The medium is the message

by Sam Ellis

Recently, a nice man came and built us a new bookcase. He crafted it from reclaimed church pews, but that’s another story. I’d done a bit of extra work for the NHS, and the extra cash was all the excuse we needed.Over the next week or so, we began to fill it with books. I spied a little spot, right at the top and quite out of sight, which looked as though it would accommodate my doctoral thesis.

I found whatever box it had been lurking in, and began to flick through it. I was amazed by its cogency – far more persuasive than anything I could produce these days. But stranger still, I think it might have something to tell us measurements, metrics and managerialism. Who could have predicted that there’d be a link to musicology? Well, not me.

In Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, people often said one thing and meant quite another. It’s a phenomenon not unique to this period of history! By some miracle, I managed to convince the Arts and Humanities Research Board to fund me to explore this in a thesis. And in that this, I sauntered down various avenues adjacent to musicology. One of these was the pleasing avenue of architectural history, which even today is a great (amateur) enthusiasm of mine.

The interwar years were the period of the suburb. Take a city like Glasgow, where I live now. Before the First World War there was a great wave of tenement building, while after the Second World War the focus turned to brutalist tower blocks. But in between, the fashion was for sprawling estates of semi-detached houses. And so this was repeated, across the whole of the UK.

This was nothing less than an abandonment of the idea of the city. It was an idealised version of the village, with pockets of green space and gardens – dig a vegetable before going off to work in the corset factory. And this was all encouraged as much by social democrats as by conservatives. What can we learn? Well, that the visioning, the aesthetic, the grandstanding was all very progressive – but beneath that, the actual language and vocabulary being used was deeply conservative, nostalgic even.

So what’s music got to do with it? Well, of course, this pattern was repeated in all forms of artistic expression. A hook on which to hang my doctoral research arrived in the form of the composer Arthur Bliss, who at the age of 24 had been injured at the Somme. When he kick-started his career in 1919, he was heralded as the enfant terrible of English music. He continued to make public proclamations throughout the 1920s and 1930s in which he espoused his progressive ideals – but, you’ve guessed it, his musical language simultaneously became increasingly nostalgic and conservative. Lots of shepherds and fountains and panpipes. And of course, he wasn’t alone.

Looking back now, it seems obvious and understandable that in this period, amid the modernism, there should be a strong undercurrent of nostalgia, borne of a collective sense of loss and trauma. You can almost forgive the protagonists for saying one thing while meaning another.

Saying one thing, and meaning another. You may already be a step ahead of me. I’ve been reading a few university strategies recently, and the boundaries begin to blur after a while. Many of them say some quite distinct, progressive things. But the vocabulary beneath (‘corporate speak’), and the very medium through which these ideas are delivered (‘strategies’), means that the progressive vision is seldom spoken into existence.

The machinery of university management – policies,strategies, operational plans – is deeply conservative, and is virtually meaningless to the rank-and-file who are expected to put these plans into action. As Harold Pinter wrote, ‘There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed.’

Why am I so exercised about this at the moment? Well, we’re‘entering a crucial phase’ (to coin a phrase) during which 2020 Strategies will be replaced by updated versions, suffixed with the next round year, most likely 2025 or 2030. Stefan Collini writes of the ‘fallacy of accountability’, that is, the belief that ‘the process of reporting on an activity (in the approved form) provides some guarantee that something worthwhile has been properly done.’ There is no such guarantee, of course – no guarantee that any of this will strengthen an academic’s emotional bond with their institution.

We shape our tools, and our tools shape us. The medium is quite literally the message, even when the message itself is wholly palatable. When the message is delivered as a corporate strategy, it cannot help but be poorly received.

What, then, for the educational developer? When devising a CPD ‘offer’ – see how easy it is to fall back on this empty language? – it would seem unwise to adhere slavishly to the corporate strategy. I prefer to borrow from our colleagues in art and design, and to think in terms of user-centred design. This describes well my approach to educational development. Who is the audience? Why will they be interested? What are their needs? Are we addressing their whole experience? What are the most extreme elements of their context? How can we improve what we are offering in response to audience feedback?

In short, to what extent are we actually listening to our colleagues? I have long argued that we must apply the principles of an outstanding student experience to the employee experience of staff. Fair’s fair, after all.

  • Students feeling part of a supportive institution becomes Staff feeling part of a supportive institution.
  • Students engaging in their own learning becomes Lecturers engaging in their own development.
  • Students working with their institution in shaping the direction of learning becomes Lecturers working with their institution in shaping the direction of teaching.

I concede that I’m not offering a humanising language through which to discuss our experience as cogs in the university wheel. But perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps before we’re able to do that – to do what we say, and say what we mean – we must first subvert and own the newspeak that is now the lingua franca of higher education.

