Wednesday 21 October 2009

action research project

PgCLT
Les Bicknell

action research 2009/10

My action research is concerned with delivering students the opportunity to look into themselves. It is to be a vehicle to enable them to define, who they are, recognise what they could be and take control and responsibility for their learning and ultimately their lives.

History – national context
I think it is important to understand the history of PDP, the background and philosophy of why it was conceived and delivered. “Personal Development Planning (PDP) was first conceived by the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, published as the 1997 Dearing Report (NCIHE 1997). Initially envisaged as a two-part means for recording student achievement, the proposed Progress File emerged as part of a national strategy for equipping the UK as a learning society over the following decades. In the 11 years since the report was published, PDP has evolved within a dominant context of employability and skills development, from a planning and recording tool aimed at linking formal and informal learning to one geared towards the needs of the UK as part of the global economy.”
Buckley. (2008) PDP: From introduction to the present.

The context of employability is something I will address alongside the idea of ‘skills development’ an open ended phrase which eventually I will knowingly explore and exploit with a particular vision.

History – local context
Within the past 5 years PDP at Norwich University College of the Arts, formerly Norwich School of Art and Design on the BA Textile course, formerly BA Contemporary Textile Practices, formerly BA Textiles has had a fractured and chequered past. Its initial introduction in September 2003 was confused. The concept of PDP was conflated with diary and sketchbook. This saw the staff having to read endless angst ridden youthful tales of worthless boyfriends and isolation amongst shopping lists for make up and the occasional idea relating to the students work thrown in.
Over the next 4½ years this poor practice continued even with focused and specific group briefings that attempted to direct the confused and overloaded students to be more reflected and more rigorous. This initiative recognised their inability to undertake reflective thinking but did not provide the skills, which they obviously lacked. These briefing sessions were supported with examples of good practice; the more successful PDPs of the previous year’s students and they also examined some writing undertaken by artists. But the sessions did not teach them how to truly approach the task or actually undertake it with any meaning.
In 2008 just before beginning the Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching course
the idea of addressing the issue of the PDP, by streamlining the process was considered. Subsequently initial reading led to reflective themes and so eager to undertake the PgCLT and identify my action learning I led this reorganisation.

Proposal
Currently the Personal Development Profile element of the BA Textile Course at NSAD suffered from a target driven agenda. My proposal was to develop a system, which clarified the PDP for both the student and staff attending and working on the BA Textiles Course at NUCA. This streamlining would enable students to complete their PDPs without student confusion and enable staff to assess in a shorter period of time whilst delivering appropriate feedback.
Within the textiles teaching team I decided to look at the issue of PDP because of my interest in art practice which involves developing rules and systems. This in turn led to the idea of constructive alignment, specifically Brookfield (1995) Becoming a Critically a Reflective Teacher - Becoming Critically Reflective – a process of learning and change, and a general interest in the development of systems and structures to support communication, learning and understanding, notably the work of Hans Rosling. I identified my action research as an opportunity to use good design to problem solve, something I take from my work within the public art arena.

I started the task by gathering student feedback. I ran a session where I generated student views on PDP with the current 2nd Year Textile BA students. Working in small groups they answered a set of questions appendix 01 and fed them back to the group for discussion, which was very lively and on the whole negative towards the idea of PDP. appendix 02 Examples of comments include “a good waste of paper”, “life’s too short to do something that isn’t marked”, “PDP is ambiguous I don’t know how to answer it” and “just tell me what to do and I can get on with it”. From this evidence it was identified that the students did not understand PDP or engage in reflective action.
At this time (July 09) within NUCA the PDP was marked separately. This was an important consideration when I set out to rethink how both students and staff could engage in PDP. How students undertook the process had to be aliened in relation to how staff would assess. There was a need for simplification and transparency to be instigated. As a way of streamlining the whole process after a series of meetings with the Textiles Team it was decided that the students would be asked to create a separate text, which would be the only item assessed. This writing would directly address the learning outcomes. appendix 03 Using our VLE Moodle system we developed a process for the students to complete their PDPs with the minimum of fuss. Over the period of the unit a system was constructed where they were given the opportunity to write their response to the 5 learning outcomes and get feedback from their cohort and the tutors, (if posted within a specific time frame). At the assessment point they were asked to write a 700-word statement which would need to address the 5 learning outcomes. Their previous 5 answers could be cut and pasted to create this new text, which were in turn cut and pasted from their blog, which they were encouraged to undertake. appendix 04 This successful pragmatic solution meant that the staff no longer had to read the students rambling journals – finding evidence to create marks and the students knew precisely what was asked of them. This was to be my action research project and as the statistics illustrate it was a successful activity.

