Critical Pedagogy

Introduction

This resource takes the form of a conversation between two white members of staff, Dr Eileen Pollard, from the University Teaching Academy, and, Dr Jenny Reeve, from Professional Services. The conversation is structured around them having watched these videos of Student Case Studies that record the experiences of racialised students on campus; these stories are voiced by BAME Ambassadors and/or actors.

The conversation is one of critical friendship and is structured around the three questions below, and was designed to model, especially to white colleagues, the need to reflect on the realities of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) student experiences, in order to confidently advocate for our students:

• If you were to summarise to a colleague the learning you have taken from these videos, what would you say?
• Did these videos prompt you to reflect on your own teaching? If so, which aspects in particular?
• How will you change these reflections into action?

Positionality, representation and further work

Eileen previously worked as a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Chester and then as a Learner Developer at Manchester Metropolitan. She has over ten years experience teaching in HE and joined UTA in February 2022.

Jenny has taught history in a number of universities in several countries as well as in schools in the US school system. More recently she delivered tailored study skill sessions for the ASPIRE (now STRIVE) programme and on a second-year sociology unit, Race, Racism and Society.

Eileen and Jenny are critical friends and white allies.

They acknowledge the need for alternative epistemologies and further representation in this area of work, as such this recording marks the start of a series of conversations about ‘difference’ in the HE space.

If you have any questions or feedback about this resource, please contact Dr Eileen Pollard e.pollard@mmu.ac.uk.

Intentions and limitations

This conversation is a starting point, ideas are welcome to support/foster development of other resources.

This article on allyship and this blog on allyship are worth reading for further context and guidance, as is the Manchester Met Respect at Work and Study Policy and Procedure (password required) as well as other policies and strategies supporting inclusion, diversity and equity at the University.

Eileen and Jenny acknowledge there are limitations to the case study videos and indeed limitations to their own conversation and positionalities as white.

For further reading, please see Robin DiAngelo (2018) White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Beacon Press.

Glossary of terms

Decolonising the curriculum: identifying, acknowledging and challenging the ways in which colonialism has impacted upon perceived knowledge and learning, including what is taught, who teaches and the spaces where teaching and learning takes place.

Anti-racism: recognising that it is not sufficient to be non-racist and that anti-racism requires the enacting in behaviours the values of inclusion, diversity and equity.

Whiteness: an understanding that white cultures, positions and histories have had and do have a powerful structural and systemic effect, which needs to be acknowledged, examined and questioned.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the many stakeholders who fed back on this resource and made it stronger.

This work has contributed to the forming of The Collective, a staff group at Manchester Met that brings together academic and professional services colleagues from across the University who are working on addressing Racial Equity gaps. If colleagues wish to join, please email Dr Eileen Pollard at e.pollard@mmu.ac.uk.

Finally, as well as recognising Black pain, it is important to say that this resource acknowledges as well that there is also Black joy.

Transcript

The most effective personal tutoring is relational personal tutoring. By which I mean personal tutoring that places the development of the relationship between tutor and tutee and trust therein at the heart of the activity. Our personal tutoring policy at Manchester Metropolitan University places the importance of relationships at the heart by handing over the design of personal tutoring systems to program teams.

We are proud of the diversity of our learners at Manchester Met, and we recognise that the people who know these wide ranging cohort best are the program teams who teach them. Since being appointed in February 2022, I have been contacted by Liverpool John Moores, UCL, and the University of Leeds to find out more about our locally owned approach.

The policy was developed following consultation with a very large number of stakeholders during the HEFCE funded Intervention for Success Personal Tutoring Project 2017 to 2019. From which I quote “Personal tutoring is often seen as the answer to a question that is in fact ill defined, and that has a myriad of different interpretations by students and staff”. From our institution wide work, underpinned by a soft systems methodology, we proposed the following actions that were implemented:

One; an institution wide purpose statement for personal tutoring as a starting point for local adaptation as needed.

Two; a set of design and evaluation questions that can be applied to existing or proposed personal tutoring models to interrogate their likely impact.

Three; a set of resources that support program teams in designing personal tutoring systems for their context.

Four; a personal tutoring policy that sets out the expectations for personal tutoring at a high level across Manchester Met.

Links to more detailed findings and publications are available from the University Teaching Academy website, including data analysis from the Manchester Met Student Union Award, in the category of personal tutor. Analysis of these comments revealed three aspects to the tutur/tutee relationship that can make students feel supported, motivated and sometimes inspired. The tutor cares about me, helps me improve my work, values me as a learner. These insights informed both the institution wide purpose statement and the three C’s that operationalized it. First, this is the purpose statement produced following many focus groups of diverse stakeholders, even beyond the original time span of the project and into the pandemic.

A student support system delivered by academics staff through a coaching approach that recognises the importance of personalised and individual support in creating equal opportunities for students to succeed and fulfill their potential through a five year planning approach to personal, academic and career development. As well as clarifying the personal tutor as a member of the academic staff rather than professional services, and that they would take a coaching approach.

The emphasis on personal, academic and career development neatly translated into the three C’s of activity for the personal tutor. These were course, progress and attainment, community, belonging, confidence and support and career, planning and goal setting. And yes, this all concerned skills development. But what about diverse learners? Well, equal opportunities are at the heart of the strategic purpose statement is further operationalised by local design and ownership of personal tutoring systems within programs.

For example, on our website we have case studies of different personal tutoring systems from sport and exercise sciences, strategy, enterprise and sustainability, and English, each tailored to the specific disciplinary needs of their learners. Therefore, local ownership of personal tutoring is one way to meet the different requirements of diverse learners across an institution. Ultimately, like so much in higher education, context is everything.

So in sport and exercise sciences, personal tutors taught their duties in core units; academic skills at level four, research methods at Level five; and staff were buddied with another tutor, allowing them to team teach sessions. Elsewhere in strategy, enterprise and sustainability, personal tutors also teach their tutee’s on professional development units using a strengths profile they were trained to use by Cappfinity, whereas the English Department is a unit called Metropolis, all about the city of Manchester. These systems work because, as I said at the beginning, they place the building of trusting relationships at there heart.

Transcript

Orlagh McCabe 

Hi, my name’s Orlagh. 

Paul Giladi 

Hi, I’m Paul. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Welcome to another episode of the Manchester Met Critical Pedagogy podcast series. 

Paul Giladi 

And in today’s episode, we’ll hear from Jonathan Rodwell, who is a Senior Lecturer in international relations here. Jonathan is going to be talking about diagnosing and overcoming problems with contemporary knowledge and information ecologies. 

Jonathan Rodwell 

I’m trying to link two things together. The first is the extent to which the nature of university study and debate feeds the social and political failings of current politics and society. And the second is how that links to a flawed approach within our teaching to the use of information and changes in the media. At the end, I’ll say how I want to try to do things a little differently, but I’ve not yet had time to find out how successful my new approach is, and I do need to do more reading about it.  

On the first part, I think an idealised university / academic approach to debate - the idea of a space where different arguments can be ‘discussed’ openly (which is what is certainly expected as the default in my areas teaching) - is a myth. This myth feeds current problems. Why do I think it’s a myth? Because I think this ‘debate’ environment is not the open discussion of competing viewpoints, but the dominance of the most confident voices in the room (be this a seminar room, a conference room, or review of work). I’m minded here of what Karl Popper said, namely that science doesn’t progress through experimentation, but it progresses when old scientists die. In short, confidence links to power and it’s power that wins, not argument. And, as a result, today, we’re surrounded by confident bullshitters (to use Harry Frankfurt’s framing) and I think we sometimes need to wonder about what we produce and encourage in the room, the extent to which we teach and encourage people to be confident presenters of something where the consequences of that thing is actually of far less importance than just ‘wining’ that moment. You win the debate in the room. But, so what? Where is the space for the voices not heard? 

Ok, all that is a five min podcast in itself! So, I want to briefly cover what I think also links to this. Universities failure to engage with a change in, let’s say, knowledge and information ecology. In short, there is loads of info out there, now including something like ChatGPT. So how do we as educators navigate it? This links to the previous thing because I think most educators worry about ‘false’ info, or controlled info. Myth busting! Fact checking! Students should not use ‘bad’ sources, because only by using the right and proper info then we can return to our reasoned debate. But I don’t think that’s the problem. The problem - as explored by Neil Postman in things like ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ (inspired by Aldous Huxley), and others such as Marshall McLuhan - is the problem of there being so much info that we don’t care. So, the problem is not that x is deemed true but that x is in fact false. The real problem is superficiality. There is so much stuff, everything counts so nothing matters if it works for you. It’s just entertainment. And, as a result, what is often communicated is glib.  This feeds the confident, but superficial ‘debate’ and ‘discussion’ we have. Unserious positions emerge as a result. It’s just a game.  

In an effort to try and teach in light of this stuff, what I want to do is move away from the ‘traditional’ ‘debate’ seminar towards a ‘disproving’ seminar. On this point, I’m inspired by something I read recently. A scientist visited a flat earth conference. They went there to try and understand why the delegates couldn’t see the nonsense in what they were saying, why they couldn’t just accept accurate and established facts. These people were anti-science, according to the scientist. But what the scientist found was that the delegates believed in science. They believed in facts! But the delegates responded to his science as ‘biased’ - just one of many possible approaches, no better than theirs. And I think we do the same thing as academics in order to foster the ‘traditional’ debate. This scientist tried something different. Instead of offering different facts, or even an argument / debate, he would say “ok, if I could do anything, provide you with anything that would change your mind, what would it be?” And he said it was in that moment, where he simply asked questions to lead his someone to consider their own logic, that some had to reconsider.  

This is what I’m trying to do, not have seminars as a debate, but instead a session where we all start from a position, and think “what would we need to find to reject this, or challenge this? And let’s see if we can find that now in the room using the tools we have”; we just keep asking those questions, if we can, then we keep going. If we can’t ask any more questions and find any more info to reject something, we have to just accept that position as settled and move on. The key thing is I go in not telling students what to find – we do this collectively, we’re trying to find answers and info to answer the “ok, so what do we need to reject this position?” together. As a result, hopefully all can be involved: we’ll collectively progress as a group, not favouring the loudest voice.  

I should end by noting that beyond the fact this is basically just the logic of ‘disproving’, I think this links quite closely to Neil Postman again, who in his 1969 book Teaching as a Subversive Activity proposed his ‘enquiry education’, but I need to read a bit more on that. 

Orlagh McCabe 

I just thought that was great. It speaks to me. It speaks to me because it’s about dialogue. First of all, Jonny’s style, his colloquial approach to the podcast, I felt like he was talking to me. It was so nice to really hear about his practice. It felt so real. And I loved the way that he has flipped up a traditional approach for his discipline and really started to think about an innovative way of changing things with pulling things together differently. And I note his concerns about AI and I thought that he tied in so well with the idea of the superficial and the idea that we kind of reinforce a narrative about discourses forever being represented, and that it is really hard to challenge that dominance. 

And I thought it was great: everything is becoming so superficial within that context that he’s looking for something more meaningful and he gets that through his active learning approach. And I just thought it was so instructive to hear all about that. 

Paul Giladi 

Yeah, I mean, totally agree. It’s particularly super-relevant for contemporary society, as we know. Given the amount of BS floating around, I think it was really useful the way that Johnny pointed to how now with the culture of bullshit in the technical Frankfurt sense, there isn’t an interest in truth per se, there is an interest in personal gain. In that sense, we have to be particularly open to myth-busting and fact-checking, which is all well and good. But like you said, superficiality: superficiality with respect to whether it’s just using generative AI to produce results, or even speakers just simply floating ideas around in the seminar room thinking that because one has certain privileges (e.g. gender-based-, cis-privileges) that such practice means that they’re entitled to certain discursive spaces. 

What’s really interesting as well, and it’s perfectly in line with the theme of the pedagogy series that we have here, is when Johnny talked about power and the way power wins in arguments, because he’s really debunking that really kind of cuddly but innocent and slightly naive Habermasian view that all we need is the force of the better argument. That’s why I think the Flat Earth Conference experience reference that Johnny used was really, really useful. 

You don’t begin discussing these kinds of ideas with people whom you’re never going to win over in terms of rational persuasion. You’re not going to rationally persuade a climate change denier about climate change being real and being anthropogenic. Equally, you don’t do same thing with flat earthers. What you have to do is just try and see how the logic of disproving is going to work in your favour. And I just think it’s fascinating.  

Orlagh McCabe 

I agree. And the whole notion of the disproving seminar I thought was really interesting. It’s a bit like problem-based learning. Where there is crossover is that Jonny’s idea of problem-based learning says a lot about inclusive practice and, like you say, in terms of the different dominant forces that are present within this kind of learning experience. Actually being able to offer a flat, inclusive non-hierarchical opportunity for learning is a really challenging thing to ask, and one of the things I think that was great and I would have liked to know more about in terms of how those voices are captured, whether Jonny uses any other kind of techniques like apps for teaching and things like that to capture the voices of those students who may be less likely to offer their opinion in these contexts. I would be really interested to hear more. But overall, I really enjoyed it, and it made me think a lot, which is exactly what this series is all about. 

Paul Giladi 

Precisely. I think any podcast that is concerned with the dynamics about knowledge and information environments, I mean, it’s a beautiful expression ‘knowledge, information ecology’. That’s the most important point, because if anything, everything is derived from those kinds of environments. If they’re healthy, they’re functioning properly, then maybe we can enjoy the Habermasian naivety of the force of the better argument. 

But given that 90% of knowledge and information environments aren’t like that, we do need to be much more critically motivated and attentive. I think that’s all for now. Join us next time for some more very exciting adventures in critical pedagogy. 

Orlagh McCabe and Paul Giladi 

Bye! 

Transcript

Paul Giladi 

Hi, I’m Paul. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Hi, I’m Orlagh. 

Paul Giladi 

And welcome to another episode of the Manchester Met Critical Pedagogy Podcast series! 

Orlagh McCabe 

In today’s episode, we’re going to be hearing from Emily Crompton, who is a Senior Lecturer in the Manchester School of Architecture. Emily’s talking to us about the ways in which she articulates the idea that ‘architecture is for everybody’. 

Emily Crompton 

Hello. My name name’s Emily Crompton, and I’m a Senior Lecturer at Manchester School of Architecture. I’ve taught on both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the school. One of my recent teaching leadership roles was being the first-year leader from 2017 to 2021. This is a role I really relished, as it’s a unique year in education of teacher professionals. Students essentially go from ‘zero’ to an architect. 

