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Episode #14 Scandal Du Jour · When Will They Learn?

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to When Will They Learn?
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Greg Ashman.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm Caiti Wade.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: This is a podcast where we explore what's trending in the world of education.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: In each episode,
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: we discuss podcasts,
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: articles and opinion pieces that are shaping education discourse at the moment
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: and examine these through a science of learning lens.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: We discuss not just what's popular, but what's supported by the evidence.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome, Greg.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're recording at a normal hour again this week.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's good.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm awake.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Helps.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, me too.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: Barely.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: But I am awake.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: How's your last couple of weeks been?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Are you pumped for research at Melbourne on the weekend?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: I am pumped for research ed in Melbourne on the weekend.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I am.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: I also have some personal news.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: So earlier this month,
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: I went to open up my phone and it said I needed to re-sign
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: into my Australian Catholic University email account.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: I tried to do that, wouldn't let me in.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I found the IT desk and they said, oh, you're no longer a fellow, an honorary fellow.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then I looked myself up on their website and my role did actually finish on
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: the 13th of July.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I contacted ACU, the sort of the office, the people you do.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: They said they'd look into it.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: But I was fairly convinced that whatever it was,
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'd obviously been appointed for like two years or three years and it had run out.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I contacted a few other people and I am now an adjunct senior research fellow
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: at La Trobe University.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, that's exciting.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, as of like yesterday,
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: but I've only managed to really sort of get into it and work the email system
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: and stuff today.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: So there you are, adjunct senior research fellow at La Trobe.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: Well, congratulations.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: That is exciting news.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: Look, Greg, we've got a couple of interesting ones to jump into today.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: Shall we get started?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think we should, Caiti.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm going to start us off.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: I became a teacher because I really love reading from a PowerPoint.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: Said no teacher ever.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: That one is a direct quote from the first article today,
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: which is by Alison Bedford and Emily Ross over at the AARE blog.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: I know we've spoken to their stuff a few times.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: And this article is,
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_02: What Should an Australian Teacher Look Like Now?, This is your chance to decide.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I do want to quickly jump in on that and say this is your chance to decide.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: For any listeners of the podcast,
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: you guys are also going to have the opportunity to decide if you're listening
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: to this only on the day we release it very quickly.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: So there's going to be a call to action in this.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: So I need you to skip to the right section, go to the show notes and do that now.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: But to save spoiling,
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: so I became a teacher because I really love reading from a PowerPoint,
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: said no teacher ever.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: I understand what it is the authors Bedford and Ross are gesturing at here because,
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: I'm the first to agree death by PowerPoint is genuinely awful and if that was
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: a good part of my job, I probably wouldn't really want to do it.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: However, I don't think it's going to surprise the listeners to this podcast.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, what they're critiquing isn't that idea
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: that teachers are just stood up reading directly from a PowerPoint.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's having our shared curriculum resources or things like,
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to draw on in Australia,
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: we've got Okra Education, which again are free resources.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: They're free.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have to use them.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe you do.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: But they're really like, they're complaining about the off-the-shelf planning.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: Now, again, I'm obviously someone who's for that.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: But the thing is, that's not really the point that they're making in this piece.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: And it was a really interesting tactic that they've used.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: So they've started off talking about, I mean,
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: essentially scripting lessons,
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: not having the ability to employ any kind They've got this big emotional appeal
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: to sort of frame this dive into.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's a review of the Australian Professional Teacher Standards.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: And they're really using that to set the scene for the professional teacher standards.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: So the reason that they're doing this is,
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: of course,
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: at the moment,
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: and this is going to frame my call to action for our listeners as well,
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: that's because closing today when the podcast is released,
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: there is a review of the teaching standards in Australia that you can respond
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: to online and you can give your opinions on it.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: What they're trying to do in this article is sort of build this case to,
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: I guess,
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: shape the responses that people get and build up a little bit of a,
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know,
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: rally together the troops, I guess, to push their sort of viewpoints on this.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: But what I want to do is I want to back up and actually talk to
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: the professional standards for a little bit.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: So just for anyone who's listening,
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: if you're not from Australia,
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: I took a quote on this directly from the website
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: about Australian professional teacher standards.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: So essentially the professional teacher standards,
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: there's seven of them,
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: they're broken up into multiple sub-descriptors that sort of dive
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: into what each one is.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: So for example, standard number one, I've got the matrix in front of me.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: Standard number one is no students and how they learn and they break that up
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: into what elements would constitute,
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: I want to say good practice in that,
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: but we'll get into that because I think that's what it's meant to do.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that's what it does.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: But the purpose of these standards is this,
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: and I quote,
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers help you understand
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: and develop your teaching practice and expertise across four career stages.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: By demonstrating the standards, you can have maximum impact on all learners, end quote.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that sounds great and wonderful.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's just that it's not that I disagree.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that's what they do.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's not true, is it?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: So it's really nice and it's ambitious.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I think this is why this review is so important.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: So the Australian Professional Teaching Standards,
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: it's funny because when I was looking at the review, I was in two minds about it.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I was in two minds because I have issues with them that I think we'll talk to
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: because I know you also do, Greg.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: But I was also in two minds because I use them as part of my role.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I do all of our teacher accreditation when teachers move from there.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: You move through your different career stages.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: So from your sort of graduate level into the full registration,
