The last few weeks have been extremely challenging and fun. As my group's mission is centered around analysis of preexisting literature on the impacts of education and extracurricular programs and not so much on primary research, we are still taking the time to finalize our literature review. I've been amazed by the depth of theoretical work that exists on education, especially the wide-ranging exploration that we find in Gert Biesta's The Beautiful Risk of Education, where, among other things, he argues:

The concept of learning inherently contains value judgements about the information being obtained and its necessity, and serves to dislocate responsibility from society for the institutions which obligate people to behave in certain ways by framing social coordination issues as matters of individual growth and responsibility.

A teacher must, to be a teacher, propose something new that a student could not arrive at independently, as against the Socratic notion that learning is simply the recollection of abilities buried in the mind.

The democratic political realm of navigating differences and creating new, spontaneous projects with opportunities for others to be spontaneous agents is inseparable from the way students naturally interact with each other, and therefore political matters are relevant to education, contra Hannah Arendt.

We also took a tour of the Blackbird-Leys estate this Friday, an outlying district of Oxford with a long history of challenges in underdevelopment, overpolicing, and limited social mobility. The people I met there were extremely friendly and the community and nonprofit sectors are highly active. I am looking to partner with several extracurricular providers there to collect more data and also to volunteer for the rest of the summer!

It's been lovely getting to know my groupmates more, who are fascinating people with wildly different experiences of education systems. There's another American in my ground, but she and I are from opposite sides of the country and have major differences in our exposure to co-curricular activities.

I'm a bit nervous about how the interviews will go, as I haven't heard back yet from the providers I reached out to, but even if we have limited primary data we still have many sources to go off of. I have never done a literature review before and am not entirely sure what to expect in terms of balancing fact and analysis and connecting the various sources, but I have faith that I will be able to craft something clear and compelling in the time that I have. The most important thing I'm still missing is a study on eliminating both selection bias and common-cause effects from the relationships between extracurriculars and attainment, as most of my studies are vulnerable to one or the other.

Best,

Peter