Society for Research into Higher Education Conference ...



Society for Research into Higher Education Conference – ReflectionsMarge Clarke8-10 December 2009The Society for Research into Higher Education’s is an ‘… entirely independent and self-supporting learned Society which exists to stimulate and co-ordinate research into all aspects of Higher Education. It aims to improve the quality of Higher Education through the encouragement of debate and publication on issues of policy, on the organisation and management of Higher Education Institutions, and on teaching and learning methods in the curriculum’From SRHE website accessed 25 Jan10The Annual Conference took place in the Celtic Manor Resort near Newport, Gwent, which has excellent conference facilities, very good service and great food. The conference sought to illuminate the challenges posed for Higher Education under the themes of ‘Knowledge, Policy and Practice’:The Higher education is facing fundamental challenges to its purposes and role in society, stimulated by the shift from elite to mass and now near universal provision in many national contexts. There are shifting civic and economic expectations to which higher education is being asked to respond. At the policy level, the extent to which mass participation can promote social and economic mobility is being seriously questioned as is the boundary between ‘higher’ education and other parts of the post-secondary sector. … At a practice level, the nature of academic identity is being challenged as the synoptic role ‘unbundles’ into sub-specialisms. There is a continuing search to find ways to teach our students more flexibly, and questions about how we ought to evaluate the quality and ‘impact’ of our research. accessed 25 Jan 10The three keynote speakers provided a backdrop to the conference theme of ‘Challenging Higher Education: knowledge, policy and practice’. Professor Gary Rhoades, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors (the nearest US equivalent of UCU), drew parallels with the global financial crisis in his talk Beyond Academic Capitalism’s Bankruptcy: Reinventing in Intellectual Capital and Social Enhancement. There were some interesting perspectives on US universities, such as the fact that the University of California has increased its fees by 32% and it now costs $40K per year to go there. He suggested that there is much more local social engagement by US universities, evidenced by the fact that citizens apply bumper stickers with pride if their town has even a very small university, and the community colleges which feed them truly widen participation, especially for Latino students. He fears that the recession means this will change and that admissions will be limited only to those who are certain to succeed. He offered illustrations of the potential effects of this. Merle Jacob is Professor in Research Policy at the Research Policy Institute, Lund University. Her presentation Crossing the Rubicon: towards a more synthetic relation between research on policy for higher education and policy for research was probably the one which challenged HE the most. Her key questions were ‘What is the proper relationship between science and society?’ and ‘Who should be the beneficiaries of publicly funded research?’ She argued that research into research policy was absent from journals and that mechanisms were being developed for steering research activities to effect specific pre-determined outcomes. She discussed the utility argument vs academic freedom and posited that research in higher education was relatively insignificant – a ‘prop’ – when compared with industrial and commercial research. theme of whether the purpose of HE was connected with ‘the public good’ was picked up in Professor Tara Fenwick’s presentation Knowledge wars and educational futures in unruly times: matteri-ings of mess and responsibility, examining the local-global in the context of 200 million people currently living outside their country of origin. Her style of visual presentation was novel – with no bullet points and very few words, but a series of arresting images from across the globe. I found the images compelling but affected my concentration somewhat, as they seemed unrelated to what was being said. Professor Fenwick is Head, Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia. relevance of the issues raised by the keynote speakers has been highlighted by recent strategies and reports, such as ‘Higher Ambitions’ with a foreword by Peter Mandelson and the ‘Students and Universities’ report of the Innovation, Universities, Science & Skills Committee (IUSS) . I found some of the language used in the keynotes and follow-up discussions quite difficult to follow. The sentence ‘The emergence of undecidability functions as the conceptual frame for the discourse of unlearning which has yet to be problematised at meso level’ could well have been used, although in fact I created this one from the ‘Write your own academic sentence’ website at . Having said that, the follow-up discussions immediately after each keynote were an innovation for SRHE conference and generally very valuable for exploring the issues - and meeting people quickly.Paper sessions and symposia I attended included:1Assessment and feedbackThe majority of the sessions I chose to attend were within the Learning and Teaching strand, including three paper sessions on assessment and feedback. The two papers which proved most interesting to me were the first two below:Susan Orr’s paper (co-authors Pete Boyd and Sue Bloxham) called Mark my words: an analysis of HE lecturers’ essay marking approaches, which described the ‘think aloud’ process used to explore the ways in which lecturers ‘use (or ignore) assessment criteria and marking schemes when they mark students’ work. Issues such as reliability, the ‘unambiguousness’ of assessment criteria and tacit norm referencing were discussed, alongside the need to recognise the role of expert mastery and professional judgement. The research findings showed that ‘in almost every case, tutors appeared