Tag: innovation

Workshop review: ‘Innovating Pedagogy 2022’

Thursday 8th September I had the privilege of running an online workshop for FLANZ  to explore the potential of a range of different pedagogical approaches that might apply to different educational sectors in New Zealand and Australia.

See Transcript The Innovating Pedagogy 2022 is the 10th annual report from the Open University (UK) exploring new forms in interactive and innovative practice of teaching, learning and assessment. These innovations already exist in pockets of practice but are not considered mainstream. This collaboration between the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, UK, and the Open University of Catalonia, Spain, is the result of a filtering process and is compiled, based on a review of published studies and other sources. Ten concepts or themes are identified.

Hybrid models Maximising learning flexibility and opportunities. Beyond the strict curriculum delineations in Blended Learning models, Hybrid forms aim to empower the learner to optimise their own learner choices at to where, when, and how to learn. Providing flexible choices requires teachers and institutions to adjust their systemic approaches. Influencer-led education Learning from education influencers on social media platforms. Acknowledging the growth of edu-influencers, who optimise their use of social media tools to share their knowledge, experience, and passion for a range of subjects from the highly specialised to the generic. Evaluating the veracity of the message is a challenge for the learner.
Dual learning scenarios Connecting learning in classrooms and industrial workplaces. A step up from work-integrated learning models, the expectation is that course designers fully meld both formal classroom and work spaces into a coherent experience. Pedagogies of the home Understanding the home as a place for cultural learning. Not the same as home-schooling. Rather, it seeks to leverage the wider socio-cultural environment that the learner inhabits. Also recognises the burden on marginalised communities to fully participate.
Pedagogies of micro-credentials Accredited short courses to develop workplace skills. Existing approaches, snippets taken from existing programmes, fail to create an effective learning ecosystem for learners who require support to develop a patchwork portfolio meshing formal, non-formal, and informal experiences together. Pedagogy of discomfort   Emotions as powerful tools for learning and for promoting social justice. A process of self-examination that requires students to critically engage with their ideological traditions and ways of thinking about issues such as racism, oppression, and social injustice.
Pedagogy of autonomy Building capacity for freedom and independent learning. Explores the notion of incorporating informal, non-formal, and formal learning patterns into the learner’s experience, creating self-regulated learners with an emphasis on their metacognitive development and allowing them to reflect their true selves.. Wellbeing education Promoting wellbeing across all aspects of teaching and learning. Wellbeing education helps students to develop mental health ‘literacy’ by teaching them how to manage their own mental health, recognise possible disorders, and learn how, where, and when to seek help.
Watch parties Watching videos together, whatever the time or place. Leveraging the increased connectivity prompted in response to covid-19, and the move of media providers to provide educational tools, this is the notion of structured engagement around a shared viewing (or listening) experience. Walk-and-talk Combining movement and conversation to enhance learning. Not just used in service of those in need of emotional support, where the therapeutic benefits have been proven, but across a wide range of learning activities where reflection and thought would be best served by being away from the classroom and being outside and mobile.
10 Themes from the 2022 Innovating Pedagogy report

The workshop used Mentimeter as an online polling tool. Of the 25 participants, 20 regularly voted and made 659 submissions. The tertiary sector dominated, at 15, with fewer representatives from the Private Training Enterprise and Commercial L&D sectors and only one from compulsory education. Only 2 Australians participated. Despite having laboured the point in all publicity materials that it would be valuable to read the report before participating, only 8 said they had read it (or the summary), with 11 admitting they had not. Of the 17 that responded to the question about their approach to new educational technologies, 12 saw themselves as ‘progressive’, 2 as ‘radical’, and 3 as ‘pedestrian’. To get participants involved in thinking about each pedagogic approach, we ran a 2×2 square exercise, asking what the relative effort versus impact might be. See the video for responses. Following breakout groups we ranked the innovations in terms of the amount of attention participants would pay to them in the next 12 months in their personal practice (see screenshot above). The general consensus was that whilst there was nothing exceptional or radical in any of these innovations, they provided a focus for reflection and were deemed stimulating. Thank you to all who participated.

Kukulska-Hulme, A., et.al. (2022). Innovating Pedagogy 2022: Open University Innovation (No. 10). Open University.

Very Brief Overview of ‘Innovating Pedagogy 2022’

This very brief summary is in no way to be taken as a substitute for reading the full report, or indeed the Executive Summary, which is available here: Innovating Pedagogy 2022

Cover of Innovating Pedagogy 2022This is the 10th annual report exploring new forms in interactive and innovative practice of teaching, learning and assessment. These innovations already exist in pockets of practice but are not considered mainstream. This report, a collaboration between the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University, UK, and the Open University of Catalonia, Spain, is the result of a filtering process and is compiled, based on a review of published studies and other sources.