They begin as non-architects with a keen interest in the subject, of course, and then nine months later, they fostered the ability to vocalise and visualise their ideas, communicate complex spatial relationships, author creative projects with convincing narratives, and create both practical and beautiful proposals of potential futures. Figuring out ways to support the development or creation of a design process in individuals is part of my job that I love, and something I’m never tired of doing. 

My overarching theme for Year 1 was recognising students as individuals and not empty vessels: they are people who use buildings every day with knowledge and experience of how to use space. Our cohort has about 40% international students. So, with that, we had a wide diversity of cultural heritage that, of course, would impact those spatial experiences, and we found ways to encourage them to draw on their backgrounds through Design Project Briefs, such as selecting a product made in their hometown or country, and ask them to design a factory to make and sell that product. 

This task encourages sharing between students and staff and enable projects to have individuality, even though everyone in the end was working on the same brief of designing a factory. Another aim we have for students in First Year and throughout the degree is for them to become self-initiating professionals. Students come with many preconceptions of what architecture school will be like and what an architect is or what they look like. 

So part of our role as educators is to engender confidence in every student that the kind of architect they want to be is perfectly possible and that their ideas about space are valid and important: Architecture is for everybody. As part of the weekly structure, I curated a lecture series which acted in a number of different ways. It was a tool for imparting a foundation level of knowledge. 

For example, drawing conventions. As an assembly, such as weekly announcements about the course as well as an inspirational performance. I recall thinking that perhaps the way I present the lecture is just as important as the content. In one lecture, I was discussing the importance of taking building users’ needs into account when designing. This is the focus of my research and practice, so it’s something I’m particularly passionate about. 

The assembly-style nature of gathering the cohort together enables me to remind them they’re all in the same boat and that I was in that same boat, albeit many years previously. I realized that this personal connection of shared experience is vital for my teaching. While it can feel exposing to share some of my own experiences of how I design being able to draw on a successful career in the students’ field of study is a strength, and storytelling can be a powerful transmission technique. 

If I can relate my own experiences of practicing design to the students experience of design-based learning, this has potential to create a rich learning environment. The lecture in question began with me giving several examples of projects I had worked on in practice, which had elements of collaborative and co-design with building users. One project was for the LGBT Community Centre in Manchester. 

I worked with the Proud Trust who manage the building for around nine years, researching the old centre and co-designing their new one. For those who do not know where it is, it’s the gold building opposite Manchester Met’s newly refurbished Institute of Sport: go check it out! It currently only opens for specific events, but they operate a co-working space on Tuesday, so if you want to take a look inside and work somewhere a bit different, go ahead. 

Anyway, back to the lecture. Part of my explanation of my role in the design process is my personal connection to the project. My partner, Caroline, attended the centre as a young teenage lesbian. She later became a volunteer and then a trustee of the charity. And this is one of the reasons I was even aware of the building and project. 

This explanation means I have to come out to 200 first years all at once. But it’s not like I stand up and say, “Hi, I’m Emily, I’m gay!” In fact, the way my coming out was weaved into a story about an architectural project. It was very purposeful. It enabled the act to become more than just visibility. I was very conscious of this at the time and reflecting later. 

I realized that there were many different aspects as to why it was important for me to do it in that way. The most obvious one is for simple visibility. As Harvey Milk said, “coming out is the most political thing you can do”. The logic being if everyone was out, the shame and stigma would disappear and it would help dispel myths and lies about LGBT people. 

For Milk in the 1970s, coming out meant that you stood for the right of people to be free, to be who they are, and that you were willing to risk everything for that right. Of course, there will also be a number of LGBT students present in the lecture theatre and coming out in this way enabled them to see someone like them being an architect, a role model of sorts. 

It also reveals to the whole cohort that there are different people who work and practice in architecture, as many come from countries where progress on LGBT visibility and rights is way behind the UK’s. A completely unintended outcome was it enabled students to see me as other, in general, and I noted students feeling more able to speak to me about other issues in their lives that were impacting their studies, such as mental health. 

But whilst these reasons are valuable for me, they are all coincidental. My initial reason for including my individual association to the LGBT Centre project was to try and communicate that working on projects to which you have a personal connection is so much more rewarding as a designer. Architects garner skills and become well-placed to imagine new features to find novel uses for buildings and demand space for how we want to live. 

They initiate projects which can challenge current spatial circumstances. I was keen to convey that there are lots of different kinds of architects and to inspire them to build on their existing knowledge of the world communities and identities, to work on projects that make the world a place they want to live. Having now left first year leadership, I’m writing a new Foundation Year course specifically for architecture, with the aim of widening the diversity of our student cohort on the undergraduate course and is only open to applicants meeting a certain widening participation conditions, such as the index of multiple deprivations of first generation students. 

It has been helpful for me to reflect on my desire to embody that architecture is for everybody, in my teaching on introductory courses in architecture, and I’m sure many of the aspects I develop for first year will make an appearance in the new course. The course starts in September, so wish me luck. Thanks for listening.  

While coming out is by nature a personal decision, it is one that has a powerful, positive impact on others. It does more than liberate one individual. It enables others to come out too. So whether that’s as bisexual or someone with depression, listeners, I encourage you to find ways of coming out to your students, whatever that means to you. The impact on your pedagogy might just surprise you. 

Paul Giladi 

Fabulous stuff. I can’t say how much I really enjoyed that. That was eye opening for so many reasons. It’s beautiful. I found it quite moving myself. Beautiful and so intellectually rich. Orlagh over to you, because you’ve got tonnes of thoughts, I’ve got to say. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Yeah, I loved it. Again, it’s about dialog. It’s about self-disclosures. And they can have such a positive impact on learning and engagement on motivation. They lead to a more connected experience for our learners. And they can make conversations richer and deeper and not just in the classroom, but outside of the classroom. And it really can support a student self of belonging. 

I just thought it was great. And I think it’s important to note it isn’t the right approach for everybody. I know we don’t all like to use self-disclosure as a vehicle towards enhancing pedagogy. And it’s not the right approach for everyone. And it’s a personal aspect of life that some people prefer to separate from their professional practice. 

However, personally, it’s something that I absolutely use in my teaching practice. And yeah, relational pedagogy, I know I bang on about relational pedagogy[!], but it’s absolutely premised on the idea that we have mutual respect so that we have trust with our learners. And sometimes it’s very difficult to find that without sharing. So I think these disclosures and I think Emily’s approach is just beautiful. 

And yeah, I was really, really happy hearing about it. So many additional learning gains and it really opens widening participation. 

Paul Giladi 

I know, I know exactly what you mean. For me, I loved how she began by setting things up with that really wonderful student journey discourse: ‘you go from zero to architect’ – that can be really challenging and overwhelming. Challenging, as well, because it’s confronting preconceived ideas about what architects are. From my own experience, I can recall watching Sex and the City years ago and the way in which architects were presented there was in the shape of very glamorous, tall, conventionally attractive male figures. 

What Sex and the City did there is very stigmatising in terms of excluding a whole range of architects: so many amazing ethnic minority architects won’t even be captured in that ‘image’, they wouldn’t even be rendered real under those kinds of narratives, let alone when we think about homosexuality and the like in this professional context. I also think the way in which Emily talked about drawing on students’ spatial knowledge of buildings from the get-go and getting them to conceive of themselves as, to quote her, “self-initiating professionals” is so important because it gives students this real active stakeholder in their curriculum, and that cannot be emphasized enough. And even the idea of thinking about buildings themselves as designed around needs, that’s a highly politically and relevant concept, particularly if you’re interested in issues about the intersection of feminism in architecture and urban design – e.g. Cities for All, Cities of Women. 

And then there’s the storytelling. I mean, we could we could devote an entire year’s worth of critical pedagogy podcasts to storytelling about democratising, discussing coming out in a variety of ways, from sexual orientation to mental health contexts: myth-busting role models that celebrate rather than just performatively taxing on diversity and inclusivity. This is this is what we want. And, Orlagh, from my own perspective, thinking about how I’ve learned a lot of things from Emily’s practice in terms of how her likely positive impact on my own work is the ways in which architectural practices that invest in personal design projects enable students also to develop authentic assessment practices. 

And that is my new passion. As you know, I’m obsessed with authentic assessments and it just, yeah, it just ticks all the boxes! 

Orlagh McCabe 

I mean, it is so rich in so many ways. And like you say, we could talk about so many aspects of it and the student-as-expert side of things is something I think is so important. You know, if we’re supporting our students who are professionals of the future to understand that actually they are professionals of now, they are already academics, they are already working in professional environments. We really have to focus on the idea of youth as people who are already the people of the future, and all students, regardless of their age, are already in that category. I think the more that we, as academics, reinforce their status as current professionals by drawing upon their expert opinions of the world, the better. 

But thanks, Emily, for sharing that with us. And I thought it was great too. It was great to have your insight there and so many valuable things for us to think about. 

Paul Giladi 

Indeed. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Thank you. Okay, so join us next time for some more adventures in critical pedagogy. And it’s time for us to leave you there. 

Paul Giladi 

Bye for now. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Bye! 

Transcript

Orlagh McCabe 

Hi, I’m Orlagh. 

Paul Giladi 

Hi, I’m Paul. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Welcome to another episode of the Manchester Met Critical Pedagogy podcast series. 

Paul Giladi 

In today’s episode, we’ll hear from Kasia Nawratek and Emily Crompton, both based at the Manchester School of Architecture, and they will be talking about ways in which the use of queer theory and queer space can positively impact on international students studying architecture. 

Kasia Nawratek 

This is a Bakhtin-inspired and dialogic-inclusive discursive podcast. In reality, this is about being a good ally for LGBTQ+ people in an academic setting. My name is Kasia Nawratek. I’m a Senior Lecturer in the Manchester School of Architecture and I’m joined today by my colleague also from MSA, Emily Crompton. 

Emily Crompton 

Hi everybody, I’m Emily. I’m a Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture as well, and I’m really interested in what queer theory means in space and looking at kind of ways of designing inclusively. So, that’s me! 

Kasia Nawratek 

My research interests run along two strands, both rooted in pedagogy. One strand explores the use of literary methods in architectural pedagogy and research, and the other discusses the climate crisis response in architectural education using post-human perspectives. And then we are here today to discuss and reflect on the Research Methods Workshop session, which I invited you to join. 

We’re going to start with just explaining what the workshop was and the whole setting. ‘Research Methods’ is an elective module for first year of Master of Architecture students, which aims to introduce them to various research methods before they start their dissertation. The workshop uses literary and linguistic methods in architectural modes of investigation. The dialogic and polyphonic approach informs the workshop making inclusivity and negotiation key elements of the working environment. 

All tasks and final assignment are group work – this is in recognition of the collaborative nature of architectural practice. The idea of polyphony originated from Bakhtin’s readings of the literary works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. ‘Polyphony’ is a term borrowed from music and was used by Bakhtin to read Dostoevsky’s works as containing multiple voices and perspectives with their own importance within the novel and able to speak for themselves, sometimes even against the author, highlighting the potential of tension as a source of deeper understanding. 

I invited you [Emily] to do a short presentation for my students before a task they engage with later in the day, which was a photographic project. Their task was to photograph our schools building to reveal it as a space of mystery, wonder, danger and queerness. That’s why Queer spaces were the topic of your presentation. Would you like to maybe say a couple of words about that? 

Emily Crompton 

Yeah. So I was invited by Cassia to do a kind of short introduction to Queer Space, and it’s a concept that the students are really unfamiliar with. I kind of got back to basics and looked at what the word ‘queer’, focusing on where that comes from and how it’s been reclaimed by LGBT communities to a certain extent, and then use the LGBT Centre, which I’ve worked on for many years, as a kind of built example of potentially a queer space. 

But we also looked at ‘queer’ in terms of the meaning of ‘kind of odd’ or ‘dangerous’ or ‘different’ as well. It was really interesting to see their reactions from that as well. 

Kasia Nawratek 

Yes, because it’s important to mention that the majority of students don’t speak English as their first language. I think that they were all international. And for many, an open discussion about queerness in an academic setting was something they never experienced before. Our aim, therefore, was to normalize the language of LGBTQ+ issues and demonstrate how this perspective can be and is used in research. 

Emily Crompton 

Yeah. I guess it wasn’t me just coming out for the sake of coming out and being visible. But this was using queer theory and the kind of concept of queer as a methodology or as a way of starting a project or a starting point: ‘being other’ somehow. And I think the students kind of caught onto that and it was a safer environment then to talk about that. 

Kasia Nawratek 

Yes. And it was only possible because I think that there were a couple of conditions that had to be met. So first of all, I already had a relationship with students and the dialogic principal in the studio, in our workshop, combined with a focus on language, allowed me to discuss the idea of difference based on culture and language as something that should be acknowledged in an academic setting. 

It wasn’t a new idea for them: very often international students with different cultural and language background somehow feel that they have to cut off that identity and somehow conform to a very idealised model of the student that we expect them to perform. And they kind of don’t want to talk or acknowledge their own culture and language. 

But when we kind of make space for it, they start to be more accepting of other identities as well. 

Emily Crompton 

And I think that’s a really good point, and your explanation of… 

Kasia Nawratek 

Polyphony. 

Emily Crompton 

Polyphony, sorry, yes! Polyphony ties in so well with queerness, and with queer theory. You know, if someone writes down the definition of queer theory, we’re all kind of screwed because it’s so difficult to define. And it means different things to different kinds of research, different kinds of methodologies, and actually showing students that there isn’t a one definition for this kind of thing really enabled them to say, ‘okay, well, I’m going to define it in this way, or I’m going to use it in this way in their later work in the photography section’. 

Kasia Nawratek 

So in a way, including LGBTQ+ people in the discussion is simply taking the dialogic polyphonic principle further to enrich the discussion. So as a result, queerness is normalized and validated. Just another perspective that needs to be acknowledged and included in the discussion. It’s not something special. It somehow becomes one of the categories maybe, or characteristics that define people, and it’s just one of them. 

And I think that felt very safe to do that in the setting both for us and for students. 

