The purpose of the contextual report (U8) is to situate, or support, your practice (U7) with research. The report should include your reflective statements, and develop them further by placing them in the context of a conversation, across time and space, between people, ideas and objects…
The thematic conversation is an opportunity for you to consider the status of your platform work as a part of a conversation of ideas. The main ideas that might support your work might derive from the consideration of the shared theme of education and learning…or from the the two words that distinguish the name of your platform.
The Stuart Hall text that we have already shared with you describes systems of representation through words. But the same surely applies to systems and technologies, and techniques.
For example, you can imagine the system of education (that we are in) as providing for a brutal and hierarchical representation of different kinds of intelligence. This hierarchy might obviously be linked to the other hierarchy attaching to issues of cultural capital. That conversation might connect Hall, Bourdieu, Benjamin and Illich…
Each platform is named with two words…so you can start by describing what those words mean in relation to the tools, techniques, themes and personalities that have informed your work in the platform.
What are the tools specific to your platform? What are the techniques associated with those tools? How do the tools and techniques suggest the various themes that distinguish your platform? How do these themes shape the way that you see, and engage with the world? Who are the designers, writers and thinkers who you look to, for inspiration and example. You can add all this material to your word-cloud and mind-maps on the miro whiteboard (22/11).
All of these things combine to form a cognitive and practical background that i forms your work. The platform tool-kit becomes a kind of machine, based on how you see the world, that you can use to shape your work and inform its meanings.
Each platform provides for a way of engaging with the world through observation and interpretation. At a meta-level, we could describe this as a specific discipline of observation that links practices and values.