Phil Wood

@[email protected]
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14 Posts

Professor of Education at Nottingham Trent University interested in change, complexity and process philosophy.

Ideas and reflections on my website www.aprocessview.com

Phil WoodNov 24, 2022
New Post: what is a process? https://www.aprocessview.com/blog---general-musings-on-change/what-is-a-process
What is a process?

Processes are the central elements of a processual metaphysics. But how can they be defined? A definition is given by Rescher (1996: 38); ‘A process is a coordinated group of changes in the...

An Exploration into Educational Change
Phil WoodNov 21, 2022
I love this painting by Marcel Jean. It's a great way of capturing the complexity of trying to carry out research. We're only ever able to see parts/glimpses of the issues we're interested in - we have to extrapolate, and the things we're interested in are in constant processes of emergence and change. Finally, the more approaches we use in a design, the more portals we open to glimpse our areas of interest.
Phil WoodNov 20, 2022

'Change is the ongoing consequence of tangles of linear and/or non-linear processes

This definition focuses towards a metaphysics of flow and process, and away from substance, and at the same time identifies and allows for simple/complicated/complex and chaotic changes. It also points towards the idea that change is ubiquitous.

In education this means that we need to understand our area of interest very differently in terms of practice, policy, theory/philosophy and research design.

Phil WoodNov 8, 2022
Kate WallNov 8, 2022

Can the ECF really fix our perpetual retention crisis?

No. And that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone working in teacher education (in school or HE). As this article states, the one-size-fits-all approach is inherently problematic for students and mentors, although the day of teachers in the framework is seen positively and should be incorporated as we go forward.

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/can-the-ecf-really-fix-our-perpetual-retention-crisis/

The ECF can be improved but retention is an unlikely result

A new report sheds light on the early career framework's year one performance, writes Becky Allen, but we may have to rethink the measure of its success

Schools Week
Phil WoodNov 8, 2022
As English school education continues to adopt the language and processes of applied cognitive science, does it risk a severe process of complexity reduction? Do we need to retain a more holistic view of learning such as that outlined by the work of Knud Illeris, seeing learning as not only cognitive, but also emotional and social.
Phil WoodNov 7, 2022
'I can imagine a set of beings which might fortify their souls by passively reviewing disconnected ideas. Humanity is not built that way - except perhaps some editors of newspapers.' Whitehead (1929). Has modularisation of HE led to a lack of synthesis and holistic understanding?
Phil WoodNov 7, 2022
politicians steering it and not attending to quality could be kicked out. Now, multi-academy trusts have no responsibility to local people at all, if they are poor, local people have no recourse to get rid of CEOs, executive heads etc. MATs have created a damaging impact on local accountability and local democracy. They only react to diktat from the DfE. This has to change. Any future government must make the running of MATs far more open to local democracy.
Phil WoodNov 7, 2022
Reading an interesting book on the complexity of policy making. Big stress on the role that distribution of power has due to local government not being wholly controlled by the centre - the imperative of local accountability. This, for me, is one of the greatest problems New Labour and then Gove created in developing multi-academy trusts. When schools were overseen by local authorities, there was a clear democratic route to accountability in schools. If the local authority was poor, the
Phil WoodNov 7, 2022
FionnbharrNov 7, 2022

Very useful:
"A Big List of Mastodon Resources"
https://researchbuzz.me/2022/11/05/a-big-list-of-mastodon-resources/

#Mastodon #fediverse #resources #Instances

A Big List of Mastodon Resources

I took a pop at Mastodon several years ago, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t figure out how to make it social, and I didn’t have a good grasp of how the “federated” part…

ResearchBuzz
Phil WoodNov 6, 2022

#edutooter.

I'm interested in the nature of change and its practical implications for education and beyond. My work is based in process philosophy, the notion that reality is primarily process driven, and materialities at most are secondary, and actually do not exist. I then consider how tangles of processes interact with complexity to create educational and social change.