Student as producer: a pedagogy for the avant-garde?

I was awarded my National Teacher Fellowship in 2007. The award was, in part, a recognition for my work on developing the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Warwick and Oxford Brookes as the Director of the Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research. The Centre sought to connect undergraduate teaching and learning and academic research so that students become part of the academic project of the university: as producers of knowledge and meaning. Since leaving Warwick I have developed this work under the slogan Student as Producer. In this paper I set out the intellectual ideas that lie behind the concept of Student as Producer, and how that idea is being developed across the sector and at the University of Lincoln. The theoretical basis for my work is derived from critical social theory grounded in avant-garde Marxism that developed in Soviet Russia after the Bolshevik uprising in 1917, before being suppressed by Stalin, and a group of modernist Marxists working in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. A key issue for Student as Producer is that social learning is more than the individual learning in a social context, and includes the way in which the social context itself is transformed through progressive pedagogic practice. This transformation includes the institution within which the pedagogical activities are taking place, and the society out of which the particular institution is derived. At a time when the market-based model for social development appears increasingly untenable, the creation of a more progressive and sustainable social world becomes ever more necessary and desirable. Work on developing the principles and practice of Student as Producer are currently funded through the National Fellowship Project Scheme 2010 – 201

The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education

In this chapter, we set out to provide an overview of recent critical responses to the corporatisation of higher education and the configuration of the student as consumer. We also discuss the relationship between the core activities of teaching and research and reflect on both nineteenth century discourse and more recent efforts to re-establish the university as a liberal humanist institution, where teaching and research are equal and fundamental aspects of academic life. While recognizing recent efforts which acknowledge and go some way to addressing the need for enquiry-based learning and constructivist models of student participation, we argue that a more critical approach is necessary to promote change at an institutional level. This critical approach looks at the wider social, political and economic context beyond the institution and introduces the work of Benjamin and other Marxist writers who have argued that a critique of the social relations of capitalist production is central to understanding and remodeling the role of the university and the relationship between academic and student. The idea of student as producer encourages the development of collaborative relations between student and academic for the production of knowledge. However, if this idea is to connect to the project of refashioning in fundamental ways the nature of the university, then further attention needs to be paid to the framework by which the student as producer contributes towards mass intellectuality. This requires academics and students to do more than simply redesign their curricula, but go further and redesign the organizing principle, (i.e. private property and wage labour), through which academic knowledge is currently being produced. An exemplar alternative organizing principle is already proliferating in universities in the form of open, networked collaborative initiatives which are not intrinsically anti-capital but, fundamentally, ensure the free and creative use of research materials. Initiatives such as Science Commons, Open Knowledge and Open Access, are attempts by academics and others to lever the Internet to ensure that research output is free to use, re-use and distribute without legal, social or technological restriction (www.opendefinition.org). Through these efforts, the organizing principle is being redressed creating a teaching, learning and research environment which promotes the values of openness and creativity, engenders equity among academics and students and thereby offers an opportunity to reconstruct the student as producer and academic as collaborator. In an environment where knowledge is free, the roles of the educator and the institution necessarily change. The educator is no longer a delivery vehicle and the institution becomes a landscape for the production and construction of a mass intellect in commons

Open education: common(s), commonism and the new common wealth

Open Education, and specifically the Open Education Resources movement, seeks to provide universal access to knowledge, undermining the historical enclosure and increasing privatisation of the public education system. An important aspect of this movement is a reinvigoration of the concept of ‘the commons’. The paper examines this aspiration by submitting the implicit theoretical assumptions of Open Education and the underlying notion of ‘the commons’ to the test of critical political economy. The paper acknowledges the radical possibility of the idea of ‘the commons’, but argues that its radical potentiality can be undermined by a preoccupation with ‘the freedom of things rather than with the freedom of labour’. The paper presents an interpretation of ‘the commons’ based on the concept of ‘living knowledge’ and ‘autonomous institutionality’ (Roggero, 2011), and offers the Social Science Centre in the UK, as an example of an ‘institution of the common’1. The paper concludes by arguing the most radical revision of the concept of ‘the common’ involves a fundamental reappraisal of what constitutes social or common wealth

Educative power: the myth of dronic violence in a period of civil war

This paper provides an exposition of police state (‘mythic’) violence through the optic of drone culture, in a moment when the police state has declared war against the civilian population. The moment is contextualised during a period of resistance by academics and students against the capitalist university in England 2010-2011, where the financialisation of academic and student life was seen as an act of intellectual vandalism. Grounded in Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘educative power’ (1921) the paper asks what forms of revolutionary ‘divine’ violence are needed to disable the mythic violence of killing drones. Taking its cue from Benjamin Noys’ (2010) challenge to counter dronic violence as a negative collective agency through the abolition of capitalist work, the paper presents a collective form of action by a group of students and academics who have established their own critique of waged-labour, as a worker-student cooperative, the Social Science Centre, Lincoln. All of this is illustrated as a sort of social science fiction through a reading of China Mieville’s The City and the City (2011), where the Social Science Centre’s public subversion encounters the mythical power of the surveillance state as a concrete thought experiment

Teaching Excellence Framework: a critical response and an alternative future

This article considers the impact of the new Consumer Rights Act 2016 and the Higher Education and Research Bill 2016 on teaching and learning in Higher Education in England. It argues that these new legal arrangements fundamentally undermine any concept of student engagement based on collaboration and co-operation between students and teachers. The author suggests another model for higher education: a co-operative university, based on work he is doing with colleagues and other organisations linked with the co-operative movement

