Yesterday was the final day of the strike action which has been taking place at the University of Derby. Another joyous day of coming together with colleagues to argue both for the reconsideration of the mass redundancy plan and for a different way of thinking about what education is and what it is for.
There has been some amazing activities, speeches and statements of support over the last few days. If you are on Instagram or Facebook then check out the updates there as you will get some of the flavour of the last three days.
On day three we organised a teach out, which gave staff and students and opportunity to come together in the warm and talk about academic ideas. As ever this was an incredibly fertile intellectual space and different lecturers led sessions on creativity, the philosophy of education, and football and Palestine. Politics was never far from the surface and we all spent time thinking about the relationship between our disciplines, the context in which we are teaching and the actions that we have been taking over the last three days.
I led a session on decent work. Decent work is a concept that I work with a lot. It is problematic and normative, but also useful as a way of thinking about what work should offer to people and what we should be helping people to understand within the context of careers education. Decent work is also something that we are trying to achieve by going out on strike, so it seemed a neat symmetry to end the action talking about this.
This is what I had to say…
The session prompted a lot of interesting discussion about how people saw decent work and what we could do to get some for ourselves, and ensure that students could find some for themselves. As is often the case in my work, there is an uneasy balance between helping people to effectively play the individualistic, neoliberal game, and encouraging people to think more carefully about structural issues and work collectively for an improvement in them. This is the kind of ‘career guidance for social justice’ approach that I’ve tried to push for a number of years now, so it was great to be able to talk to people about this in the middle of a moment of collective action