Emily Crompton 

Definitely. I think as the person who is being invited to that space, it was a group of students I’ve never met. Obviously, I knew Cassia, but I’d never met them before and I don’t think like some of them might not have known I was LGBT, you know, that wasn’t really the focus of it. It was more that I was sharing it as a way of looking at the world. 

And maybe some of them knew, and maybe from the story about Caroline being my partner and, you know, they might have picked up on it, but it might pass some of them by it. And that made it really interesting, I think. 

Kasia Nawratek 

Yeah, because suddenly, you know, particularly in the light of the podcast that you just recorded it, when you talk about, you know, about coming out to students, that was not part of the conversation and it didn’t have to be. But yet, that allowed us to kind of widen the field. And I think particularly if we think about those students, quite a majority of them come from come from countries which do not allow any discussion about those issues. 

So being able to kind of open the discussion in this direction I felt was very valuable. 

Emily Crompton 

Oh, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. It might have meant something to the students, and we can’t even know the full extent of what it meant to them. I think that’s got power and it really is. That’s great education, I think. 

Kasia Nawratek 

And then reflecting on how it contributed to that course itself and to that assignment, I think that they understood very well that our polyphonic approach and dialogic approach forces everybody to constantly negotiate and make space for other people. This is in part of how my own practice of positioning myself here as an ally. 

What it means is to follow the polyphonic and dialogic principle by sharing my platform with LGBTQ+ colleagues. 

Emily Crompton 

Yeah, and it was one of the first times I even thought about using kind of queer ideas in the teaching of architecture in that way. So it was really enlightening for me as well and enabled me to do some more reading and yeah, go further with my own research, which was great. 

Kasia Nawratek 

So, let’s see what we will come up with next! Thank you. 

Emily Crompton 

Thanks. 

Paul Giladi 

Wonderful stuff! 

Orlagh McCabe 

That was great. I enjoyed that. And, you know, I think some of the key things that just covered so much. There were so many things that we could talk about right now around internationalization and the experience of international students around sharing our own cultural approaches around norms and values around space and place. So, it was just lovely. 

Orlagh McCabe 

What did you think? 

Paul Giladi 

I mean, in terms of the dynamics of things, it’s so interesting because there is the research method component as workshopping how to train up students at master’s level to understand building design, and then there’s the urban space and building space in general through the use of queer theory dimension. That’s fascinating: it’s also the use of Dostoyevsky because we all know he’s a really interesting writer, because he’s also basically a philosopher, which helps for folks like me! 

Polyphony is really fascinating because the idea of actually thinking about how inclusive language works for the purpose of not just simply allyship. And I think Kasia herself provides a really exemplary way of being a constructive ally and a real ally for LGBT folk. The way in which polyphony can be used to normalize LGBTQ language, particularly expressions like ‘queer’ for students whose first language isn’t English necessarily, and invariably students who come from countries which criminalize homosexuality and queerness itself, is especially helpful. 

So, thinking about how to use polyphony as not just an academic tool, but actually as an imperative social justice tool is well worth thinking about here. I wish I could actually do this research method class myself. I think I’ll get a lot out of it! 

Orlagh McCabe 

Yeah, and it was really powerful. And then with my sociological lens, I just want us to take a step back and not just think about this experience here. 

Paul Giladi 

Yes. Good. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Because actually, if you’re thinking about polyphony as an approach, it’s used beautifully here as a collaborative, critical reflection of practice: to hear two colleagues having great and deep discussions about how they approach their teaching and but also not just in a one-off way, the conversation was iterative. 

They built upon each other’s practice. They had conversations about how one another was doing something. And then the other colleague then said something different about that approach, and they ended it beautifully because they said: ‘let’s see what we will come up with next’. Yeah, it was so collaborative. I thought it was fab. And so both from a student perspective and that disciplinary kind of point of view, but also from a kind of staff development, a co-development and a co constructed practice perspective as well. 

So yeah, it’s just great, fabulous stuff! 

Paul Giladi 

I mean as well, just to complement everything you said, the idea of constantly negotiating and making space as a never-ending cycle of self-development I think is really, really interesting because it also contributes to all of those critical enterprises that are anti-naturalization, anti-ideal theory. And I think another major take-home point, based on what Kasia and Emily were speaking about, was this awareness of how all these kinds of cultural hegemonic forces that come from English being the first language or the Global North as having a type of primacy over the Global South in university contexts that creates alienating pressures on international students that are formally similar, at least in the ways that, say, heteronormative structures alienate queer folk. So that’s why I was thinking there is so much interconnectivity between this idea about LGBT friendly-language using ‘queer’ as a category for transforming social schemes themselves: at the heart of what Kasia and Emily are talking about is the need for pedagogy that is rooted in care for vulnerable communities and that’s something which should be celebrated and normalized across the board, not just in the humanities, but crucially, we see it also in STEM subjects like architecture, which is great.  

So over to you, Orlagh, now. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Yes. So it’s just really to end and say join us next time for some more adventures in critical pedagogy. 

Paul Giladi 

Bye for now. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Bye everyone. 

Transcript

Paul Giladi 

Hi, I’m Paul. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Hi, I’m Orlagh. 

Paul Giladi 

And welcome to another episode of the Manchester Met Critical Pedagogy Podcast series! 

Orlagh McCabe 

In today’s episode, we’re going to be hearing from Anthony Picot. Anthony is in the Department of Languages Information and Communications, and he specializes in second-language acquisition and teacher education. Anthony is going to be talking to us today about assessment patterns and particularly the ones that he uses in his teacher training modules. 

Anthony Picot 

Hello, my name is Anthony Picot and I’m the programme leader for the M.A. in Applied Linguistics. Part of what I do is teacher training, and I run a unit called ‘Language Teaching and Technology’, where we train teachers of English to speakers of other languages: TESOL, so TESOL teacher training. And I’d like to talk a little bit about one of the assessment patterns which we use on this unit. 

So basically the student has to look at a provided course book extract, we give them a selection of units from different course books, and we ask them to first of all, consider a context in which they might like to teach in the future, or think of designing a contextual description for a group of students that they’re already familiar with, and their job would be to evaluate the suitability of this course. 

I feel this is a very useful assignment for them because it’s a little bit like a real-world task: during my experience of working as an English language teacher, I was often asked to look at sample material sent by publishers, either through the post or by email, and think about whether we want to adopt this course book and whether it would be useful for a particular course which we’re teaching. 

So, to some extent this helps students with their employability. If at job interview, they’re asked, you know, what do you know about this context? What is your approach to teaching and learning? They should be able to talk about this to a great extent because they will have completed this assignment. And the assignment also, I suppose, has other benefits. 

It requires that the students evaluate the suitability of this course book extract for how well it teaches the four skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening, and the three language systems grammar, lexis, and pronunciation. And this sort of forces the student to address all aspects of the inputs of the unit. So there’s good breadth, good coverage with this assignment type. I’ve seen on some units and it’s fine if they want to specialize, but on some units students are asked to focus on a particular sub topic within that unit or focus only on the parts of the syllabus of the inputs of that unit, which doesn’t really necessitate breadth of coverage of unit input. 

But another thing I like about this assignment, it requires that the students do a lot of reading, a lot of independent and wide reading, to show that they can cite the literature to support their evaluative points. So if they’re saying that the speaking skills are well taught because it involves pre-task preparation, they can cite the literature where it says that this is good practice. 

They also have to demonstrate good critical and analytical skills because part of the assignment is for them to make suggestions to adapt these course book materials to better meet the needs, the lacks, the wants and the preferences of this particular group of students. This requires that the student also demonstrates familiarity with the context that they’re evaluating these materials against. 

So far we’ve ticked a few of the level seven descriptors which are university wide. But students also seem to enjoy this assignment type because it helps them to sort out their own attitude, their own beliefs, in teaching and learning – after all, there are different competing theories of how languages are learned and students. As with all humans, we can hold different opinions as to how things happened within our minds. 

But they have to put down on paper what they think would be best for this particular group of students. And yeah, even more experienced students on the MA have said that they found this very beneficial because it helps them to articulate their beliefs about teaching and learning. So I hope you found this interesting. Do feel free to contact me if you’d like to hear more details and good luck with your teaching. 

Paul Giladi 

Brilliant. Very, very, very fascinating stuff from Anthony, particularly, I think with respect to his emphasis on considering context in which students would like to teach as active stakeholders in curriculum. Orlagh, what do you think specifically about this stuff? 

Orlagh McCabe 

Yeah, I mean, I thought it was great. You know, I do a lot of work around assessment across the university and we often hear of very interesting examples and approaches. And I am always encouraging staff when I hear something quite innovative, particularly at the moment with the kind of an work around authentic assessment that’s going on. 

I’m always asking colleagues to share their practice. Tell us more. Tell everybody about what you’re doing. So it’s great that Anthony sharing that with us here today. Some of the key things that, you know, really spoke to me was around this idea of authentic assessment and really the challenges that some disciplines face in terms of imbedding that approach in their practice. 

It was great to have a good example here to share. 

Paul Giladi 

Yeah. I mean, in terms of my perspective on Anthony’s stuff, I think there is a huge amount to be said with respect to what he talks about students evaluating suitability. I think why I found that particularly interesting and helpful is because of the way in which, as with previous podcasts we’ve seen (actually I would say even all that in all of the podcasts we’ve previously heard since the series began), it’s about having students identify right from the get-go as active agents with abilities to engage in normative reflection, not just simply absorbing content, but they’re actually reflecting on it from the get-go. 

And I suppose why this is very interesting and provocative is because a lot of the time, as we all know, when we’re constructing learning outcomes and we’re thinking about skills scaffolding from First Year through to Second Year to Final Year and then to Master’s, we often are disposed maybe because of, say, all of the various neoliberal pressures on academics to be efficient, etc., and to make sure that there is appropriate skill scaffolding, to think that First Year students just need a very easy transition to university life. But I suspect we have colleagues across the board who are invested in really throwing First Year students into the deep-end, by getting them to identify as active stakeholders in the curriculum, which is very empowering and I’m sure has also lots of advantages for thinking about progression, for thinking about positive graduate outcomes, and so and so forth. 

I just think it’s really interesting the way Anthony does it, by enabling the students to occupy a standing in the literature, by getting them to be sensitive to what they think students want, what students need, and that’s empowering and enriching. So something again, to be celebrated. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Could not agree more. I mean, that social value of authentic assessment is really important. I don’t know. Have you seen that recent article from MacArthur? And I’ll actually pop it as a link under this. 

Paul Giladi 

That’ll be really great!  

Orlagh McCabe 

But she says, you know, it’s so important that we think about why your task matters and because it enables that shift from a student as an isolated subject to them becoming a member of society and encourage us to really think about the sense of achievements that can actually become much deeper and richer and enhance their students’ sense of self-worth and their own wellbeing. 

There are so many there is so much around that social value that you’ve just kind of alluded to, and that is absolutely so important and actually authentic assessment is having its moment at the moment, mostly because of work around generative AI and the kind of the way in which assessments could potentially be replicated or used or kind of the way students could be encouraged to work towards an assessment in a different way. 

And actually by using authentic assessment, it’s less likelihood of students being able to generate material that could be used for an assessment. So, lots of talk around authentic assessment, for that reason, at the moment, across the sector. However, it’s this kind of social value of authentic assessment that I think Anthony really picks up on here. 

And you know, you might as well. And it’s something that I think, you know, we should as a sector to be thinking about even more. 

Paul Giladi 

Yeah. And it’s, I think, finally contributing to what we might call the death-knell of traditional curriculum approaches, which is just giving students a fixed assessment brief and telling them to get on with it. And I think now with the authentic assessment, students will engage much more and feel much more belonging at home in the university, because I can easily imagine with Anthony’s student responses that it’s overwhelmingly positive. 

You know, so many of them would have been thinking, ‘oh, you’re actually interested in knowing what I think about context. Wow, I’ve never had that opportunity before!’ And I think, again, to quote that wonderful line that we heard ages ago from Simon Massey, “non-traditional students, non-traditional pedagogy”. It’s as simple and effective as that. And I think Anthony’s giving us another really excellent insight into his practice. 

So I’m very grateful, as of course you are as well. So, thanks, It’s that time again. Join us next time for some more adventures in critical pedagogy. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Bye for now! 

Paul Giladi 

Bye for now, see you soon. 

Transcript 

Paul Giladi

Hi, I’m Paul.

Orlagh McCabe

Hi, I’m Orlagh. Welcome to another episode of the Manchester Met Critical Pedagogy podcast series. In today’s episode, we’re going to be hearing from Eileen Pollard. Eileen works in the UTA and she’s going to be sharing some practice with us.

Eileen Pollard

The topic is the use of a room-plan-based icebreaker, in the first meeting of any seminar group, personal tutor group or short course – partly to learn names and give everyone an opportunity to speak in that first session – but, more importantly than that, to start to build relationships and foster belonging.

I’ve used a room-plan-based icebreaker (which I’ll explain in a moment) with almost every class I’ve taught – ever since I ran my very first English literature seminar group back in 2012! It has become a central tool within my practice even though I very nearly didn’t do it in that first session, as I was worried the students might feel patronised by the term ‘icebreaker’! But once I had, I could see just want a difference it’d made to take that risk and start the class in that way: the energy in the room had completely changed afterwards, I’d spoken to everyone and everyone had spoken to me and I’d begun, not just the process of learning everyone’s name, but much more significantly, I’d started to get to know my students – and them me. I didn’t know it at the time but in adopting a student-centred approach like this one, I was taking a humanist view of the classroom and my students (informed by Rogers, Maslow).

So, now I’ll explain how a room-plan-based icebreaker works in practice. It involves a little forward planning, as you need to either set up the seminar space in advance (preferably in a circle) or, if setting it up yourself, or changing the layout isn’t possible, then at least knowing what the layout is, in advance, is key. Then, prior to the class you draw out the room layout on a sheet of A4 paper and note the details of the class or personal tutor group you’ll be meeting at the top.

At the start of the class, you explain that you’re going to do an icebreaker where you’ll ask each person their name and to share the title of their favourite book or film (or another nice and easy question appropriate to your subject) – and that you’ll write down their answers on your room plan to learn their names.

You start with yourself of course, introducing yourself, your preferred name and an answer to your own question. In my case the favourite book I almost always share is Fludd by Hilary Mantel. I say I did my PhD on Mantel and explain quite honestly that if I hadn’t read that book, I wouldn’t be sitting in front of them now!

