HERDSA 2012: Final general talk – that tricky relationship, University/School

Posted: July 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

When working in Higher Education, you fairly quickly discover that there is not actually a genuine continuum between the school level and the University level. School curricula are set, with some input from the higher ed sector, mostly by school and government, but they have little-to-no voice at the Higher Education level. We listen to our peers across the water and around our country, adopting ACM and IEEE curricula suggestions, but while we have an awareness of what the different sectors are doing (in terms of local school and University) it’s certainly not a strong, bi-directional relationship.

That’s where the Australian government reforms of 2009, designed to greatly improve participation in University, get interesting. We’ve been told to increase participation from lower SES groups who hadn’t previously considered Higher Education. We, that is ‘we the university’, have been told this. Ok. Great. Now some people will (flippantly) start ranting about how we’ll have to drop quality standards to do this – an argument that I feel is both incorrect and somewhat unpleasant in its tone. Given that we haven’t gone out of our way to try and form a continuum before, well some people have but with limited success, we can certainly address some of the problem by identifying higher education as a destination to students who may not have been aware that it was even an option for them.

This is where the work of Dr Karma Pearce comes in, won “Building community, educational attainment and university aspirations through University-School mentoring partnerships”. Dr Pearce’s research was based on developing student aspirations from traditionally disadvantaged regions in South Australia. The aim was to look at the benefits of a University/High School mentoring program conducted in a University setting, targeting final year secondary school students from the low SES schools in the area.

We are all aware of the problems that disadvantaged schools face and the vicious circularity of some of these problems. Take Chemistry. To teach chemistry properly, you need teachers and lab resources, including consumables. It’s not like a computer lab that can be run on oldish equipment in a room somewhere – chemistry labs have big technical and safety requirements, and old chemicals either don’t work or get consumed in reactions. If your lab is bad, your numbers drop because the teaching suffers. If the numbers drop below a certain level for schools in South Australia – the class gets cancelled. Now you have a Chem teacher and no students. Therefore, repurposed teacher or, shortly, no teacher. (Of course, this assumes that you can even get a chemistry teacher.)

The University of South Australia had recently build new chemistry labs in another campus, leaving their old labs (which are relatively near to several traditionally disadvantaged areas) free. To the researcher’s and University’s credit (I’m serious, kudos!) they realised that they could use these labs to support 29 secondary school students from schools that had no chem labs. The school students participated in weekly lecture, tutorial and practical chemistry classes at Mawson Lakes campus, with the remaining theory conducted in their own schools. There were two High School teachers based in two of the schools, with a practical demonstrator based at Mawson Lakes. To add the mentoring aspect, four final year undergraduate students were chosen to be group mentors. The mentors required a minimum of credit (B) level studies for three chemistry courses. The mentor breakdown, not deliberately selected, was three women and one man, with two from private (fee-paying) schools and two from regional state schools. Mentors had transport provided, a polo shirt with logo, were paid for their time and received a significant amount of mentor training as well as a weekly meeting with a University coordinator.

The mentors assisted throughout the 26 week program and, apart from helping with chemistry, shared their experiences of University as they worked with the students. Of the 20 secondary students who completed the program (10 F, 10 M), they indicated in surveys that they thought they now understand what Uni life was going to be like but, more importantly to me, that they thought it was achievable for them. From that group, 35% of them had family who had been to University, but all of the secondary participants who made it to the end of the program had enrolled to go to Uni by the end of their Year 12 studies.

In discussion, a couple of points did emerge, especially regarding the very high teacher/student ratio, but overall the message from the research is pretty positive. Without having to change anything at the actual University level, a group of students, who didn’t come from a “university positive” environment and who were at some of the most disadvantaged schools in the state, now thought that University was somewhere that they could go – their aspirations now included University. What a fantastic result!

One side note, at the end, that I found a little depressing was that some students had opted to go to another University, not UniSA, and at least one gave the reason that they had been lured there by the free iPad that was being issued if you enrolled in a Bachelor of Science. Now, in the spirit of full honesty, that’s my University that they’re talking about and I know enough about the amazing work done by Bob Hill, Simon Pyke and Mike Seyfang (as well as a cast of hundreds) to completely rebuild the course to a new consistent standard, with a focus on electronic (and free) textbooks, to know that the iPad is the icing on the cake (so to speak). But, to a student from a disadvantaged school, one where a student going into medicine (and being the first one in the 50 year history of the school) is Page 3 news in the main state newspaper, an iPad is a part of a completely different world. If this student is away at a camp with students from more privileged background, this device is not about electronic delivery or lightening the text book burden or interactive science displays and instant communication – it’s about fitting in.

I found this overall talk very interesting, because it gave an excellent example of how we can lead educationally by sharing our resources while sharing the difficulties of the high school/University transition, but it also made me think about how students see the things that we do to improve their education. Where I see a lab full of new computers, do students see a sign of stability and affluence that convinces them that we’ll look after them or do they see “ho hum” because they’re only 21″ screens and not the i7 processor?

Once again, when I look at things from my view, what do my students see?

HERDSA 2012: Connecting with VET

Posted: July 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

As part of the final session I attended in the general conference, I attended a talk by A/Prof Anne Langworthy and Dr Susan Johns who co-presented a talk on “Why is it important for Higher Education to connect with the VET sector?” As a point of clarification, VET stands for Vocational Education and Training, as I’ve previously mentioned, and is generally concerned with trade qualifications, with some students going on to diplomas and advanced diplomas that may be recognised as some or all of a first-year University course equivalent. If a student starts in a trade and then goes to a certain point, we can then easily accept them into an articulation program.

The Tasmanian context, a small state that is still relatively highly ruralised, provides a challenging backdrop to this work, as less than 18% of school leavers who could go on to University actually do go on to University. Combine this with the highest lower socio-economic status (SES) population by percentage in Australia, and many Tasmanians can be considered to be disadvantaged by both access to and participation in University level studies. Family influence plays a strong part here – many families have no-one in their immediate view who has been to University at all, although VET is slightly more visible.

