People, politics and pedagogy

Photo by David Bushell on Geograph

In a previous incarnation I was Training Manager for a distance learning project called RATIO back in 1996. RATIO was a three year project funded by the European Union and as a team we were tasked to establish 40 learning centres across the rural areas of South West England.

Over the first of few months of the project, we met with local communities, selected centres, and developed our relationship with the local businesses and stakeholders. Then we began to roll out our technology, embedding networked computers, video conferencing and digital satellite television receivers into the centres.

This was where the problems started. There was plenty of squabbling about how many computers each centre would be allocated, and then once they received them, how much training we were giving them in comparison to other centres. They were getting the technology for free, but still wanted to get all they could out of us.

On one occasion, I remember setting up a new centre in a small Devon town. We needed our team to install a satellite dish, and to do this we needed line-of-sight with the communications satellite. There was a huge tree in the way. Following a lengthy process of negotiation with various local community groups, the parish council, the town council and the district council, several environmental agencies and various technical groups, the general consensus was that the best solution would be to hire a tree surgeon to come in and lop a couple of branches off the tree. This would give us line of sight to the satellite and the centre would receive perfect reception.

On the day, I arrived on site with the two centre managers, two tree surgeons, my technical team, and a representative of the council. We began to set up all our equipment, and the two tree surgeons set up their ladders ready to remove the branches. At that moment, a small grey haired man approached us and asked us what we were doing. When we had explained the task, he informed us he was the chair of a local committee that was a sub-group of another committee that was associated with the district council (phew!), and complained that they had not been consulted. He threatened to sue the project, the tree surgeons, the centre, the council - and me personally - if we so much as touched the tree.

There followed another few weeks of negotiation while we attempted to placate everyone before we were finally able to go back and complete the task. The branches were removed, the satellite dish installed, and the local community could enjoy and learn from the educational programmes we broadcast via the satellite. Working on that project, I think I learnt far more about people and politics than I ever learnt about technology or pedagogy.


People, politics and pedagogy by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.