Then, once you’ve introduced yourself, explain the ground rules again, noting that if someone really, really doesn’t want to speak they can just say ‘pass’. After that, go round each student asking their name, making sure you note down their preferred name, and briefly engage them in conversation in response to their answer. It takes practice to get good at properly engaging with each student but giving each roughly the same amount of time – while making sure that the icebreaker doesn’t take too long! I’ve got better over the years and realised that, as this exercise is primarily auditory, it is very helpful for visually impaired students for learning the names of their peers.

After engaging with a student, I always thank them for their answer and then move to the next student. Then, after the class, I review the A4 sheet and try to picture each student in turn, remember their name, and also note down something that I remember from the brief conversation I had with them. I then put up the sheet of paper at home, along with others for other seminar groups and personal tutor groups, and, as a result, I have learnt the names of every student in every class I have ever taught. I recognise that this is partly due to the way my own memory works, but I share this strategy not as a rigid exercise but more as a prompt for others to think of ways that would help them to get to know their students better – starting with that first class. There are lots of ways to do this, including utilising tech – which is especially helpful for online spaces of course – and Padlet and Flipgrid are particularly good starting points to try.

As well as expressing a humanist approach to students in the classroom, this example of practice also links to relational pedagogy, which Catherine Bovill (2020) defines in her book Co-creating learning and teaching, as, putting ‘relationships at the heart of teaching and emphasising that a meaningful connection needs to be established between teacher and students as well as between students and their peers, if effective learning is to take place’ (3). I like to think of my room-plan-based icebreaker as initiating, in a small, but important way, the co-creation of such a community of learning in my classroom.

Orlagh McCabe

Wow, I think that was great. Paul, I don’t know what you thought, but personally I’m a huge advocate of relational pedagogy and particularly those key components, those ideas of, you know, strong communication, trust between learner and tutor, and that notion of mutual respect. And I love that this has the ability to transform learning, particularly in relation to the development of individual and collective agency. I really enjoyed that: a very simplistic activity that actually has so many dimensions to it.

Paul Giladi

You’re quite right; and I suppose one thing that is very thought-provoking about the idea of room- plan-based icebreakers is that, like you said, something so simple and almost innocuous, visually speaking, can have a huge impact on both conceptual uptake but also affect - like the actual affect of students radically changing. And it was so interesting hearing how Eileen spoke at length about how the students had that kind of real transformation in the dynamics [of the task]. It really reminded me again of those themes touched on by John and Sarah in their podcast about just how the architecture of educative space is so important: it’s such a force for inclusivity when done properly. Equally, when done improperly, it’s such a barrier to learning. It’s such an obstacle to make students feel at home. And I think – because I learned about relational pedagogy from you and I remember just how impactful that was for myself – if you want students to feel at home at university environments – despite all those bits of authoritarian and even colonial structuring, something like relational pedagogy can cut across that and that produces relational institutions, which feeds back into what Honneth was talking about in Freedom’s Right itself.

Orlagh McCabe

I totally agree. But it also links really nicely to that active learning narrative again. You know the way in which we can help students to really strengthen those existing skills that they already have through strong narratives with each other, you know, developing confidence and developing really key transferable skills. Anyway, thanks for joining us again. Please join us next time for some more adventures in Critical Pedagogy.

Orlagh McCabe

Bye for now.

Paul Giladi

Bye for now.

TRANSCRIPT 

Paul Giladi

Hi, I’m Paul.

Orlagh McCabe

Hi, I’m Orlagh. Welcome to another episode of the Manchester Met Critical Pedagogy Podcast series.

Paul Giladi

In today’s episode, we’ll hear from John Spruce and Sarah Moriarty, who will be talking to us about the MIRO platform as a virtual studio.

John Spruce

Hello, for this episode of Critically Pedagogies you’ll be listening to me (Jon Spruce) and my colleague (Sarah Moriarty). Hello Sarah… We are both lecturers in the subject of product design here at MMU.

Our topic for the podcast focuses on the introduction of a digital tool called MIRO - a virtual whiteboard and collaboration space that we used extensively within our programme over the past 18 months to support remote learning.

Importantly, the use of MIRO proved so valuable as a learning tool during periods of remote teaching delivery that we have continued to integrate its use through this academic year to enhance our students on-campus learning experience.

So, Sarah, why did we turn to MIRO? What did it offer us?

Sarah Moriarty

Well, MIRO offered us an analogue to the traditional ‘physical’ design studio in facilitating remote delivery of our programme.

In brief, MIRO provides a dynamic visual representation of an entire project or unit journey as students’ progress through their project.

Visualising the whole project journey in an accessible digital space has positively impacted students’ ability to use design methods and frameworks to support their development, and in the process, generated a greater sense of awareness of their own learning journeys.

MIRO greatly supported teaching delivery at both group and one-to-one level, while also enhancing students’ opportunities for personal reflections on their learning processes as an asynchronous resource.

The digital space afforded a near infinite ‘studio wall’ enabling the integration of teaching materials and research resources alongside students actual project work within the same environment, the content could be visually indexed, connecting the teaching and learning experience in a way that is beyond the capacity of a physical space alone.

So, Jon, did MIRO foster good routine and design habits? Was there a sense of community?

John Spruce

I think over time students worked both independently and collaboratively within remote communities, reflecting the social aspects of physical studio participation where students are drawn to a common place that holds attraction. The changing nature of their engagement perhaps emerged through a growing sense of routine and habitual use, exploring the rules of engagement creates the time, and confidence to experiment within the digital space.

The amount of asynchronous use that is still evident in several of the projects supported by digital spaces suggests that the flexibility to access and share content beyond taught lessons has emerged as a very positive mode of exchange not always afforded by the physical studio environment – the MIRO board is not locked at the end of the day! – and sharing of thoughts, ideas, and exchanges within a digital format such as MIRO does not tarnish over time as in a physical space, sticky notes don’t fall off the wall and get binned! They remain visible and accessible to be returned to by each student in their own time, affording personal reflection, which is a real bonus!

So, Sarah, has MIRO as a virtual studio space gained some of those sticky characteristics that we associate with a ‘studio pedagogy’ as its use has developed over time?

Sarah Moriarty

Student autonomy, ownership and experimentation within the MIRO spaces has developed over each project as their familiarity with the platform has grown.

Utilising the elasticity of the digital space and its ability to bring together different media into a shared, accessible environment mimics the use of physical studio space, wherein the arrangement and application of space is adaptable to the required need.

This created liminal spaces for ideas sharing and discussion to develop as an environment for sticky exchanges between students, tutors, and their subject.

In summary, the reorientation to remote teaching proved to be both challenging, and compromising in delivering studio-based education. However, it also proved that through adversity comes new insights. The rapidly developed use of digital tools has proved to be a game changer in the daily practices of many industries, and in our case, the adoption of MIRO as an analogue to the physical design studio revealed new behaviours and transformative opportunities for the evolution of how we teach and how our students engage in learning through their design and creative processes.

John Spruce

That’s great – thanks, Sarah. We hope you have enjoyed this episode of critical pedagogies!

Orlagh McCabe

Wow, that was really interesting. What did you think, Paul?

Paul Giladi

Well, Orlagh, where to begin? I suppose for me what I found really interesting is the idea of digital space as something which can foster good habits and a sense of learning community. This is because I suppose what interests me as an educator myself is finding ways of redesigning exactly how we even conceive of study spaces and university spaces to encourage and develop and even enhance students capacities for criticality across the board.

Orlagh McCabe

Absolutely. I totally agree. It’s also great to see how they’ve managed to capture the student voice in a kind of accessible way. And it’s got really key links, I think, to education for sustainable development. It’s a really good example of this, and particularly that idea of around liminality and those sticky exchanges.

Paul Giladi

Yes, absolutely. I completely agree. What I also thought was really interesting is the idea that it was a very democratic space as well. And even thinking about the idea of studio spaces, as someone who works in philosophy, it’s not like, for example, me and my students would be really in studios that much. But it just got me really reflecting on actually even how the layout of a room is designed, you know, not just simply in terms of sitting in circles, but even actually the way in which students feel genuinely at home in space itself. For example, you’ve got all of those famous urban theorists talking about the Right to the City and cities as communal spaces for capability enhancement. Maybe also what we can take moving forward from John and Sarah is the idea that, well, if you’re designing a virtual studio space, that kind of studio space is designed to challenge existing approaches to how even seminar rooms are laid out. And when you mentioned sustainable development, I mean, who doesn’t want to have sustainable development? That sounds exactly the kind of thing we should be doing. And there’s a real deficit in that at the moment. And maybe, moving forward, we will have inspired listeners who will go in to do this at their own practice.

Orlagh McCabe

Absolutely. Sounds fantastic. Make sure you join us next time for some more adventures in Critical Pedagogy. 

Transcript

Orlagh McCabe

Hi, I’m Orlagh McCabe.

Paul Giladi

Hi, I’m Paul. And welcome to another episode of the Manchester Met Critical pedagogy podcast series.

Orlagh McCabe

In today’s episode, we’re going to be hearing from John Lean. John is the unit leader for the RISE project.

John Lean

Hello, I’m John Lean and I’m the Unit Leader for the RISE programme at Manchester Met.

RISE is the university’s platform for cross-curricular experiential learning. We provide a programme of opportunities to students, from one-off seminars to long-term projects, and help them to tie these opportunities together so that they can

What I want to talk about today is some of the deeper thinking behind RISE, in particular the way in which it is influenced by the 20^th century American philosopher John Dewey.

My first meaningful encounter with Dewey came via his work as an educator. When I visited schools in the United States, he was treated like a god by progressive teachers who were interested in project-based and authentic approaches to learning. And this stands to reason: the core of his educational theory is that students learn best by actually thinking and acting in the ways that people do outside the classroom. Indeed, during his lifetime, Dewey put this into practice by establishing an experimental school at the University of Chicago.

Dewey was a philosopher as well as an educationalist, though, and there’s a deep philosophical foundation to his argument for experiential learning that can often be glossed over when we skip straight to authentic learning.

Dewey’s philosophy of pragmatism focuses on how our understanding of the world is an active process. Rather than simply perceiving the world, we are instead taking part in a constant conversation with the world and each other to establish meaning and understanding.

But how does such a fundamental belief about our interactions with the world lead to experiential learning? This depends on Dewey’s understanding of three key concepts: experience, communication, and democracy.

Experience is at the heart of Dewey’s pragmatism. Everything we know and understand about the world comes from experience, but importantly this is an active process and experiencing is itself a form of interaction with the world. All the time we’re negotiating with new ideas and experimenting with different ways of doing things, even in everyday situations.

Because of this, communication is vital. We try to convey our meanings to others so that we can reach a shared understanding, so communication becomes part of the meaning-making process. Meaning develops out of our experimentation with the world, but these meanings feed back into our communication with others, which in turn affect how we understand the world.

Given the primacy of communication, Dewey settles on the idea of democracy as the ideal state in which to come to understand the world. This isn’t democracy as a political system, but as a way of participating in society. Each of us needs to be free to conduct our own experiments in living, but we also need democratic space to discuss the meanings we have developed and continue the process of making meaning. We learn from democratic participation, but our participation also cannot help but transform.

The educational upshot of this is that, whilst experiential learning is in itself a good thing, it is hampered if we engage in it knowing exactly what students are going to learn from it. It only really becomes truly transformative when it is also democratic. This means that students need to be central to the process of transformation, and they do this by engaging in genuine meaning-making conversations and interactions with the world.

It’s less about recreating the world outside the classroom, and more about giving students the tools to transform both the classroom and the world. Ultimately, students are not the only thing developing through learning.

For RISE, this means we’re trying to do much more than provide co-curricular opportunities for our students. We want students’ experiences to be transformative not just at an individual level but for the university and the city.

At an activity level, this means providing opportunities that are ambitiously authentic in how they enable students to respond to challenges. We plan to be surprised by their responses, and put structures in place that are deliberately responsive to student ideas.

And this is the case at a programme level too. We plan whole courses of activities not necessarily knowing what the next step will be but expecting students to provide the way forward. This happens organically, but also through our structures; we employ students as contributors and designers precisely so that their voices are centred in planning conversations.

In this sense, we’re following a similar experimental principle to that of John Dewey when he set up his school in Chicago. But importantly we’re doing this not just because its engaging but because it has the potential to transform higher education itself.

Orlagh McCabe

So, Paul, what did you think about that?

Paul Giladi

Well, all I have to say, that’s like catnip for me. I know that we’ve got only a very short amount of time, but it’s so wonderful to hear discourses about John Dewey’s pragmatism being so beautifully articulated as well. I mean, what I really love to pick your brains about is the idea of meaning-making conversations Because the idea of transforming the classroom and the world itself through experiential reflection sounds like something which is exactly at the heart of what critical pedagogy is all about, whether it’s, you know, the kind of Paolo Freire school or the bell hooks school of thought. But, you know, Dewey, even as an American pragmatist and as a kind of salt-of-the-earth liberal seems to be doing something really radical. I would love to know what you thought about it as well.

Orlagh McCabe

Absolutely. I mean, one of the fundamental things for me when you talk about meaning-making is this idea of how it links to discourses around active learning, which is something that’s so pivotal to what John was talking about. And aside from that, just hearing about philosophical approaches to underpin a particular approach to a programme. And it’s just great, you know, it’s just great to really have insight into the way in which academics are thinking about the kind of constructs and the design and the implementation of their programme. I think it’s worth mentioning here as well, RISE also has an open public program which is free for external participants, but also for Man Met learners. And it’s an opportunity for students in Manchester Met to gain additional skills and experiences to offer a more bespoke learning experience overall. But it’s great to see how, you know, Dewey has influenced this area and continues to you know, I see it all the time across the PGCert and I’m sure you do in your practice as well.

Paul Giladi

I think that’s completely spot-on, particularly with the idea of, you know, thinking about the world as a complex series of active processes. I think that’s, that’s something which is incredibly radical because not only is it, metaphysically-speaking, very, very transformative, but it also suggests that what we can do as educators is really start thinking about a kind of meta-reflection on teaching itself. The process of teaching is itself a series of active processes. And that’s, that’s really given certainly me a lot of food for thought. And, you know, I can’t wait to tell my students about this. I’ll get them to listen to it first thing tomorrow morning!

Orlagh McCabe

So, make sure you join us next time for some more adventures in Critical Pedagogy. That’s it from us today. Bye!