A problem of methodology

by Sam Ellis

I made the leap to educational development after a brief but passionate career in my home discipline of musicology. ‘Musicology?’, people would ask. ‘What on earth is that?’ I found it hard to justify that a peculiar branch of history – that is, the history of music – had its own special name and its own special apparatus. It was always too much to explain further that musicology is more than history – it’s (music) theory too, and harmonic analysis, and an array of other treats.But by that time, they’d always stopped listening.

Perhaps because I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool educationalist, I’ve struggled a bit with methodology. (It’s yet another thing that marks me down as a total fraud.) I never had to sit one of those tedious research methods modules, because my first degree was in music. Being no good at performing or composing, I became a theorist and historian – in other words, a musicologist.Once again, no need to learn a variety of methods. An ability to ‘read the dots’ (I mean really read the dots) was the main qualification. In fact, it was the general approach which seemed far more important – was I a feminist, a modernist? – and after that, we simply got on with immersing ourselves in the historical method: complex, but at its root, good old-fashioned detective work. It probably explains why my guilty televisual pleasure is factual police procedurals.

As I’ve moved towards educational research, this has not served me well. My nature is to be curious, analytical, unconvinced by the obvious – but I have no method. Not what a social scientist would call ‘method’, anyway. Already, I fear it is too late. I’ve read a couple of books that have helped me bridge the divide between working with the dead and working with the living. The dead are much more compliant – they can’t argue back. I remain largely innumerate, so I’ll always be a qualitative person, and some recent forays have strengthened my confidence in this area.

Strengthened, yes, but not to the level of Tyneside Toughened Glass. I’m interested – many others have ‘crossed over’ to educational development. How have you adapted or updated your existing methodologies? Or have you started anew, going back to a methodological ‘square one’?

Why humanise higher education?

This space emerged from an event held at the University of Stirling in June 2018 where a group of multidisciplinary colleagues came together to provoke one another and to discuss their emergent thinking on learning and teaching in contemporary higher education in the UK and in Canada.

As academic colleagues across the higher education sector continue to develop and expand their scholarship of learning and teaching,  we want to pause and consider what methodologies and thinking from the Arts and Humanities disciplines can bring to a wider understanding of learning and teaching in Higher Education. Specifically, what might they contribute to current debates in a climate that is increasingly preoccupied with measurements and metrics? How can these practices benefit colleagues from across the disciplines, helping us all to translate, interpret and seek out patterns as a way of understanding what is happening and how we could learn from each other?

To continue and expand this conversation, we have decided to share our provocations with you so that we can collectively and critically examine our own learning and teaching practices and those of our colleagues and to see whether we can we find a humanising language to explore meaningfully our increasingly metrics-driven higher education context? Please join in.

Areas we would like to explore:

  • Examining learning and teaching from new perspectives
  • Embodying academic practice
  • Making power, resistance and desire in learning and teaching explicit
  • Exposing the fear and shame of teaching
  • Joy and creativity in teaching
  • The role of the humanities in the metrics-driven agenda of current HE sector in the UK

Provocation: You gotta have soul

by Daphne Loads

So what does it take to be a university teacher? As an academic developer, this question is often on my mind. I know it’s more than subject knowledge plus technique. More and more I’m coming to think that as George Jackson  put it, “you gotta have soul.”

“Some women, they grow a little shorter,
Some women  grow a little old,
Short or tall, young or old
If you wanna love me you gotta have soul.”

Here Jackson firmly rejects metrics and introduces the notion of soul. Okay, he’s talking about love, but I think his ideas apply to teaching too. Seriously. If you want to be a university teacher, you gotta have soul.

daphne 01

So what do I mean by soul? Let me give you an example. Say we’re trying to learn about “student engagement.” There are lots of ways we could deal with this topic. At one end of the continuum is techno-rational learning. I liken this to taking the temperature. We could, for example, use learning analytics to find out how many hours students are studying online and how many comments they’re posting on a discussion board. This would give us a straightforward measurement of student engagement in a particular course. (For a discussion of some of the debates around learning analytics and student engagement, see Wintrop, 2017).

If we wanted to delve a bit deeper, we could try to bring about a transformational learning experience, and get lecturers (and students) to re-examine their taken-for-granted assumptions about what engagement actually means. This suggests something more immediate and vital, that I think of as feeling the heat. Sarah Mann’s (2001) paper on students’ alienation and engagement is a great example of this kind of critical reassessment, and could be used as a prompt for further reflection. She proposes a range of (surprising) explanations for why students might experience alienation rather than engagement, and makes suggestions about how teachers can respond.