Among the sobering statistics presented, where that out of a 12 year schooling system, where Year 12 is the most usual pre-requisite to University entry, as a state, the percentage of people 15 years or older who had year 10 schooling or less was 54%. Over half the adult population had not completed secondary schooling, the usual stepping stone to higher education.

The core drivers for this research were the following:

  1. VET pathways are more visible and accessible to low SES/rural students because the entry requirements aren’t necessarily as high and someone in their family might be able to extol the benefits.
  2. There are very low levels of people articulating from VET to Higher Ed – so, few people are going on to the diploma.
  3. There is an overall decline in VET and HE participation.
  4. Even where skills shortages are identified, students aren’t studying in the areas of regional need.
  5. UTAS is partnering with the Tasmanian VET provider Tasmanian Polytechnic and Skills Institute.

An interesting component of this background data is that, while completion rates are dropping for the VET skills, individual module completion rates are still higher than the courses in which the modules sit. In other words, people are likely to finish a module that is of use to them, or an employer, but don’t necessarily see the need of completing the whole course. However, across the board, the real problem is that VET, so often a pathway to higher ed for people who didn’t quite finish skill, is dropping in percentage terms as a pathway to Uni. There has been a steady decline in VET to HE articulation in Tasmania across the last 6 years.

The researchers opted for an evidence based approach to examine those students who had succeeded in articulating from VET to HE, investigating their perceptions and then mapping existing pathways to discover what could be learned. The profile of VET and HE students from the SES/rural areas in Tas are pretty similar although the VET students who did articulate into Uni were less likely to seek pathways that rewarded them with specific credits and were more likely to seek general admission. Given that these targeted articulations, with credit transfer, are supposed to reflect student desire and reward it, or encourage participation in a specific discipline, it appears that these pathways aren’t working as well as they could.

So what are the motivators for those students who do go from VET to Uni? Career and vocational aspirations, increased confidence from doing VET, building on their practical VET basis, the quality and enthusiasm of their VET teachers, the need to bridge over an existing educational hurdle and satisfaction with their progress to date. While participation in VET generally increased a student’s positive attitude to study, the decision to (or not to) articulate often came down to money, time, perceived lack of industry connection and even more transitional assistance.

It’s quite obvious that our students, and industry, can become fixated with the notion of industrial utility – job readiness – and this may be to the detriment to Universities if we are perceived as ivory towers. More Higher Ed participation is excellent for breaking the poverty cycle, developing social inclusion and the VET to Higher Ed nexus offers great benefits in terms of good student outcomes, such as progression and retention, but it’s obvious that people coming from a practice-based area, especially in terms of competency training, are going to need bridging and some understanding to adapt to the University teaching model. Or, of course, our model has to change. (Don’t think I was going to sneak that one past you.)

The authors concluded that bridging was essential. articulation and credit transfer arrangement should be reviewed and that better articulation agreements should be offered in areas of national and regional priority. The cost of going to University, which may appear very small to students who are happy to defer payment, can be an impediment to lower SES participants because, on average, people in these groups can be highly debt averse. The relocation costs and support costs of moving away from a rural community to an urban centre for education is also significant. It’s easy sometimes to forget about how much it costs to live in a city, especially when you deprive someone of their traditional support models.

Of course, that connection to industry is one where students can feel closer when they undertake VET and Universities can earn some disrespect, fairly or not, for being seen to be ivory towers, too far away from industry. If you have no-one in your family who has been to Uni, there’s no advocate for the utility of ‘wasting’ three years of your life not earning money in order to get a better job or future. However, this is yet another driver for good industry partnerships and meaningful relationships between industry, VET and Higher Education.

It’s great to see so much work being down in both understanding and then acting to fix some of the more persistent problems with those people who may never even see a University, unless we’re dynamic and thoughtful in our outreach programs. On a personal note, while Tasmania has the lowest VET to HE conversion, I noticed that South Australia (my home state) has the second lowest and a similar decline. Time, I think, to take some of the lessons learned and apply them in our back yard!

HERDSA 2012: Final general session – connecting with the community.

Posted: July 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Today I’m sitting in a session whose theme is engagement and connection, with the community, with Vocational Education and Training (VET) and the university-school relationship. All of this goes to our greater role in the community, as knowledge leaders, as mentors and in giving value to the community as a whole. This post is the first of a couple that I want to make about this session.

It would be fairly easy to only think about the students who are already in your class and, given that they’ve got in, that it is up to the student to do all of the heavy lifting to stay there but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that there are many students who, for reasons beyond their control, will have difficulty even making it to University, let alone staying there.

The first talk discussed the issues from the rural Canberra perspective. For those who don’t know, Australia is heavily urbanised with a coastal major city focus. There is still a rural community but with 201o numbers of rural population estimated at less than 2.5 million and steadily declining, Australia’s population heart is its cities. The declining rural employment sector and the movement of population, jobs and resources to the cities is leading to a drop in standards of living and rising unemployment. This is accompanied by a low percentage of families who have engaged in higher education and a very low level of attainment of the final years of secondary education. These low engagement rates with high secondary and higher ed make perfect sense when lifetime jobs are there without much further training, or with low levels of VET assistance, but become a trap once unskilled or traditionally apprenticed roles start to dry up.

The Commonwealth Government (that’s the Australian Federal Government for those who don’t know that we’re a commonwealth) has identified that they want to see a lot more low socio-economic status (SES) participants in higher ed by 2020 as they are largely unrepresented in the existing higher ed community. As people who did not traditionally attend University, this is a rich source of new students – assuming that we can solve some of the key problems in engaging, preparing and retaining these students.

Barbara Cram presented a paper on “Establishing a regional enabling pilot programme through uni-community engagement” which deals with the rural catchment area around the University of Canberra. Canberra, Australia’s capital city, is situated in the middle of a rural area and U Canberra sees itself as the University of the surrounding district. (The Australian National University is also in Canberra but, I believe, tends to focus on urban students from around Australia.) In the areas surrounding Canberra, roughly 8% of people have Bachelors’ degrees, well below the national levels, and, more depressingly, up to 50% of students who finish their schooling do not go on to either employment or further study. The social implications of this are profound – a community steadily heading towards disengagement and multi-generational unemployment, reducing opportunities further.