Paul Giladi

Bye!

Transcript

Orlagh McCabe

Hi, I’m Orlagh.

Paul Giladi

Hi, I’m Paul.

Orlagh McCabe

And welcome to another episode of the Manchester Met Critical Pedagogy podcast series.

Paul Giladi

In today’s episode, we’ll hear from Rachelle Andrews, who will be talking to us about radically reflexive narrative practice. 

Rachelle Andrews

In this podcast, I am going discuss a critical approach that has been used to work with executive leadership and management students to explore their practice through the writing and sharing of experience through narratives. This approach takes the form of ‘Radically Reflexive Narrative’ methodology; and in this short overview and introduction I will explore three questions.

What is the rationale for Radically Reflexive Narrative?

The rationale rests on the idea that as social beings we learn from experience as we interact with others. Chris Mowles, in a recent book about social complexity, suggests that narratives have been used for as long as humans have been living together in groups, they are associated with knowing, and provide a way of bringing diverse ideas together and showing the relationships between them.

As those in leadership and management roles are often working in highly complex and uncertain situations traditional management models do not always provide responsive approaches to deal with the everyday tensions and conflicts that arise. Reflective practice can be an opportunity for developing skills to challenge assumptions and beliefs and to critique the theory as we look for more reality congruent explanations of working together. As Ann Cunliffe states, ‘by uncovering the limitations and possibilities of our assumptions, we are less prone to becoming complacent or ritualistic in our research practices’. While she is talking about research in particular, this applies to exploration of leadership practice in a similar way.

I have spent over 20 years working with executive students, and have come to see that narratives can provide a starting point for deeper understanding. As educators we often ask students to reflect and share experience, but we do not always provide space to go beyond the story and to explore this critically. For example, how often do we pause to think more about the broader influences that led to the situation that is being narrated? It can be like holding a mirror up to our deeply held beliefs by asking ourselves – ‘what it is about this particular situation that has stayed with me that I would like to explore?’ It could be that this can uncover something unresolved or something that puzzles us. This puzzlement can form a fruitful start to more meaningful exploration of leadership practice in action.

When we are in a learning environment that challenges us to ask critical questions of our self and others, we begin a process of thinking about our thinking and that goes beyond reflection and can lead to developing reflexive practice.

What does this mean in practice?

Writing narratives is the first step in an iterative process and what makes this approach different is that the narratives themselves become iterative and there are opportunities to revisit and rewrite based on feedback from tutors and peer learning groups. As part of a broader programme at Master’s level this process can be undertaken longitudinally and by gaining some distance from events, and sharing views with others, this can help to gain perspective on the influences that may be out of our immediate understanding. This means that rather than seeing narratives as fixed snapshots of a past experience, there is a more complex understanding of time. This is an abductive process; and as Barbara Simpson suggests, in abduction, rather than the present being a bridge between past and future, both past and future are experienced in the actions of the present. The rewriting of narratives reflects shifting understanding that often represents a transformational experience for the student, inferring a best explanation at a particular time, but also recognises the fallibility of any particular conclusion as these can change.

This is an ethical approach, and as Manchester Met are signatories of UN PRME (Principles for Responsible Management Education), there is a requirement for Business Schools to provide education that develops understanding and capabilities of what it means to be a responsible leader. When working ethically we enable students to remain open to exploring their leadership practice, allowing them to engage with what it means for them to lead responsibly.

What theory supports this approach?

A key source for this approach comes from the complexity literature that has been taken from its natural science context and explored in relation to the complex patterning of social interaction and organisation. The work of Ralph Stacey and Chris Mowles, in particular, has drawn on the work of John Dewey, well-known for his educational research, and George Herbert Mead, a behavioural psychologist, and others such as Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, and Axel Honneth that provide a useful foundation for a radically social critical approach. Students can choose to explore a theme that is coming out of their narrative such as conflict or a sense of being stuck and they can engage with literature that helps them to explore this. One way of doing this might be to draw on Elias’ examinations of power arising in the figurations, or webs, of people engaged in ongoing power relations, or Bourdieu’s work on habitus and understanding of ‘playing the game’ can be used to explore our own position in organisational life. From experience, this can lead to significant learning about working with others.

This is a very brief introduction to this approach and I have produced a short reading list to go with this podcast for anyone who would like to explore these ideas further, and if you are listening to this and thinking that you would like to discuss this in more detail, please get in touch.

Orlagh McCabe

Wow, that was super interesting. And I think, you know, just the idea of having a space for reflection and a time to pause is absolutely critical to thinking about teaching practice more broadly. What did you think, Paul?

Paul Giladi

There’s a lot to really tuck into in this fabulous podcast by Rachelle because I think - I mean purely from my own research interests - as soon as I heard ‘Axel Honneth’ my ears pricked. I just thought, ‘Oh my God, my hero lives now in critical pedagogy form!’. I thought one thing that was especially powerful and certainly something which, you know, as educators we can learn a lot from is how radically reflexive narrative practice not only challenges existing assumptions about how reflexive writing works, because it’s even a kind of more complex second-order type of thinking (as it’s reflexive, not reflective). But it was also Rachelle’s point concerning how traditional leadership models are ultimately normatively deficient: there’s something radically wrong with a vertical hierarchical model of leadership. It’s authoritarian. It doesn’t involve that kind of intersubjective recognition, with regard to Honneth. And, you know, if we can think of these kinds of narratives that she talks about as positive, dynamic feedback loop which gets students reading critical theory itself, which then feeds into their own learning practices, you create a really, really fascinating, virtuous cycle of development, which is completely at odds with the standard model of us beaming knowledge into the students who just soak it up and then don’t know what to do with it. This is active learning on steroids, if that makes any sense.

Orlagh McCabe

Absolutely. And, you know, look, there’s also a meta-narrative going on here because actually just the process of being involved in the podcast for the presenters goes some way to being a kind of catalyst for this process. It really is transformational.

Paul Giladi

Absolutely. I mean, we’re even doing a kind of three meta-level analysis.

Orlagh McCabe

Oh, for sure.

Paul Giladi

Meta on meta on meta. It’s amazing!

Orlagh McCabe

Excellent. Okay. We don’t want to go beyond our time. But please do join us next time for some more adventures in Critical Pedagogy. Bye for now.

REFERENCES

Andrews, R. 2018. Sustaining Reflective Conversation: A Narrative Exploration of Advising and Learning with Small-Business Entrepreneurs. PhD, University of Hertfordshire

Bourdieu, P. 1990. The logic of practice, Stanford University Press.

Cunliffe, A.L., 2003. ‘Reflexive inquiry in organizational research: Questions and possibilities’. Human relations, 56(8), pp.983-1003.

Elias, N. & Scotson, J. L. 1994. The established and the outsiders, Sage.

Honneth, A. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Mowles, C., 2021. Complexity: A Key Idea for Business and Society. Routledge.

Mowles, C. 2017a. ‘Experiencing uncertainty: On the potential of groups and a group analytic approach for making management education more critical’. Management Learning**,** 1350507617697868.

Mowles, C. 2017b. ‘Group Analytic Methods Beyond the Clinical Setting—Working with Researcher–Managers’. Group Analysis**,** 0533316417701080.

Mead, G. H. 1934. Mind, Self and Society, University of Chicago Press.

Simpson, B. 2009. ‘Pragmatism, Mead and the practice turn’. Organization Studies, 30, 1329-1347.

Stacey, R. 2003a. Complexity and group processes: A radically social understanding of individuals, Routledge.

Stacey, R. 2003b. ‘Learning As An Activity Of Interdependent People’. The Learning Organization, 10.

Stacey, R. 2012. Tools and techniques of leadership and management: Meeting the challenge of complexity, Routledge.

Transcript

Paul Giladi

Hi, I’m Paul.

Orlagh McCabe

Hi, I’m Orlagh.

Paul Giladi

Welcome to another episode of the Manchester Met Critical Pedagogy podcast series.

Orlagh McCabe

In today’s episode, we’re going to be hearing from Rod Cullen from the Technology Enhanced Learning Team. Rod’s going to be talking to us about constructive alignment.

Rod Cullen

Hi there. My name’s Rod Cullen. I’m a Senior Lecturer in learning and teaching technologies with the best part of 30 years of experience in designing, teaching, learning and assessment. And in this short introductory podcast, I want to say a little bit about my experiences of constructive alignment which in a nutshell describes the relationship between three things. The intended learning outcomes of a course or program study. In other words, what we as teachers want our learners to be able to do as a consequence of studying. The assessment tasks for that course. In other words, the method that we will use to determine if the learners have achieved the intended learning outcomes. And finally, the teaching activities that we will engage our students in to prepare them for the assessment tasks.

The most important underpinning principle of constructive alignment is that the learner constructs their own learning and meaning through engagements with the teaching activities that are designed by the teacher to promote the intended learning outcomes. So you might say that constructive alignment is the basis for our outcomes-based, student-centred higher education system. In the context of my own teaching, I quite like the structure in the discipline that’s imposed by designing my provision so that my teaching and assessment activities are aligned with the intended learning outcomes that I’ve created.

However, in my experience of providing CPD courses to teaching colleagues, I found that the role of learning outcomes is not typically well understood and colleagues often struggle to articulate them in the first place and then put them to one side and focus on curriculum content and develop in their programs and units. Whereas I personally spend a lot of time thinking about my learning outcomes and how they might be assessed.

I find that when I get this right, I tend to find that they naturally suggest formative activities that can be embedded into teaching to provide scaffolding for the summative assessment, and also that they can provide the foundations for developing assessment rubrics that are so helpful when it comes to marking. I teach on a unit on the postgraduate certificate in Master’s in higher education called Enhancing Learning Teaching and Assessment with Technology (ELTAT for short).

And with this unit, I wanted participants to be able to do three main things as a result of taking the unit. Firstly, I wanted them to be able to review their current use of technology in teaching practice. What sort of things work, what doesn’t work so well. Secondly, I wanted them to be able to design the future use of technology effectively into their practice.

And thirdly, I wanted participants to be able to realistically plan any developments that they were proposing. I formally articulated these aspirations as three intended learning outcomes that on completion of the units, participants would be able to: 1) evaluate the use of technology to enhance their current learning, teaching and assessment practice; 2) to design constructively aligned learning, teaching and assessment strategies that embed technology effectively into their practice; And 3) develop an action plan to effectively embed that technology within that practice. Using these learning outcomes, I was able to create a holistic portfolio assignment with integrated weekly formative activities. Furthermore, I was able to create an assessment rubric using the language of the Man Met standard assessment descriptors that helped markers to determine the extent to which participants had met those intended learning outcomes.

I actually wrote a paper on this with Rachel Forsyth explaining in some detail how I went about this. I sometimes think of constructive alignment as ‘a what and two hows’. So what do your students need to be able to do? How will you know if they can do it? And how will you teach them to do it? So any research into constructive alignment will bring you to John Biggs. His writing, I find, is very accessible, clear with lots of practical advice dating back to the 1990s with regular revisions and updates.

I do recommend an excellent recent paper by Colin Loughlin and colleagues called Reclaiming Constructive Alignment, which is a very insightful review of constructive alignment in recent higher education discussions.

Thank you for listening. I really hope you’ve enjoyed the podcast.

Paul Giladi

Brilliant stuff there from Rod. Orlagh, would you care to give us your thoughts about it?

Orlagh McCabe

Yeah, sure. I have to say for me, there’s something really reassuring about constructive alignment, and I can see how it’s very valuable to staff. You know, it’s something that I come across all the time. Because essentially if it’s considered appropriately in the planning and design of a particular session, it effectively means that a learner can leave having undertaken all aspects of a particular learning outcome, and therefore we can be reassured that they’ve been effective in having the most optimum opportunity for learning to take place.

Paul Giladi

I mean, it’s interesting that you use the expression ‘reassuring’ because I was wondering what exactly you meant by that: it sounds like what you were thinking about in terms of reassurance is that it’s reassuring for the student that they will be able to satisfy all the learning outcomes. But do you think also maybe, Orlagh, that there is something interesting about constructive alignment that even though in traditional pedagogy now with all of the kind of Bologna agreement stuff, etc., it’s often quite conservative with the learning outcome discourse that you just want the students to be able to have these skills and accomplish these tasks, do you think maybe what is refreshing or even reassuring about constructive alignment is that it’s reassuring for the staff practitioner themselves to be able to have a student who can do things other than simply satisfying learning outcomes.

Orlagh McCabe

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think this is actually quite a contentious area. But for me, most importantly, the use of constructive alignment allows for a significant amount of transparency for our learners. And I think ultimately that has a massive impact on accessibility and that can only be a good thing, surely. Having said that, there is a rhetoric and a body of work that questions the use of learning outcomes you know, as you say, they’re a key component of the constructive alignment process.

But for some people, learning outcomes are seen as bureaucratic and sometimes associated with a behaviourist approach to learning. And some critics have suggested that learning outcomes only provide a really basic indication of what has actually happened in the learning process. And actually there’s wider implications there particularly for us when we’re thinking about critical pedagogy and because in work by and other colleagues, that work rejects that predetermined top-down approach. And actually, I can see for some that they could be seen to restrict that exploratory and discovery educational experience and because, they can’t always be easily measured or quantified. But I have to say, personally, I’ve encountered colleagues who use learning outcomes and they’ve helped them to feel more confident and more empowered in a teaching situation, particularly for newer members of staff or people who are new to teaching.

And also, when we’re thinking about things like university metrics, we really are thinking about how they inform our approaches to constructive alignment, I like a quality measure. It makes me feel reassured that actually when learning outcomes are constructed carefully, they can capture unintended meaning very well. Outcome-based learning models are relatively under-researched. And so, we are seeing a move towards more research evidence in this area beginning to emerge.

Paul Giladi

That’s really interesting. I love it. I mean, hopefully what we’ve done is now provoke colleagues into thinking ‘can you do critical pedagogy with learning outcomes-centric discourse?’ or ‘can you even reject one without having adverse effects on the other? All of that was absolutely sensational. Brilliant stuff.

Orlagh McCabe

Yeah. Thanks to Rod! Do join us next time for some more adventures in critical pedagogy. Bye for now.

Transcript

Paul Giladi 

Hi, I’m Paul! 

Orlagh McCabe 

Hi, I’m Orlagh! 

