As part of rethinking and relaunching the MA in Community
Education, Equality and Social Activism we are delighted to announce that Ian
Manborde of Ruskin College Oxford has agreed to act as our new external
examiner.
The extern has the role of reviewing how student
dissertations and assignments are marked, to make sure not just that the marks
are fair but in a wider sense that the assessment process, and ultimately the
course itself, reflect the best practice in the field. For a practitioner-oriented
MA for activists like our own, this means verifying that the process of the
course is genuinely contributing to activists’ own learning, to movement
processes and community education and that we are working well with the very
wide range of life experiences and movement and community struggles that people
bring to the course.
We are very happy that Ian has agreed to do this for us.
Ian brings a long background both in social movements and in popular education
to the role, having started out as a trade unionist in the 1980s and then worked in workers’ and
TU education for over twenty years. He directs Ruskin’s MA in Global Labour andSocial Change, one of a small number of sister courses of our own MA which have
to work with the challenge of combining academic rigour in theory and research
with a real practice-oriented bite for the problems that students are trying to
think about. Ian has thus spent many years supporting radical education for
social change, and we hope to learn a lot from working with him. More on Ian at
https://www.ruskin.ac.uk/about/ruskin-staff/ian-manborde.
Since Ruskin’s course is ten years old and ours is five,
it is by way of being a big sister; where Maynooth has had particularly strong
relationships with community activism and environmental movements, Ruskin
College has historically strong relationships with trade union movements across the UK, EU and internationally.
Their course has recently undergone its own rethinking and reorientation
process, and the CEESA course team have learned a lot from discussions with Ian
and his colleagues at Ruskin around this. Some people may also have caught him
at our recent Dublin event, “What education do union organisers and other
activists need?” or during his previous visits to Dublin. His reflections on
the event are at http://ianmanborde.blogspot.ie/2016/02/turning-rage-into-hope-reflections-on.html.
We have also thanked our first external examiner, EurigScandrett, whose term is now up. Eurig’s courses in environmental, gender
and social justice at Queen Margaret University in Scotland were an
inspiration for founding CEESA and we are very grateful for all the work he has
done supporting CEESA through our first five years. We have learned a lot
through our many exchanges during this time and the connection will not be
lost.
We look forward to working with Ian as we relaunch the
course, and keeping on asking ourselves difficult questions about how best we
can meet activists’ needs and support the development of popular education and
social movements in Ireland and beyond.