University of Canberra’s goal was to enhance regional participation in higher education in a thin market but what does it take to establish a new program in a regional town using a community-based participatory approach? The strategy is to use a community-based partnership strategy to develop community trust and to ensure that the community sees the value of the offering. Two course styles were offered: a community capacity development course (volunteer training and Certificate IV courses), or an enabling (university preparation) course. The community that U Can were working with, the town of Merimbula, decided that an enabling course was the best way forward.

The UCanReach program ran over 14 weeks, 2 evenings a week, and allowed participants to study three units: Learning at University, Communicating for Professional Futures (analysis of, and practice in, the range of text types of u/grad study), and Understanding Community (critical analysis, active participation, independent learning, primary and secondary research and academic literacy). The support provided here was considered critical to the success of the program, including in-house tutoring if students had particular difficulties and taxi vouchers to get people to the course if required. The support, from library resources to putting books into local bookshops, was based on the principle that all barriers to attendance should be reduced.

The overall results were very promising. From the 16 students who started, 14 stayed to the end of the course and, in an equivalence test to assess their University entrance rank, scored in the band 74-89 (out of 100). The benefits identified, through surveying, included the obvious educational benefits, economic and financial benefits, employment prospects, personal/family benefits and the community/social benefits. Ultimately, the last should be no great surprise, because there is less need to give support to these people and this reverses the overall trend of decline.

The major lessons learned here were that communities do place high value on university-community engagement but they need long lead times to ensure broad community-based promotion and ensures sustainable class sizes. Localisation into the community is important. You need to train local tutors in overall resources, keep links between the university and the students to maintain motivation, but relationship with other universities in the region is also important as enabled students may move to other Universities. However, support can’t finish at the end of the course. The presenter identified that there is still a need to provide scholarships for graduates wanting to study in Canberra.

The risks for the future, given how fragile this engagement is and that ongoing support is required, include the increasing costs for the students. When first run, the only cost was $40 for the textbook. Now, student amenities fees are going to add $200 for this. It is, of course, the mistake of privilege to make such statements as “well, if it’s important, then it’s only $200” and pick something that we perceive as a luxury for the target group to forgo. I found this talk interesting from many perspectives and also went up to thank the presenter for their efforts in trying to make a positive change to their region which, ultimately, will have great benefits for the community.

HERDSA 2012: What is the New Academy?

Posted: July 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I attended some (more) interesting talks today on building research capacity, how we build the connection between education and research (the dreaded research-teaching nexus) and how we identify ourselves as academics. If I were going to summarise all three of these talks, it would be as:

How are we defining the Academy of the 21st Century?

There is no doubt that research is a crucial component of what we do – you can’t even be registered as a University in Australia unless you pursue research – but it often seems to be the favoured child in any discussion of importance for promotion and allocation of serious resources. Now I realise that a lot of work is going into fixing this but research has, for many years, counted for more.

So it’s interesting that, as Winthrop Professor Shelda Debowski, UWA, observed after returning from her Churchill Fellowship, we don’t really bother to do as much training as we should for research. Research success doesn’t automatically flow from finishing a PhD, any more than a PhD is an indication of readiness or aptitude to teach – yet many early researchers don’t get a great deal of development assistance. This leads, in some cases, to what Debowski refers to as middlescence: a great PhD but after 5+ years it all dies.

Succesful research requires many capabilities and ongoing learning and, while our universities try to support this, we’re not often sure what the best way is to support this. Staff are seeking guidance – research leaders are keen to help. How can we connect them usefully and efficiently? For me, I rephrase the question as:

How are we defining the Research Academy of the 21st Century?

Research is a simple world with a complex set of concepts behind it. Are we looking at the basis of inputs, outputs, strategy and impact? Are we looking at industrial interaction with collaboration, engagement and support? Are we being productive and effective, innovative and creative? There is, for many people’s careers, not much room for failure.

The PhD used to be all that was needed, in theory, because we had the time to make some mistakes, to find our feet, and to iterate towards a better model. Not any more.

My take on this, to go on from what I was saying in the last post, is that we can define the New Research Academy in terms of its environment. Like any species, the New Research Academic must adapt to the environment that they are in or they will perish. Climate change is a threat to the world, similarly Academy Change is a threat to the old inhabitants. The New Academy is fast, hungry, competitive, resource starved, commoditised, industry linked and, above all, heavily dependent on the perception of our efforts. The speed of change makes a difference here because if you were raised in the gentler environment of the Old Academy, but have been around for 20 years, then you have probably achieved enough success to survive. If I may take another biological example, you have accumulated enough resources that you can survive the lean years or the harsher years. The New Academy has frosts and only so many places available for the tribe. You build your resources quickly or it’s over.

Unless, of course, you can find a group to support you. Returning to Debowski’s material, she points out why development of researchers is so critical:

  • Start with PhD – used to be the only thing that you needed to do.
  • Now you have to understand how it fits into strategic research areas and areas of strength (broader sphere of understanding)
  • Need to hook in with a research community (this is your resource sharing group)
  • ECRs need to have to develop: communication skills, team and collaborative skills, project management, track record/profile, time, priority, career management, and grant seeking behaviour
  • Research managers and leaders need to take a professional stance to support this: induction, culture setting, human resource management practices, strategic management, financial management, relationship building, mentoring and sponsorship, project management, risk management, media/promotion.

But, looking at that final list, do some of those look like the behaviours of a professional research academic? I’ll come back to this.

Debowski finished by emphasising the role of mentors and, in the Old/New Academy framework, this makes even more sense. A new PhD student has only a limited amount of time before poor performance effectively removes them from the appointment and job pool – they don’t have time to waste taking false paths. A mid-career researcher needs to work out which path to take and then has to optimise for it – do I continue teaching, do I focus on research, should I take that Associate Deans position? This is where a mentor is vital because the New Academy has a cold wind blowing through it. Huddled together, we’ll see Summer again – but, of course, you have to huddle with the right people.

