Exploring Partnership Work as a Form of Transformative Education: "You do your yapping and I just add in my stuff"

Abstract

<p><span>This paper details the work of a group of learning disabled people (people with intellectual disabilities) who contribute to the teaching of students undertaking a degree program at one of the UK's most elite universities. Traditional notions relating to knowledge production within academia are examined and we demonstrate how the participation of learning disabled people in classroom teaching challenges these. Drawing on the work of Freire (1972) the paper demonstrates how co-teaching by learning disabled people has a transformative impact on educational experiences. Finally, the current changes impacting the UK higher education sector are detailed and we explore how these changes are negatively impacting on courses that seek to move away from traditional approaches to pedagogy.</span></p>

Learning in Collaborative Moments

“…Not-knowing and the need to come to terms with ambiguity are typical features of dementia as a complex condition for which there is no treatment. Similarly, the dialogue evenings were not directed towards solutions, and thus allowed for mess, not-knowing and ambiguity (Greenstein et al 2015). One could say that participants learnt 'doing | 15 complexity' together, which they felt was an unrecognised aspect of their work.…”

“…There were, however, also restrictions, such as the fact that doing the dialogue evenings did not count for completion of the PhD projects and that funding from the university stopped once the PhD funding ended. We nevertheless see a clear role for academic anthropology emerging: it is easy to be critical of the university as an ivory tower that does not produce solutions for real-world problems or to see the university as applying the 'banking concept of education' (Freire 2009;Greenstein et al 2015). Also, with current budget cuts, it might be hard to invest 'time and resources in activities that might not be immediately translatable into measurable outcomes, such as ge ing to know one another and building trust' (Greenstein et al 2015).…”