Paul Giladi 

Welcome to another episode of the Manchester Met Critical Pedagogy podcast series. 

Orlagh McCabe 

In today’s episode, we’re going to be hearing from Joe Greenwood. Joe is a colleague from Learner Development at Man Met, and he hosts the wonderful ‘A Critical Thought’ podcast. You can see a link to this on our UTA webpages and on our critical pedagogy webpages as well. Today, Joe is sharing his experiences of supporting students to think, to write more critically. 

Joseph Greenwood 

I want to outline an activity I lead in the Writing Critically session of the Writing Project. The activity is a task-based learning activity, which is my connection to critical pedagogy. Task-based learning is great to use in the classroom, in my experience. It originated as a ‘Teaching English as a Foreign Language Pedagogy’, but I think it translates fantastically well to classrooms in higher education. 

David Nunan’s language teaching technology outlines some advantages of task-based learning as giving an emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language. It introduces authentic materials into the learning situation. It provides opportunities for learners to focus on the language and also on the learning process itself, which is key here. It enhances the learners own personal experiences as contributing elements to classroom learning, and it attempts to link classroom language learning with language activation outside the classroom. 

So, as you can see, talk about advantages in an ‘English as a foreign language classroom’ setting translates really well to target language in an academic context; in this case, critical language. The activity is the first of the pedagogical session and the students are shown a poster promoting veganism. On it, there are some pictures of animals: some farmyard, some pets, dog, chicken, cat, etc. And, above, it some text promoting veganism. 

The students are first just asked to describe the poster and its elements. They are given the cue not to be critical, only descriptive. Then they’re given two to three minutes to discuss on their table. Then, they are asked to share ideas. Students often do this successfully, although some may segue into critical language. They’re not pulled up on this. They are just allowed to do. 

Now, students may comment on things like ‘the animals are looking up’, ‘the font decreases in size’, ‘There’s a mix of animals’, etc. Then the students are asked to be critical of the poster and its elements. I might give one example here, such as “the ‘Go Vegan’ slogan is in larger font to draw attention to it”. Students are then encouraged to discuss in groups again and share with the class. Finally, the group is asked to discuss if they notice anything different in the language they use to describe vs. the language they use to be critical. 

The reason this activity is important to my practice: I have a background in teaching English to speakers of other languages and I’ve taught in numerous countries. And in my experience, learners can be reticent to engage with the ‘present, practise, produce’ model, and this might partly be through the fear of getting it wrong and misusing the language you’ve just modelled to them. 

And this is where task-based learning is great because through the medium of a task, students are given the opportunity to use the language in the classroom without being put on the spot. And that’s what this activity does. Students may not know where to start if we just said, “write critical sentences right away”. Equally, if we gave them some examples and said, “Here’s some critical sentences, use them in some writing”, they might just reproduce what we’d given them. Giving them the opportunity to discuss in pairs or groups and to share as a class to try and complete the task, not only are they using the language, but then noticing why they’re using the language and how they’re using the language. 

So, a really important element of it is the short discussion at the end. And I feel like this ties the task together. And the guiding questions the teacher asks in that are really important. So, for example, I might ask, ‘did you notice any change in your language when you were being critical?’ ‘What were those changes?’ ‘What kind of words did you use?’ 

And the idea is to try and elicit the answers out of the student. So, for example, when they’re being critical, we stop dealing with definites. We are now speculating, discussing possibilities, and probabilities. And this changes the language we use. We might use hedging language, when looking at the poster. For example: “the poster shows a mixture of pets and farmyard animals”. Descriptive. This could have been done to remind the viewer that all animals have equal value, which would be critical. So, that difference there is very noticeable to the student. The use of hedging language is actually covered in a previous session on the course as well, so there’s been previous input and hopefully that draws through to this activity.  

As the teacher, I might also highlight some words they used to be critical. For example, verbs. They might say “This shows” and that use of verbs to explain evidence constitutes criticality. And the final important thing about this activity is how it’s followed up. So, you might remember this session was called ‘Writing Critically’. But this is an oral activity. Doing it is as an oral activity encourages engagement and participation, and elicits discussion amongst the students. 

Hopefully, then, this helps them notice the language they are using. And I then follow it up with an activity that focuses on writing. And that allows students to identify the critical language on the page and to place it in paragraphs. So, the task-based learning activity acts as a great motivator and a great activity to help noticing. 

Some further reading or resources I might suggest. I’ve already mentioned Nunan’s book Language Teaching Methodology’. I should also mention the practitioner credited with creating task-based learning, N.S. Prabhu. And there’s a wealth of literature regarding task-based learning and Prabhu’s work. One of the cornerstones of that would be ‘Second Language Pedagogy’. And finally, a book I’ve used a lot to inform my practice is Klaus Brandl’s Communicative Language Teaching in Action. And I like that book because it contains a number of activities that you can lift out and apply in your classes. I think that opportunity to bring the theory to life and use it in the classroom is really rewarding.  

So, task-based learning works really well in a higher education classroom. It’s active, it’s engaging, it increases students involvement, and it gets them to focus on the learning process, not just the end result, which is crucial for me. Thanks. 

Paul Giladi 

Excellent stuff there from Joe! Orlagh, would you care to give us your thoughts here. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Yeah, Yeah, thanks. I thought that was really interesting and it was a really good example of a think pair share, actually, in terms of the kind of activity that Joe was undertaking. For me, I felt it raised some key issues, particularly ideas around risk. Identifying that notion that the learners might feel reluctant to answer a question in case they don’t offer the correct response. 

We come across that all the time. I’m sure you do as well. 

Paul Giladi 

Yeah. 

Orlagh McCabe 

And I think this activity scaffolds those questioning techniques, and it really helps to build that critical overview. Overall, it’s a neat way to capture the key components of critical language development. And I felt Joe took a flipped approach. I think it’s worth noting that. Following it up with an activity that made it really easy then to determine if learning had taken place, if the activity had been successful. Effectively using constructive alignment in that ‘present, practise, produce’ model. So, that was really good. 

Paul Giladi 

Yeah, I completely agree! I suppose one thing that interests me based on what you said as well, Orlagh, is when Joe talked about students being allowed to just do - that’s nicely connected to the point about risk, where it seems more than reasonable to suppose that kind of good critical pedagogy involves embracing risk and encouraging not necessarily ‘failure’ - because that’s a loaded term, especially in the political and economic circumstances - but more so the idea of experimentation: you can kind of just play around with concepts, play around with your ideas. It sounds also what Joe was doing with the flipped approach was creating a very engaging environment where, as you said, the scaffolding moves from description then to explanation and then to, we might use the words ‘ideological disclosure’ or anything like that, for example. So, that sounds like a really, really simple technique, but it has immensely powerful political effect. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Absolutely. Totally agree. And it’s like you say, it’s very simple, straightforward, and it’s something that could be adopted for a multitude of different situations. And I think that, you know, it’s a really nice example of something that we could all just pick up and take into our practice. Okay, join us next time then for some more adventures in critical pedagogy. 

Bye for now! 

Paul Giladi 

Bye for now! 

Transcript

Orlagh McCabe 

Hi, I’m Orlagh! 

Paul Giladi 

Hi, I’m Paul! 

Orlagh McCabe 

Welcome to another episode of the Manchester Met Critical Pedagogy podcast series. 

Paul Giladi 

In today’s episode, we’ll hear from Stella Bosun-Arije, who’s speaking about combining academic rigor with academic kindness. 

Stella Bosun-Arije 

Good afternoon, my name is Stella Bosun-Arije. I’m a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Nursing at Manchester Metropolitan University. The main focus of my topic this afternoon is being a facilitator and collaborator of learning takes a mix of academic rigour and academic kindness. As academics, we are facilitators of learning, and we are ever prepared to adopt different strategies and present varies academic and professional outlooks to facilitate our learners learning regardless of the learning styles of the learners. 

Academics are also collaborators of learning because they interact with the learners for knowledge-expansion to take place. This podcast entails a careful discussion of how my concepts of academic kindness and academic rigour are underpinned by a pedagogical theory of learning by a renowned theorist, Lev Vygotsky. So you may want to ask ‘what is the relevance of applying this theory into what I do as an academic?’. Well, as a lecturer, I am thinking about application of what I do into practice. 

I want to think about the contemporary society which we live now and contemporary nursing education. Student nurses are educated to be patient-focused, having the patients at the centre of every nursing activity. Effective communication is a skill and a concept that student nurses are required to learn, to be patient-centred and competent in a world that is gradually becoming a global village. 

Communication in itself is a complex concept, yet instrumental to achieving patient-centredness. Therefore, when I teach patient-centred care, for example, I cling closely to learning theories proposed by Vygotsky. One of these theories states that social interaction and scaffolding are learning aids. In relation to this, I anchor my concept of academic kindness. By supporting the learners, providing them with scenarios that can guide their thoughts and help them focus their discussion, I’m also scaffolding the learners. Then, they work in groups where they can interact with other learners by asking and answering relevant questions on communication. When they do this, the learners are able to be critical thinkers when they interact with one another.  

Second, frameworks and experiences encourage learners to expand and extend their knowledge, incorporating these skills, understanding, and competencies. These concepts underpin the concept of academic rigour, which I apply into teaching. A practical example of this is that when I need to blend academic kindness and academic rigour, I do this in order to meet learning objectives on effective communication and patient-centred care. What I do first is to ask the learners about their previous experiences around communication. I then present them with theoretical frameworks which will help them develop their communication skills, helping them to be culturally sensible, culturally sensitive and culturally competent. 

This is important because it helps deepen the learners understanding and competence in communication. So, in conclusion, I think blending academic rigour and academic kindness is not as easy as it sounds. It takes patience, principles, intellectual ability, interaction, and innovation. So finally, I think it’s worth reflecting on the proposition that both facilitators of learning and learners are core constructors of knowledge, and they should continually seek knowledge expansion, skills and approaches that will promote quality teaching and learning in high education. 

Let me leave you with some literature authored by Vygotsky, which is centred on social constructivist theory of learning. And there, you would be able to read about social constructivism and its relevance to learning and teaching. I will round up by saying that being a facilitator and collaborator of learning takes a mix of academic kindness and academic rigour. Thank you. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Brilliant stuff there from Stella! Paul, what did you think? 

Paul Giladi 

There’s a lot, I thought, in Stella’s presentation. Particularly because not only does it beautifully combine and blend with what Laura D’Olimpio, our keynote speaker at the Launch Event, was talking about in terms of compassion, and critical perspectivism, it also sounds like what Stella is suggesting as a type of radical approach in terms of patient centeredness, about asking learners about their previous experiences, suggests that academic kindness and academic rigour is not just simply a matter of combining thought and emotion, a matter of collapsing those standard dualisms that are inherited from effectively early modern periods and even from ancient philosophical periods where you find such dualisms in with Plato’s thought. But it also about recognising how the collapse of this inherited distinction enables also greater authority and voice: students actually realise that when they’re being asked about their previous experiences in a caring environment that is not simply designed to give them a sense that their opinions matter but also to help them see that they have an opinion which can lead a discussion. There’s greater epistemic power, I think, in that form. And that’s especially enhanced by what Stella was talking about with regard to cultivating cultural sensibilities. 

Orlagh McCabe 

There’s also quite a meta narrative again going on here, I felt, between her pedagogic approach and the learner-centred approach as well. And like so many of our podcasts, this left me wanting more. You know, I just wanted to know more about it. And I really like that idea of academic kindness and its combination with academic rigour. I can see how it’s important, particularly in supporting patient-centred learning. What I think I’d like to have known a bit more about, and it’s something that I think I might go and explore, is this notion of academic kindness and where that fits in relation to relational pedagogy discourses and discourses around pedagogy of care. Because I think, you know, there’s a lot of overlap and similarities there. So, it would be nice to look at that as a distinct thing. 

Paul Giladi 

Yeah. And potentially, even the idea about academic kindness is translating to all features of higher education practice. It could even translate into research practice - maybe even to the whole peer-review process of how grant application writing works, where it often feels quite disciplinarian, quite punitive - it’s all about get the money, get the money, get the money - , and if you don’t succeed, there’s something categorically wrong with your framework, with your project. But, you know, a pedagogy of care can also translate to a culture of care in an institution setting. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Yeah. 

Paul Giladi 

Well, that was great. Join us next time for some more adventures in Critical Pedagogy.  

Orlagh McCabe 

Bye! 

Paul Giladi 

Bye! 

Transcript

Paul Giladi 

Hi, I’m Paul. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Hi, I’m Orlagh 

Paul Giladi 

Welcome to another episode of the Manchester Metropolitan University Critical Pedagogy Podcast series! 

Orlagh McCabe 

In today’s episode, which is our first of 22/23 academic year, we’re going to be hearing from Rod Cullen. Rod’s talking about active learning and the TREC model. 

Rod Cullen 

Hi, there! My name’s Rod Cullen. I’m a senior lecturer in Learning and Teaching Technologies with the best part of thirty years’ experience of designing, teaching, learning and assessment. And in this, my second Critical Pedagogy podcast, I want to share with you some thoughts and experiences on active learning. You’ll find that there are lots of definitions of active learning, but the one that has most resonated with me is Felder & Brent’s 2009 definition of ‘Active Learning’ is anything course-related that all students in a class session are called upon to do, other than simply watching, listening and taking notes. 

Sometime in the early 2000s, I attended a conference where the keynote speaker, whose name I certainly can’t recall, delivered a session to over 200 delegates on large group teaching. He started his session with a question to the whole audience and immediately pointed out that the majority of us were now doing our best to avoid his gaze, as we really didn’t want to be the one that he picked on to answer his question. He went on to show what he considered to be a better way to engage students with questions during large group teaching situations. So he handed out a pack of Post-It notes. He asked another question and told us to take a minute or two to write our answer down on a post-it note. “Okay”, he said, “[G]et yourself into groups of three and share your answers with each other and then try and agree which is the best answer in your group”. 

The room soon became very noisy with our discussions, but after a few minutes we completed our debate and the presenter explained that in writing our answers down, we’d been challenged to move our thoughts out of our heads and articulate them in a meaningful way on the Post-It note. We then been further challenged to explain this to others in our group and to discuss the merits of each of others answers in coming to an agreement on which was the best. As individuals, we’d all been cognitively engaged with the question way beyond simply listening to someone else’s answer, and we were all now in a better position to talk about it. 

