#LoveLD – and love the #creativeHE jam!
This year – in person – 7 June – at Leeds.
A great chance to immerse yourself in creativity – and showcase your own creative practice.
Getting ready for 2022-23
We come back to a mass of marking. We have our Managing the Assessment and Feedback Process PGCert LTHE individual projects coming in on the 12 September, the Negotiated Study Module projects and the MA LTHE Dissertations a week after that … alongside APEL (Accreditation of Prior Experiential Learning) Interviews and written submissions to assess. At our university we offer APEL for FHEA and SFHEA – we also offer APEL against our PGCert and MA LTHE modules – which are themselves mapped and variously validated against A/FHEA. So it is busy!
So this is a very brief post. Just wishing everybody a happy new academic year – and offering a #shoutout to our friend and colleague Lee Fallin – who has just moved from a Learning Development role to a disciplinary one – teaching Research Modules within Education Studies. Lee is blogging about his move from ‘third space’ professional to formal academic.
The notion of LD as third space professional is beautifully argued by Helen Webster – and really if you have not read it before – take a few moments to read it now: https://rattusscholasticus.wordpress.com/2018/04/05/my-conceptual-model-for-learning-development/
Lee’s blog can be found here: https://leefallin.co.uk/2022/09/and-so-it-begins/
Footnotes:
Love this from @spencerideas on creating dialogic, Socratic classrooms: https://spencerauthor.com/socratic-seminars/
Oh – and we were interviewed by Carina Buckley and Alicja Syska for the @LDPpodcast – we’re episode 3: https://aldinhe.ac.uk/networking/the-ld-project-podcast/ – with podblasts from Kate Coulson and that John Hilsdon preceding us.
Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence 2022
#Becomingeducational – We are part of #creativeHE – and we have been awarded a CATE!
First of all, our warmest congratulations to all NTFs and CATE winners 2022! You are all super stars!!!
Thank you Advance HE for this Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence. A very special recognition for our collective work as the #creativeHE team and the community set-up in 2016. A community which not only has been sustained since then but also keeps growing and evolving. It is purely fuelled by our collective commitment to each other and more importantly to create stimulating learning and teaching experiences maximising on resourcefulness, curiosity and imagination to help educators and students to grow ideas, practices, scholarship and research, nurture creative potential and talent and transform practices in our institutions and across the sector.
Who would have thought! It all started small and locally. Chrissi Nerantzi had designed and led a postgraduate module part…
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#Becomingeducational Call for Papers: Examples of creative and inspirational collaborative practice in HE
This year is proving very interesting – not only are we switching all our staff-development work online (and we will be covering this over the coming weeks) – we are also Guest Editors for the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice (JUTLP) Special Issue 2021 ‘Collaboration in Higher Education: Working in Partnership with Students, Academic Colleagues and Others’. This is a CfP – with proposals due 15th December. We are building in some time and space for this because we know how pressurised is the work context right now. We do hope that we here from you.
https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/latestnews.html
The special issue focuses on the opportunities (and challenges) created by engaging in collaboration and partnership in higher education. As higher education institutions become ever more competitive to sustain their place in a global, neoliberal education market, students and staff are increasingly confronted with alienating practices. Such practices create an audit and surveillance culture that is exacerbated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic and the wholesale ‘pivot’ to online teaching. In this individualistic and competitive climate we are looking for papers that advocate a more inclusive and empowering education. One that sees learning and teaching as a practice that enables personal, collective and societal growth rather than a means to an end. The human element of education is therefore at the core of this special issue: focusing on what we can do and achieve together, both students and (academic) staff.
Contributions of desire
We are interested in theoretical and practical explorations of how students and staff can take control of where and how they work together; finding their academic identities in ways that are recognised by the academy, but which they negotiate more on their own terms, and in collaboration.