Evaluation (1)
Unfortunately after more research reading around PDP and working on the PgCLT further to generate a wider and more rigorous understanding of my intervention I realised that this travesty of surface learning, constructed for all the right reasons was to fundamentally misunderstand the value of PDP. The PDP’s relationship to assessment is the factor that students consider; they review the learning outcomes and attempt to fulfil them without engaging fully with the actual learning opportunities that engaging rigorously with the idea of PDP and reflective thinking can offer.
We had created a poor teaching and learning strategy. Although it attempted, through good intentions, to solve the problem of a misunderstood concept (PDP) which had been delivered to a confused body of people, (students) which needed to be assessed within a limited time scale by a time poor group of people with forms to complete (staff). The streamlining of the exercise was successful. The tutors were able to assess the PDP’s quicker with a rigorous attention to the learning outcomes and the formal feedback was specific and directed to the Learning Outcomes. The students as a whole had a directed, successful experience. They had a defined task, which they understood and fulfilled to a higher degree than previous years. The PDP mark contributed to 20% of the final assessment in the final units of year 1 and 2 and was marked separately with its own set of learning outcomes. The cohort that undertook the PDP before the streamlining exercise attained an average mark of 47 in the academic year 2007/08. The following year, 2008/09, post streamlining, the same group attained an average mark of 53. This is a 6% increase. The 1st year cohort for 2008/09 who was introduced to the streamlined concept as part of the final unit briefing achieved an average mark of 59. This is a 12% increase.
This increase in the marks and the fuller engagement of the students through the VLE could be viewed as a success and in fact has been recognised by NUCA through the awarding of a Teaching and Student Support Award to myself for my work on PDP through the VLE. This was awarded in recognition of staff contribution to a high quality student experience at this year’s graduation ceremony.
This success is recognised in the unsolicited student comments I have received – an example of which is, “I have found that reflecting on my work up until now, has allowed me to look at the year as a whole and remind me what has been successful this year and in a wider sense I have been able to establish unsuccessful and successful areas of my projects and by seeing this it has made me question why this could be, it has also allowed me to begin to draw links…much of this year I have been worried about the rate I am progressing but this has allowed me to see where I have developed from last year”. Student Email 08 05 09. Feedback from a meeting with the students after the assessment appendix 08 led to a number of positive comments about the process including “5 tasks is okay – concise and easy enough to complete. Too much convoluted language in the briefs”, “Just have 5 tasks”. These comments will form the basis for change as there is also a number of thoughts which challenge the idea of streamlining from the student perspective.
But I believe this new approach was a diversion or at best a small step to what was needed, it allowed and supported surface learners to strategically engage with the PDP. Deep learners were also misdirected as they could not fully engage with the program as the systems we initiated were so specific, being closely tied to the assessment criteria and learning outcomes. The student therefore developed little or no understanding of the true value of reflective thinking, which is at the core of the PDP experience. As a result of my reflection I decided that a new strategy had to be employed both as an extension to the outcomes of my action research project but more importantly to develop an appropriate and fit for purpose system for the students to undertake PDP and reflective practice.

