Personal and Professional Blog 3rd May 2014

Last week I talked about the OpenPad Personal Inquiry I’m doing in order to apply to be a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and I mentioned the book by Diana Laurillard (Teaching as a Design Science). I’ve not read much more of this this week but I have had the Open Pad very much in mind. I think this has meant that I’m increasingly alert to ideas and thought that make sense of what it is we are doing to and for students through our writing.
I for some reason I thought I’d look back at the list I had of things I needed to do and see how many of them linked to this notion.
My list started with the following:
1. Sort out weeks 1 and 8 of Taking your first steps in HE
2. Develop the quizzes for this Badged Open Course
3. Write the long and short course descriptions
4. Check through the revision s on another BOC
5. Have interviews with colleagues to collect evidence for my OpenPad PI (and write up the notes from these)
6. Revise my conference presentation
The first 4 all relate directly to developing teaching materials for students and so issues of whether they are ‘fit for purpose will be upper most in my mind. This even applies to number 3 as these descriptions clarify what the courses are about so that it’s clear to students and people advising them
The last two involving thinking about the impact we have on students – or perhaps a better way to put this is how we relate to students through our teaching. This certainly applied to my conference presentation which looks at what widening participation has done to and for ‘non-traditional’ students.
However, the best laid plans …
Early in the week I was reminded that I still had some critical reading to do of the learning guides that make up the block focused on ageing in New Perspectives on Health and Well-being. I’ve talked about critical reading before and I’m increasingly beginning to think that it’s a vital academic role. Not only does it (hopefully) contribute to the enhancement of teaching materials it also develops understanding or the perils (and the power) of writing for teaching. In the context of my OpenPad PI it is also one way in which I can show that I have an influence on the teaching of colleagues.
So I re-framed the unexpected addition to my work load as something that could contribute to my PI. I have done much the same in relation to the conference (Widening participation through the Curriculum) that I attended on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. The OpenPad PI asks you to look at relevant literature and theory. Much of this (like Laurillard) focuses on how design and constructive alignment has come to the fore. Much is also dismissive of the traditional transmission model, although this is firmly in place where accredited formal learning occurs. However speakers and presenters at the conference usefully (for me) opened up other possibilities. These included actor network theory, assemblage and bricolage. One of the keynote speakers also identified 5 interacting megatrends that provide the context for widening participation:
demographics
mobility
geopolitics
sustainability
and technology
Taken together these have the power to increase inequality and increase stark differences between the rich and poor. If this is the case then higher education should offer a way to increase resilience and adaptability to carry people through extended lives in a context of increasing complexity.
During the conference I chaired a talking circle on ‘Revisiting Theory’. It was a fascinating conversation but I’ll just note two points. One was that the relationship we have with theory can be liberating or restrictive. We were also reminded of the words of Marx that provide his own epitaph:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.

Personal and Professional Blog 14th February 2014

What started off as a Wednesday blog is clearly now a Friday blog. Perhaps that works better – letting me look back over most of the ‘working week’.

As usual, I’m never quite sure what I’m going to write about until I start writing. I’ve just checked back to last week’s blog which focused on the Rhizo 14 course I’ve been half following. Well, I can’t say much about that as I’ve not really looked at it since that post.

One of the main reasons (excuses?) for this has been lack of time but that’s not really stopped me talking about it and thinking about its implications. Knowing about the existence of this approach to learning, and having had a bit of a go at it provides a really useful perspective on aspects of the ‘day job’. A good example of this was on Sunday, which was the second day of the Residential Weekend for the third year Open University Education Doctorate (EdD) students. A key part of this week end is the opportunity for face to face supervision session between students and tutors. I currently co-supervise three third year students.

I think all the session that I and my co-supervisors had with these three students were useful and clarified what work has been done and what is still outstanding before theses can be submitted later this year. But the stand-out moment was, as I’ve said, on Sunday morning when I sat down with one of my students. Finding meaningful connections between theory and practice is always difficult and this student has been trying to make connection between her own practice in education and the theory of Bourdieu. Having, perhaps unwisely, gone for Foucault in my own PhD I know that it can be very difficult to make sense of these ways of thinking. However, in the course of our conversation I asked my student if she had come across Bloom’s taxonomy of learning, which I had only recently discovered via a posting on the Rhizo14 course.

There is a really nice interactive version of this from Iowa State University at http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/RevisedBlooms1.html . The table below is from the same site:

 

Table 1. The cognitive processes dimension — categories, cognitive processes (and alternative names)
Lower order thinking skills …………………………………………………………………………………..higher order thinking skills
remember	understand	apply	analyze	evaluate	create
recognizing (identifying) recalling (retrieving)	interpreting (clarifying, paraphrasing, representing, translating) exemplifying (illustrating, instantiating) classifying (categorizing, subsuming) summarizing (abstracting, generalizing) inferring (concluding, extrapolating, interpolating, predicting) comparing (contrasting, mapping, matching) explaining (constructing models)	executing (carrying out) implementing (using)	differentiating (discriminating, distinguishing, focusing, selecting) organizing (finding coherence, integrating, outlining, parsing, structuring) attributing (deconstructing)	checking (coordinating, detecting, monitoring, testing) critiquing (judging)	generating (hypothesizing) planning (designing) producing (construct)

(Table 1 adapted from Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001, pp. 67–68.)

The student told me that she has been using Bloom to transform her own understanding of teaching and learning as well as using it to transform the approaches of colleagues. She’d already established a link between theory and practice!

I also find this taxonomy intriguing and stimulating (and persuasive) in terms of the thinking I’ve been doing about the skills aspects of the two level 1 Open university modules I’ve been working on as well as the Badged Open Content Courses.

On the level 1 modules, I think we need to develop the sense that students are comfortable with doing the things that enable them to remember, understand and apply and use this as a platform for developing analytic, evaluative and creative thinking skills. So, we should be moving from getting them to recognise and interpret to encouraging critiquing and hypothesising.

Once you start thinking in this way then the links abound. Not only might this apply to the formal learning that goes on within a setting like the Open University it should also help develop the informal learning of the sort we discussed at the National Older Learner’s Group (NOLG) In London on Wednesday. In the same that that university education does, learning linked to being an older worker, a volunteer or as someone who gives or receives care can help us all move along the continuum in Bloom’s taxonomy from simply remembering stuff. It’s interesting that one of the key verbs under ‘create’ is planning. I was struck when NOLG discussed a project run by NIACE looking at the value of a mid-career review, how powerful planning is as a way of taking control and how such control is routinely denied to many of us.