This brings me to the next talk, on How Universities Connect Education and Research, presented by Professor Lawrence Cram. This was a very interesting talk, dealing with complexity theory to explain the small-scale chaotic relationships in trying to explain which actions get people promoted these days. This is a very mechanistic approach to life in the New Academy. Which X do I need to maximise to achieve Y? Cram, however, very nicely identifies that X is in fact a set of things, Y is a different set of things, and the connections between them operate at different levels at different times.

Cram identified the outputs of Universities as experience goods, where the product is hard to observe in advance, in terms of characteristics such as quality or price, but you’re quickly aware of how good they are once consumed. This generally requires you to sell your product on reputation but once this reputation is established, your pricing model (market position) tends to stay fairly stable. (Amusingly, dropping the price of experience goods, because we’re unsure of how the goods are created, may result in uncertainty because people will make up reasons for the price drop that generally include drop in quality, rather than efficiency of delivery or something positive.)

This makes mapping inputs to outputs difficult and explains why such measurable outputs as number of students, pass rates and research publications are far more likely to form the basis of any funding. Cram is looking across a very large area with a very large number of questions: does research success generate a corresponding success ‘buzz’ in the student body? Does research discovery parallel or assist the student with their own voyage of discovery through their courses?

Ultimately, directives from senior management drive a functional and idealistic approach that produces graduates and intellectual property, but most universities are struggling to unify this with directives and government funding, compared to what students want. Linking this back to the roles that we are expecting research managers to take, we start to see a managerial focus that is starting to dominate our professional academic staff. I rephrase this, and segue to the next talk, as:

How are we defining the Professional Academic in the 21st Century?

The final talk used identity theory to examine the different work ideologies that academics espouse. Wayne O’Donohue presented his and Richard Winter’s paper on “Understanding academic identity conflicts in the public university: Importance of work ideologies” and it was both an interesting presentation, as well as being a full paper that I hope to finish reading this evening.

Fundamentally, managerial and professional ideological beliefs differ on how academic work should be organised. As I have mention throughout this post, we are seeing more and more evidence of creeping requirement to become managers. Managerialism, according to Winter and O’Donohue, has moved us into market-driven entities that regard students as commodities. Consumers need to be swayed by branding and pandering to preferences – we risk basing the reputation of our experience good upon a good marketing campaign rather than a solid academic reputation.

The conceptual framework for this work is that the two identities are, effectively, at odds with each other. Academics who are forced to be managerial find themselves at odds with their idea of what it means to be an academic – they are not being who they want to be and are at odds with what their University wants them to be. If we are to be good managerial entities then we focus on competition and consumer preferences for allocating resources. If we are to be good academics, then we focus on economic and social welfare of all members, stressing normative goals and beliefs. It is hard to think of two more opposing points within this sphere and it is no wonder that the people surveyed by Winter and O’Donohue had to be censored to remove obscene language that reflected their frustration at their own perception of their role.

We know that the market is not all that good at managing public good items. We know the benefits of the educational system in breaking the poverty cycle, reducing crime and violence, improving families, but the market would have to change its short-term benefit model in order to factor this in. We are looking at the substantial differences of short term economic focus versus long term social welfare focus.

Ultimately, the dissonance generated by people doing things that they were asked to do, but didn’t want to do, causes dissatisfaction and cynicism. Dispirited academics leave. Leaving, of course, those who are willing to adapt to the more managerial focus to then rise through the ranks, take positions of power and then impose more managerial focuses.

So what is the New Academy? Is it really a world of bottoms on seats, feudalist in its enforced fealty to existing barons to see you through the lean years, unconnected to funding models and overly metricated in strange ways?

If you want my honest answer, I would say “Not yet.”

Yes, we are heavily measured, but we still have the freedom to challenge and correct those measurements. A great deal of work is being done to produce instruments that give us useful and applicable information, as well as ‘handy’ numbers.

Yes, it helps to be in a research group, but informal communities of practice, faculty and university initiatives, external funding sources such as OLT, ALTA and the ARC do not require you to sign your swords over to a baron or a King.

Yes, we are measured as to our student intakes but we are still, in many important ways, academically free. We can still maintain quality and be true to our academic heritage.

You don’t have to take me word for it. Read everything that I (and katrinafalkner) have been blogging about. You can see all of the work being done, that we have seen at this conference, to draw us all together, to make us remember that we are strong as group, to provide useful metrics, to collaborate, to mentor out of the desire to help rather than the desire to control and the work being down to find and advertise our identity and the way that we can achieve our goals.

Yes, the idea of the New Academy is intimidating, and I write as one who was lucky enough to ride the wave of the new expectations, but in the same way that we bring our students together to learn and explore the benefits of collaboration and social interaction, I am convinced that the best rebirthing of the Academy will occur as we continue to share our work, and meet to discuss it, and go back home and be active and build upon everything that we’ve discussed.

And, being honest, sometimes it just takes sticking to our point, when we’re right, and not doing something that we know is wrong. I know that these are times when people are scared for their jobs, and I’m certainly not immune to that either, but the question comes down to “how much will you put with?” Let me finish with two final questions, which are also, I’m afraid, a call-to-arms:

What have you done today to define the Academy of the 21st Century in a way that matches your ideals and intentions?

What will you do tomorrow?

HERDSA 2012: Informal Communities of Practice: What are the advantages?

Posted: July 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

One of the talks I went to today was on “Money, Mountains and the Law, The powerful process of interdisciplinary collaboration”. I’m afraid that I can’t give you all of the names of the presenters as there were two physical and three virtual (Edit: The speakers were Leslie Almberg and Judy McGowan – thanks, Leslie!)- and the paper was submitted by Symons (spelling corrected!), Almberg, Goh and McGowan, from Curtin in Western Australia.

The academics in question all came from different disciplines, and different generations and cultures of academia, and found that they had a key thing in common: they considered themselves to be “constructive dissenters”, people who are not happy with how things are in their own patch but rather than just grumbling, they’re looking to make positive change. In this case, these academics had to stop outside of their own discipline, looking in a framework for embedding language elements into their courses, and their similarities were identified by a facilitator who said, effectively, “You’re all saying the same thing from your own discipline.”

The language expert, in this case, worked as interdisciplinary hub – a meeting point for the other three academics. For me, what was most interesting here was how the community of practice was defined between people with similar ideas, rather than people from similar disciplines.