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: I do that as part of my job and oversee that process.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: So I see them in that.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: But realistically, I don't use them to inform how I teach a lesson.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: So there's an element of me that goes,
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: I don't really care what happens because it's not going to change what I do in
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: the classroom.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: I think the reason that I'm taking a little bit of an issue with and that I wanted
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: to talk about is because the descriptors don't set our teachers up for success.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: And that's from a couple of different levels.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: So you would think, Greg,
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: that if there was a descriptor on know the students and how they learn,
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: that would in some way reference any of the evidence around how students learn,
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: right?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: Unfortunately, that's not really mentioned in here.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: There is one descriptor that says,
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: understand how students learn,
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: demonstrate knowledge and understanding of research into how students learn and
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: the implications for teaching, which is amazing.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: But what are those?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't say.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: No, and we've kind of dropped the ball early, but it gets far worse in my opinion.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I would, I mean, my biggest complaint is really they skirt over a lot of things.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think you need to go into detail around what something looks like in practice
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: because labelling that a good teacher should do curriculum assessment
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: and reporting is amazing and But what is that?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: What do you mean by that?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: What constitutes good practice in that area?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: But I think my bigger concern with it is it's probably around what some of the descriptors say.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: So it's demonstrating can you use ICT in the classroom?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: Greg, I'm a maths teacher.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: I project my stuff on a PowerPoint that I don't directly read off.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: But other than that,
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: my students,
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: unless they're doing a task that directly absolutely requires a computer,
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: which in Queensland is really,
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: that's their internal assessment tasks,
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: unless they require that, they wouldn't touch a computer.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm failing on that standard.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: What about you?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have your students using ICT?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: No, and I'd have the music even less.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think there is a role for it in assessment, although it's a limited one.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of imposed on us by the fact that NAPLAN assessments require a computer.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: But no, I don't think that it's a desirable thing to necessarily introduce into
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: a maths classroom.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the fundamental problem.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: The standards are not really based on anything solid.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's no research evidence to underpin why you would use ICT in the classroom.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Differentiation, which you've spoken about a lot.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: That was my next one.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's one of the standards.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: And there's no evidence to support.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, it depends what you mean by differentiation, which is the discussion.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: Which is not defined.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, not defined.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: And how most people often envisage it is not.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's no real evidence to support it,
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: yet it's something you've got to demonstrate in the standards.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Why should people care about these standards?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a very good question that you raise, Caiti.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: If experienced teachers are all just ignoring them,
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: then does it really matter what the consultation is?
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think it does because it's particularly relevant to new teachers.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: They have to jump through a number of hoops that are based on these standards.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: One of those is that they have to plan lessons themselves completely from scratch
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: and teach them and then review that,
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: which actually makes it very hard for us at my school to take...
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: We would give them lesson plans to follow because we think that's far more sense
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: than asking someone who's never taught before to plan a sequence of learning
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: for students.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: So we would give them those plans and we would teach them how to teach them.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: But can I chime in on that and ask the question?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: Because the authors raise that.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: To be clear, I agree with you.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: The authors raise exactly this in this AA RE article.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: They say that that means that teachers are technicians and they're tasked
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: with delivering curriculum rather than making it.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: Why would you want this for a new teacher?
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's rubbish, isn't it?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: No one says actors are technicians or mechanics are,
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: well, I suppose mechanics are technicians, or surgeons are technicians.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: All these people are following procedures that they didn't invent or create
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: from scratch themselves.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very strange idea that we have in education that you have to invent
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: and create these things for yourself because apparently the kids in front of you are
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: so unique and special and different that They can't possibly benefit from
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: the lesson plan devised for a similar group of students.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: And this is deprofessionalising, it's de-skilling.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's nonsense.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: The skill is in,
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: unless the lesson is fully scripted,
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: and I don't believe there are many lessons being taught in Australia
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: that are fully scripted,
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: where the teacher literally has words to read off a page to say.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Unless it's fully scripted, teachers are making thousands of decisions all the time.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: About how to explain things,
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: about what to re-explain,
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: about how to pace things,
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: about how to relate to the kids and that's really important too
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: because relationships are really important and I know that's often
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: a very progressive education line to take.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: But they are.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: And by having a plan that works,
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: that you don't have to constantly think about and revise on your feet
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: because it's never been tried out before,
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: it creates the space for developing those good relationships for students.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so that could be one good reason that if you have a new teacher or
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_02: a pre-service teacher, it would be of benefit to give them a pre-done lesson plan.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a kind of romanticism behind this.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's basically in denial of how difficult teaching is and how many things you have
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: to put together, piece together to teach.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: Expert teachers make it look effortless, but it's not.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's really complex.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so...
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: Giving people plans.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm teaching a lesson tomorrow on the Earth's magnetic field.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: I've got a plan that someone else has written that I'm going to follow,
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: that I've been looking at today and I'm going to spend a little bit more time on in
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: the morning.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a real benefit to me because that's a starting point.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: I can then think about how I'm going to deliver that,
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: how I'm going to make sure that the students in my class will understand that.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: I can think about the different kids.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: I know them a bit now.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: I know their different...
