Learning for a complex world

Begin again

One of the great things about the nature of learning (if we choose to remember) is that it's cyclical. As in the famous quote from TS Eliot

- We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

This blog has actually been 'resting' from exploration, but  is now about to commence again as a link from the complex world wiki - a messy, lively and interactive space, which will allow you to do far more than 'comment'. As assistant director of SCEPTrE with a research and evaluation brief, my intention here is to record short incidents that 'show' how SCEPTrE is learning in complex ways. Maybe this provides 'evidence' for evaluators and ourselves - and I do deliberately put scare quotes around the word evidence. But my main purpose is to slow down our thinking, to help us rush more slowly into the uncertain future in order that when we 'arrive where we started' we will at least have a sense of the terrain we have covered, the useful detours and the dead ends. All part of learning and change

Sustaining the dream

Returned from the CETL conference with many of my expectations realised - not all for the best. Sustainability is seen in financial, business planning terms - corporate plans and senior managers seem to be the key focus. Impact is about measurables rather than ideas. Dissemination involves us in presenting our work in the best light.

But the Open Space event allowed space for me to ask whether anyone would be interested in 'sustaining the dream'. It was encouraging that a good-sized group came and stayed to 'play'. A representative of the Academy came to 'observe' but not participate.

There is a conference wiki and there will be a version of the dream we created - and our (my) compliant response to the feedback prompts about 'enquiry' and 'issues / solutions'. The link - or the document itself will be added to this page. I think the wiki needs a 'dreams' section.

Notes from session: How do we sustain a dream?

Jo invited all participants to draw or otherwise represent their ‘dream’ university - to transform our limiting beliefs, fears and structures into creative aspirations.

Images generated included a couple of beaches, several interplanetary cosmic settings - university in the widest sense - and many messages about connection, respect, autonomy and individuality, equality and communication between managers, teachers and students, time and duration for learning and so on. Imagine two beneficent suns - research and learning/teaching, both providing warmth and light also stored in solar panels.

These ideas were tempered by salutory reminders from / for the group: caution can be an important part of the dream process.
•    Create spaces of safety (pools) for learning, allowing for process and progression
•    Take account of the whole education process - higher education is not an island but part of a political and economic system, including schools and workplaces.

The group then looked again at their personal university images and, individually,
•    noticed where they already do (or have created) something that they see in their picture
•    observed where there are opportunities - where they might or could create something - either in their immediate context or in an area where they have influence.

Enquiry

•    What are my personal dreams / ideals?
•    What do I already do to create such a reality?
•    What else could I do?
•    Who could do it with me?
•    What are the barriers - are they real or imagined?
•    How do we manage our own fears and vulnerability?

Ideas and solutions
•    Make it so: ignore or dismantle the voices (in our heads or in our institutions) that tell us we can’t do something different.
•    Work the system - use language carefully to take advantage of creative opportunities to realise or grow a bit of our dream. (e.g., drop the word ‘excellent’ in favour of ‘wonderful’).
•    Start to choose our actions based on our dreams - while allowing enthusiasm to be moderated by a realistic ability to say ‘no’ to some things.
•    Speak truth to power. Tell people (in positions of ‘consumer’ and political power) that real education is: an engagement not a purchase.
•    Listen to students and find ways to allow them / help them to influence and grow the curriculum.

How do we know?

I have heard many people, in the past few years, struggling with the nature of the research they need to undertake as a key part of their CETL project. [For those who have come in from outside UK Higher Education, CETLs are government-funded, practice-driven centres where successful learning and teaching initiatives are encouraged to flourish - there are 74 CETLs in England and Wales].

I'm looking forward, with some scepticism, to the annual CETL conference at the end of this week. The sorts of questions that are being addressed seem, as far as I can see, to focus on
                'How do we evaluate and demonstrate impact?' 
This question seems to me to be a self-referential, closed hypothesis that is really about justifying effective use of funds - in no way is this a research question. The other question we apparently ought to concern ourselves with involves 'dissemination', as if sprinkling seed from our work is the nature of the task.  I should not refer here to the strangely masculine nature of this seed sprinkling activity, or the biblical disapproval of such wasteful acts. Unless we are able to talk with some confidence about contexts for risk, learning and change - the conditions for successful germination of seed - the issue of dissemination truly is not worthy of further attention.