One of the academics, who self-described themselves as an end-of-life academic, was musing on the difference in the modern academy from the one that she had originally entered. The new academy is competitive, full of Roosters (in the strutting sense, rather than the sitting on eggs sense [ Edit: Roosters don’t sit on eggs, do they?]), and requires you to be constantly advertising your excellence. (I’ll speak more on this in another post.) This makes it harder to form an in-discipline community of practice, because there’s always the chance that you will think about the person across from you as a competitor first and a collaborator second.

I have a blog!

The advantages of the interdisciplinary community of practice, as outlined in the talk, is that it is outside of your traditional hierarchies, formality and established space for competition. It doesn’t matter if you tell someone your amazing teaching secret – you won’t be competing against them for promotion. Better still, telling someone something good doesn’t have to make them (if they’re keyed this way) feel bad because you’re outperforming them on their home turf.

In the words of the speakers: these interdisciplinary communities of practice are “organic, outside of hierarchies and silos, provide support mechanism, remove the undercurrent of competitiveness and liberate”.

This forced me to carry out some reflection because I am, to a great extent, someone who would be easy to describe as a rooster. I am a very visible, and mildly successful, early career academic who has a number of things to talk about. (Long time readers will know that an absence of content hasn’t actually slowed me down yet, either.) I try very hard to be inclusive, to help, to be a mentor in the small circle of expertise where that would apply, and to shut up when I can’t help. I work with just about anyone who wants to work with me, but I do expect people to work. I collaborate inside my school, outside of my discipline and outside of my University and, to be honest, the feeling of liberation of working with someone else who has the same problems is fantastic – it makes you feel less alone. The fact that I can share ideas with someone and know that we’re building bridges, not being boastful or accidentally (but implicitly) belittling people who haven’t achieved the same things, is one of the best reasons to work ex discipline.

But I realise that I would not be some people’s first choice to work with because I am still, to many interpretations, a rooster. Obviously, I have a lot of personal reflection left to do on this to work out how I can still achieve and maintain a position as a positive role model, while being fairly sure that I don’t end up as a point of division or someone that is seen as a glory hound. I would be slightly surprised if the last were felt widely but it’s a good time to step back and think about my dealings with the people who are more successful than me (have I been resentful or subordinate?) and the people who are on my level (are we helping each other?) and those people who might benefit from my help (am I helping them or am I being unapproachable)?

HERDSA 2012: Integrating concepts across common engineering first year courses

Posted: July 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I attended a talk by Dr Andrew Guzzomi on “Interdisciplinary threshold concepts in engineering”, where he talked about University of Western Australia’s reconfiguration of their first year common engineering program in the face of their new 3+2 course roll-out across the University. Most Unis have a common engineering first year that is the basis for all disciplines. This is usually a collection of individual units each focusing on one discipline, developed and taught by academics from that discipline. For example, civil engineers teach statics, mechs teach dynamics, but there is no guaranteed connection or conceptual linkage between the two areas. This is despite the fact that statics is effectively dynamics with some key variables set to zero. (Engineers, you may now all howl in dismay!)

This work looked at what the threshold concepts were for engineering. These threshold concepts are transformative, in that if you understand them it will change the way that you think about the discipline, but they are also troublesome, they need work to teach and effort to learn. But, in theory, if we identify the right threshold concepts then we:

  • Focus teaching, learning and assessment activities
  • Renew otherwise crowded curricula

This is a big issue as we balance the requirements of our students, our discipline, our professional bodies and industry – we have to make sure that whatever teach is appropriate and the most useful (in all of the objective spaces) thing that we can be teaching.

Dr Guzzomi then discussed the ALTC (Australian Learning and Teaching Council) project that supported the basic investigation to conduct an inventory of what all groups considered to be the core threshold concepts. UWA was the case study, with an aim to reducing a guide for other educators, and to add back to threshold concept theory. This is one of the main contributions of the large-scale Australia-wide educational research support bodies: they can give enough money and influence to a project to allow change to occur.

(I picked up from the talk that, effectively, it helped to have a Chair of Engineering Education on board to get an initiative like this through. Even then, there was still resistance from some quarters. This isn’t surprising. If we all agreed with each other, I’d be shocked.)

The threshold concept identification required a very large set of workshops and consultative activities, across students and staff both within and without the discipline, starting with a diversification phase as concepts were added, and then moving to an integration phase that rationalised these concepts down into the set that really expressed the key threshold concepts of engineering for first year.

The implementation in Syllabus terms required the implementors to:

  • Focus teaching and learning on TCs
  • Address troublesome features
  • provide opportunities to experience variation (motion unit taught using variation theory, when students work at indiv tables, doing different problems at different tables but pool similar answers for comparison to show the difference in approach and answer)
Then developed concept maps for each unit, showing inclusion, requirements and examples, used with, dependencies and so on.
This was then turned into a course implementation that had no lectures at all: courses were composed of four individual units that had readings, tutorial-like information sessions and 2 hour studio session that comprised practicals and more interaction sessions. I did ask Andrew about the assessment mechanisms in use and, while they’ve been completely rebuilt for the new course, they are still reviewing these to make sure that they exercise the threshold concepts appropriately. (I’ll be sending him e-mail to get more detail on this.)
Their findings so far are that these concept identification exercises have revealed the connections between the disciplines and the application of the same concepts across the whole of the discipline. Three concepts were identified as being good examples of concepts that have a reach that spread across all disciplines (integrating threshold concepts):
  1. System identification: where you work out which system he problem fits into to allow you simplify analysis
  2. Modelling and abstraction: where quantitative analysis is facilitated through translation to mathematical language and students use judgement to break system into salient components for modelling
  3. Dimensional reasoning: Identifying the variables needed to describe a complex system – making sure that equations balance.
The conclusions were relatively straight forward:
  • Rather than a traditional and relatively unlinked common foundation, teaching integrating concepts is showing promise
  • Threshold concepts provided the lens and developed approach to integrated disciplines
  • Teaching through variation supports student diversity in solutions
  • This approach reveals connections across engineering disciplines beyond those in which they later chose to specialise
UWA and U Melbourne run a very different degree program from the rest of us, so it’s always interesting to see what they are up to. In this case, there’s a lot going on. Not only have they done a great deal of surveying in order to find the new threshold concepts upon which their courses are now built, but they’ve also completely changed their teaching style to support it, with much greater use of collaboration and team work. I’ll be very interested to see some more follow-up on this after it’s run for the full year.

