Thinking about reflexivity

Reflexivity and learning

I spent an evening at the Institute of Education recently, discussing widening participation and its effects on learning and teaching and the effects of learning, teaching and assessment practices on learning and teaching.

At the risk of sounding like a taxi driver (“I’m not racist but…”), I am all in favour of widening participation and making higher education available to people who have not, historically, been able to access it but I do think there are real problems with some of the approaches and theories which exist around this issue.

I could have been identified as a WP student myself, since I come from a working class (depending on how you define that) background, growing up on the edge of a council estate with a pensioner father and a mother who worked 4 mornings a week at a playschool. I’m also in a minority group in terms of sexuality. When I went to university I went to a former Polytechnic (only just former, since I started in October 1992) where my course was full of WP students. In fact, one of our lecturers caused uproar at the beginning by implying most of us were there because we’d either done badly in our A-levels or we were returners! I firmly believe that we should make higher education available to a wider range of people (the figures for the UK tend to show that the increase in participation has mainly been due to an increase in numbers from groups who already participate, rather than a widening of the groups). I also believe that there are significant issues about the ways in which we teach and assess in higher education which could be altered to make the transition into HE easier for students, and which could improve student learning. There are two main things I have a problem with.

Firstly, a practical issue. Many of the theories about involvement and inclusion are, in my opinion, derived from and aimed primarily at:
a. arts and humanities disciplines, rather than science, engineering or medical disciplines
b. disciplines with relatively small class sizes
c. disciplines with wide divergences of ‘accepted’ thought and much optionality within courses.

Having discussed some of the issues with colleagues from medicine, they cannot see how some of these ideas about reflexivity and critical pedagogy can easily be translated into their field. As one colleague from nursing said to me yesterday, a heart attack is a heart attack and patients don’t want their student doctors and nurses challenging dominant theoretical frameworks, they want them to solve the problem!

Secondly, the theories about the unconscious prejudices and preferences which are embedded in ‘traditional’ teaching and learning approaches imply that a root and branch revision of teaching and learning is needed to include WP students. I am not sure I agree with this. Yes, selection methods need to be better tuned to allow fairer access to HE. Yes, there are issues about involvement, interaction and critical thinking which could be better addressed in many UK institutions. Yes, I do think that we have gone too far in some ways into making higher education a tool of industry and of economic growth. The issue is that, in my opinion, discussions around power relations, truth claims, knowledge construction and ‘ways of knowing’ have serious implications for the very nature of Higher Education. This may be a good thing, but it is not something that individual staff (or really, for that matter, individual institutions) can do much about, and there is a danger in de-motivating staff who cannot make the differences that these theorists would like. The ‘critical pedagogy’ approach of sharing power and breaking down the ‘traditional’ power relationship of lecturer and student (with the lecturer having the knowledge and therefore the power, and the student being, in effect, the client and powerless) is all well and good, but is it a feasible project in an HE system where students are paying fees and where there is an expectation that there will some greater utility (in Millist terms) in having a degree than not? OK, we may well be talking about economic utility, and there could well be an argument for a social and personal utility being gained from HE but, at the end of the day, the UK system is funded largely through taxation, and economic improvement is, surely, a legitimate requirement of the sector. I am not, by any means, arguing that it ought to be the only requirement, but it must be one, surely?

On a separate, but linked note, discussions of power in the classroom came up when I was running a session on dealing with disruptive behaviour in classes for a group of academics recently. As they put it, when a group of students chat so loudly that the lecturer cannot be heard, who has the power then?

A bit of background

An admission first of all. Apart from three months in 1995, I have either been a student or worked in higher education since I was 18. I don’t know how common that career path is nowadays, but it is mine.

I have been very lucky, in some ways. In my final year of my undergraduate course I got a note in my pigeon-hole from my dissertation supervisor which said ‘If you get this before 12:30, come and see me. If not, don’t bother!’. I did get it in time, went to see her and learnt that she thought I ought to put an application in for a DFES (as it was at the time) Librarianship PhD studentship based on my dissertation. The bad news was that the deadline for submissions was the following day! We spent the afternoon together, knocking up an application. It was 1995, and my dissertation was looking at the role of the public library in supporting unemployed people. I had stood outside my local job centre and done questionnaires with about 30 people, as well as investigating the local libraries’ provision for the unemployed. Anyway, we managed to knock something together which seemed to make sense, my supervisor sent it off (along with two other applications from other students) and I forgot about it.

Then, just before graduation, I was contacted by my supervisor to say that, whilst I had not got a grant in the first round, the panel liked my application and wanted me to do some more work on it and re-submit. I did some more work – with a bit more time now to think about it properly – and re-submitted. In August, I learnt that I had been successful and had secured one of one three DFES studentship for librarianship in England and Wales for that year.

I started my PhD that October, and began teaching almost immediately. The department at Brighton at that time had a specialism in media librarianship, we had done photography and radio and video production as part of our course, as well as studying the media in options. The department was also developing a new course in Information and Media Studies, intended to be a mix of practical media and information work. I started teaching video production. I was dreadful! I tell colleagues on my courses now about my first experience of teaching. I received no training, or really any guidance. I was given half a module – six weeks – in the first year of the undergraduate course. Half the class were with me doing video, the other half were with a full-time colleague doing ‘multimedia’. After reading week they swapped. I knew that what I was doing was bad, and I did my best to evaluate and revise what I was doing. In reading week, I met with the lecturer running the module and told him about what had gone wrong and how I wanted to alter things his response?

‘You can’t do that! The second lot have to have the same experience as the first, or the first lot could appeal if they fail!’

I think it was at that moment that I realised that I wanted to do better than that, that students deserved better than that.

Ever since then, the students and their experience of teaching and learning has been central to my work. I wanted students to learn, to enjoy learning and to want to learn. I taught as much as I could whilst I was doing my PhD. I taught anything and everything I was asked to teach (although I didn’t realise that this was storing up problems for the future). I evaluated what I was doing as best I could (I still had no training). I hated it if I thought the students were bored. The wonderful Arthur Marshall said that he would have stood on his head when teaching if it helped the students pay attention. I don’t think I would have gone to quite those lengths, but I certainly did all sorts of mad things.

Six months before I was due to finish my PhD, I got a lectureship. It didn’t change much, except I now had to go on a course to learn how to teach, and I was part of the department proper. Sadly, the course was pretty dreadful! It was full of navel-gazing and very low academic standards (I passed one element of the course when my ‘Action Learning Set’ agreed that my proposal for the research section ‘looked about right’. I am still not convinced that anyone had really read it, and I received no more feedback, apart from a pass mark!).

I loved teaching, and I also got stuck into administration and organisation. However, this was a mistake. By the time I left Brighton in 2003 I was Programme Leader for the undergraduate courses, and teaching 13 modules in a year. It was too much!

Since 2003, I have been working at Queen Mary, University of London, first as Teaching Quality Adviser, and now as Education Adviser. I am still passionate about improving student learning and improving the standard of teaching. I am now lucky enough to work with medics, dentists, mathematicians, engineers, scientists of all kinds, historians, linguists and lawyers amongst others.

You may well be wondering why I’ve written all this and what this blog is about. Well, this blog will not be representing anything other than my views, for a start, and I thought it useful for readers (should there be any) to know where I am coming from. Secondly, this is not intended to be anything other than my thoughts and reflections, as someone who works with academics and students, on issues which face higher education and which are raised by my colleagues and others. I’m not setting myself up as an authority, but I hope to be able to contribute to and inform debate on the roles and functions of higher education. Above all, I hope to be interesting – as far as I am concerned, one can aim no higher.