Hybrid models
Maximising learning flexibility and opportunities. Beyond the strict curriculum delineations in Blended Learning models, Hybrid forms aim to empower the learner to optimise their own learner choices at to where, when and how to learn. Providing flexible choices requires teachers and institutions to adjust their systemic approaches.		 Influencer-led education
 Learning from education influencers on social media platforms. Acknowledging the growth of edu-influencers, who optimise their use of social media tools to share their knowledge, experience, and passion for a range of subjects from the highly specialised to the generic. Evaluating the veracity of the message is a challenge for the learner.
Dual learning scenarios
Connecting learning in classrooms and industry workplaces. A step on from work-integrated learning models, the expectation is that course designers fully meld both formal classroom and work spaces into a coherent experience.		 Pedagogies of the home
Understanding the home as a place for cultural learning. Not the same as home-schooling. Rather, it seeks to leverage the wider socio-cultural environment that the learner inhabits. Also recognises the burden on marginalised communities to fully participate.
Pedagogies of microcredentials
Accredited short courses to develop workplace skills. Existing approaches, snippets taken from existing programmes, fail to create an effective learning ecosystem for learners who require support to develop a patchwork portfolio meshing formal, non-formal and informal experiences together.		 Pedagogy of discomfort  
Emotions as powerful tools for learning and for promoting social justice. A process
of self-examination that requires students to critically engage with their ideological traditions and ways of thinking about issues such as racism, oppression and social injustice.
Pedagogy of autonomy
Building capacity for freedom and independent learning. Explores notion of incorporating informal, non-formal and formal learning patterns into the learner’s experience, creating self-regulated learners with an emphasis on their metacognitive development and allowing them to reflect their true selves..		 Wellbeing education
Promoting wellbeing across all aspects of teaching and learning. Wellbeing education helps students to develop mental health ‘literacy’ by teaching them how to manage their own mental health, recognise possible disorders, and learn how, where and when to seek help.
Watch parties
Watching videos together, whatever the time or place. Leveraging the increased connectivity prompted in response to covid-19, and the move of  media providers to provide educational tools, this is the notion of structured engagement around a shared viewing (or listening) experience.		 Walk-and-talk
Combining movement and conversation to enhance learning. Not just used in service of for those in need of emotional support, where the therapeutic benefits have been proven, but across a wide range of learning activities where reflection and thought would be best served by being away from the classroom and being outside and mobile.
10 Themes from the 2022 Innovating Pedagogy report

 

Kukulska-Hulme, A., et.al. (2022). Innovating Pedagogy 2022: Open University Innovation (No. 10). Open University.
 

Dr Simon Paul Atkinson PFHEA / 13 July 2022

Image is generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E2

Post human frontiers for educational technology

The Society for Research into Higher Education (www.srhe.ac.uk/) or SRHE, held the inaugural meeting if the new Digital University Network, convened by Dr Lesley Gourlay and Dr Kelly Coate, at its office in London on Friday 2nd March 2012.

The network is a response to the changing technological landscape in which Universities now operate and the disruptive opportunities that technologies in education represent. The network aims to being together researchers and practitioners to explore the impact of technologies on academic work. This first session set the tone as clearly one both practical and theoretical, concerned with the impact of technological processes on identity, social networks, research methodologies and the evolution of theory.

Some twenty academic practitioners from across the UK and Ireland attended the inaugural event to share insights into the new emerging theories of education responding to technology. The emphasis of this first session was clearly positioned as moving away from the social ‘human to human’ relationships towards new considerations of the human-object relationship.

Education as Sociomaterial Practices – posthuman frontiers for educational technology
Professor Tara Fenwick, School of Education, University of Stirling

Building on her background in professional studies and professional learning and building her coherent argument around actor-network theory (ANT), with a passing reference to complexity theory, Tara Fenwick provoked debate regarding knowledge located outside of human-human interaction. Working off Bruno Latour, she explored the notion of humans as nodes, with equal status to other objects, within complex networks. The implication being there is only one ‘closed system’, that of everything.

As though to reinforce Latour’s argument that social critiques must embrace empiricism to regain focus and credibility, Professor Fenwick produced a range of theoretical lenses and examples from health, emergency services and education to demonstrated the non-centrality of the individual in ANT. Borrowing on the French notion of ‘assemblage’ she outlined the issue of the importance of materiality, of materials conveying meaning, preventing actions, permitting actions.

This concept of the socio-material assemblage was illustrated with classroom examples (children changing socio-material relations with the introduction of a glue gun) and she argued the social and material not only inextricably intertwined in assemblages of the human and nonhuman, but also that education is itself a ‘network’ or assemblage of ‘practices and knowings’. This ‘posthuman’, not anti-human, approach, prioritises the sociomaterial and poses challenging questions for education and educational technology. It provoked me to consider carefully how we approach the nature of our physical spaces and the particular ‘intrinsic’ affordances of those spaces.