HERDSA 2012: Session 1 notes – Peer Assisted Teaching Schemes

Posted: July 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The second talk I went to in session 1 was more work on A/Professor Angela Carbone’s work in Peer Assisted Teaching Schemes, for which she has highly awarded and, for 2013, will be taking up a senior fellowship at the national level to continue this work. Congratulations, Ange! The subtitle of the talk was “A Way of Creating and Developing New Connections”.

There is a lot of support for new academics in terms of induction and teacher preparation but what about those educators who are already established but have units that are in need of reform or reduce? Who do they turn to in order to get help? What if you just want to adopt new technologies and you’ve been in the game for decades? Who can you ask for help? The core of the PATS work is that we need to think about teaching standards, more experienced staff, transition issues, risks, and new technology.

We are constantly being assessed – CEQ, SETU/SELT, lots of controversy around these instruments. Arts and Humanities seem to appear better than physical sciences, and there is not much research from either side to answer the question ‘why?’ Do student evaluations measure student outcomes or teacher effectiveness? According to the research, they don’t actually measure either. The use of these things for management addds stress to academics and their school – people get stressed when they even just use these measures in their class.

So, if we’re stressed, struggling and trying to adapt, it’s pretty obvious that we need help but the question is “where does this help come from?

What is PATS: academics within a faculty are partnered together and follow an informal process to discuss strategies to improve unit quality and develop educational innovations.

Aim:

  • to improve student satisfaction with units
  • improve the quality of teaching
  • to build leadership capacity amongst teachers.

A mentor and mentee are linked in a reciprocal partnership. The theoretical basis this comes from a large number of sources including Vygotsky, Lave, Gratch and Boud, looking at our teaching through four lenses, after Brookfield 1995. The four lenses are: the student view, the theoretical view, the autobiographical view and the colleague’s view, where another academic can serve as a critical friend.

The relationship between mentor and mentee begins before the semester, where the relationship is developed, with ongoing catch up sessions through the semester, discussion and review, including subsidised coffee meetings, culminating in a critical review (with a friendly perspective) and self-reflection. This is looking at all of the aspects with a critical eye but alongside someone that you now have a relationship with – a critical friend to assist you in your own reflection. However, within this, there are workshops and deliverables to make sure that both parties are actually working in and at the relationship – it’s not a free coffee club.

I can’t summarise all of the PATS work in one post but I think we can all identify people around us who might fall into this category: people who might need help but are outside of the traditional bootstrapping systems that we employ. A/Prof Carbone also commented that there were people that were taking part who were looking to improve good courses to really good ones, rather than just trying to fix courses that had been identified as under-performing. This was helping to reduce any lingering stigma at being in a PATS relationship with someone. Some of the unexpected results included the mentors and mentees forming a relationship that allowed them to work together on research and development beyond the designated course improvement.

In the framework of this conference, which is all about connections and community, it’s obvious that PATS is helping to link people together, making connections and building community. There are lots of works to read on this, and I enjoy reading through the theoretical underpinnings as well. (Plus, you know I’m a Vygotsky fan…) I already knew about this work but it’s always interesting to see how it’s evolving and developing.

HERDSA 2012: Session 1 notes – Student Wellbeing

Posted: July 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I won’t be giving detailed comments on all sessions – firstly, I can’t attend everything and, secondly, I don’t want you all to die of word poisoning – but I’ve been to a number of talks and thought I’d discuss those here that really made me think. (My apologies for the delay. I seem to be coming down with a cold/flu and it’s slowing me down.)

In Session 1, I went to a talk entitled “Integrating teaching, learning, support and wellbeing in Universities”, presented by Dr Helen Stallman from University of Queensland. The core of this talk was that, if we want to support our students academically, we have to support them in every other way as well. The more distressed students are, the less well they do academically. If we want good outcomes, we have to able to support students’ wellbeing and mental health. We already provide counselling and support skill workshops but very few students will go and access these resources, until they actually need them.

This is a problem. Tell a student at the start of the course, when they are fine, where they can find help and they won’t remember it when they actually may need to know where that resource is. We have a low participation in many of the counselling and support skill workshop activities – it is not on the student’s agenda to go to one of these courses, it is on their agenda is to get a good mark. Pressured for time, competing demands, anything ‘optional’ is not a priority.

The student needs to identify that they have a problem, then they have to be able to find the solution! Many University webpages not actually useful in this regard, although they contain a lot of marketing information on the front page.

What if we have an at-risk profile that we can use to identify students? It’s not 100% accurate. Students who are ‘at risk’ may not have problems but students who don’t have the profile may still have problems! We don’t necessarily know what’s going on with our students. Where we have 100s of students, how can we know all of them? (This is one of the big drivers for my work in submission management and elastic time – identifying students who are at risk as soon as they may be at risk.)

So let me reiterate the problem with the timing of information: we tend to mention support services once, at the start. People don’t access resources unless they’re relevant and useful at the particular time. Talking to people when they don’t have a problem – they’ll forget it.

So what are the characteristics of interventions that promote student success:

  • Inclusive of all students (and you can find it)
  • Encourages self-management skills  (Don’t smother them! Our goal is not dependency, it’s self-regulation)
  • Promotes academic achievement (highest potential for each of our students)
  • Promotes wellbeing (not just professional capabilities but personal capabilities and competencies)
  • Minimally sufficient (students/academics/unis are not doing more work than they need to, and only providing the level of input that is required to achieve this goal.)
  • Sustainable (easy for students and academics)

Dr Stallman then talked about two tools – the Learning Thermometer and The Desk. Student reflection and system interface gives us the Learning Thermometer, then automated and personalised student feedback is added, put in by academic. Support and intervention, web-based, as a loop around student feedback. Student privacy data is maintained and student gets to choose intervention that is appropriate. Effectively, the Learning Thermometer tells the student which services are available, as and when they are needed, based on their results, their feedback and the lecturer’s input.