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: Foibles, for want of a better word, and I can tailor what I'm going to do accordingly.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to go home tonight and Google Earth's magnetic field and start trying
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: to create a lesson plan from scratch,
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: which would mean that I couldn't do all those other things.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: So there's an unreality.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Look, I think my reading of the subtext of this Because there's been a few articles on this.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's been two articles on the AARE blog about this consultation now is
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: that they're very worried that cognitive science,
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: cognitive load theory,
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: space practice,
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: retrieval practice, all these sorts of things will go into the teacher standards.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: And they don't want that because as people involved in teacher education,
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: that will put more pressure on them to teach those things because they have
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: to Apparently delivered teachers who can meet these standards.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: And at the moment,
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: that's the source of a lot of bad stuff,
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: but potentially could be the source of good stuff.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: They don't want to borrow that.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: So they're trying to rally the kind of people who read the AARE blog,
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: who they would assume are like-minded,
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: to fill in this survey to try and shape the result.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what's going to happen.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: I never know what's going to happen with these things.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: But I suspect that's part of what's going on.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: I actually did.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: I know you've done it.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: I actually did the survey today because I wanted to do it in preparation for this.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, the survey, the review, whatever it is, I completed it today.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: And just for the listeners, it doesn't take me all that long.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: But I went through it and I I think that's an overreach at all.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a basic expectation.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: But I kind of went, well,
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: I don't actually know to what level they're going to get in and actually read those
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: because, I mean,
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: I suppose it depends how many responses you get,
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: but I don't see them going into all of that detail going, man, yeah,
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: Caiti and Greg really put a lot of effort into backing everything up
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: with cognitive science.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: Great.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: Let's listen to these guys.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't know what's going to happen with it or how it's going to work.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: But I do, I think you're right.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: In this piece, I mean, they've referenced...
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: What else was it that I saw?
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they spoke about the,
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_02: what is it, the proposed, I've like blanked on what, what does TLC stand for again?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: The Teaching and Learning Commission.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: So that's going to replace all these federal bodies
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: that we've got doing different bits of education at the moment with one overall.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: Look, they're very worried about this Teaching and Learning Commission, Caiti.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: To go back to your question,
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: I suspect they,
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: whoever is reviewing these standards already has a good idea of what they want
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: to do.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: But you have to have a consultation process.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: So they've created a survey, which everyone should do as part of their consultation process.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: However, that affects the outcome is unknown.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: They probably do have a fairly clear idea of what they want to do.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what that is.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: It probably does link to this Teaching and Learning Commission.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: From their perspective, these guys probably do have a reason to be concerned.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how well founded that is, but it could go in a particular way.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: We've got state and federal education ministers endorsing explicit teaching
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: and things like that.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's it.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, the standards are something that at certain points in your career you face.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_02: And like,
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: realistically,
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: they were relevant for me,
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: predominantly as a graduate teacher when I had to go, right,
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: have you met X,
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_02: Y, Z, moving into your, what we call a full registration in Australia.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: Otherwise,
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: unless you're going on to do your highly accomplished or lead,
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: again, they probably lose a little bit of relevance.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: But I just, I mean,
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: even in that,
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder if the reason that they're not relevant to me is
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: because they don't tell me what good teaching looks like.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe if they were,
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: it would be something that I could go back to as an educator and say,
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: yeah, you know what, I don't think I'm meeting standard X as well as I could.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: Here's some descriptors that I'm not doing.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas I think when I look at it and go, oh, well, I'm following this evidence.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: I'm doing the best I can to use that to inform my practice.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's kind of where it ends for me.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Look, they're a nonsense, really.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: They're not.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I think they've got some in England that are a bit better.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem here is you're trying to impose a big generic rubric on
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: a very complex skill, which is teaching.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: And, well, it's not one skill.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's a whole combination of skills and knowledge.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: So trying to describe that in a single rubric that you can put on your screen, on your laptop...
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: You're going to get some generalities.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: Could those standards be a lot better than they are?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: Are they ever going to be at a point where you could look at them and go,
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: oh, this is what I want to do next?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: Probably not.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: Probably, if you look at something like StepLab, which is the...
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like the professional learning environment that's been created.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's a company, Steplab.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: And they've created this professional learning environment for teachers.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it's full of things you can rehearse and things you can work on.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: And everything is broken down, the clues in the name, into tiny little steps.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot of it.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's just a vast amount of it.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's the sort of thing you need if you want to know what the next, A hundred percent.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Look, I will,
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: just to finish that one off,
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: in this particular article, they close by inviting whoever to
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: Whoever's reading their paper, the authors close by inviting them to respond to this review.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: But they actually do that by saying they want you to reflect on teachers
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: who influenced your own education and they're talking about whether they're ones
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: who followed a script or a rigid lesson plan or whether they're ones
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: who were really responsive.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: So, I mean, one,
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: I would close by inviting you all to respond to that if you listen to this podcast
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: on the day it's released.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: But two, I actually, I did take their advice on this one, Greg.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: So I did go and respond to it considering an educator who influenced me.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: Can you guess who that might be?