But I’m talking about going further and doing what Dirkx (1997) describes as learning through soul. This symbolic, metaphorical way of learning makes me think of the mythological phoenix, who rises from the flames. One of my favourite ways of inviting in soul, is through collaborative close reading of a poem. As a group, we  read and build up layers of meaning, word by word and line by line.  Randall Jarrell’s piece : “Office Hours 10-11” works well when we’re talking about student engagement:

Dear Mr. Jarrell:
It seems that the twenty-fourth floor is complaining of lost students who are hunting you. Could you put your name and office hours on the door?
Thank you.
The English Office
[University of Texas, at Austin]

Mr Jarrell: Come back and you will find me just the same
Hunters, hunters–but why should I go on?
Learn for yourself (if you are made to learn)
That you must haunt an hourless, nameless door
Before you find–not me, but anything.

Lost Students: It never seemed to me that I was lost.
You were, perhaps; at least, no one was there.
I missed you; why should I go back?
I am no hunter, I say. I was sent
And asked to find–not you, not anything.

English Office: Each of them is lost, and neither hunting;
And they stand still around a crazy door
That tells a truth, or lie, that no one learns.
Here is a name, an hour for you to use:
But name, or come, or come not, as you choose.

Randall Jarrell

Together we could explore the echoes and patterns in this poem: the huntings and hauntings, the poignancy and paradoxes. We could notice that “made to learn” seems to mean both “forced to learn” and “created for learning” and that “we missed you” may or may not have any emotional content. This way of learning can be very powerful; it doesn’t, of course, suit everyone.

Daphne 02

So I think of learning through soul as at one end of a continuum. Techno-rational learning is instrumental; it’s about adapting to external requirements. It lends itself to measurements of performance and productivity and can be presented as an objective report. Transformative learning, by contrast, is concerned with seeking and making meaning. It includes not only individual reflection but also social critique. Discovery and authenticity are valued; it might take the form of a reflective journal. Finally, learning through soul draws on narrative, symbol and myth. This kind of learning makes space for spirituality in all its forms; it draws on emotion and intuition. I have given the example of poetry, but in fact soul seems to be at home wherever the varied disciplines we know as the arts and humanities come into play.

One way of explaining this is by talking about two ways of experiencing the world: logos and mythos. According to Dirkx (1997), logos is,

“…the realm of objectivity and logic, the triumph of reason over instinct, ignorance, and irrationality…”

Whereas mythos represents,

“ very personal and imaginative ways of knowing, grounded in a more intuitive and emotional sense of our experiences …. giving voice in a deep and powerful way to imaginative and poetic expressions of self and the world.”

When we make and respond to paintings, music, drama and the rest, we are following the way of mythos and this opens up forms of learning that are inaccessible through logos.

I still prefer George Jackson’s way of putting it:

“You gotta have soul.”

References

Dirkx, J (1997) Nurturing Soul in Adult Learning

New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 74

Mann, S (2001) Alternative Perspectives on the Student Experience: alienation and engagement Studies in Higher Education 26 (1)

Wintrop, A. (2017)Higher Education’s Panopticon? Learning Analytics, Ethics and Student Engagement Higher Education Policy 30(87–103)

Provocation: We should consider ourselves as Artists of Learning & Teaching when undertaking scholarship

We are not as self-confident in the Creative Arts as we should be i.e. we do not apply our approaches to other subjects and disciplines.

Take the Scholarship of Learning & Teaching, for example, and the opportunities that we are missing by not considering our teaching practice as creative practice.

We adopt & adapt from other subjects such as education e.g. self-reflection, or anthropology e.g. (auto)ethnography, but we should adopt & adapt our own research approaches in return. I posit that we can learn much in our enquiries into learning & teaching by adopting appropriate creative research approaches.

Researching creative practice has been an evolving area in the past three decades, as it struggled to take its place of acceptance (Candy and Edmonds, 2018, p.63) amongst the established research areas in Arts & Humanities. Tensions between disciplines e.g. Science and Art (Candy, 2011, n.p) and their perceived value of research have also been of hindrance, with many arguments revolving around the axis of an objective/subjective divide (Hawkins and Wilson, 2017, p.84), and a simplistic notion of ‘scientific truth’ vs ‘artistic creation’ while there is no objective ‘truth’ to be discovered, because “there is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality” (Hawking and Mlodinow, 2010, p.58).

With creative research having claimed a special status until now, rather than aiming for mainstream recognition (Hawkins and Wilson, 2017, p.82), literature on methodological approaches to creative practice and the creator/artist as researcher is less developed, lacking a formality that could otherwise aid in developing self-confidence.

Take education, for example, and learning & teaching to be precise. The go-to enquiry for investigating L&T practice is still action research – too often applied indiscriminately without due consideration of its appropriateness for a specific enquiry. While action research’s premise of evaluation cycles is of course useful, one of its issues is that it is based on the deficit model and focuses on problems and their solutions, rather than acknowledging the quest to seek greater understanding without the driver for improvement.

