Author: Andy Pitchford. Two men with big bushy beards have had a disproportionate impact on my academic career. While I am grateful for their influence, for reasons that I will now explore, I am occasionally troubled by the beards themselves.
Author: Andy Pitchford. One of the more depressing moments of my academic career was on a July Friday, in the midst of a long, hot summer sometime in the late 1990s. I had just taken the wrong door out of my department office, having had a very nice chat with the people there which had distracted me somewhat from my morning’s journey.
Author: Andy Pitchford. One of the great challenges that face those who work in education is imagining alternatives to the way we currently work. We are all so acculturated to the norms of the education that are promoted by the societies that we inhabit that it can be very difficult to see which aspects of learning are inescapable.
“Authentic learning is a sham,” an experienced academic colleague tells me. “How can we pretend that what happens in my class, and what happens within a university generally, isn’t real life in some way?
