Recent Advances in Conductive Education (RACE)

For some twenty years the history of Conductive Education has been characterised largely by attempts in a growing number of countries to adapt and apply practices that had been developed in Hungary over the previous forty to meet the social situation then prevalent in that country. By the twenty-first century it was becoming increasingly apparent that the process of internationalisation from this base, traumatic as it could sometimes be, was no longer enough and that a further wave of reconstruction and transformation was under way. In the context of very concrete real-life constraints and opportunities, in ever-diversifying national contexts, the fundamental tenets of the conductive approach are creating new conductive practices, interacting with new ideas as they do. This is of course occurring against the background of a much wider social trend: and Conductive Education now has to meet the requirements and standards of the fast-globalising world knowledge economy, harnessing new media to participate to do so.

RACE was inaugurated in 2001 as a print journal, to capture, record and share some of what was now happening in Conductive Education and to encourage formal communication both within the conductive movement and without, as an important tool in the further development of Conductive Education as a whole. Initially the RACE journal was published in samizdat form, developing its content and its physical form progressively from issue to issue and exercising firm and, it was hoped, formative, editorial control over the quality of articles published.

RACE in its print form is available on subscription, and individual issues and articles can also be purchased, all at a deliberately low price. Give the diverse and dispersed nature of the conductive world, however, market penetration has been inevitably limited. Abstracts for each issue are published on the Internet by the National Library of Conductive Education.

Recent Advances in Conductive Education is supported by the Foundation for Conductive Education which has as its mandated charitable purpose ‘the development and advancement of the science and skill of Conductive Education’.

In addition to the obvious task of bringing developing practices and ideas into the public domain, RACE has also therefore sought to encourage and nurture a much-needed tradition of formal reporting in the field of Conductive Education. Conductive Education also has need to develop a tradition of critical reviews, of books as well as other published materials – and to identify and develop a pool of potential reviewers.

It has been and remains vitally important to broaden the author base of Conductive Education and, given the nature of the conductive movement, this has to include practitioners, providers, users and researchers.

Authors to date have ranged from those with considerable previous experience of formal writing to those for whom their article is a first experience of this kind. The editors have been and continue to be most willing to devote time to advising and if need be mentoring first-time authors and reviewers, with special consideration for those for whom English is not their first language. It is to the advantage of RACE to encourage potential authors, all those with an idea for an article, and requests that get in touch and see how this might be worked up. The idea might be an already completed draft submission, existing practice materials, a tried verbal presentation existing mainly in the form of over-heads or just… an idea. This invitation is extended to parents, disabled people, conductors, administrators, researchers and academics. Others with something relevant to contribute are also welcome.

Conductive Education is now well established as an international field. To date RACE has published articles from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Hungary, Israel, Kuwait, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The first wave of internationalisation of Conductive Education has been to the developed countries, within these largely favouring relatively more advantaged individuals and sectors of society. Even so, resources have often been stretched, finances have to be prioritised and, in the process, there may be little possibility, for users and providers alike, to spend money on books and journals. Conductive Education is now tentatively beginning to spread to the developing world, where growing interest in the potential of this ‘people technology’ usually comes alongside great difficulties in accessing knowledge. To date Conductive Education has had no effective mechanisms to begin democratising access to knowledge even to the have-nots of the developed countries, never mind to the developing economies.

In view of the current status of English as a world language, the language of RACE is English, specifically British English. Exceptions could be considered, however, in particular circumstances.

The general English expression ‘Conductive Education’ is now a widely recognised international term, variously defined in the major dictionaries of British English and the overwhelmingly most productive entry in this field for searching the Internet. Conductive Education is taken here to include reference to ‘conductive pedagogy’ and ‘conductive upbringing’, and to include what is referred to in other languages by a variety of expressions in other languages:

konduktív pedagógia, konduktív nevelés; l’education conductive, la pedagogie conductive; konduktive Förderung, konduktive Erziehung, konduktive Paedagogiek; konuktiv pedagogik; educazione conduttiva, pedagogia conduttiva; educaçion conductiva; educacaõ condutiva; konduktiv pedagogiekk, konduktiv oplering; konduktiv pedagogik; konduktiv opetus, konduktiivinen kasvatus; Nauczanie Kierowane; konduktivna nauchenie; кондуктивная педагогикя; кондуктивнoe обучение; החינוך המדריך; متلازمة اون.