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: No, Caiti, no idea.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: So for those of you who are listening,
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: this would be Greg, who did teach me back in year 11 physics.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I reflected on all of the really great things that you did and how that sort
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: of got me into going.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: I think that Well, thank you, Caiti.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: You're very kind.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: Article number two is the problem with transferable skills by
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: the incredible Daisy Christodoulou.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: And we've spoken about transferable skills previously.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: The reason that I really like this article compared to a lot of the others
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: that I've read is I think Daisy starts, I mean,
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: she starts it,
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: she kind of carries this throughout,
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: but she actually starts by acknowledging why it is there is such a focus
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: on transferable skills.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_02: She really, I mean,
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: she breaks this down into two reasons that you'd go transferable skills are great.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: So essentially the first one is obviously we know that the world is changing
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: over time and AI is scary and technology and I don't know what's going to happen in
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: a few years and what skills or what jobs are going to exist.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: And so from that,
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: this idea of something that's a transferable or
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: a generic skill like critical thinking sounds great because it means regardless
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: of what comes at you, you don't need to worry about knowledge.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: You can just go and say, right, I can think critically about whatever.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: And reason number two sort of draws on that too.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: The other one's a little bit more political and that's the fact that it's hard
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: to agree on or people aren't agreeing on what knowledge should be taught.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you don't agree on it,
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: then it's far easier to go, well,
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: if I teach you, again,
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: these transferable skills about how to think rather than what to think about,
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: then you can take that and you can apply that to whatever it is you want in
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: the world.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so it sounds beautiful.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: And she introduces it with that,
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: but then finishes off by saying that whilst that is a really great solution,
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: she says,
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: unfortunately, the best evidence we have indicates that it is not possible.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I liked this one because when I've mentioned this to people outside of education
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: and I've said, well, transferable skills and critical thinking aren't a thing.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: The common, I mean,
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: the common response I get is, I mean,
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: it's always the critical thinking is they go, yeah,
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: but it's really important to teach students to ask why or question what's in front
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: of them.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: And this This article does a really brilliant job of explaining that whilst that's
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: the thing you can do and you can teach people that you should question things or
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: that you should do your own research,
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_02: knowing that you should do that doesn't actually mean that you can do that in
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: a different context.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's trivial in a way and it doesn't get you very far because unless you can answer
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: the questions that you ask, you're no further forward.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I kind of,
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: I started getting into it being like, well,
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: what would be wrong with,
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: and I'm not saying that we should just blanket,
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: just stop teaching, hey, you should ask why.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: But I started to sort of get into it and going, well,
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: what would happen if I applied that logic to everything and I picked something
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: that I didn't know something about and I said, well, why?
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_02: And you wouldn't, like, you would be questioning everything that is ever said.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not that you can't do that, but it's, I mean, these are for several reasons.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's entirely impractical.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: In order to know what it is you want to question or in order to know
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: to question something,
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: there needs to be some reason for you to question the plausibility
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: of what's being said,
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: whether that's the specific source that's saying that or whether it's something
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: a little bit more detailed.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I totally agree.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: You can teach these very basic heuristics.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: She talks about the classic one that Dillian William mentions
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: in his American Federation of Teachers,
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: American Educator magazine article,
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: where he says you can teach students that they need to look at something
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: from multiple perspectives,
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: but if they don't know what those perspectives are, they can't.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: So it doesn't get you very far.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what a lot of these heuristics do.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: I would argue So John Sweller, he wrote a paper with Andre Tricot.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, I've decided to have a mint.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I've got a mint in my mouth.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: I do apologize.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: I've been like popping chocolate bullets this whole time secretly, so it's fine.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: So Sweller and Tricot,
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: anyway, I met him, a nice bloke, big fella, like not at all, like sort of French.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: Top bloke.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, they wrote this article and they're quite hard line that basically anything
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: that is generic,
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: that has a general applicability,
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: so you can apply it to lots of different things,
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: is essentially biologically primary.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: So most people,
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: unless they have some sort of impairment,
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: which is that interesting paper I sent you yesterday, Caiti,
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: that we might end up talking about in the future,
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: but I won't talk about it anymore because we're not talking about it today.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: So you don't really need to be taught these things.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: So the only things that you need to be taught is more specific knowledge.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: If you need to solve algebra problems, you don't need generic problem-solving skills.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: To the extent that they exist, you've already got them.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to solve algebra problems, you need specific algebra knowledge.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: They take this very hard line.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: I've always taken a slightly softer line than that.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a trade-off.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: So rather than saying there are no generic skills,
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: everything is very specific to a particular discipline,
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: I will allow that some things are more general than others.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the example I often give is the ability to notice logical fallacies.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: So there's lots of logical fallacies.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you spend about five minutes on Twitter, you'll probably be exposed to most of them.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: And they're about ad hominem, attacking the person rather than their arguments.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: Strawman attacking a caricature of someone's argument rather than what they actually...
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's a whole load of these things.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you can teach people about them.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: And they are applicable to a wide range of arguments,
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: from political arguments to historical arguments to scientific arguments
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: to religious arguments.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: So they're quite widely applicable.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: They're not applicable to everything.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: They're not a general problem-solving skill.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: You can't apply it to an algebra problem like I was just mentioning.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: But they're widely applicable.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: But what they trade for that is that in the fact that they are so widely applicable,
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: they trade a bit of usefulness.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: So if I can identify that someone has made an argument that's got a logical fallacy
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: in it, okay, I still don't know whether they're right or wrong.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: In order to do that, I'd have to have some more knowledge.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: It might give me a hint that if someone's deploying a logical fallacy,
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: maybe they're not as confident in The argument that they've got maybe,
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: or maybe they're just not very good at arguing and they're right,
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: but they've got a bit emotional,
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: so they're calling me names, but they're still actually right.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a limited usefulness, but a wide applicability.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: So the most useful things are very narrow.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: So solving my algebra problem,
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: knowing a worked example relevant to that algebra problem,
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: extremely useful, but it's not really going to help with anything else.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then the things that are more generally applicable I think are just not as useful.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: They're quite thin.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm less of a fundamentalist on some of these things than, say, trichotanswella were.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I could say that, though, just about the asking why.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you can know to do that, but unless you know when to do that,
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: that doesn't really help.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's exactly what you're getting at.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's just...
