information
Bill's work outside the café
updated 16th October 2009
WHAT ELSE IS BILL UP TO?
2009-10
all the Café's work is linked to on-going research-and-development
this outside-the-café work is listed below
you'll find links to café material
some of this r&d can usefully be linked to your own work
to talk about the possibilities contact Bill
updates in green
on practice
integrated curriculum. Bill’s development work with Northamptonshire Connexions is based on his LiRRiC proposals on the personal-and-social-development curriculum. Many of those ideas now appear as part of QCDA proposals on 'learning for well-being'. The new arrangements integrate economic, personal, spiritual and civil well being. The Northants action project, now funded for a third year, engages small groups of main-stream teachers in self-selected schools. They plan for how ‘academic’ work can enable students for well-being in life. The strategy is ‘follow the energy’: working with teachers - a few in each school - who recognise the possibilities, are in command of their subjects, and are up for the challenge. These teams work on schemes with time and space for students, teachers and community-contacts share real-time activity. The background development work is on-going: an interim version of an interactive open-learning pack is now available - partnerships for learning.
integration in The Netherlands. The original 2007 conference in the Hague is now published in English - contact Frans Meijers. The work with the Dutch KPC Groep continues. KPC is a national consultancy on curriculum development. It is drawing on ideas in partnerships-for-learning . Bill working with a delivery team supporting teachers working on careers-work partnerships. This team met members of the Northamptonshire project schools during a three-day workshop in Cambridge. In November Bill will deliver a key-note and run a storyboarding workshop at a follow-up conference for Netherlands teachers. A tam from one of the Northamptonshire schools has been able to accept the Dutch invitation to run a workshop on managing change.
Canterbury Christ Church University. Alongside Tony Watts and Jenny Bimrose, Bill delivered a key note at the Centre for Career and Personal Development 2009 conference - The Re-emergence of Career - Challenges and Opportunities. His lecture is entitled 'Rethinking Partnerships in Contemporary Careers Work' - and is based on partnerships for learning. The conference papers will be published early in 2010.
storyboarding. This words-and-pictures filmic technique enables students and clients to set down thoughts and feelings about what is being learned, and how it is used in life. Earlier this year Bill set out the ideas at the International Centre for Guidance Studies (iCeGS) in University of Derby. It was, at first, considered as a research-and-assessment tool - a method for looking into student progress. Those original ideas are now incorporated into handbook. However iCeGS has gone on to canvass the idea to a wider range of interest in the university. There is now a project steering group comprising members from iCeGS and also from psychology, careers, social work and education departments. A pilot film has been made to support trialing of storyboarding in their work. Bill has been advised by the group that in order to protect the intellectual property this should be called 'Bill Law's Three-scene Storyboarding'. An article under that title appears in the October edition of the Association for Careers Education and Guidance Journal - contact Alan Vincent. The handbook will be updated, with this new information and experience, later in 2009. Bill continues to seek for opportunities to trial the material in schools and colleges. But work will also continue on developing its research potential (see below).
iCould. Funding for this Careers Research and Advisory Centre's on-line project has been extended into 2009. The project website now shows around a thousand well-produced films - of a wide range of people recounting their own career-management experience. The project draws on café concepts concerning the importance of labour-market experience. and of understanding narrative in terms of its turning points. Bill's consultancy to ICould is at an end. He is now working on issues for the uses of narrative on the net (see below).
narrative in HE. With Paul Dowson at Leeds Metropolitan University, and David Stansbury at the University of Reading, Bill has completed his work on the development project drawing on the uses of narrative. The project is part of the Higher Education Careers Service Unit's (HECSU) ‘Putting Research Outcomes into Practice’ (PROP) project. It is for personal-and-social development in HE. It supports students working on the relationships between career, ethics, enterprise and responsibility. The project will enable students in the use of narrative techniques - to set out their on-course experiences, thought and feelings. With the help of a media-consultancy, Logistiks, the storyboard is available interactively on-line. You can get further information from Paul Dowson.