Digital disaggregation: assessing the uncanny posthuman
Dr. Sian Bayne, School of Education, University of Edinburgh

Dr. Bayne ((@sbayne)) followed with a fascinating and wonderfully illustrated presentation of sociomaterial assemblages in both the form of her presentation and the examples of her postgraduate students’ work that she shared. She is the Programme Co-Director of the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in E-learning (https://www.education.ed.ac.uk/e-learning/), and following a review of the literature used examples from this innovative programme to illustrate that to learn and teach across diverse and complex digital spaces is to experience “uncertainty, disorientation and fragmentation”. Drawing on the literature of the ‘posthuman’, but not interestingly of earlier sociological (Schultz), or historical (Innes) perspectives, she explored the idea of ‘strangeness’ in new ‘digitally enabled’ modes of ‘being’ in education. In particular, she raised challenging issues regarding assessment practices in online learning can explicitly engage with disaggregation, spectrality and posthuman pedagogy, as critical moves in re-thinking teaching, learning and assessment for the digital mode.

There was an interesting discussion around the ambiguity of ‘technology-enhanced’ learning and technology-critical perspectives that might be said to imply that technology served simply to enhance what was already effective and human-centered. Using a range of literature from critical post humanism (literary), ecological post humanism (biological sciences) and technological post humanism (technology) Dr. Bayne placed the human ‘outside’ the centre of things, and in so doing illustrated the pervasiveness of the idea of the ‘other’ as essentially ‘other then human’.

Dr. Byane shared some exciting examples of student MSc work, assessed ‘digital essays’ in which the textual artefacts themselves were ‘gatherings’, looking beyond text as representational. Examples from the “thinking otherwise” project included a museum to the cyborg in Second Life called “imaginarium” in which textual content displayed as billboards and notecards, and an apparently traditional essay in which every work was hyperlinked to a different URL, demonstrating the ‘portal’ nature of words (the scene from the lost railway station, ‘Mobil Avenue’ in The Matrix sprang to mind in which Rama Kandra says to Neo, ‘What is Love?, it is a word’). My personal favourite amongst the Edinburgh student work was a digital essay in Google Earth in which connections were illustrated through visual metaphor, analogy and representation, the essay explored the notion of the flâneur, with the audience gaze itself of being acted out as a flâneur.

There was intense discussion about the difficulties and challenges of assessing such work although we were led to believe that the institutional processes were fairly mainstream and the assessment rubric looked like any other Masters level ‘essay’ rubric. There was discussion about the notion of ‘essay’ and concern about the subjectivity of the assessor. I found it intriguing that colleagues felt they could not assess the content because they did not posses the ‘technical’ skills of the authors, demonstrating perhaps that we continue to assess in an ‘apprentice’ framework and not one based on dispassionate criteria. Also perhaps, that we are in assessment practices of all things, still essentially ‘human’.

Teaching-Research Nexus Creative Workshop

Part of my role at the LSE that I really enjoy is working with staff to find novel solutions to age-old problems. So a few weeks ago I was invited to discuss with colleagues in a research and teaching ‘cluster’ within a department that perennial question: “what’s the point of an away day?”

The head of department appeared to want the staff to spend the day writing serious funding proposals and yet a survey of the staff suggested they wanted to “have fun, and get to know each other.” The away day became a half day and the focus remained a little vague. The fixed points were lunch at noon, a gastro-pub at 5pm, and those apparent polar opposites, ‘research applications’ and ‘fun’.

The result was an off-campus half day at St Martin in the Fields, in the newly refurbished St Martin’s Hall. I had organised a ‘research-poster workshop’, in which tables of 4 or 5 colleagues, of different grades, backgrounds and discipline focus (socially engineered by the departmental manager), worked from a ‘mock’ European Journal funding call. The funding call, which modelled the ‘real thing’,  invited applications for 12-24 month projects to build research networks with at least three country partners and a particular discipline focus. There was a specification about dissemination, use of technology and so on. The session ran along lines similar to the ‘World-Cafe‘ concept. So each table had to come up with a draft idea, blu-tac their A2 poster to the wall and then circulate around the other four groups’ posters providing feedback in the form of post-its (colour coded for each group).

Workshop Image

The second session then allowed groups to revise their posters, go around and ask for clarification on any feedback received and produce a ‘final’ version of their research network proposal. All the while, the groups had a copy of the ‘marking criteria that would be used at the end, by them, to judge each-others efforts.

Final posters were put up and the groups circulated ‘marking’ the submissions. Each group had to come up with an agreed mark for each of the posters under some time pressure. As the ‘very light touch’ facilitator I went around between each round and photographed the posters, and I threw in a ‘red-herring’ with an envelope for each group suggesting a rumour that “The DG apparently likes…..”.

The effect was to have groups explore:

  • the difficulty of working with criteria which can appear ambiguous and needs careful unpacking;
  • the advantages of collegial review at both the developmental and final stages of proposals;
  • the need to think often ‘outside the box’ to come up with something original;
  • the danger of getting so carried away on a good idea it evades the call;
  • the danger of listening to rumour;
  • and that it is possible to have fun and still talk about research funding applications!

The feedback was gratifyingly positive and I’d suggest it’s an excellent model for a half-day workshop that recognises the need for junior staff to benefit from the experience of more seasoned researchers whilst bringing creativity and innovation to the process. It was also fun! Any workshop where people willingly stand up and start moving is good to see!

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