GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017
also believe that education works best in a workplace where people, whether
they be learners or teachers, are cocreators of the educational experience and
are supported and enabled to give of their best. Almost all of our students at
our university will spend some time in a workplace experiencing what it might
be like in the world of work and a very large and important part of their learning
and their development comes from that process.
That is why we are proud to be a partner of GFTU in developing educational
opportunities for your members. We are working with you now to develop a
gold standard Training the Trade Union Educator programme which we hope
will become an enabler for those who want to deliver any form of training within
the trade union movement, but we also hope that this will become the start of a
much broader and deeper partnership with you. Many of the unions here that
are affiliated to GFTU also hold common ground with our university. We, for
instance, teach psychology, broadcast journalism, broadcast technology,
cinematography, theatre, management, music performance and production
social work, sports management, coaching and performance development and
on the latter (and I will just say this, because I say this everywhere I go now) if
Leeds Beckett had been a country; that is, all of our staff, all of our students
and all of our former students had been formed together as some kind of nation
state we would have been ahead of Switzerland in both the Olympic Games
and the Paralympics.
One of the first people I met was our chief athletics coach when I joined the
university, Mick Hill, who worked quietly and silently and out of the glare of
publicity with Jessica Ennis-Hill, one of Britain’s greatest ever athletes. When
he started working with her she could throw the javelin 25 metres, when he
finished working with her she could throw it 47! I asked him how he did it,
because I have had the good fortune to meet her once, and she is actually tiny
and he said, “It is all about timing, it is all about technique and it is all about
confidence” and that seems quite a metaphor for the educational process in
itself.
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