More history context
In the teaching year 2009/10 BA Textiles will be working with another new framework. Within this structure we are no longer assessing the PDP as a separate entity. It is to be marked from within an embedded position; the students will need to consider how to work with the concept of reflection and the staff will have to train themselves to recognise the students understanding of reflection through this holistic approach. At present we, as staff implementing these changes, have no idea if the assessment will require a specific mark or if it will be a learning outcome within the unit. This indecision/lack of direction from the management of NUCA lead me to develop a PDP strategy that is robust and focuses on the needs of the student and would be successful with or without an assessment. For it to be valued, valuable and sustainable it needed to be a creative experience to equip them both within and after the course.
The context is that we have to accept that students will develop strategies to undertake the course we have to develop a strategy equal to their strategic thinking, which will support the individual students learning. This is all within an altered educational paradigm that of from exclusion to inclusion, massification; an intention from the government that 50% of school-leavers will attend higher education by 2010 as opposed to a lack of targets in 1982 (the year I went to College) where 12% of school leavers attended higher education. The range of education opportunities, cultural backgrounds and general life experiences our current cohort have is vastly different from any time before and it is our responsibility as lecturers to engage in creative, flexible thinking to deliver this inclusive policy to further the cause of societies development.

Conclusion
Action to be undertaken as a result of the action research project.
I will develop a clear program of activities, which at their core will rethink philosophically how the course approaches PDP and as a result of this decide what and how we will deliver PDP within the BA Textile course at NUCA. The aim is to instil in the student’s minds that PDP is a process not an outcome. The initial idea is to make the process rather than the outcome of PDP mandatory attempting to present to the students a more meaningful experience. There will be no separate assessment but attendance at the teaching sessions would be noted and marked.
I have used the feedback I gathered from the initial session as a starting point for the reorganisation of PDP. Here I will outline the proposed intervention and the thinking behind each one. The PDP needs to be seen to be useful yet also integrated with what we are doing – it needs to be sustainable, filling gaps not create more work for the staff and students.
Students need to become engaging in and see the worth of PDP. One very practical strand of thinking to sell the idea to students would be to address the issue of employment. The inaugural Student Living Report, conducted by MORI and commissioned by The UNITE Group plc highlights students concerns around money and employability.

"Today's students focus on gaining good qualifications to help them find the right job. While they are happy with their choice of university and recognise that university studies are a wise investment in their future, they are worried about their debts."
Professor Sir Worcester, Robert. Chairman of MORI.

University is seen by those entering it as the gateway to their future; this includes a way for them to develop their job opportunities, increasing their knowledge and the essential skills to prepare them for their future life. This issue could be exploited to initially engage with and connect the student to PDP by presenting them with an understanding of how PDP links with the world of work and how engaging in PDP fully will enhance their employability. Edwards (2005) The Higher Education Academy Paper – connecting PDP to employer needs and the world of work outlines how the activities within PDP relate directly to the needs of employees. When asked what they looked for in potential employee’s employers listed.
Flexibility, adaptability and the capacity to cope with and manage change, self motivation and drive, analytical ability and decision making, communication and interpersonal skills and team working ability and skills.
It is interesting to note that these skills and attributes recognised as valuable by employers are the very ones that are developed and heightened by a rigorous engagement with reflective thinking within PDP. Although in the light of both current and historical employable rates for art college graduates, specifically at NUCA, it would appear that another role for PDP needs to be developed.
Unable to gain more recent data on student specifics at NUCA, in itself an interesting factor, I looked at Knight (1996). It focused on notions of success in art graduates at what was NSAD. She found that only 3% of graduates from 1991 – 94 were making a living selling their work.

