Started this Blog today because it is the day after the first of the Education and Community Development Study Seminars.

Our speaker was at the seminar was Dr Sanjay Sharma who came to talk about Critical Pedagogy. Critical Pedagogy turned out to be an ideal topic with which to start the seminar series. It has certainly inspired me to get this blog started at last.

Dr Sharma is the author of Multicultural Encounters (2006) and "Teaching Diversity: im/possible pedagogy" in Policy Futures in Education 4(2): 203-16. He also the co-editor of the online 'race' journal darkmatter - http://www.darkmatter101.org

Dr Sharma's talk about critical pedagogy focused on the politics of teaching and researching critically, with a focus on ‘race’ and multiculture. His presentation was based on 6 provocations for 'Thinking about Critical Pedagogy from an Anti-racist/non-Eurocentric perspective'. In exploring these provocations, Dr Sharma has certainly helped us to open a space in which we can go on to review our programme's teaching and learning content and practice; and to examine its role in the lives of our students and the wider community as well as the theoretical and philosophical principles which inform its content and pedagogies.

The aim of this seminar series is to bring speakers with specialist knowledge to the Cass School of Education to dialogue with students and scholars across the University as well as the wider community about issues that are (or should be) of contemporary significance and concern. We are inviting speakers to share with students, scholars and the wider community the research they are doing or planning, as well as their thoughts on the research required in the area of their specialism.

Scholars will want to attend these seminars to hear about, and comment on developments in the field; to inform their own work and to make links across disciplines and the community we serve.

Students should find these seminars a stimulating point of reference and learning for their own research projects and, because speakers will be asked to comment on the implications of their work for community development we hope that these seminars will build links between scholars and students at the university and the wider community that it is our mission to serve.

The seminars are scheduled for Wednesday afternoons between 4 and 5.30 at the Stratford Campus of the University of East London.