Instead of blindly picking action research why don’t we look at our L&T practice with fresh eyes, namely that of a creative arts practice researcher? Besides, isn’t it telling that Barrett (2007, p.1) proposed to view artistic practice as the production of knowledge in action? Knowledge-in-action, reflection-in-action, action research… we are always looking at a process here.

Practice-led research (or -based, while not synonymous, sufficiently similar for this provocation’s purpose[1]) necessarily focuses on the process of knowing, as the artefact itself does not constitute the research as a contribution to knowledge. One of the reasons is the ambiguity of ‘language’ that does not allow knowledge to be communicated directly through the artefact. Neither does implementing a new teaching practice a contribution to knowledge, but rather the systematically investigated process of implementation. Of course, practice itself – like an artefact itself – is not research “and must be differentiated clearly if it is to have any meaning. […] conflating research and practice leads to insufficient emphasis on scrutinizing and sharing any claims of originality and diminishes any claims to new knowledge.” (Candy and Edmonds, 2018, p.64) Undertaking a practitioner enquiry, may this be in L&T or in creative practice, thus requires as much rigour as any other research.

Candy defined creative practice by its focus on creating something new – but is not all research implying new knowledge (Carter, 2004, p.7) thus creating what had not been there before? – and “also by the way that the making process itself leads to a transformation in the ideas, which in turn leads to new works.” (Candy, 2011, n.p.) If we substitute ‘works’ with ‘teaching approaches’, the applicability becomes even more evident.

It is the process of engaging in practice and with it in research, that puts the practitioner/artist at the centre, and that requires self-reflection in a formalised way, requiring us as researchers to “describe and reflect upon these observations as possible moments of innovation and learning.” (Franks, 2016, p.49)

A process that involves making tacit knowledge explicit through articulation. We all know this, and none of us could have missed Schön’s (1983) or Moon’s (1999) ‘Reflective Practitioner’ in our work. As Friedman (2008, p.154) described it: “All professional practice – including the practice of research – rests on a rich stock of tacit knowledge. This stock consists of behavioural patterns and embodied practice embedded in personal action. […] tacit knowledge is reflected in the larger body of distributed knowledge embedded in social memory and collective work practice.” Or as Polanyi defined it, tacit knowledge is embodied and experiential, but theory requires more; it requires for knowledge to be made explicit. (Polanyi, 1962)

So instead of enquiring into L&T by pulling on an old, tattered slipper, we should consider our practitioner selves as creators of learning; our students’ learning as a non-corporeal artefact within a specific approach/environment/etc; our enquiry as practice-led research that involves self-reflective methods like auto-ethnography, creative writing, visualisations, and that builds theory out of a grounded approach.

 

Barrett, E. (2007) ‘Introduction’, in Barrett, E. & Bolt, B. (eds.) Practice as research: approaches to creative arts enquiry. London & New York: I.B. Tauris, pp. 1-13.

Candy, L. (2011) ‘Research  and  Creative  Practice’, in Interacting:  Art,  Research  and  the  Creative  Practitioner. pp. 33-59 [Online]. Version. Available at: http://research.it.uts.edu.au/creative/linda/CCSBook/Jan%2021%20web%20pdfs/Candy.pdf (Accessed: 24.05.2018).

Candy, L. and Edmonds, E. (2018) ‘Practice-Based Research in the Creative Arts: Foundations and Futures from the Front Line’, Leonardo, 51(1), pp. 63-69.

Carter, P. (2004) Material Thinking: the theory and practice of creative research. Melbourne: Melbourne University.

Franks, T. M. (2016) ‘Purpose, Practice, and (Discovery) Process: When Self-Reflection Is the Method’, Qualitative Inquiry, 22(1), pp. 47-50.

Friedman, K. (2008) ‘Research into, by and for design’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 7(2), pp. 153-160.

Hawking, S. and Mlodinow, L. (2010) The Grand Design. London: Bantam Books.

Hawkins, B. and Wilson, B. (2017) ‘A Fresh Theoretical Perspective on Practice‐Led Research’, International Journal of Art & Design Education, 36(1), pp. 82-91.

Moon, J. A. (1999) Reflection in learning & professional development: theory & practice. London: Kogan Page.

Polanyi, M. (1962) Personal knowledge: towards a post-critical philosophy. 2 edn. London: Routledge.

Schön, D. A. (1983) The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books.

 

[1] “If a creative artifact is the basis of the contribution to knowledge, the research is practice-based. If the research leads primarily to new understandings about practice, it is practice-led.”(p.64) Candy, L. and Edmonds, E. (2018) ‘Practice-Based Research in the Creative Arts: Foundations and Futures from the Front Line’, Leonardo, 51(1), pp. 63-69.