In my view, neither 'dissemination' or 'impact' are useful focus for evaluation or research.There are some hard and messy questions: 'How does change happen in xxx University with yyy sorts of students?' 'What conditions seem to enable learning in aaa discipline?' 'What processes help people think more creatively and work better with their students under bbb conditions?' Of course, these aren't 'proper' research questions and don't have quantifiable answers. Learning and change are local and contexted, so generalisations are difficult.  But I'd rather spend time thinking, talking and writing (if I ever claim the time for this) about those practical questions than measuring and disseminating value for money.

Ways of being

There are many ways of being an evaluator. In my earlier post, I muttered briefly about the need to describe the role and agree it with the people involved in the evaluation. I'm not sure it's possible to always be as clear as this. And in my post at the beginning of the year, I talked about the need for the evaluator to go more slowly - have a hand on the brake.

Yesterday, Norman and I shared a conversation with a colleague about a new strategy which we think is important to the University, but risks (we think) becoming a rhetorical position, with no action required. SCEPTrE's agendas are aligned with this strategy and we both see value in the direction of travel it signifies.

Because we are busy, we don't often work together in this way, but I found it incredibly valuable to be an informal, unspecified 'process evaluator', watching what was happening, observing my own feelings and telling a story to myself about the different intentions and needs of the other two people in the group. On the walk back to the office, I heard Norman's story of what he had seen and briefly shared my own version of events, in an appreciative sort of way. Together - as a three-some - I think we each showed different qualities of creativity and leadership - hard and soft: encouragement, pushing and pulling, clarification, identifying shared purposes, opportunities to voice anxieties and reservation with a final push to action.

As process evaluator, and because I think it's part of my role in this team, I found myself subtly 'giving permission' to go a little more slowly - mediating between the drive forward that Norman offers and the reluctance to rush in that our colleague was holding. We shall watch with interest whether this approach is better than the way we sometimes work, where the resistance happens after the push forward.

Process evaluation

Last week, SCEPTrE had an intensive week of Applied Creativity with Fred Buining. There were two events: three days for 'external' colleagues under the Zooangzi banner and two days for Surrey staff, led by Norman Jackson with facilitation by Fred.

I participated in the three-day training with a brief (from Norman) to be the 'process evaluator'. From this, I learned a lot - apart from the value of working with Fred and 10 other people on processes and relationships that support creativity. I learned (though surely I already know this) to always agree in advance the evaluation purpose and process, especially with  the facilitator. About myself, I learned how easily I can fall into the 'mother' role, checking that everyone is okay and feeling responsible if I think they aren't. Is that evaluation? Is that process evaluation?

Process evaluation. Collective reflection? Pushing at boundaries? Learning from observation? Formative feedback? 

And now we are establishing a group wiki for the participants. I want them to be involved in setting it up. I want it to be owned by them all. But that means I have to show, tell, encourage, bully, drive the project which, again, feels like pushing at professional and personal boundaries.

Where have we been?

Well, what a poor sort of a blog is this turning out to be - having not written since November. Personal circumstances, life in general - no excuse, but many apologies to myself and any readers.
New year resolutions AND a very successful, appreciative event have given me hope that I can do better, this year.

Running a conference AS an appreciative inquiry, involving people from around the world, virtually and in person AND focusing on a term as huge as 'immersive experience' and learning in higher education has probably sent everyone away with lots to process. And there is, of course, a huge amount of data to review by way of evaluation.

Immediate, top-level evaluation thoughts:
The evaluation process
Good to not try and hold the evaluation alone. Working with someone else to think about how to evaluate - particularly someone like Glynis Cousin (is there anyone like Glynis?). She brought Bing Crosby and the theme song - 'accentuate the positive' and was brave enough, also, to 'mess with Mister In-Between' - all the ambiguities of our conference, the confusions and the uncertainties.
Should evaluation always be a collaborative process, anyway - there is a sense in which all participants are evaluating, making choices and judgements, joining in and hanging back - an evaluative relationship with events. There's more thought needed here about Open Space and managing participation effectively. We certainly didn't do it perfectly - 'That takes time', says Glynis.
And now there are all the data. 
The outcomes
Well, happy, smiley people are always good.
Immersion happens.
And it's important to hold a focus on what we wanted as an outcome - an interactive community willing to meet again next year and say where we are up to. We didn't get THAT commitment. Yet.