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like that in itself isn't particularly useful.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's not that it's completely useless.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: I would say it's very general and less useful than the logical fallacies example.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: So it's more general and less useful because asking why is...
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: It could be annoying.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: It could not really get you very far.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: You need some knowledge.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: You don't even know what to ask why about.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: When someone's talking and you know something about their argument,
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: you listen to the flow of it and you understand what the main idea is.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: I would believe that.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she is incredible.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: But what she includes in here very clearly and very simply is a bit of history and context.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: So she talks about Thorndike.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Thorndike is this early 20th century psychologist who comes up with a theory
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: of transfer, which I still think has a lot going for it today.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: So basically,
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: he says the extent to which knowledge transfers from one domain to the other depends
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: on the extent to which they have overlapping elements.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: So if there are things that are common to the two domains, you can get some transfer.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: If there's nothing that's common, you won't get any.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very simple model.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: And he developed it when he was looking at things like teaching Latin and Greek and
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: the fact that that just didn't make you smarter,
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: that it didn't necessarily transfer to other areas.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so he developed this theory.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: Elements in Common Idea immediately deflates most claims made about generic skills
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: if you start looking into this.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: If you buy that,
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: and there's a certain logic to it,
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: and it's certainly backed by a lot of empirical evidence,
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: if you buy Thorndike's theory,
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: the rest of this stuff just collapse like a house of cards.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing that's interesting is the...
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people will know about this because Daniel Willingham has written
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: about this a lot, but...
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: Daisy mentions it, is the chess player expertise research.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so glad you brought this one up.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: So expert chess players, they,
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: given the positions of some pieces on a board to memorize,
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: if the pieces are in a plausible game position,
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: expert chess players can memorize them.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: But if they're just in random configurations, they can't.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: And what Simon and Chase,
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: the inferences that people have drawn from this,
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: That it's not the fact that expert chess players are really good at memory
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: or have some really good insight or have a particular ability to reason
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: and process lots of information.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: They have specific chess knowledge.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: They know about lots and lots of configurations of chess boards,
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: realistic ones from realistic games.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's why they can identify those realistic configurations but not the other ones.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: Shall I just add a little personal one on this?
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: This article by Daisy is for the American Enterprise Institute,
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: which is like a kind of American think tank, center-right think tank.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I got asked to write something.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: And what I wrote, Daisy,
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: was so bad that I got it back
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: with what we might term extensive revision suggestions.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: They were very polite about it.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: They were very, very polite about it.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it was so bad.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: I went off on one.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think I thought I was being very clever.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I started with Ozymandias.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know Ozymandias?
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: Ozymandias is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'll print it out because I thought you might be interested.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: You're probably not, but I'm going to read you the poem anyway.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: I met a traveller from an antique land who said,
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert, near them on the sand.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: Half sunk a shattered visage lies,
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor,
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: well those passions read,
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: which yet survive,
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: stamped on this lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: And on the pedestal these words appear, My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing beside remains,
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: round the decay of that colossal wreck boundless and bare,
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: the lone and level sands stretch far away.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I haven't read that very well because I'm not an English teacher or a poet.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: I really enjoyed the voices.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: I will take that.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: I will take a compliment.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: So that's Ozymandias.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I tried to structure my thing around that.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: The point I was making...
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's writing.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it's about this statue.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously it's of a great king.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's based on King Ramesses II of ancient Egypt, the pharaoh.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: But I digress.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea is that he had...
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: Has had this massive statue made of him because he's such a big man.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: But now it's just a ruin in sand and no matter how mighty he was in his lifetime,
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: he's forgotten and all that remains of him,
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: these two sort of stumps of legs and this writing.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: But the point was there's writing and I wanted to riff on that about the fact
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: that this must have been sometime within the last 5,000 years because that's
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: the only time we've had writing and And I wanted to talk
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: about biologically primary knowledge and biologically secondary knowledge
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: and all this sort of thing and ease into the foundations of cognitive load theory
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: that way.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: But it was obviously so convoluted and impenetrable that, yeah, it didn't get off the ground.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it was just too much to too many...
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: Revisions to cope with.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: So you won't be reading my article with Ozymandias in it on the American Enterprise Institute.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, personally, after hearing that, I'd prefer it to be an audio book anyway.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: Fair enough.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: Anything else on Daisy or did you want to move on to Old Mate?
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: There's probably one more that I'll- Go on.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: Don't mention.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I was trawling social media,
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: having a look at what people were saying about transferable skills.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I found a really interesting point where...
