Vision Statement

 
Cross Frontier Education was established in September 2008. It is a foundation dedicated to the continuous promotion of educational improvement both for children and for teachers, indeed everybody engaged within the “learning environment”.

CFE wishes to promote an inflation of educational discourse across the critical zones of culture and communication. CFE will serve a discursive function, seeking to promote debate and improved teacher professionalism. It is critical to promote an inflated debate over education, a debate asking not simply what “education” means but moreover what it is actually supposed to do; and beyond what education actually does, what precisely must it say? Education and teachers must find a new “voice”. Teachers must show improved understanding that the knowledge which is produced inside academic institutions is shaped in the terms of the power-interests that sustain them. We live in a time of intensifying professional “reflexivity”. Teachers must learn to become the coherent link between the existing educational text and the realities of the world in which education must permanently evolve. We as teachers have to permanently self-improve and up-skill. Teachers have to rebuild their professional image, find a unified language and engage in a meaningful and progressive discourse. Improving teacher professionalism lies at the core of this task.
 
We live in the developing new age of “Money-Politics”, or “Tele-Democracy”. Call it what you like. We are certainly witnessing the early dangerous days of post-modernity. Information is now being managed differently and the quest for “elite-knowledge” is on. We, as teachers, find ourselves increasingly constrained within an intensely negotiated space. We must become increasingly aware of the history and constructed nature of what professional craft-knowledge and experience are. This is why CFE has launched “Teacher to Teacher România” (T2TR) as its premier training project inside Bucharest. “T2TR” will be the flagship for our educational brand:
 
“The T2TR” programme is premised on the “Teaching Today“ manual of the renowned English educator Geoff Petty and is dedicated to making lasting qualitative and quantitative impacts on the delivery and reception of teaching inside Romanian schools for today and tomorrow”.
 
Theory is the name we will apply to this process, and training will be the means to improve teacher craft-knowledge. We must show critical and intellectual self-scrutiny. We must focus on the manifest content of theory and its discursive impacts. So, we must depart from one an all-encompassing global narrative for teachers. We must ask critical questions: How are teachers represented? What is their image in society? We need to focus on situated-knowledge, understanding that strategic identification is now fluid. There is a weakening of the claim for the professional pedagogic monopoly of knowledge. We must attend to cultural value. We must examine the relationship of culture and nature, with the role of culture being to reflect. There is no longer a condition of the permanent. We have to produce “reflective practitioners”.
 
A clear and agreed professional language is imperative in this transitional stage between two phases of capitalism. Teachers’ voices must be heard and the profession has to improve its own command of language and discursive powers. We now live in an age of increasing “credentialism”. Teachers must commit to on-going career training. We exist in a society of career hierarchies based in specialized occupations selected through merit and based in training expertise. It is a society based on education and exclusion. It is the time of money-politics. Everything is underpinned by economics. Efficiency is the watchword, and efficiency is measured in economic terms. The pace of change is accelerating and will impose ever increasing strains on Western society. No institution is safe, and teaching will not be exempted from these historical forces. Teachers will stand on the fault-line of this new tectonic landscape; the once accepted geography of teaching is now disappearing. Teachers now need to agree a new map for a new pathway in education. In this context, we must accept that education will constantly need to evolve and change. Ergo, teachers have to accept change too, for education is deeply embedded in a politix of culture; a politics of official knowledge and a politics which embodies conflict.
 
So what lies ahead for education? How will teachers and schools continue to operate within the contextual change that is a product of policy? Education will continue to be political.
 
Today’s dominant metaphor is the market and education is seen to exist for the good of society. In this context, education exists essentially for an economic good. These are the critical demands on teacher performance. Our work has to justify these demands. Governments and employers, parents and students want educational success and improved examinations results. Society needs better educational product; and international society will lean increasingly on teachers to come up with the optimum results for an ever changing, technologically complicated global jobs market. Yet schools must also exist to provide democratic and ethical awareness. There is a protracted struggle for control of knowledge inside the educational state. Politicians and bureaucrats are winning because of fundamental flaws within teacher professionalism. There is now a new rhetoric of exclusion. In understanding how power works, look to the margins to locate resistance, with resistance acting as a corrective mechanism. We have an increasingly “thin democracy” and “thin morality”. A free market is only ever efficient if there is perfect information and the ability to pay. Ethical professionalism is breaking down. CFE therefore pose its self as a professional skills provider for those within the educational sector.
 
Education must continue to be the central plank of civilization. Education must focus itself on the business of replicating adult society. It must remain as the essential transmission mechanism for creating thoughtful, creative and empowered citizens; people who are tolerant, democratic and suitably prepared for the neo-feudal jobs market. It is axiomatic that education contributes to economic growth but it can only deliver if it stays true to its central mission of teaching. Are the teachers specialists or not? Is teacher professionalism prepared for the hard knocks of the future? What is the role for teacher professionalism for today and tomorrow? These are questions which hopefully CFE and T2TR can assist in answering effectively. Together, they will provide an open gate on the pathway to lifelong learning and training, building bridges between systems and cultures, with “Teaching Today” as a vehicle for promoting best international practice.
 
CFE will reach out to build and sustain optimum levels of performance to the widest possible audiences of people working inside education. It will provide a professionally eclectic synthesis of best values and practice, best approaches and pedagogical methodology – proven through experience, in tandem with the current needs of all learners. Inside our community, we shall all learn together, in a pragmatic solution-seeking style. We will provide a shining example of best practice for our multiple audiences to emulate. We will be a collaborative and cooperative philosophy where people “opt-in” for self-improvement. Our quality of learning will grow from the quality of our personal and professional relationships. And we promise, we will always be progressive and never static.