He then went on to explain how he included these kinds of questioning activities in his large group teaching at regular intervals to make sure that his students were regularly engaging in things other than listening to him talk and taking notes. This one session had a huge impact on my approach to in-class teaching regardless of the size of the class. 

I realized that getting thoughts and ideas out of students’ heads in a meaningful, inclusive way was vital to successful engagement and learning. Over the years since, I’ve developed a structured way of planning and designing active learning. More recently, I’ve worked with my colleague, Orlagh McCabe, to articulate this as the TREC approach to active learning. Here’s an example of how I might deliver a TREC activity.  

I always start with a trigger activity (“T”). So let’s say I was introducing new teachers to active learning. I might ask the whole class to write down three important characteristics of active learning. Now, these days I tend to do this anonymously using a digital app on my students’ smartphones. The important thing, though, is that writing the answer down gets what they already know or understand or believe out of their heads, and these tangible outputs are shared with the whole group. 

I then move on to “R” of TREC and review the contributions made by the learners. I try to highlight where there are common themes and any differences of opinion and begin to help us develop a shared understanding of what active learning might be.  

What I then do is I’ll compare and contrast the student contributions with the expectations and evidence, the “E” of TREC model that can be sourced from the wider research and literature. In this case, I’ll share formal definitions and examples of active learning, usually on a PowerPoint slide, and I find that this comparison will prompt further discussion with the students. At this point, we found out what my students already know, think, or believe about active learning. We’ve reviewed and highlighted common themes and differences, and we’ve compared and contrasted those with formal definitions of examples. 

And so (“C”) I can now challenge my students to consolidate their learning with a follow up activity, which might be to share their own examples of effective, active learning tasks. For me, at the core of active learning is getting thoughts, ideas and questions out of students’ heads in a meaningful and tangible way. And I found that the TREC approach helps me to do this in a structured way that students are comfortable with value and benefit from. 

If you’re interested in active learning in general, I recommend Felder & Brent’s 2009 paper, or more recently the work of Alejandro Armellini around active blended learning. If you’d like a bit more detail on the TREC approach, please check out the five-minute read that Orlagh McCabe and I wrote for the Media and Learning blog. Thanks for listening.  

I hope you’ve enjoyed the podcast. 

Paul Giladi 

That was really, really fascinating. I loved it! Orlagh, tell us what you think? 

Orlagh McCabe 

Okay, so I’m a bit of an insider for this one, Paul. As Rod mentioned in his podcast, Rod and I have been working together on this area of active learning. So the TREC model really began from a discussion that we were having when we were supporting staff during the pandemic in the move to online learning. And it’s just really taken off from there. 

It’s very simple in its kind of orientation, but I think it does give practitioners, teachers, tutors quite a nice and simple mechanism for supporting their students to actively engage with learning and teaching. 

Paul Giladi 

What I find so interesting is not only the fact that Rod named you as his partner in crime here, which is lovely, but also how the TREC model as a type of relational pedagogical practice itself is much more radical in a way than it seems. It’s interesting because even though the language sounds like it’s just, you know, about common sense and it’s just about sticking with ordinary language and things like that, the idea of automatically alerting everyone to the problems of listening-while-taking note model is exactly the kind of diagnostic point that Paolo Freire worries about in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: the model is the banking model - you are transferring credits to be deposited in someone else’s mind and then that gets reproduced. 

I just wanted just to pick your brains, Orlagh, in your capacity as the co-author of this model, about how you found the students’ uptake of this in terms of their practices and how it took off and became a really flourishing narrative for them. 

Orlagh McCabe 

I think what is most powerful here is, is like you say, it does move away from that banking model. But in doing that, what it also does is it allows our students to genuinely make meaning about their learning. So they have agency, they have interaction, there’s an opportunity for authentic dialog to take place. The consolidation side of the TREC model is actually super powerful because what it does is it gives that moment for reflection, which we don’t always necessarily embed in our teaching practices, both as practitioners and as learners. 

So I think, you know, I think probably that’s why it’s become quite popular. And from our perspective, we saw it as this kind of simplistic framework for staff to use as the very basis for the development. But actually, we’ve been asked to talk about this internationally and quite frequently at the moment! 

And we’ve also been writing about this so much more. Active learning is a really fundamental part of the education strategy for the University, and it’s something, you know, flexible; active learning is most particularly embedded in the way in which pedagogical approaches are taken forward institutionally. And it’s really important for staff to be able to a) know what that means for their practice and b) have the mechanisms in place for them to be able to adapt these in a sequential, informal sometimes way and in a way that actually doesn’t cause them too much work in replanning or reimagining of their current teaching practice. It should be just quite simple and easy to articulate and embed. 

Paul Giladi 

Yeah, that sounds absolutely amazing. Just one final word on my part: it sounds like given what you said about the international appeal of it, it’s probably very big in America, right?  

Orlagh McCabe 

Yeah! So we’ve been speaking recently, in fact, we’re speaking at a conference next Tuesday in Florida. It just seems to have taken off in other places. And we know that this podcast series is popular in the US, so hopefully some of our US listeners will have the opportunity to find out a bit more about that from here as well! 

Paul Giladi 

Indeed! A big shout out to our transatlantic cousins who enjoy listening to the podcast. That means a lot. Orlagh, the really final word will go to you here. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Just to say, join us next time for some more adventures in critical pedagogy. 

Paul Giladi 

Bye for now. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Bye for now. 

Transcript

Orlagh McCabe 

Hi. I’m Orlagh! 

Paul Giladi 

Hi, I’m Paul! 

Orlagh McCabe 

Welcome to another episode of the Manchester Met Critical Pedagogy Podcast series. 

Paul Giladi 

And in today’s episode, our second for the 22/23 academic year, we’ve got something rather special in store: a slightly extended podcast from Simon Massey, one of our lecturers in sociology, who’s going to be sharing some of his experiences with online delivery during the pandemic. 

Simon Massey 

Hi there, my name is Simon Massey, I am the Deputy Director of the Manchester Met Q-Step Centre and a lecturer in sociology. One of my roles at the Q-Step centre is leading on the development of innovative pedagogies in quantitative research methods, also known as trying to make statistics fun. I’m very proud to work at Manchester Met in particular, where we have a diverse body of students, not to mention the large number of non-traditional students here who, for one reason or another, balance other life responsibilities alongside their degree or are the first to come to university from their family. 

Since the emergence of online teaching, I have witnessed first-hand how quickly non-traditional students may be cut off from learning opportunities if we, as educators, allow it. During the height of the pandemic, we had to think quickly and become very adaptive with digital technology to try and uphold the same standards of teaching we were used to on a face-to-face basis. However, whilst we had more challenges than ever in engaging students, they also had more challenges in trying to engage with us. When teaching my statistics module during one of the lockdowns, I noticed the same students were not logging on to lectures, classes or drop-ins. These students also would email to let me know they couldn’t make it and would apologise and assure me they would catch up. I noticed instantly the students had reasons they couldn’t make regularly scheduled sessions. They had children learning from home, parents shielding, other caring responsibilities. Many of them were key workers covering for other staff who couldn’t work. they therefore couldn’t make it because of unique personal responsibilities that all had something in common.  

I therefore decided to do a drop-in session at a different time to any other. This was at around 5pm and it often would last an hour or two. Simply put, I would sit there in my kitchen on a Thursday evening with nothing more than my laptop and my camera on, and I would be there to provide students any support they needed. Whether that was to recap lecture content, demonstrate stuff from seminars or just to make sure they were ok, I was there if they needed me. This was the birth of my ‘Tea Time Teams Sessions’. To explain the name, although some students were drinking cups of tea, these sessions were not about that. They were online learning groups that met in the evenings, when most people were eating evening meals, commonly known as ‘Having their Tea’ in Manchester and much of Northern England. What was different about these sessions to ordinary drop-ins, was that they were at times we might regard as inconvenient, yet very convenient for these students. I would have some logging on during breaks at work, some during or after cooking their dinner, or tea, and some who had finished everything they needed to do that day and were finally ready to do their university work. What was instantly special about these sessions, was how people were both grateful for them, but also prepared because they knew it was for them specifically.  

These sessions used Scaffolding with Communities of Practice to provide students who could not learn during traditional hours with a supportive community where they could learn from one another. So, each week, students learning would build from the previous weeks and therefore when someone missed a session, they could be brought up to speed by other students haring their learning or even some work they had done. I very quickly learned that students were certainly engaging with the learning materials, just not the live sessions scheduled in regular hours. This therefore became their own study group. What made it more special, was how they all realised they all had things in common at that time, such as childcare, and then began to support one another personally. This quickly built their own sense of community, and before I knew it, they were helping each other like friends. There were three key moments that made me realise this was not an ordinary drop-in service. The first was when I was late to my own session, the second was when the sessions started getting busier but less needed my help, and the third was when I realised, I was no longer needed. 

The first key moment: when I was late to my own session. It was a very cold dark Thursday night. I had just finished 6 hours straight of online teaching and was preparing for my ‘Tea Time Teams Sessions’. Just as I flicked the kettle on to make myself a cup of tea, the whole houses power cut out. We really need to get a new kettle, I said to my partner. It’s not just us, she replied. The whole street’s out. I therefore think quickly and decide I better call a colleague to cover the session. I then remember that I live in an area that is essentially a black hole for phone signal. So I have no power, no signal and no way to tell these students that I can’t make the session and no way to ask a colleague to help. I then take a walk to clear my head and as I live at the top of a hill, I quickly realise that the whole town is out of power. I chat to various neighbours and make small talk about how it’s like living in the stone ages, all from a safe distance of course, and suddenly, the whole town lights up again. As a child I regularly went to Blackpool Illuminations – the excitement I felt when the electricity around me surged provided flashbacks, albeit without the stick of rock or worrying about seagulls stealing my chips. I walk back to my house and log on. When I finally get into teams, I see my session has started. I then wait for a few seconds whilst the screen is still loading, I hear sudden cheering. Actual cheering. For the first time in my career, students were cheering at my entrance. I felt like a rockstar who has just walked on the stage. The students were very empathetic about by lateness and explained to me that they had just started the session without me couldn’t believe it, there I was worrying my students were all going to feel abandoned, isolated in their home with no clue how to conduct a statistical test, and they were just cracking on without me.  

The second key moment was when sessions started getting busier. Following learning that the students had started the previous session without me, I was confident that should all power in the town shut down again the students would be in good hands. However, the following week I was able to turn up on time and couldn’t believe it when there were 15 students already in there ready to go. I asked if they were ok and if they thought it was an ok session. Some responded ‘yes’: they just want to make sure they didn’t miss anything. I learned that this was the most popular drop-in session not because of me, but because students had been provided a space to socialise with each other through their learning. The maths anxiety I usually had to deal with was not there. Instead, students would complain about their children not being in school yet, or their parents complaining that the shopping wasn’t right. Regardless, the students were being supportive of one another and were still learning the content. This takes me to the final key moment: where I realise I am no longer needed.  

Each week the sessions would have a lot of students turning up but fewer and fewer asking for help. I would ask ‘is everyone ok?’, and they would just say ‘yes’ – just getting on with it. My presence was merely a comfort. I was there to answer any questions should they have any. When it came to the end of the unit, I was overwhelmed with the number of students thanking me personally for sorting the ‘Tea Time Teams Sessions’. What began as a modest idea to assist a few students evolved into a model of effective teaching that recognised the value of identity and community building. After doing some research to evaluate the teaching, the tea-time sessions came up in an interview with a student. Who said specifically: “I didn’t need to be there; I just came for the party.” Students enjoyed the session because they were getting that important part of the experience that remote learning was denying them – friendship. Community. A sense of belonging and most importantly a sense of identity. When returning to campus, I was thrilled to see students who had met on my tea-time sessions sat next to each other on campus supporting one another. I also found out that they had started their own WhatsApp group.  

I have always argued that non-traditional teaching is essential for non-traditional students. ‘Tea Time Teams Sessions’ have given me a concrete example of that and a model of teaching that does not only need to happen during a global pandemic.  

Thank you for listening. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Wow. I found that absolutely enthralling. It’s just so wonderful to hear from staff across. And I hear about this all the time, but just to hear from staff across the university who have adapted an approach to make it more inclusive, to meet the needs of their learners. And although a really kind of simplistic endeavour, it’s absolutely powerful and transformative. 

What were your thoughts? 

Paul Giladi 

There are so many things to talk about with respect to Simon’s podcast, just because, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind at least is I find it kind of both enriching and moving at the same time because the amount of vulnerability that was displayed: Simon’s vulnerability in the pandemic; and his acute sensitivity to our unique student body’s vulnerability. 

And I think it’s so important how Simon phrased that, because at Man Met we are privileged, I think, not hampered by in any shape or form, privileged to have non-traditional students. It really requires us to be pedagogically right on it, you know, at a world-leading level. For, it’s much harder to do non-traditional pedagogy than it is to do traditional pedagogy, let alone to do it in such a constraining environment and an anxiety inducing environment that the pandemic caused. 

So how to make statistics fun, which I thought was a wonderful question in the pandemic through the Tea Time sessions, I think is amazing. For me, I’ve always thought about this and we’ve had previous podcasts where we’ve looked at the idea about technology as both enhancing student uptake of content, but potentially how technology can be used as a barrier to uptake of student content, etc. The idea that digital spaces could sustain community is something I found really interesting. As Simon said, it’s not an ordinary drop-in service. But, I think for me the most powerful points about Simon’s anecdotes and his experience was how there is a real sense of authentic transformational leadership going on. And by that, I mean the idea that what you do as a leader is you don’t want to maintain a leader-follower dualism: you want ultimately that leader-follower dualism to dissolve so that ultimately the whole logic of leadership means that you don’t need a leader as such: everyone is self-motivated, self-sustaining, self-directing, and as Simon phrased it so well, the phase from having to drive the narrative and explain the function of the session, the normal work that we do as educators, to then gradually seeing that level of not autonomy but communitarian autonomy students as a collective supporting one another and even supporting Simon dealing with a range of logistical issues. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Absolutely. 

Paul Giladi 

I think just incredible. And the idea that a simple thing as a Tea Time Teams session can produce something that is tangibly self-authenticating transformational leadership is amazing. That’s huge credit to Simon and I think something which we at Man Met can be very proud of about how we do our pedagogy. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Absolutely. And just one example of some of the innovations that take place across pedagogy here. But it’s really great to hear from Simon and to see that transformation in terms of students being more agentic and absolutely be more empowered in their own learning. So fantastic stuff. 