The acquisition of skills is an important factor – there is a view from the student body, noted within feedback systems both official and anecdotal, that little is actually taught at degree level. This perception is evidenced through discussions in individual and group tutorials, reflective essays and committee reports. This has been noted and is a key factor in the development of the new systems that will endeavour to teach the students how to think reflectively – how to engage with the process of critical thinking so that it not only makes sense but so that the student can use it to heighten their potential. The need to actually teach students skills around reflective thinking has led to the creation of 16 specific sessions, appendix 05 which will start in the first week of the first year and continue, into the second year. The sessions, lasting between 1 ½ and 2 hours are mapped closely onto the course structure so that the sessions have practical examples to hand and specific issues to solve within the experience of the course. These sessions address recognised needs from the curriculum and its learning outcomes: presenting a way of navigating the course and of student requests detailed in feedback sessions and formal evaluation points within the course.
After each session there will be an opportunity for extended learning by utilizing the VLE. There will be a set task that will evolve from each session. It will require the student to reflect on the activity and post a response to a specific forum on Moodle. This activity will act as a form of formative reflective activity, illustrating learning and enabling the group to share experiences and for tutors to follow up any issues.

The new PDP support framework I have instigated has grown out of discussions with students and developed from the research I have undertaken around the concept of reflection. I have specifically been looking at how reflective thinking can be embedded within a creative practice to inform the PDP element of the undergraduate framework within the BA Textile course at NUCA. I have also directed my energy to position PDP at the centre of thinking within the course structure. appendix 06

This idea of repositioning, placing the idea of reflection at the centre of ones practice means that both during and more importantly as a legacy after the course, the individual is enabled to continue their own creative journey, either as a professional practitioner or an educated audience member.
My overall approach to rethinking the PDP has been informed by reading a wide range of material. Initially Buckley (2008) was particularly useful. Her overview gives an understanding of the context of PDP both from a historical perspective, recognising a need to introduce such a structure, and the contemporary concerns of how to embed reflective research into ones practice.

Framing thinking
This section of the paper outlines the intention and research that has informed the individual PDP sessions.
The professional practice aspect, that of considering the role of the artist in society and looking at how to look at developing a responsible curriculum to underpin a students learning towards employability, was informed by Edwards (2005). His work ‘Connecting PDP to employer needs and the world of work maps the research he has undertaken in a very pragmatic way. It makes connections between PDP and the ‘real world’, seeing reflection as an essential not an ethereal distraction from the ‘real work’.
Particularly useful was the work he has undertaken on recognising the specific skills that employees are seeking. These skills which are embedded within PDP reaffirmed the deep value I set on lateral thinking, problem solving and the wider approach to creative thinking that I espouse to my students.
The case studies within Connecting PDP to employer needs and the world of work were useful in that one of the valuable aspects of undertaking extended learning, especially the PgCLT has been the connection with other members of the teaching profession – exchanging how we undertake our jobs. The case studies were a direct insight into how to do and also through reflection more importantly how not to. Andrew Holmes at the University of Hull outlines very succinctly the issues that the PDP has to address for the professional. On a wider issue Dr Jayne Stevens at De Montford University writes about how PDP eventually provides the engaged student with the confidence to develop their own learning programme and be less reliant on staff feedback. This is something that I am working towards, developing a culture of support within the student body enabling them to realise that their vision of where or who they want to be is their greatest asset.
Studies undertaken by Mitra (2007) outline the value of learning in groups. His research shows that when individuals learn within a group situation, sharing knowledge and developing their own systems for learning their individual learning is more rapid and more developed. Through a deep engagement with the process of learning they develop ownership and responsibility of their own learning.
The case studies presented within the work undertaken by Edwards (2005) was instructive when setting out an initial session, which will introduce the students to PDP. There were several instances where I recognised many examples from my own experience of both good and bad practice within the paperwork – or should that be appropriate and inappropriate activity? I was able to formulate a direction for how the BA Textiles course at NUCA would undertake the all-important introduction to PDP for the incoming 1st years. Holding the student’s attention is essential. It is important to outline clear directions to new students to instil rigour within the systems that are set up as well as consistency. This request is outlined in student feedback regularly but in this instance the comments within the initial action learning feedback session around consistency was important. Examples from the students include “clearly explain what we need to do, not keep changing” and “overcomplicated, keep changing your mind”. appendix 02

