Dave Hill (professor)

Dave Hill
Brighton Borough Councillor
In office
1974–1976
In office
1979–1983
East Sussex County Councillor
In office
1981–1989
Personal details
Born 10 October 1945
London, England
Political party Left Unity; The Independent Socialist Network (part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition; OKDE-Spartakos (the Greek Section of the Fourth International)
Occupation University Professor

David Stanley Hill (born 10 October 1945) is a Marxist political and educational activist. He is Research Professor in Education at Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, England, and also Visiting Professor at the University of Limerick, Ireland, at the Kapodistrian and National University of Athens, Greece, and at Middlesex University, London.[1] He was an elected Labour Party councillor for East Sussex County Council and Brighton Borough Council in the 1970s and 1980s, and has fought as a candidate in twelve local, national and European elections since 1972.

Early life

Dave Hill was brought up in a working-class family from the East End of London. His mother was a dressmaker and his father, a cabinet maker and carpenter.[2] Hill became the first in his family to go to a grammar school; he attended Westlain Grammar School in Brighton.[3]

Hill studied Politics and Modern History at Manchester University and subsequently gained master's degrees, one in politics and another in Education at the University of Sussex and a PhD at the London University Institute of Education under the supervision of Geoff Whitty. During the late 1970s and the early 1980s, he worked as a part-time photo-journalist for some of the Left Press in Britain, covering elections in Portugal, Spain and France for New Socialist, Labour Weekly and Tribune.

Politics

In 1961, Dave Hill joined the Labour Party and became Chair of Brighton Young Socialists. In 2005, after 44 years of active membership,[4] he left the Labour Party and joined the International Socialist Group (which later merged into Socialist Resistance), and the Respect Party. He left Socialist Resistance in 2014 and joined the Independent Socialist Network, an organisation within the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), for whom he has fought local and parliamentary elections,[5] and in Left Unity.

Local politics

As a Labour Party member, Hill was an elected East Sussex County Councillor between 1981–1989 and in the mid-1980s, became Labour Group Leader on East Sussex County Council. He was also a Brighton Borough Councillor during 1975–76 and again during 1979–83. From the beginning of the Thatcher years Hill became more radicalised and opposed what he saw as the increasingly rightward drift in the local and national Labour Party. In 1988, Hill announced he was leaving Labour electoral politics.[6]

National and European elections

In the 1979 and 1987 parliamentary elections, he fought as Labour parliamentary candidate for Brighton Pavilion Constituency, but was defeated both times by Julian Amery, the Conservative Member of Parliament. During the 1979 local elections he scored the highest vote ever recorded for a Labour candidate in Brighton.[6] Hill contested the 2010 General Election as the candidate for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition[7] in the Brighton Kemptown Constituency.

Hill contested in the 2009 European election for the left-wing electoral alliance, No to EU – Yes to Democracy as lead candidate for the South East Region of England.[8][9] He is the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition(TUSC) parliamentary candidate for the Hove and Portslade constituency for the 7 May 2015 general election in the UK.[10]

Teaching and scholarship

Between 1967 and 1969, Hill taught at Stockwell Manor Comprehensive School.[1] From 1972, he taught in higher education, Bognor Regis College of Education which became part of West Sussex Institute of Higher Education (now the University of Chichester), mainly part-time because of his responsibilities as trade union representative and as an elected councillor. He also taught prisoners, adult education tutors, youth workers, and in Thorney Island Refugee Camp for Vietnamese boat people. He subsequently developed and led for five years the Crawley Bachelor of Education Degree for mature and nonstandard entry students.[11][12]

In his long career he has taught in London's East End, at Tower Hamlets College in 1996–1997, and after that at the University of Northampton in between 1997 and 2010, where he was Professor of Education Policy. Since 2012 he has been Research Professor of Education at Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, England, and pays regular visits to Athens, Greece, and Limerick, Ireland, and Ankara, Turkey. While on trade union and Left demonstrations he has been teargassed in Athens and Ankara.[13] He is Visiting Professor of Education at the Nationaland the Kapodistrian University of Athens, Visiting Professor of Education at the University of Middlesex, and, 2011-2014, Visiting Professor of Critical Education Policy and Equality Studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

Educational activism

In 1989, Hill set up the independent-left research unit, the Institute for Education Policy Studies and co-founded and chaired the Hillcole Group of Radical Left Educators between 1989 and 2001.[14] Affiliated writers and academics sustained Marxist and socialist educational analysis and policy formulation in Britain, through its publications of two books and thirteen booklets, published by Tufnell Press between 1990 and 2002.[15] It included Caroline Benn Mike Cole, Glenn Rikowski and for the first few years, Gaby Weiner and Stephen Ball. It also included some activists from the Socialist Teachers Alliance.[16][17]