to come to a holistic conclusion regarding the final mark’ and only one tutor, a teacher educator who was ‘assessment literate’, looked through the assessment criteria before starting to mark. Citing the work of D Royce Sadler, Pierre Bordieu and Suellen Shay, they suggest that there is a disjunction between the standards we publish to students about predetermined criteria and the reality of the marking process: ‘A more honest approach would be to help students to understand that application of assessment criteria in higher education is a complex task involving professional judgement rather than measurement’. The paper went on to argue more energy could be put into academic departments creating an atmosphere where the holistic, socially constructed nature of marking is discussed openly, rather than trying to construct further written guidance – ‘talking more rather than writing more’. the paper session Rethinking the meaning of feedback: a ‘gift’ to the student or a relational and dialogic process? (Karen Handley, Margaret Price, Jill Millar, Chris Rust, Berry O’Donovan) the document ‘Feedback: An Agenda for Change’, proposed by the ‘Osney Grange group’ was presented. This is a supplement to the ASKe Manifesto described in Roos Zandstra’s Australian RMIT conference feedback, available N:\EE General\Australia vist feedback. The Agenda for Change view moves away from ‘the traditional notion of feedback as a ‘gift’ delivered from expert to novice ... and instead emphasises the dialogic nature of learning and ‘coming to know’. The dialogic nature of feedback was discussed in relation to a 4-year project which indicated that ‘dialogic’ is not just to do with spoken words, but also human relationships which ‘enable students to listen to others and see through their eyes’. The paper also draws on ongoing research into the dialogic aspects of formative and summative oral vivas in undergraduate teaching in a Business School and how students created ‘their own sense of the meaning of “good communication”’. these papers emphasise talking about assessment and feedback, as opposed to relying on written guidelines, policy statements and criteria. The Great NUS Feedback Amnesty and David Boud’s Assessment 2020 propositions described in Sue and Roos’s Australian RMIT conference feedback (eg Proposition 3iii: ‘Dialogue and interaction about assessment processes and standards are commonplace between and among staff and students’) agree. The NSS scores for feedback are still of concern. The NSS statement ‘I receive detailed comments on my work’ doesn’t help as it suggests written feedback in the form of a ‘gift’ (see Handley above) and is likely to be interpreted as a written gift. When we review the Assessment and Feedback strategy, should dialogue feature more strongly? Should we be emphasising dialogue in our sessions on assessment, marking and feedback?The third paper session on assessment and feedback I attended - The Challenge of Investigating Academic Understanding of Formative Assessment in Higher Education: A thematic Interpretation of Divers Communities of Practice (Avril Aslett-Bently, Amanda Ashgar and Jean Laight) described the analysis completed thus far in ongoing research into identifying themes about how academics perceive formative assessment. One of the main interim conclusions is that the ‘discourse of formative assessment if profoundly shaped by the cultural context of the courses and their communities of practice’. and teaching: dialogue, academic writing and researchTwo papers about teaching and learning by academic developers applied concept mapping to the ‘intellectual territory’ of educational development and to ‘knowledge structures’. The paper Using knowledge structures as a lens to consider the development of university teaching (Ian Kinchin, Lyndon Cobot) draws a distinction between linear chains, authoritarian certainty and ‘non-learning’ characterised by bulleted lists in PowerPoint slides, as compared with networks, uncertainty, dialogue and personal learning trajectories. They suggest that uncertainty is a unifying concept which links teaching and research and that intuition involves a process which moves from chains to networks Put at its most basic, they direct us to ‘avoid linear handouts that simply repeat the presentation’ and ‘stop using bullet points’ since both contribute to non-learning. This had considerable appeal for me, and I talked to Ian after the workshop about using Prezi, a non-linear presentation tool based on concept mapping principles, as an alternative to PowerPoint . Ian’s handout is shown below. Fanghanel and Paul Blackmore’s paper Texts and contexts: mapping the intellectual foundations of the field of educational development described the process of concept mapping educational development through the bodies of literature. Building on the work of Tamsin Haggis, which suggests that HE educational literature is always playing catch-up with cutting edge psychological and sociological research, the paper considers the distinctions between different levels of practice: individual, ‘meso’ (a term which cropped up a lot at the conference and appears to mean ‘middle’ or ‘departmental’) and organisational. It also suggests that education developers need to be more strategic and agents of change, rather than ‘just expounders of good teaching practice’. The concept map offered was ‘work-in progress’ and not to be reproduced. It outlined a continuum of concepts from the ‘giving answers’ end of the spectrum from the psychology perspective (eg cognitive theories, disciplinary epistemologies) to the ‘asking questions’ end from a sociological perspective (eg institutional habitus, change theory and policy). ReflectionsI appreciated the reference to Tamsin Haggis’s critical approach to HE educational literature. Not only does it appear to play catch-up with psychology and sociology, it also, I think, appears to overlook research for other phases of education. However, I felt that Education Enhancement at Exeter was one step ahead of the exhortation to become more strategic. We