This list of terms is certainly not inclusive and the Editors look forward to adding others, particularly those in other alphabets and writing systems.

Proper consideration of Conductive Education encompasses matters to do with its practical pedagogy, for children and adults and their families, its philosophy and values, its spread, organisation and politics, the experience of its users as well as the professional concerns of its providers. RACE welcomes articles relating to any of these. Formal enquiry into these admits methodologies from education and pedagogic science, medicine and health studies, social and political science, history and philosophy, while less formally there is considerable need and scope for descriptive documentation of personal and collective experiences of living and working within Conductive Education. All articles received will be submitted for peer review.

Electronic communication, not least to and amongst service-users, has been a vital factor in the internationalisation of Conductive Education, initially through television and subsequently through websites and discussion groups on the Internet. In the twenty-first century, however, the world is already moving on. A new generation is growing up, and this increasingly includes most young parents, disabled people, conductors and other practitioners and providers, while institutional Conductive Education, including its publishing continues at best in the website age. Meanwhile Conductive Education’s liveliest (and in some cases most technically advanced) web-presences are to be found not in conventional websites but in the more personal spaces of groups and the blogosphere.

Further, technology has created a massive cultural change in which communication of information increasingly proceeds from the bottom up – and crossways, as easily between continents as across the street. Choice and exchange of fashions, enthusiasms, ideas are increasingly in the hands of people who expect immediate access to information and knowledge and for whom knowledge is not just something there to be ‘accessed’: it is something that they too can create for themselves and then share actively with others. Their telephones invariably include cameras (and increasingly videos too), their communication is as likely through texts as emails. They regard blogs, YouTube, facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Second Life, etc. as commonplace. They expect knowledge to be public and downloadable: it had better be instant, and preferably interactive too.

Part of this revolution is the open access movement in academic and professional publishing. New on-line technologies have reduced the costs of managing and publishing a journal to the point that it is possible to publish new forms of on-line journals free of charge through the Internet and provide universal access to knowledge. Moreover, journal publication can now becomes a progressively more interactive process for readers, authors, reviewers and editors. Individuals, institutions and libraries therefore gain access to a more dynamic community of inquiry, on a global scale, not possible through publication on the printed page alone and contributing in new ways to the democratic quality of the world at large.

Against this background of technological and cultural change the journal Recent Advances in Conductive Education is to create an open access edition, RACE Online , to continue the development and purpose already established by its print edition. Its on-line edition will do more, however, than simply publish a version of the paper edition on the Internet, seeking to develop further within the technology and spirit of the global democratisation of knowledge. This has been suggested before in various ways but the open access RACE Online will be the first practical manifestation.

This transparent way of publishing offers particular advantages for Conductive Education, with its often isolated practitioners, service-users or centres, usually short of the financial resources to buy written material, and usually with no means of being assured of the quality of sometime conflicting information. The especial relevance for those in the developing economies need not be emphasised.

Ever since Conductive Education began to internationalise, the conductive world has yearned for what has been variously identified as acceptance, recognition, legitimation, credibility. There are various paths towards this goal, one of which involves developing the tradition and mechanisms of scholarly publication. Conductive Education is a long-established field of practice but remains comparatively underdeveloped as a field of scholarly inquiry. Conductive Education has dispersed fast and wide across the world over the last twenty years but most of this is being achieved with very limited resources. New on-line technologies are therefore closely suited to facilitating the communication of experience and the development of knowledge. (The word ‘facilitation’ is used here in its conductive sense, to imply motivating and teaching people to do things for themselves, rather than doing things for them!).

To achieve this involves rather more than simply providing a platform for ‘getting things published’. Individual publications should be part of a systemic, dynamic process of knowledge-creation and knowledge-refinement.. Three components of this process that will be greatly enhanced by establishment of RACE Online are introduced here: