Month: March 2023

In our final face to face session, we read and discussed some readings in small groups. The Hyland (1999) and Macfarlane & Gourlay (2009) pieces in particular posed interesting questions about what knowledge is and how it is understood in the university context. 

Hyland studied 80 different research papers to understand how citations are employed across academic disciplines. They found that arts and humanities academics used substantially more references than those writing within more empirical subject areas. This points to the community of knowledge that one must participate in by acknowledging others knowledge in order to have one’s own knowledge accepted

The Macfarlane & Gourlay piece likens the reflective aspect of PgCert courses to a reality show where contestants undergo a total transformation. It explores the insidious nature of reflective assessment as a means of control. It is not acceptable to reflect that you that the course has not transformed you. Students must perform a road to Damascus style epiphany about their practice that only could have been achieved through the course. They must then dutifully reflect on this to pass the assessment. 

These papers provoke a few thoughts for me, not least this idea of performativity which reminds me of Judith Butler – to what extent do we perform our knowledge in line with societal expectations? For Hyland’s article, it is on the one hand understandable that we participate in communities of knowledge; we learn from each other, and we evidence our knowledge based on what we have read. Thinking critically though, these knowledge communities are not neutral spaces; politics and biases are strong undercurrents in deciding who counts as a knowledgeable member of the club. As Holmwood asks:

What precisely does neoliberal higher education bring into being? And how can we assess its claims to be a system based on merit and individual responsibility rather than group affiliation?

Holmwood (2018)

In decolonising curricula, we confront the institutionalised racism and bias within academia. While we try being critical of our curricula, I wonder how many this action is coming too late for. Equally, the institutions that house these academic communities are symbols of power, privilege, and dominance in the semiotics of the knowledge economy. Shouldn’t elite institutions therefore de-centre themselves to allow others to speak? Couldn’t they use their profits and prestige to empower other knowledge centres rather than pursuing their own endless expansion?

I see connections  between Macfarlane & Gourlay’s point around performing knowledge and what Allan Davies says about learning outcomes in art and design education. I explore Davies’ article further in this blogpost, but in sum Davies argues that art and design skills develop over time and they resist being captured within a specific assessable event. Our learning from this PgCert is similar, it informs our practice in a gradual sense. Yet can our knowledge be said to have been achieved if it is not performed in an assessable way?

Macfarlane and Gourlay wrote their piece in 2009, to what extent have things changed? There still is a need for teachers to assess their students’ knowledge and for students to participate in the performance of knowledge in order to be accepted into the academic fold. And as Gourlay states in their more recent text Posthumanism and the Digital University (2021): 

the VLE can be critiqued as a technology of surveillance, which is used to discipline students into a very particular form of digital textual performance. It is common to ask students to ‘reflect’ on their learning on VLE discussions boards, and relate the content of the course to themselves in some way. As I have argued elsewhere (Macfarlane & Gourlay 2009), reflection may appear to be highly personalized, but can in fact be used as a disciplining practice, corralling participants into a narrow band of acceptable ways of expressing their subjectivity. It may also be used to quantify student engagement in terms of the frequency of logins and length of time spent on the VLE.

Gourlay 2021

As a learning technologist, learning analytics are part and parcel of my role.  The assessment of frequency of logins and time spent as an indicator of knowledge or worthiness of knowledge therefore rings alarm bells for me. In my context, learning analytics help to assess when necessary activities, such as health and safety inductions, have been completed. But the reduction of a student’s learning to numerical data and stats is dehumanising and serves as a potential tool to further grease the wheels of the neoliberal university.

References

Holmwood, J. (2018) ‘Race and the Neoliberal University.’ In Bhambra, G. K., Gebrial, D. and Nişancıoğlu, K. (eds.) Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press, pp.37-52. 

Gourlay, L. (2021). Posthumanism and the Digital University: Texts, Bodies and Materialities. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 

Hyland, K. (1999) Academic Attribution: Citation and the Construction of Disciplinary Knowledge. Applied Linguistics 20 (3), pp.341-367 

Macfarlane, B., & Gourlay, L. (2009) The Reflection Game: enacting the penitent self, Teaching in Higher Education, 14 (4), pp. 455-459

In the on-site session on the 24th February, we thought about the knowledge and values that underpin our approaches to learning. My group mind-mapped these out to: 

• Our underlying (subject) knowledge: how much to share it and when.
• Ourselves: our biases, backgrounds, strengths, insecurities, etc.
• The students’ contexts: their course/year, hopes & dreams, expectations, lived experiences.
• Course aims and objectives our expectations of our students.

We then judged  our responses against the V1-4 and K1-6 of the UKPSF. Curiously, as a learning technologist I hadn’t even considered K4: The use and value of appropriate learning technologies. On reflection, this is perhaps because I do not have a core subject knowledge, but I use my core knowledge of learning technology and design to supporting technicians to deliver their core knowledges effectively online. I also think that in the context of the PgCert I am thinking about what teaching is for my peers who I assume to be “traditional teaching practitioners” (which I acknowledge is just an unchallenged assumption in my head!) versus me thinking about these questions individually. 

UAL Principles of Climate, Racial and Social Justice

In the pre reading for the session, I looked at UAL’s core social purpose principles. Staff and students have developed the following set of principles of climate, racial and social justice:

1. Move with urgency
2. Cultivate systems thinking of practice
3. Foster futures thinking
4. Design for human equity, social and racial justice
5. Accelerate activism and advocacy

The co-design of these principles encourages inclusiveness and chimes Paulo Freire’s dialogic pedagogy and the belief that classrooms (or in our case workshops, labs, studios?) can be sites of social change. 

It is encouraging to see that there is a clear action plan for embedding the principles within the curriculum. The action plan seems achievable, in terms of achieving a baseline that can be practically built upon to develop awareness, ideation and creating a total shift in the curriculum.

In the session we talked about frameworks and policies and who gets to decide them. It seems that UAL’s principles were developed by a working group that did not include technical representation (as the accompanying picture shows). The framework also focuses on how to embed the principles within academic programmes. I wonder how this could be embedded within technical teaching and learning, or in online learning practice.  PgCert peers related that the principles also aren’t being embedded coherently in other parts of the university, ie IT (sustainable supply chains, electronic waste). 

From my role as a learning technologist for the CSM technical team, I know that the climate crisis is a big concern and we think critically about the materials we use, acquiring LEAF status, etc. The development of CSM’s swap shop is an example of where students and technicians have collaborated to deliver on these principles. The dye garden on CSM’s roof terrace is another example, with Print & Dye technicians and students are applying these principles to creating sustainable environmentally friendly dyes.

I also don’t need to wait for explicit guidance from the university to think about and apply the principles to my practice. I have been working to redesign our CSM Technical Moodle site, so that each section has the same structure with common categories for content. I have included sustainability as a core category to clearly signpost this information. Another effect all technical workshops are now be encouraged to think about sustainability in their context and to include content as this one of the core categories. Additionally, something I need to educate myself more in is sustainable website design. Websites, particularly the more complex and highly designed, generate C02 and accumulatively across the whole of the internet this is a large-scale issue. I’m hoping to enrol in a course like Product for Net Zero, so that I can robustly apply sustainable practices to my work.

In one of my other blog posts I considered how the practice of learning technology itself could be decolonised by being critical of and rejecting the humanist pedagogies that so often pervade our practice. Co-design, between staff and students, is a tangible way I feel I can work towards enacting this. Similarly, adopting a universal design for learning approach – where learners are engaged, represented, and can act and express themselves – gives me the tools to work on this. I am committed to continually engaging with this and being awake to new methods, approaches, and perspectives.