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: Someone's come in and they've said that a lot of people in the working population,
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_02: they work in professional sectors that are different
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: from what they were actually qualified for.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_02: And the argument is that, well,
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_02: there must be some level of transferable skill because if you're working in
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_02: an area that's different to what you're qualified in,
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: then the knowledge is very different.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean,
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_02: apart from the fact that I was like, I mean,
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_02: a skill is knowledge and kind of got into a little bit of a deep dive on that.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: I actually thought that just in terms of discussing some of the myths,
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_02: could I call it,
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_02: some of the misconceptions around transferable skills,
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: I actually thought that I'd bring that one up.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Greg,
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: what's your take on that idea that,
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_02: yeah, if I'm trained in X field, But I'm working in Y.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, clearly I don't need the knowledge, but my skills must be transferable.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_02: What would you say to that?
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's well known.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: So you will have CEOs who will move between companies that do very, very different things.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure how well that works.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: So the market thinks this is a great person.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: They brought this wireless factory to profitability so they can go and take
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: over this tea cake making bakery or whatever it is.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a bit daft.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: The worst manifestation of it is in politics.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: So politicians,
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: they get appointed defence secretary and then they get promoted
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: to Education Minister, but they'll do Treasury.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: The idea that they could be across all those things in any meaningful way is absurd.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: They can't.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: Do I therefore want to undo democracy and have an authoritarian regime where
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: the education secretary works their way up through the ranks of the party?
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: And no, I don't want to do that at all.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't fancy that one bit.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: I want to be able to get rid of people.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: But it does mean that we have this system where totally unqualified people take
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: over departments.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now, some are better than others.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: Ben Carroll is the Victorian education minister,
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: did quite a bit of research and knew his brief very well.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now he's our premier.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how that's going to go.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: Michael Gove did a lot of research, read Edie Hirsch.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: She was the transformative education minister in England in the early 2010s.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: They've now appointed, what's the name?
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: They've appointed a new education minister whose name escapes me for the minute.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: And she's been saying some ludicrous and bizarre things about education on social media.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: Things that anyone who had followed education Twitter for
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: about five minutes would think were silly,
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: about an over-focus on academic curricula,
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: about introducing vocational courses from the age of 14,
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: but in a very ill-thought-through way.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: I've written about that...
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: I read about that,
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think, in my curios last week, a little bit about what they're trying to do.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: Lucy Powell is her name.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: These names always come to me in the end, Katie.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so you do look on it, and to paraphrase the great Ozymandias, and despair, but what...
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: What's the alternative?
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's a real problem.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: I would prefer.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: But then you have people who have got an education background who become education minister.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that's awful, too,
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: because there's loads of people in education who don't know what they're on about
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: and don't know what they're doing.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: So what do you do?
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think you just stick with democracy.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: And if they're awful, you exercise your right to vote them out.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: So this is...
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: Jason Arday.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: Now,
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: I feel a little bad really mentioning this because Jason Arday has been the subject
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: of quite a pylon on social media.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: He is to blame for some of this, I think.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to pronounce judgment on allegations that have yet
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: to be properly tested and established.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_01: But there's certainly room to question Professor Arday.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: So Professor Arday, Jason Arday, he is...
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think the youngest black professor ever appointed to Cambridge University at
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: the age of 37,
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: he becomes a professor of the sociology of education at the education department
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: at Cambridge University.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: He did a PhD in 2016, or did he, which was all about mentoring student teachers.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's not Groundbreaking stuff, if I'm honest.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: I've had a bit of a read of it.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: Straight,
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: if there were no questions raised about it in any other sense,
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: it's just a very unimpressive bit of filler research of the kind
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_01: that you'll find anywhere in education.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't really say much.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: Common of a PhD anyway in itself.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: He has done some work on critical race theory.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: He's lent into his identity as a black man, as someone who suffers.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: Suffers?
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's not the right word.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: As someone with neurodiversity.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: So he's lent into all that.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: What happened was,
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: a couple of weeks ago,
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: and I saw it first appear on Twitter X, this guy called Nathan Kofnus.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Nathan Coughness is an interesting character.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: He had a position at Cambridge himself and was essentially kind of hounded out
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: because he's got these very unsavory views about race.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: He would call himself a race realist.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: Others might call him a racist.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: We will leave that for other people to decide.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: But he's at the University of Ghent in Belgium now.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: And what he started to do was...
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: Compare Jason Arday's research output with others.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: So there's this person who completed a PhD in 2009 and Kofnus claims that a lot
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: of what's in Jason Arday's PhD is in This 2009 PhD thesis in either
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: a very similar form or a form that's ever so slightly changed.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: Our day does reference this researcher who wrote the 2009 paper,
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: but not as often as he would need to.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: And even if you do that,
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: you can't just take chunks of someone else's PhD thesis and put it in your own,
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: even if you do reference them every time you do it.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: So he wrote this blog post.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: It caught fire.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: It turns out other people have been questioning Arde's research.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: It turns out that a couple of journals,
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: articles that he wrote, have had to have extensive revisions.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is very odd.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: So essentially,
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: it's very hard to say anything other than
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: that these journals have essentially accepted that bits
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: of these articles have been copied from elsewhere.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: But instead of saying it's plagiarism,
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: they've amended the articles extensively to indicate the original source.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that's unusual.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like normally an article like that would be retracted for plagiarism.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not claiming that our day is guilty of plagiarism.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: That needs to be tested.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: Principles of natural justice need to apply.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: Parallel to all this,
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: Arday has got a book about his life story coming out on the 27th of August.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: And his life story is incredible,
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: perhaps in both senses of that word,
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: because he doesn't speak until he's 11,
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: can't read and write until he's 18,
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: gets two GCSEs, but does a PhD, becomes a professor.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: He does loads of work for charity.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: He's run 600 miles in, well, six days, but now it's 12 days.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's worked with WaterAid overseas,
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: putting in water filter things, but WaterAid apparently don't send people overseas.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's one that came out today.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: He...
