We Are the Revolutionaries : Visibility, Protest, and Racial Formation in 1970s Prison Radicalism

This dissertation analyzes black and Puerto Rican prison protest in the 1970s. I argue that prisoners elucidated a nationalist philosophy of racial formation that saw racism as a site of confinement but racial identity as a vehicle for emancipation. Trying to force the country to see its sites of punishment as discriminatory locations of repression, prisoners used spectacular confrontation to dramatize their conditions of confinement as epitomizing American inequality. I investigate this radicalism as an effort to secure visibility, understood here as a metric of collective consciousness. In documenting the ways prisoners were symbols and spokespeople of 1970s racial protest, this dissertation argues that the prison served as metaphor and metonym in the process of racial formation. A concept and an institution, the prison was embodied in protest, hidden in punishment, represented in media, and known in ideas. This dissertation examines the multifaceted mechanisms by which social movements attempt to effect change through creating new ways of knowing. I examine prison visibility through two extended case studies. First, I study a coterie of radical black prisoners centered in California and revolving around militant prisoner author George Jackson. Through appeals to revolutionary action as racial authenticity, this grouping—which included Angela Davis, Ruchell Magee, and the San Quentin 6, as well as the Black Panther Party and others—described black prisoners as slaves rebelling against the confinement of American society writ large. The second case study addresses the successful decade-long campaign to free five Puerto Rican Nationalists imprisoned for spectacular attacks on U.S. authority in the 1950s. Understanding colonialism as a prison, U.S.-based Puerto Rican nationalists in the 1970s (including the Young Lords, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional and others) defined the freedom of these prisoners as a necessary step toward national independence. Through strategies of visibility, black and Puerto Rican prison radicals used collective memory to overcome the spatial barriers of confinement. Such memories were recalled through a wide range of tactics, from bombs to bombast, from alternative media to community organizing, as prison radicals fought to control the terms of their visibility

Refining the traditional flipped classroom model: Teaching students HOW to think not WHAT to think

Berger, D & Wilde, C (2016), Refining the traditional flipped classroom model: Teaching students HOW to think and not WHAT to think, bileta 2016 CFP, Paper presented at the British and Irish Law Education and Technology Association Annual Conference, Law School, Hatfield, 11-12 April 2016, University of Hertfordshire.Peer reviewe

Turned on, tuned in, but not dropped out: Enhancing the student experience using popular social media platforms

Berger, D & Wilde, C (2015), Turned on, tuned in, but not dropped out: Enhancing the student experience using popular social media platforms, ‘’Sustainability: Securing Regulation, Education and Technology for the Future’. Paper presented at the British and Irish Law Education and Technology Association Conference, UWE, Bristol, 8-10 April 2015, University of the West of EnglandPeer reviewe

The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF): Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

Manuscript subject to 24 months' embargo. Embargo end date 22 August 2018The UK government’s Green Paper, ‘Fulfilling Our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice’, presents both significant challenges and opportunities for universities. Whilst the quantitative element of the proposed Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), underpinned by Big Data, offers the tantalizing opportunity to measure, collate and compare data efficiently between all universities, it also presents a number of significant risks in the form of institutional decision-making, the skewing of behaviours, and potential homogenisation of provision across the sector. As such, this paper asserts that it is vital that the qualitative element of the TEF is implemented diligently and effectively so as to encourage universities to develop clear internal and external narratives that clearly outline the importance of education to their respective institutional missions. Whilst Big Data may prove informative, it requires context in order to be truly useful. Therefore, the task ahead for both the government and universities is far from straightforward.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Getting The Job Done: Using Authentic Assessment Techniques In Extra And Co-Curricular Activities (Eccas) To Improve Law Students’ Employability Prospects

Authentic assessments are closely aligned with activities that take place in real work settings, as distinct from theoften artificial constructs of University courses. While the traditional ‘paper-based’ assessment strategy provides a pragmaticsolution to the problem of a general lack of time and resources to grade students en masse, the authors believe that the use ofauthentic assessment techniques, in accredited and University-run extra and co-curricular activities (ECCAs), are perfectlyplaced to improve law students’ employability prospects. By delivering authentic assessments methods in ECCAs, acombination of formative and summative techniques used throughout the assessment processes improves studentperformance, which thereby has positive cross-impact into improving critical reasoning, team-working, self-confidence andpublic speaking skills – all highly prized by employers in many different disciplines and working environments. Byexamining recent employability data, and cross-referencing them with trends in student participation with ECCAs, theauthors demonstrate that authentic assessment improves law students’ employability prospects in a variety of sectors – notjust in law

Vacations…Texas Style.

4 p

Empowering the learner, liberating the teacher? Collaborative lectures using old and new technologies

This paper documents examples of collaborative lectures in the fields of Political Communication and English at undergraduate level. Students would be given tasks between lectures (such as taking pictures, drawing characters, finding definitions and supplying examples), and the subsequent lecture would draw upon this material, thus giving students greater ownership of the lectures as ‘co-creators’ of knowledge (Freire, 1970). While these initiatives had their successes, some failed to reach beyond the most engaged students, while others got involvement from the whole cohort. We put this down to the design of the tasks and the platform on which they were exhibited. Similarly, encouraging collaboration through subject Facebook groups did not penetrate beyond the most engaged students. In contrast, traditional paper and pen did. We also found that students were more inclined to collaborate through creative tasks such as drawing characters from novels, rather than more functional tasks such as providing definitions. Reflecting on these interventions, we argue that collaborative lectures offer benefits to both students and teachers, as ‘co-creators’ of learning materials. Students are encouraged to be active learners (Bonwell & Eison, 1991) even in large groups where they are often quite passive. This has had significant benefits for their academic assertiveness (Moon, 2009) and confidence in sharing their ideas. Crucially, we found that students were learning more, and this was reflected in their assessment performance. However, for the teacher, as with much good pedagogy there is no time saving in collaborative lectures – teachers must be prepared to review student work every week

Evaluating profiling as a means of allocating government services

This paper considers the use of statistical profiling to allocate persons to alternative options within government programs, or to participation or non-participation in programs. Profiling has been used in the United States to allocate unemployment insurance (UI) claimants to reemployment services based on the predicted duration of their UI claim. We place profiling in the context of the choice among alternative assignment mechanisms. Different mechanisms have different costs and benefits - any one mechanism, whether profiling or something else, may not be optimal for every program. Within profiling systems, we highlight the need for clarity regarding the objective of the assignment mechanism, e.g. equity or efficiency, and we discuss situations in which equity and efficiency goals may conflict. In relation to UI profiling in the United States, we provide empirical evidence from the state of Kentucky on two important questions. First, we demonstrate that it is possible to effectively predict the duration of UI spells, but that effectively doing so requires using more covariates than many US states presently do. This finding is important because effective prediction of the profiling variable is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the success of a profiling system. Second, we show that the impact of reemployment services does not appear to vary with expected duration of the UI spell, indicating that UI profiling in Kentucky does not advance the goal of efficiency, though it may advance equity goals