Spaces and Places
This
year’s ALDinHE Conference took place in – and was facilitated by Huddersfield University
There
was a full programme of workshops, events and fabulous Key Note speakers, including
Lesley Gourlay and Etienne Wenger-Trayner – on the topics of:
- Who owns Learning
Development?
- Changing Staff and
Student Identities: the impact of Learning Development
- Addressing the
Marginalisation of Learning Development
- Working
Collaboratively to support Learning Development.
Communities of Practice?
Like
many people in Education I have been aware of Etienne Wenger-Trayner (EWT) and
his Communities of Practice arguments in theory and for many years. EWT in
practice and in person was a revelation: warm, inspiring and profound in his
outlining of the learning trajectory which takes us from peripheral encounters
into the centre of various communities of practice – and various learning
identities.
EWT
locates his theory in studies of apprenticeship practice. Apprentices
especially at the beginning rarely interact directly with a ‘master’ but engage
more in apprentice-to-apprentice interactions. In this way learning is
ineffably located in the group and in our group interactions: learning is
social, embodied and whole person.
For EWT,
learning experience models this apprenticeship trajectory. He described ‘learning’ as circled by complementary
processes involving community (which
offers belonging and a meaningful cadre with which to negotiate and define
competence); practice (what we do –
and how meaningful and valuable it is); meaning
(that is rooted with relevance in the now – and not deferred to some
indefinable point in the future); and identity
(who we are becoming). In this model learning is not the transmission of a
corpus of knowledge nor even a process or set of processes with which to engage
with a corpus of knowledge; learning is how we negotiate a range of processes
of becoming – that oscillate between the individual and the group.
Becoming
The EWT
model allows us to see learning as becoming: it involves a realignment of
competence and experience; it is socially defined – but personally experienced.
Learning involves negotiating identity in a complex dance in complex landscapes
of practice that navigate multiple tensions and meaning. It is identity-construction in a time of
super-complexity: it is a learning relationship between the social world and
the personal.
The
community is the curriculum
As one
who is still part of the ongoing MOOC: #rhizo14: the community is the
curriculum, I could not help but see parallels between the EWT model and the
rhizomatic model of learning espoused by Dave Cormier – and as poetically
described by Deleuze and Guattari (1997, 2005) in A thousand plateaus. Cormier - who spoke at last year’s ALDinHE in Plymouth
‘I
Robot’? Voices from the margins: narratives of LD in a Digital Age
Following
on from EWT, and after Julia Dawson and Peter Bray speaking on ‘Peer Support
reaching out beyond the institution’, from Plymouth
‘We have developed creative blended learning practice and embedded
this within our Becoming an
Educationalist and its paired Peer
Mentoring in Practice modules. We and our students write reflective
learning logs and online blogs to engage with our materials - to write to learn
- and to struggle with narratives of the self in times of transition… We wish to share narrative extracts from these places of struggle,
voice and play (Winnicott 1971) and discuss the lessons that we can learn about
our students and our own blended practice. We also want to explore how we can
celebrate and sustain such creative practices.’
How cool is that?
We were very happy to follow on from Wenger and
his arguments about learning as a process of becoming – and to talk about our Becoming module and its various practices
which we think facilitate these processes: Role playing and simulations;
creative and visual learning strategies; Inquiry Based and Problem Based
Learning; Reflective learning; Visual practices development; Poetry and Prose
analysis and discussion; Analysis of Case Studies; Real research and other projects; Digital
artefact and resource development; Peer-to-peer learning: both face-to-face and virtual;
Student contribution to the University’s annual student-facing Get Ahead
conference; Blogging and other Social Network activities to support learning (Becoming Educational blog: http://becomingeducational.wordpress.com/
and
Learning
Development Blog: http://lastrefugelmu.blogspot.co.uk/).
Spaces and places/fissures and cracks
Our students swim in educational currents
composed of the over-riding narratives of assessment, SATs, League Tables,
OFSTED, moral panics about plagiarism – and the ‘dumbing down’ of education –
for which they are personally blamed: There are Mickey Mouse students for
whom Mickey Mouse degrees are quite appropriate (Starkey 2002/3). They are caught on a cultural cusp
(Medhurst in Munt) negotiating tricky academic space which is more of a
trickster space for them – for just how far are they supposed to lose themselves
and become another in this alien landscape; and who gets to choose the
transformation – and where do the boundaries lie?
Why writing? The essay – The blog
Arguably the academic essay as a genre
exemplifies academic writing per se: it is non-polemical - yet invites
certainty of argumentation. It is ‘your’ argument whilst excluding ‘you’: the
personal, the emphatic, the confused, the flippant and the humorous. In many
ways it can be seen as a metonym for the academic world our students have
entered: implacable, reified, classed. It is the space where they most feel
like ‘a fish out of water’.
