Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Colleagues and old friends

It seems that if you google me you find this blog. And a old friend did just that and then emailed me to encourage me to continue with it. It has been a while since this friend and I have talked or worked together. I've always been amazed at how she faces the adversities in her life - but her talent has never left her. She is a gifted writer and she reports that she continues to write. Her note, encouraging me to persevere with this blog, inspires me to continue. Its always good to know that someone is reading this thing.

I also had a great conversation today with a colleague in Business Education. We talked about two of my favourite topics - the need for good quality research into business education and the need to open the accepted view of Business Ed from only being pre-vocational and technology oriented to more of a life oriented curriculum. As we spoke the creative juices flowed and I could think of a dozen different research projects that should be conducted and articles that should be written. In many places now Business Teacher Educators are working alone - they don't have Business Education colleagues to work with and talk with on an ongoing basis. I think this diminishes us a bit - I am much more creative and active when I have someone available to talk to about the issues.

There is a need to look beyond the 'width' of business education and recognize that even if it doesn't have a 'long' history (relative to some other areas of study) it does have a proud history and has served an important role. Business Education is an area that covers many disciplines which gives it strength and stability. Done properly we can inject in our students the knowledge, skills and abilities necessary to cope with the world around them from an economic point of view. We can embed this in them causing them to change organically almost like an injection of DNA!

The more I think about this and the more I work in this area the more enthusiastic I become and the more hopeful I am for the future. We work in a very important area of life. Everyone needs what we have to offer. We just need to wake the public up to our value and then do it really, really well.