This is designed to promote self-management skills and makes the student think “What can I do? What are the things that I can do?” Gives students of knowledge of which resources they can access. (And this resource is called “The Desk”) Who are the people who can help me?

What is being asked is: What are the issues that get in the way of achieving academic success?

About “The Desk”: it contains quizzes related to all part of the desk that gives students personalised feedback to give them module suggestions as appropriate. Have a summary sheet of what you’ve done so you can always remember it. Tools section to give you short tips on how to fix things. Coffee House social media centre to share information and pictures (recipes and anything really).

To allow teachers to work out what is going on, an addition to the Learning Thermometer can give the teacher feedback based on reflection and the interface. Early feedback to academics allows us to improve learning outcomes. THese improvements in teaching practices. (Student satisfaction correlates poorly with final mark, this is more than satisfaction.)

The final items in the talk focussed on:

  • A universal model of prevention
  • All students can be resilient
  • Resources need to be timely relevant and useful
  • Multiple access points
  • Integrated within the learning environment

What are the implications?

  • Focus on prevention
  • Close the loop between learning, teaching, wellbeing and support
  • More resilient students
  • Better student graduate outcomes.

Overall a very interesting talk, which a lot of things to think about. How can I position my support resources so that students know where to go as and when they need them? Is ‘resiliency’ an implicit or explicit goal inside my outcomes and syllabus structure? Do the mechanisms that I provide for assessment work within this framework?

With my Time Banking hat on, I am always thinking about how I can be fair but flexible, consistent but compassionate, and maintain quality while maintaining humanity. This talk is yet more information to consider as I look at alternative ways to work with students for their own benefit, while improving their performance at the same time.

Contact details and information on tools discussed:

h.stallman@uq.edu.au
http://www.thelearningthermometer.org.au
http://www.thedesk.org.au
thedesk@uq.edu.au

HERSDA Keynote: “Cultivating Connections Throughout the Academe: Learning to Teach by Learning to Learn” Dr Kathy Takayama.

Posted: July 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A very interesting keynote today and I took a lot of notes. Anyone who has read my SIGCSE blogs knows that I’m prone to being verbose so I hope that this is useful if wordy. (Any mistakes are, of course, mine.)

Dr Takayama started talk with an art image: “Venn diagrams (under the spotlight)” by Amalia Pica. She stressed how the Venn Diagram was simple, versatile, intearction, connection, commonality, and it also transcends boundaries – the overlap of two colours produces a new colour. We can also consider this as an absence of difference (sharing) or new knowledge (creation). However the background of the artwork was based in the artist’s experience of the suppression of group theory and Venn diagrams in Argentina – as both of these were seen to encourage subversive forms of group activity and critical theory. Dr Takayama then followed this thread into ideas of inclusion and exclusion. What are the group dynamics from our structures? How do we group students and acaemdics into exclusive and inclusive domains? What does this mean for our future?
How does this limit learning?
She then talked about our future professoriate – those students who will go on to join us in the professorial ranks. She broke this into three aspects: Disciplinary Identity, Dispositions for engagement and Integrative communities. Our disciplinary identity reflects our acculturation to disciplinary practices and habits of mind, where our dispositions identify who we find ourselves in the learning – rather than focusing on what to learn.
“In the face of today’s hyper-accelerated ultra-competitive global society, the preservation of opportunities for self-development and autonmous reflection is a value we underestimate at our peril.” (Richard Wolin)
When we discuss the emergence of disciplinary identity, we are talking about expert thinking – the scholarly habits of a discipline that allow someone to identify themselves as a member of the discipline. What do we do that allows us to say “I am a microbiologist” or “I am an engineer”?
The development of expertise is through iterative authentic experiences, truly appropriate activities carried out inside the disciple, where we have discipline-centred practices, including signature pedagogies (Schulman). The signature pedagogies of a discipline have four features. They must  be pervasive, routine, habitual and deeply engaging
Dr Takayama then discussed, at some length, a study in placing students into unfamiliar territory, where they were required to take scholarly habits from another discipline. In this case, Dr Takayama (a microbiologist) exchanged scholarly habits with students of David Reichart – Historian. Academics confirm to standard practices of their disciplines and students acculturate quickly. Takayama and Reichart sought to take pedagogies from other areas to take students into new thinking processes.
Students from the History course were required to use a science poster basis (research poster) to present their work, instead of a traditional report. The word “Poster” was reacted to badly – students thought that was a cheapening of their effort for a year’s work. Students had to think outside of the norms and discovered new aspects of communication, voice and interpretation in the unusual territory. This also added a challenge component and allowed a multi-dimensional exploration of area.
The microbiology students had to document their research in a completely blank book and were allowed to create a narrative in that blank book. This was at odds with usual structure for Science: accurate, reproducible, adhere to convention, no narrative, no first person, dates, signatures. While accuracy and reproducibly were still enforced, students were encouraged to explore much more widely in their blank book.
Student work started to resemble commonplace books (loci communes) – a compiled work with annotations and narrative from the compiler. The new student books contain personalisation, reflection, narrative, collage, moments of exhilaration and discovery – but they maintained fidelity and scientific accuracy.
This then led to the core idea from the work: (An) engagement with the unfamiliar as a means for further development of expertise.
Students’ understandings are deeply tied to existing and established practices – to the point that students feared that outside conventions would render their work invalid. Working in unfamiliar territory allows the students to refine their understanding of their discipline and push the boundaries, as well as their own understanding. Lecturers had to take risks as well, to get this realisation.
In our traditional dispositions for engagement, we have had a tendency to create a learning culture that is less interested in the unfamiliar and we have implicitly driven a focus on understanding a discipline vs developing an understanding of oneself. The nature of learning as situated in institutional cultures is something that we can see from the inside but the student perspective is vital as we want to know what the students think that we look like. From the students’ perspectives, they see learning in terms of specialisation, globalisation, technology and collaboration. This is a critical forum through which students made sense of their own place in relation to the  discipline.
Students identified two over-arching goals:
  • Routine Expertise: The Habits of mind and skills associated with efficiency and performance in familiar  domains, and
  • Adaptive Expertise (after Bransford): applying knowledge effectively to novel situations or unique problems
Students discover themselves in the material – finding connection and allowing deep eqnuiry into their own nature. (Students’ awareness of themselves in the course or the curriculum (Barbazat, Amherst))
Looking from our perspective, based on what our students want and how they succeed, Barnett (U London) identified dispositions for learning as Venturing Forward
  • A will to learn
  • A will to encounter the unfamiliar
  • A will to engage
  • A preparedness to listen
  • A willingness to be changed
  • A determination to keep going.
 Dr Takayama then went on to talk about developing a strong learning and teaching community through courses such as Brown’s Certification program, which has any benefits in enhancing the perception of value and practices in learning and teaching, as well as overall enhancement of the new post-graduates. One of the core points identified was that many of the PhD students who are produced will go on to teach in liberal arts colleges, institutions with an undergraduate teaching focus and two-year colleges. If we don’t teach them how to teach then they will be woefully underprepared for the future that lies before them – just being good at research doesn’t translate into skill at teaching, hence it must be fostered and well-organised certification programs are a good way to do this.
I hope to comment more on the cert program shortly, but  a very interesting talk with lots of ideas for me to take home and to think about.