appreciative inquiry

I have absented myself from the University to attend a workshop / conference focusing on appreciative inquiry and research. The University, earlier this year, undertook an appreciative inquiry as a process of culture-change, so I'm keen to take this opportunity to reflect on the intentions and the outcomes of such a process. Several key ideas can be shared here, even though the event hasn't yet begun.
1. Universities are not 'natural' sites for appreciative inquiry - the weight of research thinking, the pressure to create 'new knowledge' and the focused nature of the expertise that has been developed there all conspire against an inclusive, expansive, contexted way of knowing.
2. That's a challenge I knew was the case, having undertaken this sort of inquiry in another institution. But what I found here was a paper by Mark Edwards in (AI Practitioner 2007) proposing 'an appreciative meta-inquiry - using appreciative stances to celebrate 'conceptual diversity'' ... the contributions of multiple theories are acknowledged and included within our explanations and sense-making endeavours'.

how does learning / change happen?

Surrey has just launched a new strategy - planning 10 years into the future. It's a courageous thing to do and says all the right things about Quality, Student Experience, etc. But there is one glaring hole, in our view: what do we mean by 'learning' at Surrey, and how might that change over the next 10 years? How would we like it to change.Michael Eraut is right to suggest that we don't ask people about 'learning' because they think we are referring to 'what has been taught' - not the same thing at all.

In our Fellowship Festival, this week, we explored how 'change' happens in learning and teaching, in the context of rewarding Fellows - excellent teachers - with opportunities to innovate and think. Asking about 'change' is the same question - how do we think change happens? is the same question as how do we think learning happens?.

The underpinning principle, that SCEPTrE is attempting to engage the University in grappling with, is that we can't CONTROL change across a complex organisation, just as we can't CONTROL learning in an individual's personal and social psychology. We can only create the conditions where it's most likely to happen and set up markers and roundabouts to direct the flow of work towards a real curiosity or engagement.

What this means for our next evaluation strategy is that we stop trying to deliver 'impact' strategies, take our attention away from the finger pointing towards the moon, and ask about people's real experiences of learning and change. Staff and Students, of course, because we are all part of the same institution, struggling with the same questions.

Students - who do we think they are?

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.

 

integrative learning - making sense again

David Jacques has contacted me by email to suggest we look again at integrative learning - different from but related to 'immersive learning', the focus for our January Conference. An earlier post in this blog (January 2007) has a link to a US project that will interest readers of this blog, but I'm going to take the liberty of re-quoting something from that post

Of course, students must play the most important role .... but their success depends in large part on commitment and creativity from professors, staff, and administration

I think my recent flounderings have been making the point that the environhment for commitment and creativity must exist for staff before students. If staff have no space for creativity and commitment because of compliance work, students will experience their own task as compliance, too.

One thing that SCEPTrE is trying to create at Surrey is a range of spaces where people can leave the compliance or performative world behind and have real conversations about their own learning, about ways to change the University and about what might need to change around here if we want to engage in new sorts of learning for students. The forthcoming fellowship festival is aiming to create such a space - just for the afternoon. I will write, here, about how that works. Download invitation.pdf

multiple priorities - a contradiction in terms?

I was at a conference, last week - the memorial seminar for Peter Knight, at Leeds Met - where Mantz Yorke, one of my all-time role models for calm and kind intelligence, scoffed audibly at the idea of many priorities. is that right? Something is either a priority or it isn't? He has mathematics in his bones, so I'm tempted to agree with him - and perhaps I experience that SCEPTrE suffers from multiplicity. Complex World often seems to give us permission to create and co-create infinite enthusiasms, projects and activities. Where is the top priority? What drives us? Delivery and impact or process and change!

Innovation is one driver. We like new things, new ideas, new initiatives. This tends to become the priority.  Whatever the new idea is, when we have time and energy to nurture and chew it over in theory and start to imagine its potential. The difficulty comes, often, when we try to realise these ideas (ah, already they are plural) - to turn them into activities that engage people, resources and time. Each action takes longer than we anticipate - it must be a law of higher education or life in general that each idea will be slowed down by regulations, protocols and policies. And then, of course, there is the inertia of contacting people, getting them involved, explaining what we really mean by the words that seemed so clear to us at the beginning. And then, of course, to really get people involved, you have to allow them to influence and shape the ideas with you - that slows us down even more. And none of this takes account of personal resistance to getting down to the MAIN priority, whatever that is, today, and the prevarication, distraction, displacement that can slow us down at any point.