The work of Etcoff (2009) around the pursuit of happiness shows that people are happiest when “in flow with others”, be that engaged in sport, sex or collaborative art workshops. In this century of self where the individual is at the centre of themselves and the world that surrounds them. The individual in pursuit of their individuality would appear to be at odds with us becoming happier as a society. Computerised text analysis of suicide letters notes the proliferation of the first person singular. The argument that not only do individuals learn at a deeper level within groups but they are also happier is the reason for the promotion of group work within the PDP proposals. It was also both a practical solution of dealing with increased student numbers and an intelligent way of devolving responsibility away from the tutor and onto the student.

Overtly practical aspects were underpinned by a more holistic approach to reflection through my reading of Buddhist literature notably the concept of the three characteristics of existence, that of impermanence (Anitya), suffering (Duhkha) and notself (Anatma). These three characteristics are always present in or are connected with existence, and they tell us about the nature of being. They help us to know what to do with our lives.
Exploring the interconnectedness of disciplines, that of using one specialist activity to inform another has been something I have embedded into my own practice.
When developing a specific workshop to explore and illustrate problem solving and lateral thinking within an interdisciplinary context. I wanted to look at strategies that delivered actual solutions to real problems within a framework that the majority of students would understand. Design with its formal structural system, which includes concepts such as the brief, client, and presentation, appeared to fit the current structure of learning outcomes and assessment criteria. But the BA Textile course sets out to encompass fine art thinking and activity so the starting point for research had to be outside an art school discipline.
I have been looking at management theory books and business ‘how to’ bibles by the likes of Levitt and Dubner and Paul Arden. Sutton (2002) provided a number of non-textile examples, which could be easily explained and understood, as they were so extreme and outside the experience of the student’s lives. This enabled the students to reflect on their own practice developing an individuals understanding of what it is to recognise opportunities with which to develop questions which can be creatively solved, lateral thinking provides answers.

The idea of providing skills for the student to undertake reflection is important but needs to be balanced with a wider appreciation of reflection. I rethought Brookfield’s ideas around the 4 lenses set out in becoming a critically reflective teacher and rewrote them to fulfil the needs of graduate students providing them with the basic tools to begin the reflective journey and embedded them within the seminar titled 04: Reflection.

It is important to remember that we as lecturers are humans working with humans. I think the relationship between emotion and reflection is important to consider. The analytical nature of Dewey’s (1933) 5 phases or aspects of reflection are useful but the workshop that specifically focuses on reflection will look to the work of Boud, Keogh and Walker (1985). They reworked Dewey’s five aspects into three – returning to experience, attending to (or connecting with) experience and evaluating experience. By putting the students at the centre of the experience they will connect with the idea and become responsible for their own reflection – it has to come, initially, from memory, from before, the past connecting to the now, the present and projecting into the future, next.

The work undertaken by Maddocks and Newbold (2005) looks at the links between learning agreements and the PDP. Acknowledging that students are strategic learners, looking to the learning outcomes to define their learning needs. I thought that it would be useful to consider this aspect when setting out to deconstruct the language used in the interventions I was proposing. Looking at issues around how learning outcomes are formulated was useful for developing the creation of the session titled Learning agreements - the what, why and how. This intervention set out to pass ownership of the process of determining learning to the students. Davies (2009) offered a way into the subject but reading Hussey and Smith (2003) cemented my belief around the idea of valuing what is unknown.
‘the most fruitful and valuable feature of higher education is the emergence of ideas, skills and connections which were unforeseen even by the teacher’ (p.228) – this relates to the concept of troublesome knowledge and is something to gravitate to.

It was when looking for an entry point for the students understanding of the value of reflection that I considered the concept of critical moments. It was important to give students the tools to build a system which is sustainable and engages long term the idea of the significant moment. Brookfield (1995) was instructive enabling me to recognise that the critical incident Questionnaire is a key tool. This leaves me to postulate that this revelatory moment is when actual learning takes place, the active acknowledgement of a before and after. The critical incident questionnaire identifies the friction of learning where new concepts and ideas rub up against ones already established within one’s own life. It is the process of moving from not knowing to knowing.