We want our students to succeed in academic
writing for it is the sine qua non (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_qua_non)
of the University experience. But we wanted writing that was not the ultimate
erasure of the self. We wanted a space where students could have something to
say, could have their struggle to achieve authorship; but without the ‘jostling
voices’ (Carter et al. 2009) asking them to ‘write and reference properly’ and
to ‘be more academic’ – and less like the passionate, engaged and committed
whole people that they are. We suggested blogging and wanted their blogs to be
a powerful virtual tool – a quasi-academic, multimodal, public space in which to
perform the self as it becomes academic – and to perform that more wholly than
in an academic essay.
A little bit of Deleuze will do ya
Blogs especially can constitute the cracks –
the boundaries – the borders - the space for disruption, irruptions and
eruptions: the place of collision and encounter. Those representations become
where space and time collapse – compressed – intensified – because finite –
become finite – existing in a fixed place and time. Their composition emerges
from a compressed space, time and setting: meaning and communication become one
narrative. And as Deleuze might argue this offers an opportunity not to
re-trace the compilation of the sign – but a moment – just before it becomes
fixed – when all the potential and possibilities still exist. A moment of and
for transformation – for recognition of the self… A crack in space and time to
re-territorialise educational spaces – to become educational nomads.
And our
student voices said:
‘Week 9 was all about my
nightmare….drawing!
My drawings always mock me:
“Ha! I have defeated you! You may
have many words, but give you a pencil, and watch the intelligence disappear!
That’s not how you wanted it to look, is it? Is that a person or a tree?
Dumbo!’’
In a class of five year old
children, I am quite happy to display my ridiculous sketches. I explain to the
children that drawing is not my strong point, and they assure me that I have
done a very good job of representing the characters, props and scenery in the
storyboard. However, if someone were to come in, they would be quite convinced
that the children had drawn the pictures – and not the most artistically gifted
children, either!
At the moment, I feel afraid of
failure, but I have to remember that I have been here before. In 2011, I
graduated with merit at the Barbican, from a Foundation Degree in Education:
Primary Pathway. So I need to keep three things in mind:
Keep taking risks!
It will be worth all the hard work!
There are people to help me on my
journey!’
‘In this week’s lecture, we were
subjected to a 10 minute free writing exercise. If we stopped writing, then we
were to write the reason why we did so on a separate piece of paper. Seemed
easy enough, but the question given was very ambiguous to us: Winnicott
(1971) argued that play is necessary to counteract
the implicit threat of transitional...
“What?” I asked myself. “Who is
Winnicott? What does he mean by play? Implicit threat?” I started writing, even
though I had no idea what the question was asking. It took three attempts to
get my writing flowing.’
‘Today has been so proactive that I
hardly had the time to take down any academic notes and just kept on listening.
There was a guest speaker today, Chris O’Reilly, who spoke to us about the
presentation and making of a short 3 minute film and what kind of research and
methods go into making and preparing for it. I was so intrigued and fascinated
throughout the whole piece that it just had given me so many ideas. I was
bursting to how these ideas could relate to my research project Report.’
Nomads all!
Talking of re-territorialising: do we want a Learning Development MOOC?
And so to Andrew Doig, Becka Colley, Carol
Elston, David Mathew, Sandra Sinfield and our workshop on the nuts and bolts
and why and ‘what fors’ of a Learning Development MOOC. The session had a great energy and buzz - and we are hopeful that a
positive working group will emerge from those present – and from others in the
LDHEN if they want to join in.
cMOOC,
xMOOC, SPOOC – OOD??
There seemed
to be two main approaches to our potential open online course emerging:
* Set the
context: Where a group of us gather together to design and devise a course with
quite formal and defined Aims and Outcomes. Different elements of the course
might be 'owned', developed and delivered online by different people.
* What might
be called the 'bring your own context' approach: a group gathers together and
sets up a course that may or may not have formal aims and learning outcomes -
but that can be experienced differently by participants depending on their own
contexts, wants and needs. In this model, some participants may want to explore
the philosophy, pedagogy and epistemology surrounding elements of the course -
whilst others may just want a 'pick up and teach’ set of strategies...
Different elements might be delivered online by different people, with participants bringing as much to the table as the person 'running' the course that week/fortnight/month. I think that this community can manage that!
To me this
latter more of a #rhizo14: the community is the curriculum approach; and in
actual fact, I do not think that these two approaches are incompatible if
framed in a participative way.
Watch the www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ldhen list for
developments - and if people are interested in taking part – could they email
Andrew Doig: Andrew.Doig@solent.ac.uk ?
End Notes: There was more, so much more to ALDinHE – but I
reckon that this is enough for a blogpost. So if anybody else has blogged – can
you put the link in the Comments below – and perhaps we can have a conversation
of sorts to keep the LD flag flying?
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