The Project

1. The Project Personalised object-centred learning

2. The Project What it is… Handouts 1 & 2

3. What is personalised object-centred learning? • Student-led • Student-owned • Student-assessed (in part)

4. What are the advantages? • Motivation • Relevance • Develops self-awareness of skills and relevance of knowledge • Possibly geared towards future career/education • Response to contemporary culture

5. Response to contemporary culture? • Intellectual capital is no longer about epistemic expertise or possession of ‘facts’ • Intellectual capital is about knowing how to find, organise and communicate interpretations in the proper discourse and at the correct register • Example: “GPs as flow-chart manipulators”

6. The Project Requirements

7. Assessment

8. What do I have to produce?

9. Assessment

10. The Project How it is done…

12. But… • Mini-project group themes: • Desert • Credit crunch • A song • Representations of youth • The care home • Mobile phones

13. What I want…

14. Not just you. My example: bridge

15. The Project The Process

16. The seven-step path…

17. The Project Objects

18. Step 1: identification of an object • Is my object acceptable? • Scope • Engagement • Value

19. The Project Empirical research Handout 3

20. Step 2: identify the context, territory or place of the object • How do I know my object? • How does it appear to me? • How do I understand it? • How can I ‘find out about’ my object? • In which context do I understand my object?

21. Step 2: my example • How do I know my object? • As a crossing over an obstacle • How does it appear to me? • As an empowerment, as a way to overcome • How do I understand it? • A bridge is a crossing point. It links two places which ‘need’ to be connected • How can I ‘find out about’ my object? • I can photograph bridges, I can go to bridges, I can bungee jump, stand under them, read Billy Goat Gruff, talk to people about bridges, look at art… • In which context do I understand my object? • I understand bridges as a communication

22. Contexts, territories and places • There is no one set context, think about your object in many different ways: a ‘hand’ is a cultural object for a wooer, an ethical object for the police, an aesthetic object for the artist, a limb for the doctor.

23. Empirical research

24. My example

25. Contrast Handout 4

26. My example Bridge as contrast: Il Ponte Vecchio has shops on it. Is a place to stop on, to linger. It is a thing, rather than an absence… Questions arise: Why is there this difference? Is it an historical change in the meaning of bridge? A cultural difference? A geographical one? Why is my immediate intuition not appropriate to this bridge? Is there something particular here we need to know (tax laws and boundaries, for example)?

27. The Project Philosophy

28. Step 3: identification of appropriate philosophical concepts • These should arise from identifying the context of your interest and how you understand your object.

29. My example • I have talked about bridges as ‘communication’, so I need a theory of communication or language: Hegel and the expression of the will (how our ideas are made actual), Heidegger on language as framing… • I have talked about bridges as always a way-to, an absence, this links into the nothingness of Sartre… • I have talked about ‘need’, I can think about Marx and fabricated versus real needs…

30. Criteria for the application of concepts

31. Thinkers • The identification of concepts will lead to the identification of appropriate thinkers and texts. Lecture notes from all modules are invaluable within this stage. Thinkers/concepts should ideally be drawn from your stage’s modules.

32. My example • ‘Need’ as understood by Marx and the neo-Marxists: real versus functions of ideology (PHi3001) • ‘Communication’ as characterised by Hegel’s theory of expression and the social will (PHi2003) • ‘Nothingness’ as an absence, hidden by metaphysics Heidegger and Sartre (PHi3001/2) Handout 5

33. The Project Methodology Handout 6

34. Selection of an appropriate methodology

35. Examples

37. Example bridge: as cultural object • Stage 1: Il pontevecchio versus Ironbridge. Historical contrast: mercantile city versus industrial revolution, man as consumer versus man’s power over nature and so on…(Contrastive method) • Stage 2: how was the bridge understood in its time? How might we understand it differently and why? (Historical method) • Stage 3: show the development of bridge as a link connecting human need becoming a purely cultural object (see the Gateshead bridge) and our thinking is obscured by the original understanding of bridge that has nothing to do with its contemporary reality (reality always precedes thought: commitment to Hegel’s owl and so on…) (Genealogy, archaeology)

38. Methodological expectations

39. The Project How it is assessed

40. Requirements • You are required to: • Present twice, once in January and once in May; • Produce a progress report (500 words) in January; • Produce an entry for the Book of Change (a webpage summary); • Hand in a personal self-development plan (a workbook containing notes, questionnaires, data and so on, plus reflections on your work) • An 8000 word project dissertataion

41. Roles of the various requirements • But you are to receive a mark for the project dissertation alone. The other requirements are either indicative or formative and you are to assess personally how much you have gained from the learning experience. Handout 7

42. The dissertation • Title • Objectives/aims • Structure • Content Handouts 8, 9 and 10

43. What is measured in the assessment