The thinking behind the seminar 03: Who are you and how do you think? came from a number of sources. Biggs SOLO taxonomy approaches to studying questioner, was very instructive to my own practice so I reformed the questions for undergraduate students and it is a focus for the session. The experience of teaching within a context of lower resources and less student/lecturer contact time framed a need for students to consider their relationship to the idea of developing their own responsibility for their learning. It is essential for individuals to know themselves and their practice if they are to work to their potential. Know thyself could be the first rule or at least an underlying principle of the seminar.

Proposed Evaluation to be undertaken as a result of the action taken after the action research project.
I will undertake a rigorous evaluation process which will include peer assessment both as an interim measure so that any regulatory issues can be resolved and then again after they have been delivered to look at the content in relationship to the student experience, the course documents and the assessment marks. The set of seminar interventions will be discussed with focus groups made up of students from first and second years. I will ask two sets of questions. The second years will be presented with the same set they had a year ago appendix 01 and the first years will be asked questions which enable the students to review their relationship to reflective thinking and consider how the seminars have supported their learning. appendix 07 The outcomes from these discussions will inform the ongoing development of how reflective thinking is delivered and embedded within the BA Textile course at NUCA with specific reference to the PDP element of the course.

Reflection
I believe that the proposed intervention will deliver a more rounded creative individual more able to function successfully within a world requiring flexible thinking and an ability to learn from and encompass constant change. The criteria around success for this intervention of the intervention could be if the students ask more interesting questions.
The work/life balance is a factor often talked about with students. I talk about one becoming the other. Questions around how the student wishes to live their life has taken over from what do you want to do after you leave college? The interconnected, overlapping nature of creative activity can be reflected on and in a relational context the liminal space that is the edge of definitions can be defined and redefined with each action/experience. There is no then only the now. The artist Roger Ackling summed this up when he questioned where the work is, that he had possibly failed to identify the real work over the past 30 years. He went on to explain that possibly the work was not the drawings he made with a magnifying glass from the power of the sun but the smoke generated as he created them. This open thinking derived from stillness and a deep focused questioning is something I believe we should all strive for. Maybe a question for us all – where is the work?















Les Bicknell

Profile 3

PGCLT
Les Bicknell Profile 3

Use your knowledge of how students learn to inform theoretical debate and approaches to practice-based problems.

My experience on the PgClt course has inspired me to more positively address issues within my teaching, it has delivered a supportive approach and provided a framework to signpost, facilitate and support change. The opportunity to engage in debate with a peer group of colleagues enabled me to deconstruct and examine in detail a range of what turned out to be common issues and more specifically explore the experience of thinking within learning.
The experience of becoming a student again has enabled me to consider the fate of the students I work with. It has been interesting to consider Biggs suggestion that creating a good environment for teaching depends largely on two things: ‘Getting students to agree that appropriate task engagement is a good and impelling idea (otherwise known ‘as motivation’), and the kind of climate we create in our interactions with students.’ During the course I have experienced many different examples of the student experience and I am, through reflection and with the support of the theoretical literature, using these experiences to inform how my students learning experience could be enhanced by testing how my teaching environment could be improved. I have been considering stillness and silence as a way of supporting my students rather than giving answers. This way of being enables the students to navigate their own learning. I have been exploring when learning actually happens and flagging this up within practical sessions as good practice to aspire to.

As one gets older I think it is important to recognise ones position within the scheme of things. Analysing my relationships with students has delivered a range of starting points of exploring the hierarchy within the classroom, relationship and responsibility to marking and assessment procedures and developing the curriculum with the students. These issues will be addressed as part of ongoing reflection and discussion with students, peers and particularly at course meetings, appraisals and team review sessions.