We want to showcase innovative approaches, fresh applications of theory and/or creative responses to policy that “reframe” ideas of partnership and collaboration in the university context. Emphasis is on collaborative endeavours that can improve the experience of students and staff. In particular, we are seeking contributions that creatively address the areas below (noting all proposals related to the special issue theme will be considered):
- Staff and students working in partnership
- “Re-framing” group projects and teamwork for co-learning
- Collaborative educational research, joint writing and joint authorship
- Co-creation of learning/learning spaces and ‘being with’ (staff with students, but also staff with staff including cross-disciplinary partnerships)
- Collaborations with ‘other’ stakeholders
- Partnership for social justice
- Virtually connecting
The vision for this special edition is to seed the development of an ecology of collaborative practice and advocate for joint learning and teaching approaches in higher education.
Developing a high-quality proposal
We recommend the creation of a single document (Word document preferably) that contains the following:
- Proposed article title
- Proposed authors names and affiliations
- A clear evidence-based rationale for the line of inquiry proposed/covered
- Research question(s) – case study focus
- Proposed method (for both theoretical and empirical manuscripts)
- Practice-based implications of the proposed research/case study.
The word limit for the proposal is 250 words (not including references) and is designed to give the Editorial Team a sense of the rigour of the manuscript proposed and the possible implications of such research. The Editorial Team may return with an invitation to combine similar manuscripts. Acceptance of proposals does not guarantee acceptance of final manuscripts.
Final papers should be between 5,000 – 7,000 words, including references, or approximately 15 pages with an upper limit of 20 pages. Papers should include:
- A clear rationale and theoretical underpinnings
- Context of work
- Case study examples
- Evaluation and impacts
- Implications and recommendations
Timeline
- Call for papers open: 25 September 2020
- Proposals due: 15 December 2020
- Acceptance notifications: 15 January 2021
- Full papers due: 1 June 2021
- Final revised papers due: 1 October 2021
- Target publication date: 30 November 2021
For further information, or to submit an abstract (due 15 December 2020), please email us: Sandra Abegglen sandra.abegglen@ucalgary.ca: Tom Burns t.burns@londonmet.ac.uk; and Sandra Sinfield s.sinfield@londonmet.ac.uk
#Becomingeducational Welcome to 2020-2021!!
Welcome to the strangest beginning of a new academic year that we can remember! This year, definitely for the whole of the first semester, we will deliver all of our PGCert teaching online. For us – this will mean re-thinking how to make our creative and interactive face-to-face Facilitating Student Learning module work in a wholly online space – and where none of the participants will have met F2F before the class starts…
We are definitely going to journal our reflections on the experience as we go – and possibly blog about it here.
In the meantime – we found this #Patter post by Jon Rainford via Pat Thomson and thought we’d share it with you. Not only are there really useful tips for managing your PhD – there is a link to Jon’s PhD which is a fascinating exploration and analysis of Widening Participation in the UK right now.
Hope you enjoy it, and this brave new academic world.
Best,
Sandra & Tom
Starting a part-time doctorate? Three top tips
Posted on September 14, 2020by pat thomson
This is a guest post by Dr @jonrainford. Jon works on the margins between academic and professional services. He is currently a freelance researcher and part-time lecturer, working with academics to develop their use of digital pedagogy.
Doing a doctorate later in life is more likely to be a part-time affair. In the UK, the majority of the part-time postgraduate research students are over the age of 30. Despite 27,000 people undertaking this mode of study in the UK alone, it is less commonly addressed in guides to success in doctoral research. In this post I will share three things that ultimately had the greatest impact upon my timely completion.
I completed my part-time PhD, which examined widening participation policy and practices in England, in 2019. Over those five years I moved jobs twice (once as a result of redundancy) and a few months following completion lost my dad at the end of a three-year battle with Lung Cancer. Balancing employment and life challenges over a period that exceeds most full-time students creates the conditions for more of these life events to happen. Therefore, despite every experience being different, it is likely that for most part-time PhD students, the doctoral journey will be paved with varied life challenges both personal and professional; my own journey is not an exceptional one.