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: He played snooker professionally or semi-professionally.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's not quite clear, but at a very high level.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: Again, soccer professionally, semi-professionally, not quite clear, very high level.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: And people have started looking into these claims about him personally.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it is all very strange.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's all a bit bizarre.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't really want to focus on our day because if this is all true,
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: I actually think Jason Arday has been let down by the system around him,
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: if this is all true, if these allegations are all true.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think he has some responsibility,
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: obviously,
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: but if they are all true,
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: he's obviously quite a vulnerable person and the institutions such
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: as Cambridge University that are around him have got to take a lot
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: of responsibility.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: You will remember, Caiti, Stephen Vanker.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen Vanker.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_01: He helped.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_01: The guy who accused Hattie of plagiarism and who I've disagreed with.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he wrote a piece on the Jason Arday scandal, a blog post, which I kind of agreed with.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: He basically said...
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: This is happening and it's not necessarily about,
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: so a lot of right-wing people on Twitter are saying,
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: he's been given all this leeway,
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: no one's questioned him because he's black and because of diversity,
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: equity and inclusion, no one wants to question him and all this.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: But Wainke would point out that that might be a factor,
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: but there are lots of reasons for universities to protect star researchers and
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: to do not very thorough investigations of claims made against them.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: There's lots of motivating incentives for them to do that and very few incentives
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: for them to investigate these claims properly.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: Whether it's, he would say, This is Vanka.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: Whether it's Jason Arday,
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: whether it's John Hattie,
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: the university has incentive,
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: no incentive to investigate these claims properly or very little incentive
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: to investigate them properly and quite a lot of incentive to not do so.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_02: And when you look at this- It's an academic superstar thing.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's advantageous for you as an institution to have that person on your staff and
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_02: to be able to advertise that you've got that person on your staff.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: And this, sorry, I should have said the article we're talking about.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's in The Guardian and it's called Playbooks,
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: Plagiarism and a Pig's Head, New Claims Surrounding a Star Cambridge Professor.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: And the version I've printed out doesn't have the journalist's name on it.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm wondering whether you can help me out with that,
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: Caiti, because I haven't got it on my screen.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, do I have it?
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_02: Because I also printed it, but I always keep them open.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_02: It is Lan Raid the Care.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the article that we're talking about.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: And this article has some even more extraordinary claims.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: So we've got visitors,
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: knife-wielding people coming onto the Cambridge campus and threatening Jason Arday.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: But according to this article,
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: the CCTV set up everywhere doesn't capture this knife-wielding person.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: And Arday doesn't tell anyone about it for ages.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: A pig's head is sent to his family home.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: But And apparently the police investigated and they located the butcher,
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: but then this journalist has looked into it and can't find evidence of this and
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: the police say it's never happened.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a really telling bit in there where the journalist,
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: is it a female journalist or a male journalist?
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, the journalist,
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: whoever they are, they, And he says something like, I thought you'd just believe me.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, why are you questioning me?
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: I thought you'd just believe me.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: So that's this peculiar story, but that's not the bit I wanted to focus on.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think the institutions have got a lot to answer for here.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the smoking gun is this little section.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got this.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: So there's two paragraphs.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: Cambridge said it had passed complaints to the university where Arday completed
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: the PhD,
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: Liverpool John Moores,
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: which had reviewed the work and found he had not plagiarised it.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: We take allegations of academic misconduct incredibly seriously, Cambridge spokesperson said.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: It is a university procedure that investigations are carried out by the institution
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_01: at which the research was undertaken.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: This is standard practice in the sector because that institution has access to
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: the information to ensure a full and fair investigation.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: So are Cambridge saying they've got a professor,
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: About whom there are allegations of plagiarism.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: They've appointed this guy.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: This guy is lecturing to their students.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: This guy is teaching people at the university.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: And they are completely disinterested in these claims of plagiarism that occurred
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: before he joined the university.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: Disinterested in the proper meaning of the word.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's for the other universities to look into.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_01: And provided the other universities have looked into it and investigated whatever,
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: it doesn't matter to them.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: Surely it matters to them.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is a star researcher.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: It should matter to them.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_02: In any other – if we're talking specifically teaching,
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_02: if there came out to be allegations that teachers faked their degree,
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_02: as a school,
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_02: before you even get into their registration,
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_02: which should – that's the external body that said,
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_02: yep, you've done it, you've got your degree.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_02: Before it even gets to that, you actually have a – I mean, is it like, what would you call it?
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's an ethical obligation?
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_02: You've got a professional obligation?
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_02: They have an obligation to their students?
