collaboratively, and communicating findings, are also discussed in this connection. The implications of these issues are considered, and the place of expansive learning within an ontology of complexity, and virtuality is described.

Researching Organizational Learning: Expansive Perspectives

This chapter pursues these questions into socio-political issues of context in policing and elsewhere. Despite being developed with research into professional learning in mind, the specific nature of expansive learning makes particular demands on research in these contexts. I discuss the need to make viable strategic choices about credible research tools on the ground, looking first at the controversial and overlapping discourses of evidence-based practice (EBP) and professionalization in education and organizational contexts. This analysis examines the implications of expansive learning for research and leads to a provisional distinction between choices about research practices on one hand and research tools on the other.

Toward an Expansive Learning Index

This chapter examines the development of a means of capturing expansive learning for the purpose of research into organizational learning. I tackle the question of why such an index might be needed, before describing four parameters of organizational learning that such an index might help to highlight. In the third, final section, I discuss the challenges to such a research tool, stressing the tensions inherent to organizational contexts.

Introduction: Strange Matters

Expansive Learning in Professional Contexts: a Materialist Perspective critically discusses developments in professional learning with emphasis on the relevance of pedagogies of expansive learning. It draws on recent empirical and theoretical work developed in the context of Police Firearms training and makes an original contribution to the current debate across a range of professional learning settings.

Lifelong Learning between Practice and Ethics

This is what Deleuze means when he repeatedly claims to eschew resentment, negativity and oppositional criticism in favour of “joy in creation” (Deleuze, 2004c, p. 134). Ethical activity for Deleuze cannot be a negative process, but is an “aesthetics of sobriety” which constitutes a practical engagement with literary, philosophical and social practices in everyday life. Passive resignation to war, wounds and death is a sign of repetition and ressentiment for Deleuze (2004b, pp. 170–173), since simply accepting things the way they “are” refuses to see that they can and will change.