Civic University or University of the Earth? A Call for Intellectual Insurgency

This article reviews an attempt to rejuvenate the concept of the civic university in the United Kingdom through the establishment of the Civic University Commission in 2018 by the UPP Foundation. This review is based on a critical appraisal of the concept of ‘civic’ on which the idea of the civic university relies. The review suggests another formulation for higher education: not the civic university but the university of the earth, built on a convergence of the social and natural sciences and Indigenous knowledges connected to world-wide progressive social movements and political struggles. The university of the earth supports an intellectual insurgency to deal with emergencies confronting humanity and the natural world

Youth, training and the training state : the real history of youth training in the twentieth century

This work provides an explanation for the existence of youth that goes beyond the analysis presented by the mainstream sociology of youth and its critics. This involves not only a deconstruction of the sociology of youth, but also a deconstruction of the nature of reality which it supports. I undermine this reality by utilising a theory of abstraction developed by Karl Marx initially from his work on alienated labour and later through his theory of commodity fetishism. Following Marx I suggest that the real world is in fact an abstract (virtual) reality. As part of that reality youth is an abstraction which exists in a concrete form. I trace the development of this abstraction to its manifestation in its most modern form as youth. I suggest that youth has always existed, but not as youth. I argue that the modern form of youth was derived in 1948 as the product of a particular configuration of the productive consumption between capital and labour. I explore the development of this relationship as it manifests itself in its various youthful forms (: Elvis-the teenager... punk) and through a particular regulatory device (: the training state). I conclude that there is no future for youth as youth, by which I mean there is no work, by which I mean there is no money, by which I mean there is no adulthood, by which I mean there is no responsibility, only not responsibility. I suggest that the sociology of youth, and in particular the work of the cultural theorists, e. g. S. Hall, and the practical policies that it supports are, in fact, condemning youth to its existence as youth, for which there is no future. Although the subject matter of the work is youth I am also concerned with the nature of my own subjectivity. This concern includes my own subjectivity as a co-operating employee of the training state and as a subject involved in academic research. I become what I am: an immanent part of the social reality I am trying to explain. This incursion denies the detached perspective of social science and demands a critique of its methodology which I support with reference to painterly (: Cubist) and scientific theories of relativity. I connect these more complete explanations of the real world with Marx's own theory of relativity: the law of value. This engagement with relativity enables me to investigate the determined forms of social existence, e. g. time, space, subjectivity, youth and social life itself, beyond these determinations and, therefore, beyond the future

Student as producer and the politics of abolition: making a new form of dissident institution?

This paper tells the story of how a group of academic staff and students set out to establish a subversive teaching and learning project: Student as Producer, across an English university. Confronted by the intensification of neoliberal education policies and faced with the recuperation of its radical practice, the paper recounts how staff and students involved with Student as Producer moved outside of the university in 2011 to set up a cooperative form of higher education: the Social Science Centre, Lincoln, where students can attain higher education awards without the burden of debt, along with the experience of running a workers’ cooperative. This subversive practice is grounded in a Marxist ‘critique of value’, underpinned by a politics of abolition based on the work of Thomas Mathiesen. The paper concludes that it is possible and necessary to create new dissident institutions ‘in and against’ the organisational forms of capitalist society as the embodiment of revolutionary theory

Taxi Professors: academic labour in Chile - a critical practical response to the politics of worker identity

This paper discusses the organisation of academic labour as an expression of contemporary capitalism in Chile. The focus of our analysis is on so called ‘taxi professors’, hourly paid academics that carry out the majority of teaching at Chilean universities. Drawing on 23 qualitative interviews, we discuss the daily work routines of taxi professors, focussing on travel to work, gender, the labour process, academic freedom, self-management and the organisation of collective struggle among hourly paid workers. In contrast to the mainstream literature on academic identity, the discourses of hourly paid academics are not shaped merely by their sense of ‘precarity’, their belonging to a disciplinary subject or professional expertise, but fundamentally by the alienating and exploitative conditions of work to which they are exposed. This understanding of hourly paid academic labour in terms of an alienated form of capitalist work will be linked to academic writing that suggests a critical-practical activity that seeks to counteract the sense of ‘helplessness’ reflected in the discourses about academic identity. The practical aspect of this activity is presented as the possibilities of platform co-operativism, expressed in this context as co-operative forms of higher education, grounded in a critical reading of Karl Marx’s labour theory of value where value rather than labour is the focus of critical analysis

The Social Science Centre, Lincoln: the theory and practice of a radical idea

The Social Science Centre, Lincoln (SSC), is a co-operative organising free higher education in the city of Lincoln, England. It was formed in 2011 by a group of academics and students in response to the massive rise in student fees, from £3000 to £9000, along with other other government policies that saw the increasing neo-liberalisation of English universities. In this essay we chart the history of the SSC and what it has been like to be a member of this co-operative; but we also want to express another aspect of the centre which we have not written about: the existence of the SSC as an intellectual idea and how the idea has spread and been developed through written publications by members of the centre and by research on the centre by other non-members: students, academics and journalists. At the end of the essay we will show the most up to date manifestation of the idea, the plans to create a co-operative university with degree awarding powers where those involved, students and academics, can make a living as part of an independent enterprise ran and owned by its members for their benefit and the benefit of their community and society