I came across Erica McWilliam’s Unlearning how to teach[1] the other day and just reading the abstract stirred my interest.  The phrase meddler-in-the-middle launched itself at me like a beacon (not bacon) in the dark[2].  Meddler in the middle is (obviously) between sage on the stage and guide on the side.  It struck me as a parallel to what EduPunk seems to be, although EduPunk also seems to not so much as defy definition, but challenge (pre)conceptions.

But what resonates about Erica’s piece is (among a number of things) the sense that the meddler gets the changes occurring around us:

The message from social commentators on workplace and social futures is that many of our young people will be employed in digitally enhanced environments where there are few transportable blueprints for project design and management.[3]

This seems blatantly obvious to me and probably many others, but the application of this to teaching and to ‘unlearning’ how to teach[4], is perhaps where it links with EduPunk comes in, particularly when we consider the whole slew of new learning technology that is out there.  I guess EduPunk is about looking for alternative and more flexible blueprints, perhaps not even blueprints but more purpleprints[5].  But it points to ‘profound implications’ of ‘de-routinisation of present and future work’[6].  This is definitely EduPunk, although phrased in a way that many people will accept[7].

There is also a link to the idea of ‘students as co-creators’ which influenced my original move into using wiksi for engaging with students:

Rather than teachers delivering an information product to be ‘consumed’ and fed back by the student, co-creating value would see the teacher and student mutually involved in assembling and dis-assembling cultural products. As co-creators, both would add value to the capacity- building work being done through the invitation to ‘meddle’ and to make errors[8].

This co-creation idea is similar to the ‘remixing’ that is just about everywhere on the web[9].  When students co-create with us, there is more potential to move beyond static notions of knowledge, static ideas, static thought process. Erica refers to Bauman’s ‘liquid-modern social world’[10] which aptly describes the ideas behind both meddlers and edupunks.  The liquidity or fluidity of things around us mean that nothing is as it appears nor as we would have it be.  This is the power of edupunk, meddlers, contructivism, constructionism and a range of other pedagogical frames that are arising.  I think it is time we realised that the ‘stable social world’ is a furphy, and got on with the processes of learning and teaching.

Our teaching and learning habits are useful but they can also be deadly. They are useful when the conditions in which they work are predictable and stable. They are deadly if and when the bottom falls out of the stable social world in and for which we learn[11].

EduPunk is as much a reaction to shifts in our social fabric and technologies as is the idea of being a meddler.  For those of us uncomfortable with the label of ‘edupunk’, perhaps ‘meddler’ is more easy to use and less antagonistic to our peers and colleagues[12].  But, whichever way you look at it, as EduPunk or Meddler, both have the capacity to shift our perceptions and help us acclimatise to the ‘brave new world’ in which we live.  To quote Erica, yet again: To learn is to be confused, uncertain and to fail frequently ((McWilliam, p268)). These are the marks of both EduPunks and meddlers.

1. McWilliam, Erica (2008) ‘Unlearning how to teach’, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 45:3, 263 — 269 [↩]
2. Although, bacon … yum [↩]
3. McWilliam, p263 [↩]
4. personally, I hate the word ‘unlearn’, it kind of reminds me of ‘de-programming’ or ‘re-programming’, but I can’t quite put my finger on the cognitive dissonance it creates, but I digress [↩]
5. If a blueprint is a plan, then we need something less planny and more open to negotiation, hence purpleprints or any other colour print, you pick, I’m sticking with purple! [↩]
6. McWilliam, p264 [↩]
7. Given that there seems to be two camps – both for and against as well as another camp who has never heard of EduPunk before, it seems that acceptance is an ‘issue’. [↩]
8. McWilliam, p266 [↩]
9. indeed, the web is a remix and anyone who says otherwise is probably a traditional publisher [↩]
10. Bauman, Z. (2004). Zigmunt Bauman: Liquid sociality. In N. Gane (Ed.), The future of social theory (pp. 17–46). London: Continuum. [↩]
11. McWilliam, p263 [↩]
12. Not that antogonism isnt a good thing, but inclusivity is a goal of education and a more inclusive label would, perhaps, be more beneficial in the long run, not that we can’t call ourselves EduPunks, but I think we need to remember our audience and pre-empt their reactions to negatively perceived labels and this is now a sentence that I should not have let run away with itself. [↩]