In March 2003, Hill founded the Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies a free online refereed international journal, which he manages and chief edits, with Peter McLaren co-editing. It has become one of the widest circulation English language online refereed education policy journals, with more than a million downloads (as of March 2014) since 2003.[18] He is also series editor for Routledge for the academic book series: Neoliberalism and Education. He has cowritten or co-edited a number of books and articles with Mike Cole, Glenn Rikowski and Peter McLaren, and, more recently, with Deb Kelsh and Sheila Macrine, and was Chair and then Program Chair of the Marxist Analysis of Schools and Society (MASSES) Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association between 2006–2010.

In 2010 Hill set up the annual ICCE conference, the International Conference on Critical Education, with Kostas Skordoulis of Athens University. These have been held at the University of Athens in 2011[19] and in 2012[20] and at Ankara University, Turkey in 2013. The 2014 conference was held in June 2014 at the University of Thessaloniki, Greece.[21] The 2015 ICCE conference will be held at the University of Lower Silesia, Wroclaw, Poland, 15–18 June 2015.[22]

Hill lectures worldwide to academic, trade union and activist groups and conferences on the politics of education, and locations of his speaking engagements have included Greece, Turkey, Portugal, Finland, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Canada, the USA, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia,[23] India and elsewhere. His writing has been translated into Portuguese, Turkish and Greek.

In his writing Hill writes from a classical Marxist perspective, focusing on issues of social class,[24] the relationship between social class and 'race', neoliberalism,[25] socialist education,[26] and Marxist critiques of New Labour policy on schooling and teacher education.[27]

Selected publications

External links

References

  1. 1 2 http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/faculties/fhsce/about/staff/a-z/Dave_Hill.html
  2. ↑ http://www.ieps.org.uk/images/Dave%20going%20from%20cabinets%20to%20Cabinet.jpg
  3. ↑ http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-70561162.html, http://www.ieps.org.uk/PDFs/Class%20divide%20set%20brothers%20on%20different%20paths%2030%20March%202011.pdf, http://www.ieps.org.uk/PDFs/Dave%20Hill%20John%20Hill%20Argus%202%20Mar%202001.pdf
  4. ↑ Leaving Labour after 44 years|1Oct05|Socialist Worker
  5. ↑ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/england/8641953.stm
  6. 1 2 Evening Argus, 8 September 1988
  7. ↑ http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/elections/news/8118511.Election_candidate_mistaken_for_Peter_Stringfellow/
  8. ↑ Announcing his candidacy, the local newspaper, The Argus described him as, 'Working class activist... a political icon in the city in the 1970s and 80s' http://mobile.theargus.co.uk/news/4340938.Former_Brighton_councillor_to_run_for_EU_seat/
  9. ↑ His election interview is at http://respectuk.blogspot.com/2009/05/interview-with-dave-hill-tops-no2eu.html
  10. ↑ http://www.tusc.org.uk/txt/328.pdf
  11. ↑ http://www.ieps.org.uk/PDFs/CrawleyBEdchapterPhD2004.doc
  12. ↑ http://www.ieps.org.uk.cwc.net/bolsharticle.pdf
  13. ↑ http://hoverepublic.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/athens-general-strike.html
  14. ↑ http://www.ieps.org.uk/hillcole.php
  15. ↑ http://www.tpress.free-online.co.uk/Hillcole.html
  16. ↑ http://www.ieps.org.uk.cwc.net/hillcole_group_chapter.pdf
  17. ↑ Institute for Education Policy Studies
  18. ↑ http://www.jceps.com/
  19. ↑ http://icce.hpdst.gr/2011
  20. ↑ http://icce-2012.weebly.com/index.html, http://tasasociologyofeducation.wordpress.com/2014/12/05/neoliberalism-and-education-inspirational-keynote/
  21. ↑ http://www.eled.auth.gr/icce2014/
  22. ↑ The website for the conference is http://www.icce.uls.edu.pl/icce/home/
  23. ↑ Main Forum Archive — LastSuperpower
  24. ↑ JCEPS: Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies
  25. ↑ Policy Futures in Education ISSN 1478-2103 – Volume 2 Issue 3 & 4 (2004) Contents
  26. ↑ Socialist Outlook
  27. ↑ Policy Futures in Education ISSN 1478-2103 – Volume 5 Issue 2 (2007) Contents
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Sunday, March 27, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.