Learning for a complex world

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.

serendipity and coffee

Yesterday was rich in examples of the ways in which 'Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans' (John Lennon, I think). It began, as Mondays do, with a team meeting that generated a whole list of urgent tasks and actions, as usual. Mondays are like that - scoping the week to come, realising what has been missed in the previous week and trying not to be overwhelmed. Plans and (coping) strategies.

Then coffee (a meeting?) with John Hobrough - former Dean of Students (etc) at Surrey. John seems to be to be someone whose life is committed to learning and exploring what that means in practice. Our intention was to squeeze the juice from his research and to take forward a presentation he'd done at this year's WACE conference. Well, we could have done that by emails but meeting over coffee not only helped us to know more about one another - building relationship - but also led to practical insights that will help us re-design the External Fellowship framework, ensured that he came (and contributed to) David Hay's excellent workshop/seminar on concept mapping  AND made me think about becoming a school governor in a local primary school. The personal, social and political are not separate.

Immediately after the public event of the day (David Hay's crowded lunchtime seminar - this will become available via the wiki) two Fellows asked to talk with me. As they were from the same Faculty and they had overlapping needs and experience, we went for 'coffee' - a catch-all term for any conversation that doesn't have a formal agenda, though it always has a purpose. There was almost no need for me to say anything - bringing together an 'old' and a 'new' Fellow allowed one to articulate some of the things they would 'never do again' and the other to totally rethink their project plan. My role was to reassure- that this is how learning happens - and to encourage the 'new' Fellow to consolidate the changes. In my personal blog I have had a bit of a rant about the way that planning and formal structures can inhibit creativity, so I'm pleased that, at SCEPTrE, we have a commitment to 'emergence' that enables people to experience a more open-ended way of working.

Back in the office, struggling to get on with the tasks from the meeting, Steve (another Fellow, based in ELearning) comes by with a colleague who has been given Teaching with New Technologies funding to explore the use of Podcasts in teaching. Serendipitously inspired by David Hay's workshop, Steve has encouraged this colleague (who wasn't at the event) to watch the video and use concept mapping resources (on a DVD provided by David) as a way to share with students their own learning. How exciting is that, and how fortunate that Steve has the ability to copy the film to DVD instantly, rather than wait for our film team to make it so. They left, clutching resources. Steve muttered something about 'making it happen, as usual'.

Just an average day at SCEPTrE? Tasks completed? Well, that meant working late and the list still grows faster than our capacity. Exciting and rewarding, though.

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

Integrative Learning

A three-year project in USA has attempted to influence the student experience across all dimensions of life and in just ten campuses. The website has a lot of material and scholarly writing - I recommend a browse around and pass on the useful bits to others. I've quoted a few words, below as a sample of the project's focus, with one link to the section on 'leading campus change'. Great stuff.

"Integrative learning does not just happen, although it may come more easily for some students than for others. Whether one is talking about making connections within a major, between fields, between curriculum and co-curriculum, or between academic knowledge and practice, integrative learning requires work. Of course, students must play the most important role in making this happen, but their success depends in large part on commitment and creativity from professors, staff, and administration."