Knowledge processes

The purposes of education

    • What is education for? What has it done for you? What do you expect it to do—for you, for your own children, for the students you teach, for their parents?

    • Describe an incident or some incidents from a job you have had. How is this incident or incidents illustrative of the Fordist, post-Fordist or productive diversity model of work? As a class, build a catalogue of such incidents, and compare classifications.

Changing work in schools

    • Interview a retired teacher, or a teacher who has served for many years and who is about to retire. How has the organisation of schools changed in recent decades? Use the organisational categories of Fordism, post-Fordism and productive diversity to characterise the differences.

Types of school organisation

    • Read some accounts of school life one hundred years ago. Create a comparative table which names and defines the key organisational characteristics of the old school, and those of schools of today or the near future.

Work and education: The connections

    • Theorise the connections between Fordism/didactic teaching, post-Fordism/authentic education and productive diversity/transformative education. How close do you consider these alignments to be?

Tools for learning

    • List the purposes of education, then prioritise. How do your priorities this affect your attitude to education? For the better? For the worse?

    • What are the technologies of the school? How do these shape the job of the teacher?

Debating work

    • Hold a debate about the modern world. Include as speakers in the debate Ford and Taylor on the one side and Marx and Foucault on the other. Debate the merits of Fordism.

    • Survey a range of working conditions in the world today, comparing conditions for different classes of workers in different countries. Use the categories of Fordism, post-Fordism and productive diversity to characterise the differences.

    • Consider school as a place or work. Why do we need effective organisational and physical architectures?

Being a worker

    • Design and role play a comically archetypical incident in each kind of workplace: Fordism, post-Fordism and productive diversity.

Working Futures

    • Imagine the future of work. Construct optimistic and horror scenarios for the future of work.

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