For full blog: https://patthomson.net/2020/09/14/starting-a-part-time-doctorate-three-top-tips/
#Becomingeducational – shares Rattus Scholasticus post: developing wicked learners…
Her post is here: https://rattusscholasticus.wordpress.com/2020/05/17/developing-wicked-learners-for-an-unkind-university/ – and we have reproduced it in full below.
THANK YOU Helen – this is the post that has been lurking around the subliminal corners of our minds – but you have said it so much better!
Developing wicked learners for an unkind university
University is often thought of as a sheltered environment, a cosy retreat from the Real World, a safe ivory tower where young people play with ideas that are ‘purely academic’ before being launched into the unforgiving grown up world. But what if we recognised that university is far from a safe shelter where learning can be nurtured, but is in fact a very unkind place to learn indeed? What if we acknowledge that university is, in fact, wicked? And that our role as Learning Developers is to prepare students for that?
University life has its troubles, unfairnesses and downright appalling and immoral behaviour, individual and structural, and as emancipatory practitioners, we struggle alongside students against that. But I’m using the term ‘wicked’ here in a technical, pedagogical sense. Hogarth (2001) made a distinction between two kinds of learning environment and their implications for learners, and I think his notion is directly relevant for our understanding of what we’re trying to achieve and how we should go about it.
A kind learning environment has clear rules. It’s predictable, regular, has defined boundaries and patterns that repeat. It’s easy to learn them and draw accurate inferences about how things work, apply these lessons and get plentiful, immediate and unambiguous feedback on your resulting actions. You can then tweak and adjust your approach until practice makes perfect. Commonly cited examples of kind learning environments are games, sports or music, where once you learn the rules, you can play the game, correcting your mistakes with clear feedback (a bum note or a missed shot is obvious) and perfecting your technique. I’d say an example of a kind learning environment in Higher Education is Information Literacy. Thanks to the carefully designed information landscape of databases, search strategies, algorithms, Boolean logic and referencing systems, you can figure out the principles and see immediately whether your strategy is working, why, and how to improve it in predictable, regular ways. If information literacy weren’t a kind learning environment, we couldn’t have systematic reviews or replicate searches. That’s not to say it’s easy to learn or isn’t complex, but you can get better at it by learning the rules, developing your ability to predict what will happen and improving your game.
A wicked learning environment, by contrast, is unpredictable and unstable, rules are unclear, variable or just not there at all, information is missing. Any inferences you draw about how to act next time or improve are likely to be misleading or inaccurate and feedback is delayed and incomplete, meaning it’s harder to learn from. Developing expertise and practising your technique doesn’t really help at all, as next time will be unfamiliar or deceptively different. If we think about wicked learning environments in Higher Education, then many of the things that we Learning Developers work with come to mind. Take academic writing. A student does well in one essay, but feedback is 25 working days later and doesn’t pinpoint exactly what they did well. The lecturer has incomplete information about the student’s learning and struggles to give accurate and complete feedback – they only have the outcome or final product, the essay itself, to go on and can only guess at the learning processes that led to that outcome. Whatever inferences the student draws about how to do well in essays may not work next time. Next time is a different topic. A different lecturer, with different preferences. A different genre of academic writing. A different stage of study. A different disciplinary angle. And the student themselves will be different – tired, confident, stressed, distracted, motivated…. Add into this that academic writing is, in Lillis’ terms, an ‘institutional practice of mystery’ with all the unconscious competence and hierarchical gatekeeping that even expert practitioners can’t articulate. With all these variables, many of which are unknown or unpredictable, it’s going to be much harder to make progress in the traditional way- practice does not make perfect. You can’t seek to reform a wicked learning environment – it’s just the nature of the thing.