As we search for words, which we hope will attempt to explain our position or if one finds oneself in a situation where there is a requirement to pass on knowledge, you find yourself searching back into the depths of your youth for answers. Forgotten fragments of insight presented to you by often now long dead or old people now manifest themselves as either life rafts to cling onto, like a frightened passenger on the titanic or they are dispersed, as if nuggets of gold, by a John Wayne type character, to a deluded youth eagerly signing up for war in a Sunday afternoon black and white film.

Is it really as simple as this?
I am drawn, as I often have been during my research into this training to the three tenants of Buddhist thinking – nothing is fixed or permanent, everything has consequences and change is inevitable.

What is an art college for?
There is a Start Treck episode where a member of the Q continuum, an omnipotent race who have and will exist for ever and can exist at every physical point in all universes at a sub atomic level at every moment in time, in all realities both real and imagined. So what does he do with this gift?

The idea of an Art College is truly wonderful; it has the possibility to be full of creative possibilities, a space of glorious opportunity with unlimited fascination.

At one point we see Q in a field dressed scruffily trying out the role of a scarecrow where he has been passing time for several millenniums.

Up until my enrolment of the PgClt what had been my recent response to coming into contact with the phenomena of Art School latterly Norwich University College of the Arts?
I have tried out various roles from ‘maverick tutor’ to ‘jobs-worth’ via helpful but ineffective ‘paper-pusher' – this has its equivalents in deep, surface and strategic learning.
I set out this analogy as a possible context for understanding and interpreting my approach and reasons for engaging in the PgClt and subsequent intentions, outcomes and conclusions.
I have witnessed and been part of successive waves of ideologies that have deconstructed and fragmented through misrepresentation, misunderstanding or active distain, what was and could be a truly radical alternative to a mainstream, primarily capitalist consumer structure the majority of the western world is engaged in.
Warnock (2000) in Art for All. Their Policies and Our Culture. lays out a potted history of recent art policy history. Basically Thatcher and her government inherited an arms length policy where government distributed money to universities on their own terms. This was usurped by a central government initiative, which involved concepts of access, subject to quality assessment and in turn judged by fixed performance indicators and I thus was transformed from an artist to a cultural industry. Any sense of an alternative was taken away. To know this is to understand at a fundamental level how creativity is viewed by those engaged in defining and ‘supporting’ such activity. There are ongoing parallels when we talk about current ideology – the knowledge economy, as criteria for change.

My action research proposal and attempted reconstruction as a teacher could be viewed through the context of religious penance or one of recognising a need to analyse my role as teacher alongside issues of responsibility to the students and the larger project of taxation and individual relationship to government. At the core is a desire to see beyond my constructed paradigm and break down the filters I had constructed through which to view the world.

The students that tutors and lectures meet in the first year of the degree are on average younger than ever, this is evidenced within the figures gathered from HR at NUCA. We are taking students directly from A levels and for the first time we have an under 18 year old attending the BA Textiles Course. This is not a problem but there are certain structures that have to be set in place. The students have undertaken eleven years of rigorous mark led learning within their learning lives. They have an ability to deconstruct instructions or briefs and identify the aims and objectives of an assignment and they then focus their energies toward this activity. They have the propensity to look to their relationship to the learning outcomes and create work that addresses these issues with the exclusion to everything else. They are superior strategic surface learners. These students need special care and support when they are confronted with the idea of lateral thinking and open ended problem solving. They could be said to be in a state of crisis and needing special and specific support. But one could also point out that through their experience of the rigorous, strategic, criteria led learning they are aware of both how and what they are learning which will empower them in their ongoing pursuit of information and lifelong learning.

