Sphinx

This week is especially heavy on travelling, which is terrible for doing all the writing I imagined I’d get done once marking was out of the way, pretty terrible for my waistline as I resort too often to coffee and cake to keep going, moderately good for starting to work through the long list of overdue book reviews, and very good for blog posts. I’m currently, in theory, on my way to Zagreb for a doctoral workshop on pre-modern economics [update, three hours later: finally on the move…] On Tuesday I was in Manchester, and on Wednesday in London, for teacher-training sessions for the ‘Understanding Power’ project – aka ‘Thinking Through Thucydides’, but that name isn’t going to pull in the punters – that Lynette Mitchell and I have been developing with the Politics Project.

This was tiring, a little stressful – and finally a joy. It’s the moment when the fledgling stork, still fluffy and ungainly, starts to jump up and down in the nest, trying out its wings, gaining more and more height each time, and you think: yes, this is going to fly. [whaddya mean, you don’t watch Stork Cam?] Presenting our material, the activities and the underlying resources, to the teachers who will actually be putting them into practice, feeling deeply nervous about their reactions – and seeing that, yes, they get it, they can see what we’re trying to do and are keen to give it a go. This thing is going to fly. And it’s going to go to places we could never reach ourselves.

I think I’ve commented on here before that one of the big things I’ve learnt about engagement beyond academia – and it’s one reason why this project has been at least six years in the making – is that you have to give people something they want, even if you give them other things as well; you can’t force anyone to accept your exciting new project, however brilliant it is, if it doesn’t suit their needs. This week has been more about the other big lesson: you can’t limit what people then do with what you give them, and you shouldn’t try.

Okay, I guess this principle is less absolute than the first one, partly because it is possible to imagine cases where you would want to limit what people do with your research, and partly because it might be practical to do so, if we ran every school session ourselves. Which does exist as a possibility, if anyone wants to invite us for a one-off session, but if that was the only route to engagement and impact, it would have a very small reach indeed before we collapsed from exhaustion. By handing delivery over to teachers, having worked with the Politics Project to develop and refine the activities and resources and training, we can expand the number of schools and students who can get involved, and increase the amount of time spent on the activity, since we don’t have to be there to do it all.

But it’s actually about much more than scale; it’s about flexibility, and trust. The core of the whole project is the idea that Thucydides helps open up questions, rather than closing them down; the core outcome we’re aiming at is that students will have thought about a set of related issues, not that they will have acquired specific knowledge or specific views.* Opening things up means they could head off in many different directions – the fundamental questions that the Melian Dialogue raises about power and justice can apply to any number of different situations, and certainly different students will have different responses to them. It’s their teachers, not us, who will know best how to guide the discussion, how to help their students engage with and connect different ideas, and how to handle difficult situations when they arise – when the image of an abusive power relationship comes too close to home.

So this is what we’ve tried to create: a framework that provokes thoughts and questions about power, generating ideas which teacher and students then work through together under the guidance of the former. It’s an approach inspired partly by the original US Naval War College use of Thucydides, as a means of talking about Vietnam without having to mention Vietnam, but also by making a virtue of the fact that people can clearly find analogies between episodes in Thucydides and absolutely anything. It is the polar opposite of trying to promote a specific idea or message; for us, it’s been all about learning to let go, to create a space in which each discussion can learn to fly in its own way – just hoping that, at the end, they remember it was Thucydides who gave them that initial push out of the nest.

Of course, this creates a different problem: not wanting to be there at every session to see that they run according to plan, but wanting to be there at every session to see all the different ways in which people respond to the activities and the ideas…

*Obviously if they acquire knowledge of ancient history, and an interest in it and a sense of ownership and engagement, that’s a massive bonus, but it’s not the point of the exercise.

Note that, while you’ve clearly missed this set of training sessions, we are definitely aiming to do another round in September. If you are interested in getting involved with the ‘Understanding Power’ strand of the Politics Project’s digital surgeries, please do contact Hattie Andrews (harriet.andrews@thepoliticsproject.org.uk) at the project, or get in touch with me (n.d.g.morley@exeter.ac.uk) for a preliminary chat.

And, yes, I am posting this at 1am UK time as my flight was hours late and I’m only now unwinding at the hotel…