A small group of Masters' students, mostly from the School of Management, here at Surrey, undertook a sponsored thinking and writing activity, alongside their main dissertation. We asked them to share their insights - with each other and with us - on the theme of 'Learning for a Complex World'. Now that their assessed work is done (in most cases), we are starting to make sense of their experiences, what they have written and the images they have produced for us. In due course, and with their permission, I will create a link to the work itself. For now, I want to highlight a few key points from our evaluative conversations.
The four M-level students who completed the pilot - and it's probably unsafe to generalise to all students, at this point - brought a wealth of experience to their programme of study. A leading teacher in a prep school and a self-employed marketing consultant were surprised at the student/expert relationship in the formal course, feeling that an opportunity for real engagement and two-way learning had been missed. They used the space provided by the Complex World project to explore their own perspectives, rather than what they felt were somewhat restricted range of theoretical frames provided by the formal course. This project seemed to offer a useful space or set of permissions and, in conversation, they suggested that courses for experienced practitioners should draw more on the experiences of their participants - perhaps should treat them as participants in a complex world rather than students-as-consumers of facts and theories. Students can be participants or partners in learning.
The pilot engaged a small sample of students, the size of which dwindled as the process unfolded. What was remarkable was that the 'complex world' manifested in each of our lives, with each of us experiencing family problems, illness, death of a near relative, personal transitions, etc. So what's remarkable about that, you might ask! And of course it isn't remarkable at all - such things are part of a 'normal' cycle in everyone's life, but this pilot somehow made it explicit. Perhaps the fact that my husband died during the pilot gave permission to put real life 'in the pot' for discussion - it certainly left the project without a driver for most of the time. So it's also worth remarking that, having set the project up, the sponsorship (£750) and the interest of the participants has resulted in useful stories, as well as some advice and suggestions as to how best to run such projects in the future - and this despite their traumas and my own. Students have intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and are learning in the context of their own, complex lives.
What might this mean for the questions we are asking ourselves about how feedback can be better? How can we change students' perceptions of feedback? The evaluative conversation we undertook was not about quality assurance and satisfaction, it was a learning conversation about their experience, their insights, my facilitation and the whole messy process of connecting university teaching with life in the world. We didn't mention the word 'feedback' because it was inappropriate - How could we have done better? was our simple focus. Changing the relationship between teachers and students makes learning conversations possible, does not lead to expectations of a linear flow of knowledge from expert to consumer / regurgitator. And leaves the student in no doubt that she/he is responsible for the learning and its application in their own complex situation. We can learn from the complex lives of part-time Masters' students - they bring the real world into our institution - but we need to be prepared for learning outselves - a virtuous feedback loop of mutual learning.
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