do a lot more than expound good teaching practice, I think. Ian Kinchin’s forthright attitude to PowerPoint and using bullet points was refreshing, and I look forward to planning sessions without using PowerPoint at all. In my LTHE Extra session last term I referred to Mann and Robinson’s article (2009) 'Boredom in the lecture theatre: an investigation into the contributors, moderators and outcomes of boredom amongst university students', British Educational Research Journal, 35:2,243 - 258 which concludes that ‘the most significant contributor to lecture boredom in terms of teaching method is the use of PowerPoint (without a handout)’. Creating slides can replace the planning process and this inevitably makes a session teacher-centred and transmission-based. I now avoid bullet points wherever possible (but do use SmartArt in 2007 which, perhaps, amounts to the same thing). I’d like to experiment with Prezi and with other styles eg Prof Lawrence Lessig at which Jeff Bardell introduced me to. PowerPoint is ubiquitous now – I think it’s important to improve its use, and consider whether we can stop using it on some occasions.Gina Wisker’s paper Articulate: online support and development for academic writing for publication described how Web 2.0 technology has stimulated new forms of reflective, dialogic and creative academic writing, helped writers who are ‘stuck’ and created new research communities. This work formed part of a JISC funded project. research-teaching nexus in an era of mass higher education (Jennie Winter, Debby Cotton) illustrated how TQEF funding had been used in a new university to develop research-informed teaching in six faculties. The paper argues that, in the context of mass higher education and an increasingly diverse student population, there is a need to re-focus research in its broadest sense, as a mode of enquiry which engenders critical thinking., acculturation and indigineity About 30% of the 340 delegates were from non-UK universities and I was interested in the sessions offered by some of them, and also some papers which examined the challenges for non-local students and staff in UK universities. At the plenary panel session, keynote speakers were asked about what they felt was missing from the conference and two expressed surprise that there were very few sessions on indigineity, and that they would expect to see more on this topic at an international conference.I had several informal conversations with two delegates from Wollongong University in Australia, Jeanette Stirling and Colleen McGloin who offered some fascinating insights through their paper Indigenous teaching and learning: A conversation about ‘cultural competence’. They offered a critique of the ‘Indigenous Cultural Competence program’, exploring the tension between the principles of social justice and equity and the managerialist ‘box-ticking’ approach to cultural competence. They illustrated the paper with small case studies to support their view that ‘fetishing’ indigenous knowledges serves, in teaching and learning situations, to stifle and silence debate. They suggest that, paradoxically, the cultural competence framework actually establishes orthodoxy of sameness, disengaged from gender, age, class, sexuality etc. They described situations in the classroom where indigenous students had a status and right to speak above, say, newly arrived Vietnamese students engendering an unhelpful hierarchy of cultures. This led to further debate in the workshop, with a delegate from South Africa offering her perspective: in her all-black university, race is talked of openly and freely but she was unable to raise the ultra sensitive issue of wealth and poverty in a mixed socioeconomic group. paper Ideology and Utopia: British Muslims and Higher Education (Alison Scott-Baumann) was of special interest to me as, in previous roles, I have worked with the Muslim community and taught in the local mosque. Alison’s research was commissioned by Secretary of State John Denham to survey the training of Muslim faith leaders and explore the potential for collaboration between providers of training for Muslim clerics and FE/HE providers. She has found that there are many intertwining issues, such as access for women, the range of Muslim denominations, the need to train Muslim prison or hospital chaplains, the scarcity of Arabic theological scholars in mainstream HE and underlying fears about terrorism and immigration. She found little evidence of partnership working and the overall theme of the paper can be summed up in her words: It may be utopian to hope for a situation in which the secular and the religious can accept each other’s differences and yet this situation facilitates many questions about cultural identify and cohesion that would benefit all parties, if they were able to communication with each other’. In conversation later, I asked how far she had included FE in her research, which she had not to that point, and we exchanged email addresses, so that I could put her in touch with local initiatives, such as the Olive Tree project, based at the Islamic Centre of the south west, where real communication has taken place. I felt there was a real gap here in not including FE providers, who have already found a way in to the Muslim community. further papers, Internationalisation: A pilot study to explore pedagogical challenges and best practices of non-local university teachers in the UK (Po Li Tan) and Cognitive and Behavioural Sources of Acculturation Stress in International Students (Natasha Rumyantseva) explored the issues faced by non-local staff and students respectively in Western higher education. Po Li suggested that much of the research and support for internationalisation is focussed on students rather than staff, and that the challenges encountered by staff add another ’profound cultural dimension, which is deeply hidden. These challenges are not just language-related but caused by a deeply rooted cultural knowledge gap, such as the lack of host socio-historical cultural knowledge. During the presentation, she