As Learning Developers then, we have to teach students to learn in wicked learning environments. Acting as if study skills are simple matters of rules and process, simply do this and you will get that result, keep practising until you become expert, is disingenuous. There are no such things as transferable skills. If students try to transfer what they’ve mastered in one area to a new one, it’s unlikely to work – a less rigid, less risk-averse approach is needed. We can’t approach conceptual issues as if they are procedural ones – our students will need to learn to interpret, guess, take risks, live with discomfort and uncertainty, negotiate, navigate and adapt, not follow ten top tips or prescriptive guidance, not perfect a technique, not keep trying til they get it right. In an unkind learning environment, expertise is a form of letting go, of making it up as you go along, not of acquisition and refinement of narrow specialisations. This is going to be a particular challenge for those of us whose background might be in kinder learning environments such as Librarians – you can’t do Learning Development as if you were teaching information literacy. It needs to be a completely different pedagogy.
In an LD@3 webinar this week, I was looking at what an LD signature pedagogy might be from the angle of deriving it from the nature of what we teach, as well as our theoretical frameworks and values. How does the nature of learning development determine how we should best teach our students? The conclusions I draw are that it needs to be metacognitive and reflective, phenomenological, non-directive and holistic rather than positivist, procedural and technical. Or it simply won’t work. In most definitions of learning development and its underpinning theory, you’ll see the phrase ‘to help students make sense of, to make meaning’, and its by creating this space for students to navigate and negotiate their own learning that we help them cope with a wicked learning environment, not by telling them the rules, the how-to’s. We can’t turn a wicked learning environment into a kind one, and we’d do students a disservice by trying.
For she’s a Senior Fellow…
#Becomingeducational Well you wait for months for a #Becoming blog – then two come along together! This is on making an SFHEA Application – and this time it’s personal
We have many colleagues who are preparing FHEA and SFHEA applications right now.
In our institution, LondonMet, our PGCert is mapped against the HEA Fellowship scheme and the University has an accredited system of validating FHEA and SFHEA applications ourselves – either written or via a Viva.
Whether you are writing an in-depth application or preparing a Viva, the pressure to de-code the task – and to make the time and space to reflect positively on your own experience and gather just the right evidence – can be exhausting and debilitating for many.
So it is with great pleasure we share Jane Secker’s blogpost on just that topic.
Thank you for writing and sharing this Jane!!
And to the rest of you – well – read this and get writing!
All the best,
Sandra & Tom
My SFHEA Certificate
I’ve not written a blog post for quite some time and not because I’ve not had much to say, rather because there has been far too much going on. However, the occasion of being appointed a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy has prompted me to write a short blog post about this. Also because I have offered to mentor and support others and to share my fellowship claim.
Writing my SFHEA was probably one of the most difficult things I’ve written. I won’t lie, I had moments when I wanted to give up and go and lie in a darkened room. I write all the time, and I support others applying for Fellowship so I am not quite sure why I found this so challenging. I think it might be because I am not very good at reflecting on why I do things. I know…
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Social Constructivism and Learning Development – should we scaffold?
#Becomingeducational Taking Learning Developers to the Scaffold?
We wanted to share this excellent blogpost from our colleague Dr Helen Webster. Helen’s posts on Learning Development are always fascinating, well-theorised and thought provoking. This one is no exception.
Helen poses the seemingly innocent question: As LDers is our role one of scaffolding or not?
At first look it seems obvious that we are scaffolding by function – literally supporting people as they build the foundations to their own knowledge.
And yet she points to Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel who argues that some scaffolding is almost colonial in nature. There is the danger, he says, of the pedagogue completely controlling the knowledge to be aimed at – and how it should be gained. We take away student agency when we devise courses in patronising bite-sized chunks, leaving these like breadcrumbs taking the students off to the gingerbread house – to be consumed.
Take this trip with Helen – see what scaffold you might like to build so that your students too become the architects of their own rhizomatic learning.
All the best,
Sandra & Tom
A while ago now (oops) I was looking at Cognitive Constructivism in my series reviewing educational theories and their application to Learning Development. I ended noting that this school of thought sees learning as an individual activity, but that later, social constructivist theories would position learners not as ‘lone scientists’, but as interacting with others in a social setting in order to learn.
What is it?
