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 21st March 2014

Just back from a 10k run –dodging showers as though April has arrived early. This 10k takes me to 283k since the start of 2014. I was debating with myself whether to go for a run or write this blog but justified going for a run on the basis that running often helps be organise my thought – once I’ve got my second wind after about 15 minutes.

As I ran I thought about the conversation I’d had earlier in the day with an EdD student. She’s working hard to get a thesis chapter sorted and it occurred to me that she was really trying to identify the power of learning. We had been discussing how the discourses that underpin widening participation tend to position people who aren’t seen as traditional students, whether as a result of their gender, race or class. Widening participation (WP) has succeeded in bringing in more people into higher education. But this poses problems. Some universities recast WP as identifying the ‘brightest and best’ –the so-called ’diamonds in the mine’. They can argue that such exceptional individuals are very able to cope with what, traditionally has been on offer.

However, many other universities don’t have this option and have relied on increasing numbers of ‘non-traditional’ students and have come to associate them with high dropout rates. This reinforces the idea that such students are deficient, either because they lack aspiration or the skills required for study. Additionally, they are often seen as being only instrumentally interested in learning – so need to be provided with vocationally orientated curriculum.

In both these circumstances, learning is mainly about reinforcing the status quo and preserving vested interests. But my EdD student hasn’t bought into them and has developed ways of teaching in her further education college that challenges this deficit view of ‘non-traditional’ students.

So learning can reinforce assumptions or it can challenge them, depending on how it is thought about and deployed. The scope for learning to enhance our ability to make sense of the world was brought home by a presentation from Chris Phillipson at a meeting of the National Older Learner’s Group I attended last Tuesday. He challenged universities to do far more to enable an ageing society to flourish. There are potentially a range of aspects to this, including making such that older people themselves have access to information that is important (for example about finances). But it also includes working with professional groups such as social workers and nurses to make the case for why working with older people is important.

I hope that this thinking will also inform an Association of Ageing and Education (AEA) initiative which will engage with a wide range of students in higher education to encourage them to thinking about this crucial issue. I’d also like to think that similar thinking informs the approach to the various courses and modules I’m working on, including our Badged Open Course.

Well then, so much for the thoughtsAEA, I had while running.