offered a polarised cultural comparison between Western educational approaches (questioning, evaluation, self-generated knowledge, focus on errors to evoke doubt) and Eastern practices (effortful learning, behavioural reform, pragmatic learning, acquisition of essential knowledge, respect) and illustrated this through a description of the relationship between a Chinese teacher and student as much closer to a parent/carer-child bond, which would last a lifetime. She suggests that much closer attention must be paid to the hidden deep cultural disparities, which go beyond ‘surface strategies’ if teaching and learning is to be improved. Natasha’s paper suggested that a cognitive-behaviourist therapeutic approach (CBT) might be used to overcome acculturation stress and culture shock which affect non-local students’ well-being. The discussion which followed revealed some concerns (including my own) about using a psychotherapeutic model without appropriately trained staff. ReflectionsI feel that our ‘Cultural Diversity’ booklet successfully addresses many of the issues raised without an inhibitory managerialist approach but further work needs to be done with non-local staff. I have experienced occasions, some recently, in which some students have felt ‘silenced’, because of the ‘hierarchy’ illustrated by Jeanette Stirling, or because they have felt their views might be considered offensive by other members of the group. To me, this highlights the need for doing explicit work with a group on ethos and values and practising what we preach in establishing ground rules. I’d welcome ideas on how we do this with a very large and diverse group, as we have on LTHE.Learning spacesI only went to one paper about learning spaces: New spaces for New Learning in Higher Education (Paul Martin) which outlined how ?2m capital funding and ?500K recurrent CETL funding had been spent on Brighton’s InQbate Creativity Centre. Most interesting for me was the fact that staff and students creativity and enthusiasm was sparked as much, if not more, by the Leonardo flexible ‘space’ with reconfigurable write-on-able movable wall panels as by the technologies, which tended to be underused. This was especially so if the technology did not work instantly and easily – staff were not willing to put in hours of planning and learning time to exploit the technology if it didn’t work first time, and they feared that it would let them down if they tried to use it in a session with students. pleased me that we are in the process of creating flexible, creative spaces, albeit much smaller, in LT6 and the Incubator Space in the Laver Building at a fraction of the cost of the Creativity Centre. We’re also benefiting from the fact that using the technology is more intuitive than when Brighton designed their space. However, Paul’s assertion holds true for us too: ‘In order to benefit from the potential of the complex and technology enriched centre users needed planning time with centre staff to explore the opportunities of the technology and flexible learning space. To encourage and enable staff to use a wide variety of learner centred teaching approaches on a regular basis, there needs to be enough flexible learning and teaching spaces.’HE in FETwo papers, both presented by colleagues from the University of Plymouth, offered perspectives on the emerging identities of staff in colleges of further education in terms of their HE teaching. HE in FE co-mentoring: culture clash and emergent identities (Claire Gray, Sue Rodway-Dyer) outlined Plymouth’s co-mentoring scheme and raised issues of the ‘neediness’ of FE staff and a sense of unevenness of experience and culture. Differences in resourcing models, class size, contact time, dedicated space and isolation from the academic community and scholarship resulted, to some extent, in FE colleagues being ‘junior partners’ in what was intended as a mutual mentoring scheme. Similar issues were raised in The HE in FE practitioner: an emerging identity or a confused nomad? (Rebecca Turner, Liz McKenzie, Mark Stone). This paper’s concluding argument was that ‘If HE in FE continues to grow, as envisaged by policymakers, further re-conceptualisation of the identity of the HE in FE practitioner will become paramount to support this role and the individuals working across these two diverse sectors’.ReflectionsI think the points above are well-made as recent BIS publications eg Higher Ambitions and the Skills for Growth Strategy , indicate FE’s role in HE will be used as the means of ‘quickly re-skilling and up-skilling the workforce’ widening participation and improving social mobility. FE is regarded as an important part of the landscape and the reports recommend that University Technical Colleges, currently in the pilot stage, will provide specialist vocational and technical subjects such as engineering, manufacturing, product design. Skills for Growth Recommendation 35 states: ‘Universities and colleges, working with the Government, should make the concept of “Higher Education withinFurther Education” one that is universal across the country so that many more mature students, in particular, are able to study for a degree.’ Whether ‘universal’ includes partnerships between research-intensive universities like Exeter and further education colleges remains to be seen.Endnote: I had many and varied conversations during the excellent discussion groups following the keynotes, over meals and after paper presentations. One topical discussion worth recording was with David Turner, who had just published a book Using the Medical Model in Education. Over a glass of wine with colleagues, he eloquently described his personal campaign against the ‘cleverness pills’ eg Modafinil, Ritalin, Adderall. Having heard from David about the insidious hidden pharmaceuticals’ marketing campaign for brain learning and neurochemistry, it was interesting to see precisely this concern raised in the BBC Horizon program ‘Pill Poppers’ on 20 January 2010.Marge Clarke24 January 2010 ................
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