Paul Giladi 

Yeah. And getting that even transferred from the digital sphere to the hopefully now permanently post-pandemic material sphere was also really heartening, so there isn’t some kind of divide, so to speak, between the digital and that none-digital voice. But anyway, enough for me, I waffled on far too long, but Orlagh has kept me in check, which is always wonderful! Join us next time, everyone, for some more adventures in critical pedagogy. 

So it’s a goodbye from me. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Bye for now.  

Transcript

Orlagh McCabe 

In today’s episode, we’re going to be hearing from Matthew Thorpe. Matt is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, and he’s going to be speaking about the impact of the digital age on traditional pedagogy. 

Matthew Thorpe 

My name is Matthew Thorpe, and I am a Senior Lecturer in Teacher Education. In this podcast, we will consider the impact that digital and online technologies have had on traditional and more contemporary theories of learning.  

The rise of the digital age has in many ways led to a renaissance of behaviourist learning theory and its associated practices. Consider the trace data we leave behind in the form of clicks, likes, comments, our location data. This data can be processed algorithmically and used to manipulate our behaviours in certain ways. Within education specifically, student behaviour is increasingly being captured as data. This data can then be visualized via a data dashboard and displayed to students and teachers. For example, some applications may show students a weekly rag rating. If a student has attended all sessions, clicked on that week’s reading and visited the virtual learning environment, they would receive a green rating for that week. Whereas other students who have not clicked onto the relevant content may get a red rating.  

Such visualizations represent a digital form of operant conditioning, using reward and punishment to condition students to demonstrate desirable behaviours. Although behaviourism is a useful example to show the clear relationship that exists between digital technologies and more traditional learning theories, in the 21st century there has been a necessity to consider learning theory in a far more deliberate way that accounts for technological developments such as networks and online technologies. 

A more contemporary online learning theory is connectivism. This theoretical approach appeared around the mid 2000’s from the work of George Siemens. From a connectivist perspective, learning is based on the notion of networked intelligence in which humans can connect to information via digital networks. This could be digital content from web pages, blogs, videos, or other humans directly over the network. Connectivists believe learning occurs outside of the individual and is a distributed process over a network, which I think resonates with how we live our lives daily when we consider how the Internet results in it being far more useful what you’re able to plug in and access via an intelligent network, i.e. the web, rather than what you can internalize as knowledge in memory. Connectivism has evolved somewhat alongside the developments of things such as machine learning and AI over intelligent networks, and therefore it’s the best theoretical perspective to accommodate this idea of personalization or automation of education via intelligent networks that would serve student bespoke content.  

An alternative online learning theory is collaborativism, which has much longer historical roots than connectivism. This approach has closer ties to constructivist theory, with a focus on how technology can promote peer discourse and online communities of practice. Any independent study and resources should be used to supplement online collaboration and peer learning, which is always the main focus of a collaborativist approach. Collaborativism places much more emphasis on the role of a teacher as a gateway to a knowledge community by steering online discourse and collaboration as opposed to connectivism, which is about accessing information over a network in a distributed way. 

In conclusion, these two more contemporary theoretical visions for online learning represent two emerging epistemological positions that educators need to consider critically.  

Connectivism aligns with an objectivist conception of knowledge and the possibility for learning to be automated via artificial intelligence, which will be able to datify student behaviour to produce a tailored learning experience. Mark Zuckerberg represents a high-profile individual who, amongs others, has invested heavily in this educational future. Whereas collaborativism aligns more closely with constructivist approaches to acquiring knowledge, so the theory apportions much more importance to human interaction and the role of the teacher and peer learning. This approach views technology as something that can augment human intelligence rather than automate education via technical solutions such as artificial intelligence. The acceleration of technology in the shape of big data, algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence are already shaping society more broadly and pose some interesting dilemmas for the future of education. 

Considering theoretical perspectives on learning like those discussed in this podcast can help frame the conversation to ensure we embed technological practices into education in ways that are pedagogically sound and theoretically informed. It’s important we build an educational future that deploys technology appropriately and in a way that aligns with our core, ethical and cultural values as educators. 

Paul Giladi 

Some very insightful and rich material there from Matthew. Orlagh, please kick off the discussion. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Well, I’d like to. I really enjoyed this podcast from Matt. It’s encouraged me to consider some things that I hadn’t previously thought about. One of these is definitely that idea of operant conditioning through visual data. I will be honest: I couldn’t help but feel reminded of that lovely feeling I get when I’m able to tick a previously flagged email. It’s very satisfying! And actually, you know, that was one of the first things that came to mind. I really liked Matt’s explanation of connectivism and particularly his examples of machine learning. I found that interesting. I can see where some of that data is useful, particularly in terms of considering the learning experience. One of the things that we always do on the PG Cert is we really encourage our participants to really get to know their learners and tell them how that is so important in the planning and design of curriculum, of sessions, of assessment. 

But I’m not convinced that that data capture is a standalone activity, actually, in terms of connectivism. I’d rather think of myself as being a little less compliant in that process. Or not. I don’t know. Or not sufficiently rigid. I’m more of a cyber flaneur! That’s where I feel that I fit. 

But despite this, I do recognize the importance of data and the impact it can have on the learning experience. And where I feel it is paramount to learning is when we can really embody this relational pedagogical experience. I talk about this all the time, I think that’s so important, and the Connectivism side actually captures that much more appropriately. 

Paul Giladi 

It’s really interesting what you said about your reactions, Orlagh. I don’t know if it’s because I’m so disillusioned with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook/Meta, or whatever it’s now called, but connectivism really didn’t sing to me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I thought Matthew’s explanations were so eloquent and fascinating, it’s just the idea about the datafication of everything: it just sounds like it’s, you know, György Lukács’s worst nightmare, where every single thing about the lifeworld just gets subject to Facebook algorithms! But then this is almost exactly what these perennial discussions about technology and pedagogy are about: on the one side, the idea of technology as precisely a barrier to pedagogy, a barrier to capability enhancement, a barrier to capability realization. 

But then with the collaborativist approach, where, as Matthew was saying, you’ve got technology augmenting interpersonal practice, as opposed to creating that. I thought that was really, really thought-provoking, because it’s also linked to, as we know, issues in transhumanism, about the enhancement of human life: technology is viewed as something to be thoroughly valued as a source of good. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Absolutely. 

Paul Giladi 

But of course, equally, there are downsides. I think it’s almost as if this type of ‘Janusian’ situation where you’ve got the connectivist and the collaborativist sides of technology, both delimiting and also expanding our pedagogical horizons and our ability to make sense of student learning processes as an even alternative approach to how students learn in general. That sounds like it’s very, very, very powerful. And it has definitely given me impetus to go and research this on my own. And crucially to tell my students about this. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Massively thought-provoking, yeah. So, thanks for that, Matt. 

Paul Giladi 

Yes, thank you, Matt! 

Orlagh McCabe 

Please do join us next time for some more adventures in Critical Pedagogy. Goodbye for now! 

Paul Giladi 

Bye for now! 

Transcript

Orlagh McCabe 

Welcome to another episode of the Manchester Met Critical Pedagogy Podcast series. 

Paul Giladi 

In today’s episode, we hear from Stella Bosun-Arije, whom you might remember from a previous podcast where she spoke about academic kindness. Stella will be talking to us today about a social constructivist approach to teaching and learning. 

Stella Bosun-Arije  

Everyone belongs to and identifies with a society - no man is an island. Bearing this in mind makes me view the world through a social constructivist lens. Social constructivism is a pedagogic theory championed by Lev Vygotsky in the late 19th century. Applying the theory to teaching and learning in the 21st century cannot be more paramount. 

The world is now a global village; perhaps I should say it is a global society, where people interact with one another, make sense of the world, create and recreate meaning. However, the meaning they create depends on the level, brand, and quality of knowledge they have gained from different events, interactions, and engagements in the society or environment with which they relate. These concepts simply support that no one is a custodian of knowledge; knowledge is co-constructed and the environment plays a huge role in determining the type of knowledge we gain. 

Now, let me digress a bit into the Ecological Systems theory developed by Urie Bronfenbrenner in the early 20th century. His work shed light on the complexities that exist in the environment in which each person lives. Bronfenbrenner used five ecological systems: the microsystem, the mesosystem, the exosystem, the macrosystem, and the chronosystem. All five contribute to human development. In simple terms, he proposes that people interact with their immediate and larger environments. This means that the environment is directly and indirectly considered a key mechanism of how we develop and make sense of the world. 

Now, in academia, I believe the combination of these theories is synergistic, and it is quintessential to cautiously apply the theories to teaching and learning in Higher Education. That said, it will take a collaborative effort from both students and lecturers and of course the teaching philosophy and organisational policies of universities. 

Lecturers should seek to create both learner-friendly and learning-enhancing environments. Lecturers should listen to their learners, create an interactive learning space and expose learners to different opportunities to collectively connect with learning. A learner-friendly environment is organised, relaxed, well-ventilated, and has the right lecture room temperature (at least 21 degrees). According to Kim et al. (2020), when an indoor temperature decreased to 17 °C, students’ learning performance decreased by about 9.9%. Finally, lecturers should blend academic kindness and academic rigour to make learning fun and fair for all learners. 

A learning-enhancing environment frowns at didactic teaching but makes available a variety of teaching resources and uses a wide range of teaching approaches such as debate, group work, role-play and workshops to promote students’ abilities to build their knowledge, construct new meaning and gain knowledge from one another within the academic environment. 

Students, on the other hand, will need to develop a question-asking and question-answering culture. They should think outside the box- not stereotype or only learn about what exists within their immediate environment, culture, and beliefs. Everyone belongs to a society, but students should be aware of the larger environment that can also contribute to their learning. By doing so, students construct new meanings, master new knowledge and unlearn out-of-date knowledge. 

Let me sum up my discussion by quoting the words of Vygotsky to students 

‘’ It is through others that we become ourselves.’’- Lev S. Vygotsky 

And re-echo the words of John Dewey to lecturers: 

‘’The school must be “a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons.” - John Dewey 

References 

Kim, H., Hong, T., Kim, J., & Yeom, S. (2020). A psychophysiological effect of indoor thermal condition on college students’ learning performance through EEG measurement. Building and Environment, 184, 107223. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Well, thank you, Stella, for really raising a number of important points there. It’s really great to hear and think more deeply about the relationships that we develop as part of our social constructivist approach to learning and teaching. Paul, would you like to offer some comments there? 

Paul Giladi 

Sure. Yes. In terms of particularly striking remarks, that I’ve learned from Stella - again, Stella’s quite a force of nature in terms of pedagogy! - I found the expression that she used “no one is the custodian of knowledge” to be very powerful in terms of how it not only confirms the idea that we’re all socially situated and we’re all intersubjectivity constituted, however you want to cash it. But it’s also the idea that knowledge as a political tool has often been subject to all sorts of ideological forces. And these ideological forces have rendered people being silenced and marginalized and relegated even to positions of, we might even say, epistemic invisibility. And I think what Stella’s point about constructivism for my own practice is revealing is just how deeply arbitrary those ideological forces are. 

There are no legitimate grounds for silencing and marginalisation – practices of rendering certain people and groups epistemically invisible are evocative of how power works in colonial environments. Thinking that there is no custodian of knowledge is a liberatory practice because it means that we can start to have conversations about multiple ways of knowing, multiple ways of inquiring – ways, to dominant Western Eurocentric eyes, we never thought would actually be considered genuine knowledges. But those ideologically-rendered ‘subaltern’ knowledges are actually far more interesting and far insightful than we could ever have realized. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Absolutely agree. I think, you know, it makes us really consider a lot more around the accessibility of knowledge. The accessibility of theoretical knowledge. And we’ve talked about this extensively, particularly as part of this series: it’s just great to be able to make these discourses more open, more appropriate, more accessible and more visible. And I hope we do that through this series a little bit as well. It’s really great that Stella has had the opportunity to provide this space for us here. So thanks, Stella. 

Paul Giladi 

Indeed. I mean, one thing that reminds me what you said Orlagh about accessibility is do you think perhaps something that seems to be endemic in higher education environments –  I don’t know if it’s necessarily embedded just in the Global North – is the idea that theory’s always something to be feared or theory’s something to be rendered inaccessible to wide ranges of speakers and knowers such that anything which is drenched in theory means that not only do people not feel that they actually belong in higher education environments, and they can’t effectively lead in higher education contexts, but they can’t even have a healthy self-conception of themselves in higher education environments? 

Orlagh McCabe 

I think that theory can lead to disaffection for many people, and I think it can put people off. And when we’re thinking about the amount of discourse in the knowledge that’s there, whether it’s purposeful and the different areas it comes from, this is something that we share as part of the PG Cert. 

It is a ‘hotel document’ and an infographic looking at different theoretical assumptions. It’s quite high level, although it does refer to models and perspectives as well. I have to say to a lot of our participants: a theory is just an idea. It’s very basic. A theory is just an idea. And there is an absolutely magic moment, Paul, that happens very regularly: the moment where staff suddenly see themselves within a particular discourse or within a particular approach or a particular perspective, and they say: “I absolutely do that in my teaching practice - I am an X or I am Y”. It’s great to see that kind of bottom-up approach. It can be really transformative for an individual’s learning. Teaching philosophy. It’s just a magic moment. 

Paul Giladi 

Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, that’s why I think when Stella uses expressions like ‘no one is the custodian of knowledge’ and she talks about ecological complexity and also the Chicago School of Sociology: it’s giving people a vocabulary to talk about things which resonate with their own experiences. Like you said, we’ve all had those lightbulb moments when we say, “Oh, you know, my ability to talk with students in these ways, I don’t have the tools yet for talking about it in a way which can resonate at an intellectual level. Ah, wait, I’ve listened to a podcast by Stella about academic kindness and about social construction approaches, and now I have that toolkit so I can identify with it and maybe go on to reform that category and expand that category in new and further revolutionary ways!” Anyway, I digress. I’ve taken up too much of Orlagh’s valuable time as always. So, suffice to say that, join us next time for some more adventures in critical pedagogy. 

Orlagh McCabe 

Bye for now. 

Paul Giladi 

Bye-bye for now.