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you can't just ignore it.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems to me that Cambridge University is far less regulated than my school is
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: because we couldn't just say, oh, well, you know, that's fine.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: And they've gone and defended him.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: This is the thing.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: So whatever you think,
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: without prejudging these allegations,
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: without prejudging them,
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: There's definitely enough out there to suggest that there is a case to answer and
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: that an investigation and a process of natural justice should be gone through
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: to determine the veracity of these allegations.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: But a group of very, very silly people, Caiti, Yeah, great.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: On their website in support of Jason Arday,
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: calling it an orchestrated and grim effort to delegitimize
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: a brilliant young working class academic for the sin of being successful
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: while black.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: They basically say that these...
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: I paraphrase, but they basically say that the allegations against him are entirely baseless.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then you've got all these really silly people lining up to sign this letter.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: They either haven't read what's available and just rushed in,
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_01: or they They've read it and they're lacking in general critical thinking skills,
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: Caiti, because they've rushed in and signed this letter.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: One Cambridge academic has now removed her name from the letter.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: So she's obviously started to read more and more about this since signing the letter.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it was probably a bit of a knee-jerk response.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: Lord Woolley...
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: It turns out like when this letter was published a few days ago,
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: it had Principal of Homerton College, Cambridge.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: Homerton College is the college at Cambridge University.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: So everyone at Cambridge University has to belong to a college.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: They like Melbourne colleges, but you have to be in one.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_01: You can't not.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: And Homerton is one that's dedicated to education.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: So he's the principal of that college.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_01: He's still signing the letter, but he's removed his affiliation for some reason.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: Simon Baron-Cohen,
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_01: the really famous researcher,
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think psychology researcher, and somehow related to Sacha Baron-Cohen.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know Borat?
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think they're related.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I don't, but yes.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: You're probably too young for Borat.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_02: No, I'm not good with anything like media, movies.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_02: I'm awful.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: I fall asleep.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there you go because normally I'm in your position when people are telling me
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: about people like that.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: So yes, so all these silly people have signed this letter and it's a big scandal.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel for Jason Arday and I'm trying not to mention him by name on social media
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: because every second or third thing on X is about him at the moment.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: And you've got these crazy racists.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote, so side story here, the Stephen Vanker article, which was basically blaming the system.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: He, I wanted to, I put that on X because I thought it was a good article.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: But the title of it was something like, I might see if I can find it.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just searching it up.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: So the title of this Substack post that he wrote,
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: which we might put it in the show notes, Leave Jason Arday Alone.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: This is a scandal of academic educational leadership.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: And his point was, let's not focus on Jason Arday.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: Let's not hand him on social media.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is really about Cambridge.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is really about Liverpool John Moores.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: This is about failure of academic leadership.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I agree with that sentiment largely and I don't find myself agreeing
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: with Stephen Vanker very much.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it was nice to do that.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so I posted this on Twitter X.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: But you know when you post an article,
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_01: I said something like,
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: I agree with much of this and then colon and then it's the name of the article
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: and it says Leave Jason Ardea.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: And loads of people just reacted to that title.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_01: They thought I was saying like the signatories to the Good Law Project letter.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like Defending...
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, defending our day.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_01: He hasn't done anything wrong.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: Leave him alone.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, regardless of whether you think he's done something wrong or not,
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if a public trial or pile on is,
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that's an appropriate way of handling it regardless.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, exactly.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of...
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I got loads of comments from some racist people and some people
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_01: who weren't racist,
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_01: but also were just reacting to the title and earnestly informing me
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: that actually Jason Arday does have a case to answer here and there is some
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: Evidence that he is a plagiarist and blah, blah,
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: which I knew already and which is addressed in the article if you read the article.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_02: If you actually read the article that was linked
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: there.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I had to field some of those.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it is the scandal du jour.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: The Scandal du jour.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: So yes, anyway,
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to deal with that and I wanted to point the finger at the institutions
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: because I think their role in this should be the main focus of attention.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_02: And it is for so many different reasons.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's that combination of what, I mean,
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_02: it's the fact that,
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_02: if these allegations are true around his PhD,
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_02: then how did that get through all of your checks?
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_02: How did he have a supervisor who,
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_02: or supervisors who were just letting this sort of happen
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_02: and how has it never picked up?
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: This is a part of the tale,
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: Katie, because apparently he only had one supervisor and Phone them or something.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_01: But again, it's really hot in this fog.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: There's just so many different levels to it though.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like,
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_02: and even at that point,
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_02: at some point,
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_02: if this is becoming a consistent theme in his other articles,
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_02: again, you've got a responsibility then to step in as an institution and stop this.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_02: This, look,
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_02: if he did,
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_02: and I'm not saying that he did,
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_02: but if he did make a mistake and Ade did,
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_02: you know, totally plagiarise his PhD, his other, um,
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_02: It
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_02: doesn't mean that what he did was okay if he did it,
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_02: but it should not have ever gotten to this point.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_02: And that's complete negligence on whoever's overseeing any of this part of the process.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_02: It shouldn't have got to that.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: And because he was such a prominent black researcher,
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_01: the really shameful bit about this is that it could cause other people then
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: or other black researchers to think, am I not being placed under the same scrutiny?
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: Is my research as valued?
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really pernicious and insidious thing and the institutions need to sort themselves out.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you everyone for listening to today's episode.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_02: Any of the articles that we've referenced will be down in the show notes as long
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_02: as both of our socials.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_02: So if you have a podcast article or opinion piece that you would like Greg and I
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_02: to discuss in a future episode,
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_02: make sure you drop that to us on either of our socials.