Having succumbed to the use myself [feeling a need to explain to an editor who wouldn’t otherwise get it] I am still saddened to see the term erasure poetry replacing the term of its origins humument/s.

I have written on and about this before here, and I am in fact delighted to actually see the proliferation of this poetic technique under whatever name [there is also black out poetry and more I’m sure], but as Tom Phillips created it, I think we should celebrate this by retaining or at the very least referencing the name and its origins.

So I have:

Visit here for further background.

In an Ofsted PowerPoint presentation on the Education Inspection Framework 2019, it gives a definition of learning which is

Learning is defined as an alteration in long term memory. If nothing has altered in long-term memory, nothing has been learned.

Now, and quickly, at my age I would appear not to have learned many things because I am always forgetting…

But that aside, two of the visual metaphors used to exemplify the meaning of their definition are confusing to me. Here is the first:

I do get the suggestion, but in portraying bits of knowledge as stones seems from the very start to characterise it/this as hard and finite and – well – not the precious commodity implied in the Knowledge Mantra of their current thinking/obsession. This also totally undermines the implied ‘criticism’ of it/this simply remaining static by being collected in a bucket. Are they meant to be thrown? At what/whom? And it is tautologous: these are stones and by their nature are static.

Here is the second:

Again, I get the suggestion: this is vibrant and active and some kind of mesh so about interconnections and so on. And not a stone in sight!

But is ‘belief’ knowledge? Is ‘feeling’? ‘Emotion’? ‘Dread’? ‘Bias’? ‘Reflex’??

I can’t even find the word ‘stone’ in the image!

I don’t agree with Ofsted’s and therefore Gibb’s and therefore the DfE’s and therefore all the other acolytes’ and suck-ups’ foregrounding of Knowledge as the key/core ‘goal’ of teaching and learning, but given this bias [it’s a feeling really…] I still objectively don’t see how Ofsted’s visual metaphors in any way explain coherently or meaningfully what they mean by Knowledge, even in the way with which I disagree.

Most pleased to have my poem ‘Disconnect’ in the digital edition of Vallum, out yesterday online but access is through subscription/writers’ pass [details here]. Thank you Leigh Kotsilidis.

My poem here. Thanks to IT and R.