My children go to a fantastic school with exceptional teachers, and are very happy there. But it is still a school, and even the best are tied by the systemic limitations of any educational institution.

A note in my six year old’s reading book this week suggested she demonstrated some confusion about whether a text was non-fiction or fiction. In the same week I attended a meeting that explained the curriculum and teaching methods that the school use, in which teachers emphasised the importance of developing our children into critical thinkers.

Also this week I watched, once again, the RSA animation of Ken Robinson’s talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dUNWW2D3BM) that explores the data on ADHD medication across geographical locations in the US, and describes the paper clip test that suggests the majority of young children reach genius levels of creativity before formal education, and more than half have lost this after several years in school. The tension between creative and critical thinking and conformity is present at all levels.

I think this is such an interesting and problematic dilemma for educators. Obviously with a view to future testing and understanding, my child needs to learn about genre, and structure. For the purposes of assessment, there needs to be certainty in the language game of categorisation: she needs to understand the essence of language use within a text that provides indicators as to the social agreement about what genre a particular text would be categorised within. But if a child is questioning the lines of fiction and non-fiction, particularly with a text based upon advertising a holiday as this example was, is it a productive use of language to define this as confusion, or is this a sign of critical thinking?

And here is the great dilemma of education perhaps – in narrowing the gap between colloquial and literate discourses, as Sfard (Thinking as Communicating, 2008) tells us teachers are trying to do, in supporting a child’s development of full concepts through drawing scientific and spontaneous constructs together, how do we also keep the distance alive? Doesn’t criticality lie in the awareness of distances between our ways of symbolically representing and understanding our reality? But could we reasonably expect to keep those distances explicit for a six year old who has to conform to a test driven education system? I won’t be experimenting on mine in an attempt to answer that, but deciding what point is the right point to reopen and question the distances that her formal education has closed, will be a critical one.

Having intended to blog throughout the PhD journey and made three unsuccessful beginnings, I seem to have been looking for a suitable point in time to try again. I anticipated that the PhD journey would feel like it had ended after the viva, but it didn’t. Then perhaps after resubmitting after minor corrections four weeks later, or maybe after receiving the confirmation letter. Maybe I’ll feel it after a graduation ceremony in December, but I doubt it. As I attend my first international conference next week, and start a new role as Lecturer in Digital Technologies, Communication and Education at the University of Manchester, in many ways now feels like the real beginning of the PhD journey and everything that went before was just the groundwork. Not an end or a beginning but a joining of a circle perhaps. I like circles.

I walked into the Kilburn building on our campus today to reconnect with some former colleagues in the School of Computer Science, and the sense of ‘coming full circle’ was strong, as I joined the university working there as a Learning Technologist just over ten years ago.

The next academic year will be one of creating new circles and connecting these with old. I hope to use this blog to reflect on the experience and make sense of journeys through my transdisciplinary landscape (I expect to use the journey metaphor more heavily even than the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing presenters). I’m really excited to be developing a module in digital making pedagogy for the MIE (Manchester Institute of Education) MA DTCE, to the opportunity for more exploration in how we learn through making, to connecting with colleagues in MIE, and to working again with friends and colleagues in Digital Biology, Computing At School and other education and digital innovation organisations across Manchester. I deliberately fell off this community’s radar for a couple of years in order to finish the PhD process, and whether that has ended or begun, I’m going to enjoy circling back in to the community now.