Vygotsky saw learning as deriving from social interaction. This ‘dialogue’ could be with people (often more knowledgable or capable people, but potentially also peers) or with mediating cultural artefacts such as books or other learning materials. This interaction prompts and supports learners from their current level of understanding, where they are independently competent, to a level which represents their potential but is beyond their ability to reach by themselves. The place in between Can Do and Can’t Do, where the learning happens, he referred…
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Training Peer Study Mentors
#Becomingeducational Passing on the know-how to our PASS mentors?
Here at LondonMet with have staff Academic Mentors – basically Learning Developers by another name – and we have our own PASS scheme – student Success Coaches who mentor other students. HENCE we are oh so happily re-posting this wonderful blog on training PASS people from our Helen Webster…
Being involved in student support has been so valuable in so many ways…
This has led to us being involved in ALDinHE (the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education) and RAISE…
Indeed, we are hosting a RAISE event in May: The Engaging Assessment and Research & Evaluation Special Interest Groups from RAISE would like to invite you all to a joint SIG meeting taking place on Friday 5th June 2020 (10:30am – 3:30pm) at London Metropolitan University.
The purpose of the meeting is to profile the work of early-career researchers/ academics and practitioners in the area of student engagement and assessment. As such we would further like to invite PhD students and or university staff members who have completed or are undertaking professional development courses (e.g. PGCert in HE) to present their work relating to development in assessment practice in Higher Education.
If interested in presenting, please can you submit a short proposal (maximum 500 words) outlining your work. Please also include a 50-100 word biography including your current role at your institution, what PhD/ professional development course and/or practical need has influenced your approach.
Deadline to submit the proposal: Friday 7th February 2020, 12pm to Kiu Sum (k.sum@my.westminster.ac.uk)
Deadline to register your interest to attend the free SIG meeting: Tuesday 5th May 2020 https://bit.ly/2Pf69JK
We hope to see many of you there and please share this with your colleagues!
Kind Regards,
Kiu (On behalf of Co-Convenors from Engaging Assessment and Research & Evaluation SIGs)
Like many institutions, Newcastle University has various peer mentoring schemes for first year undergraduates, some of which focus on academic skills as well as the social and practical aspects of being a new student. For the last few years, I’ve been asked to run part of the initial training for the peer mentors for our excellent Combined Honours Peer Assisted Study Support (PASS). The University is now planning to roll out an element of academic skills support into the other Schools’ peer mentoring schemes, to enhance transition and the student experience across the institution. I’ve been tasked with developing adapting the PASS training, with the stated aim that it should be ‘like PASS, only lighter touch’.
Each year I’ve run the training for Combined Honours PASS, I’ve made fairly major changes to it, as I’m never quite sure of it. My approach to it has been complicated by the fact…
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#LTHEchat 163: The Role of Curriculum Frameworks in Higher Education with Adam Longcroft @AdamL50 and Iain Cross @iain_d_cross
#Becomingeducational Curriculum Frameworks – Scaffolding Discussion on What, Why and How we teach…
You wait for months for a #becomingeducational blogpost – then two come along together!
But we just had to re-blog this excellent #LTHEChat blog now – not only because this is in advance of Wednesday night’s twitter chat on this topic (20.00-21.00 GMT, 15th Jan, 2020) – but because it throws up so many excellent questions about what we are trying to do in HE – and why…
Hope to see you in the tweetchat (internet permitting).
All the best,
Sandra & Tom
The changing UK higher education landscape
The last decade has seen rapid and dramatic changes in the higher education landscape in the UK. The lifting of the ‘cap’ on student numbers led to increased competition between higher education institutions (HEIs) and the influence of new market forces, whilst the introduction of the OfS has seen the replacement of a relatively benign funding body, with a new sector regulator.
Student numbers have increased rapidly resulting in the ‘massification’ of the HE sector, and fundamental changes in the make-up of the student body in most HEIs. Despite this there is intense competition to recruit students, and HEIs are opening their programmes to more diverse and non-traditional cohorts than ever before. Student support services and resources have had to be reconfigured, and academic programme teams have had to adapt their pedagogies accordingly. Previous quality audits of research have evolved into the now familiar…
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Becoming An Educationalist 