labour-market information. Bill has been commissioned by Connexions Northamptonshire to help get labour-market information into a form which students can work with. He has developed user-friendly ideas about how a labour-market works, and how directly experiencing things can be different from taking in words and images from a page or a website. The material will show how students and clients can use all of this in talking with others about what they are going to do, and in making their own commitments. The resulting material will be published by Connexions Northamptonshire. Part of its purpose is to compare thoughts and feelings about how labour-market information equips you both for 'competing in a race' and for 'exploring on a journey' - distinctive metaphors of our work. The project is extended into 2010. A small creative team is now assembling project ideas into a framework which any careers worker or careers service can incorporate into both face-to-face and curriculum work. Bill will finalise the products into publishable form.
on research
the uses of narrative on the net. Working with various providers of on-line narratives, Bill is beginning work on an enquiry into their usefulness. The project is, so-far, unfunded; but it is important. There are four kinds of initiative: (1) some use narrative just to convey information; (2) some add diagnostic, matching and coaching techniques to that base; (3) some gather richer narratives - with at least some potential for capturing thoughts and feelings, and for showing turning points, all of which can engage users in an interrogation of what storytellers say; and (4) some acknowledge that there is such a probing to be engaged, though, the questioning is ready-made, and much like what an adviser might ask in an interview. There are issues here: (a) there is a question about how far users should be encouraged to generalise from anecdotes; (b) the narratives tend to be 'good news' stories, so users are not being helped with how to make good use out of bad news; and (c) none of this can happen unless the sites use web 2.0 and 3.0 interactivity. Using other people's stories to take command of your own is laid out in narratives for well-being. Bill's work on three-scene storyboarding develops techniques for interrogating both other people's and your own experience.
cultures of career and the research uses of storyboarding. We need to rethink what we do to enable young men and women to manage their own careers. Most urgently, we need to do this for those most at risk. It calls for a deeper and more dynamic grasp of why people decline opportunities to learn and work. We need better to understand what underlying thoughts, feelings and attitudes inform such attitudes. The project relates to café ideas for how cultural background shapes what people believe about work life; what value they find they can attach to it, and what they expect of it for themselves. Bill and Geoff Bright are working at iCeGS, on using existing ethnographies to examine, in these terms, what people say about their own experience. The work will use storyboarding as an enquiry and presentation tool.
on ideas
frameworks for action in HE. The blue-sky work of the Higher Education Careers Service Unit (HECSU) has been extended into 2009-10. The overall aim is to put research outcomes into creative practice (PROP). Bill has been commissioned to develop a contemporary framework for thinking through this work. He has designed an approached which can start with student-and-client experience, or with research-and-development thinking, or with an example of operational practice. In addition to this, HECSU-PROP group have asked Bill to base the framework on his three-dimensional coverage-influence-processes model. This is work in progress. Bill has been working on the uses of CPI for framing research into how and why students gain from careers work. He also set out a short version of the model at the 2009 AGCAS biennial conference. The completed model will appear in the café during 2010 - as a series of interactive on-line processes.
supporting innovation Jenny Bimrose at the University of Warwick, Rachel Mulvey at The University of East London, and Deirdre Hughes now a freelance consultant, are working on ideas to support useful innovation in careers-work. Bill is also a member of that team. Jenny's initiative has attracted the interest of professional associations, of CRAC, as well as of several Connexions companies and HE careers services. This management group is considering ideas for establishing visibility for innovative careers work, for being ready to respond to issues that crop up in the media, for signposting on-going developments in the careers-work field, and for helping careers-work innovators with trialing and feedback facilities. Pump-priming funding for the web portal has been awarded by MATURE - an EU-sponsored company supporting integrated learning on ‘Web 2.0’ platforms. Bill is now formally a consultant to the MATURE project. A multi-platform website is now close to launch.
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