COP2 lecture 2: the flipped classroom

The flipped classroom is the idea of student centred education. The hierarchy is flipped, or rather, completely destroyed. Students peer-assess each other's work, work as a collective and create their own answers in the hope that the learning will be more deeply embedded. In its most radical form there is no need for a teacher at all, as written about by philosopher Jacques Ranciere.

In May 1968 in France there was a student-lead revolution in revolt of the current education system. They fought against elitist education that discriminated against people according to their class, race or gender bias. They rebelled against specialist courses that they thought left them feeling limited and disempowered, and felt that because of this education was just a cog in the machine to just give you a job, with no 'enlightened' learning. They did this all be seizing control of the universities, and it lasted a while.

The art schools were taken over to produce the posters and pamphlets for their cause. It seems that these anti-capitalist posters are now for sale at a profit.

Louis Althusser taught Ranciere, and had two theories about how capitalist society keeps its citizens at bay. 

Repressive State Apparatus: the police, prisons, the army, structures that can physically stop you

Ideological State Apparatus: institutions that reproduce the modes of thinking. Church, media and particularly in this case, schools and education systems.

Ranciere wondered if we needed professors at universities at all, in his theories one has the assumption that all are equally intelligent.

He also wrote a book called Proletarian Nights, about French industry workers from the nineteenth century who were artists and poets and writers when not working their jobs. He brought up important questions such as why are they dismissed and forgotten from the art world? Why can't a worker be a poet? And studied why and how they refused their social order, like the students did in the revolution.

The Distribution of the Sensible

The idea that there are layers to the world, and why certain people are only allowed access to experience certain things. It's similar to how the art/design world is divided into different disciplines. The idea that we should work as a community, and the "police" are anybody who enforces these structures. Still, a lot of people "self-police" and it's almost impossible to get away from in education.

• Anyone can be an artist
• Anyone can be anything
• Start with the assumption everyone is intelligent
• Academics alienate the working classes by using obscure language

The School of the Damned is one of the closest models to Ranciere's. It's non-discriminatory, is free and the students organise how they want to be 'taught' and by 'who', although in these situations everyone is seen as an equal. The education model changes every year and is not dictated by history.