When the Stakes are High, the Tests Had Better Be Up to It.

Posted: July 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

(This is on the stronger opinion side but, in the case of standardised testing as it is currently practised, this will be a polarising issue. Please feel free to read the next article and not this one.)

If you make a mistake, please erase everything from the worksheet, and then leave the room, as you have just wasted 12 years of education.

A friend on FB (thanks, Julie!) linked me to an article in the Washington Post that some of you may have seen. The article is called “The Complete List of Problems with High-Stakes Standardised Tests” by Marion Brady, in the words of the article. a “teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author”. (That’s attribution, not scare quotes.)

Brady provides a (rather long but highly interesting) list of problems with the now very widespread standardised testing regime that is an integral part of student assessment in some countries. Here. Brady focuses on the US but there is little doubt that the same problems would exist in other areas. From my readings and discussions with US teachers, he is discussing issues that are well-known problems in the area but they are slightly intimidating when presented as a block.

So many problems are covered here, from an incorrect focus on simplistic repetition of knowledge because it’s easier to assess, to the way that it encourages extrinsic motivations (bribery or punishment in the simplest form), to the focus on test providers as the stewards and guides of knowledge rather than the teachers. There are some key problems, and phrases, that I found most disturbing, and I quote some of them here:

[Teachers oppose the tests because they]

“unfairly advantage those who can afford test prep; hide problems created by margin-of-error computations in scoring; penalize test-takers who think in non-standard ways”

“wrongly assume that what the young will need to know in the future is already known; emphasize minimum achievement to the neglect of maximum performance; create unreasonable pressures to cheat.”

“are open to massive scoring errors with life-changing consequences”

“because they provide minimal to no useful feedback”

This is completely at odds with what we would consider to be reasonable education practice in any other area. If I had comments from students that identified that I was practising 10% of this, I would be having a most interesting discussion with my Head of School concerning what I was doing – and a carpeting would be completely fair! This isn’t how we should teach and we know it.

I spoke yesterday about an assault on critical thinking as being an assault on our civilisation, short-sightedly stabbing away at helping people to think as if it will really achieve what (those trying to undermine critical thinking) actually wanted. I don’t think that anyone can actually permanently stop information spreading, when that information can be observed in the natural world, but short-sightedness, malign manipulation of the truth and ignorance can certainly prevent individuals from gaining access to information – especially if we are peddling the lie that “everything which needs to be discovered is already known.”

We can, we have and we probably (I hope) always will work around these obstacles in information, these dark ages as I referred to them yesterday, but at what cost of the great minds who cannot be applied to important problems because they were born to poor families, in the ‘wrong’ state, in a district with no budget for schools, or had to compete against a system that never encouraged them to actually think?

The child who would have developed free safe power, starship drives, applicable zero-inflation stable economic models, or the “cure for cancer” may be sitting at the back of a poorly maintained, un-airconditioned, classroom somewhere, doodling away, and slowly drifting from us. When he or she encounters the standardised test, unprepared, untrained, and tries to answer it to the extent of his or her prodigious intellect, what will happen? Are you sufficiently happy with the system that you think that this child will receive a fair hearing?

We know that students learn from us, in every way. If we teach something in one way but we reward them for doing something else in a test, is it any surprise that they learn for the test and come to distrust what we talk about outside of these tests? I loathe the question “will this be in the exam” as much as the next teacher but, of course, if that is how we have prioritised learning and rewarded the student, then they would be foolish not to ask this question. If the standardised test is the one that decides your future, then, without doubt, this is the one that you must set as your goal, whether student, teacher, district or state!

Of course, it is the future of the child that is most threatened by all of this, as well as the future of the teaching profession. Poor results on a standardised test for a student may mean significantly reduced opportunity, and reduced opportunity, unless your redemptive mechanisms are first class, means limited pathways into the future. The most insidious thread through all of this is the idea that a standardised test can be easily manipulated through a strategy of learning what the answer should be, to a test question, rather than what it is, within the body of knowledge. We now combine the disadvantaged student having their future restricted, competing against the privileged student who has been heavily channeled into a mode that allows them to artificially excel, with no guarantee that they have the requisite aptitude to enjoy or take advantage of the increased opportunities. This means that both groups are equally in trouble, as far as realising their ambitions, because one cannot even see the opportunity while the other may have no real means for transforming opportunity into achievement.

The desire to control the world, to change the perception of inconvenient facts, to avoid hard questions, to never be challenged – all of these desires appear to be on the rise. This is the desire to make the world bend to our will, the real world’s actual composition and nature apparently not mattering much. It always helps me to remember that Cnut stood in the waves and commanded them not to come in order to prove that he could not control the waves – many people think that Cnut was defeated in his arrogance, when he was attempting to demonstrate his mortality and humility, in the face of his courtiers telling him that he had power above that of mortal men.

How unsurprising that so many people misrepresent this.

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