The formal launch of the Centre took place on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 and  comprised of two seminars, as below.

The Pedagogy of Organisational Learning

Professor Nick Boreham, Professor of Education and Employment, University of Stirling

In the sense in which it is used here, ‘organisational learning’ refers to a pervasive organisational culture which involves all members of an organisation in collaborative activities designed to generate and share knowledge about how to improve the organisation’s work processes, products and services. In such a culture, the employees have a pedagogical role to fulfil alongside their primary role - evaluating their performance against benchmarks, devising better ways of organising their work, sharing knowledge of best practice, producing training materials and teaching their co-workers. This paper explores the pedagogical role of workers in manufacturing industry, based on a study of an oil refinery which promoted organisational learning as part of its strategy of continuous improvement.

Networks: knowledge, participation and power

Dr Richard Hatcher, Director of Research, Birmingham City University

It has become increasingly evident that the ‘standards agenda’ has run out of steam: improvement in pupil performance has levelled off and the equality gap remains wide. Educationists who are most influential on government thinking share a common diagnosis of the problem: a centralised top-down prescriptive approach which suppresses the expertise and creativity of practitioners which are necessary for continuing improvement. They are also in agreement about what the solution is. It should be schools, not government, leading change. Whole-system reform is needed, and this requires collaboration between schools for more effective knowledge and practice transfer, for which the organisational form is networks, led by new agents - system leaders. In this paper I will be exploring this emerging new and complex multiple network landscape in terms of the distribution of knowledge and the relationships between participation and power.