An issue I have recognised through my experience of teaching is that there appears to be three basic types of student. The first category are committed, intelligent, developed learners who have often fought to take an art subject as a GCSE and A level option as the secondary school system attempted to channel their learning through supposedly more academic subjects. If you choose to do Art at a secondary school today and have an academic sensibility you have to be very committed. These students will do well often in spite of the systems they encounter at BA level.
On a tangential issue art colleges could be seen to of academicised’ themselves to ingratiate them to a new target audience – parents, carers and people responsible for the paying of student fees introduced in September 1998.
The second type of student is ‘sort of’ interested in creative activity, but in effect more practical, ‘good with their hands’; they are often channelled into art by a lack of academic choice. If left alone these students cause no trouble and will leave as they arrive. They may though be disillusioned as to their new role in the art world – that of ‘knowledgeable audience’. The idea that all art graduates will become practising professional artists has to be a folly. With a larger number of people going onto both further and higher education the population, in theory, will become more educated and therefore consume more creative and ‘cultural’ activity and the arts needs these people to purchase work, populate the art galleries, theatres and music venues. But there is a space for these people to become a knowledgeable audience
Then there is the last category – the individuals who do not know why they are in higher education, or if they do it is so that they are not somewhere else. These individuals are in constant need of support; they use a disproportionate amount of staff time and will depart from higher education lost and confused, often through being asked to leave. We are operating under an illusion, a fallible structure, which does not acknowledge the existence of these groups, and therefore their specific needs are not being addressed.
I think we are working within systems that at both a practical and at a strategic level do not recognise these students’ needs and therefore fails them. I am attempting to engage with this new paradigm by investing in constructing systems which will recognise, encompass and eventually encourage their learning needs.

At a time when the evidence around us supports the need for an understanding of the interconnectedness of things we appear to be fragmenting education and the individuals engaged in both delivering and receiving education – over the past 10 years with the proliferation of increasingly specific courses we are developing bodies of students who appear fractured and isolated both emotionally and academically. The idea of connectedness and collective thinking which I have outlined in my action research project is seen as a way of engendering happiness and with that comes a more fulfilling and richer learning experience. Studies undertaken by Mitra (2007) outline the value of learning in groups. The work of Etcoff (2009) around the pursuit of happiness shows that people are happiest when “in flow with others”. I work on courses with very specific remits but I will endeavour to develop learning experiences whose structure corresponds to good practice in regards to group work and individual development.


Make a presentation to peers in a professional context.

I am familiar with the activity of delivering presentations to peers in a professional context and had prepared a PowerPoint presentation that outlined the starting points, thinking, research, history and outcomes of my Action Research Learning. My intention for the presentation on the residential element of the course was that it was for information. This was appropriate as I had discussed the work extensively with peers and students. I had also undertaken and completed the Action Research project. What was helpful was the conversation around how to write the Action Research Report and how to position my proposed intervention after the initial intervention. It was also helpful and supportive to be passed a note by a tutor that the research I had been undertaking was worthy of a pedagogic paper, something I had never seen myself engaged in. On reflection the experience did yield interesting outcomes. The idea of repositioning myself as somebody who writes as opposed to somebody who makes and is active practically is revelatory. As a result of my research I have been looking at the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) series of lectures on the web and analysing what makes them work so well. There appears to be no one way to deliver a presentation at a TED conference, there are many different ways. But what many of them have in common is that they are thoughtful and consider the audience. They were often concerned with storytelling, they reminded me of campfires or the best dinner parties I have been to, they also had passion, the person telling their story really believed and wanted you to do so too. I came across the TED Commandments
1 Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
2 Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something
3 Thou Hast Never Shared Before.
4 Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
5 Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
6 Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed
Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
7 Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
8 Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
9 Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
10 Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
11 Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.
Throughout watching the presentations I have been reflecting on my own relationship with presentation. My initial thoughts were focused on Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick. Yes the students need something new but if they haven’t heard it before isn’t it okay just to roll out what you did for last year’s 1st year. The answer has to be no so that it is fresh for you. This is so that there is personal learning and a current engagement with the subject. I have been considering what I have experienced since I last gave the presentation/seminar/lecture. So I have been re-evaluating all my presentations – not just the ones for the PDP. This has entailed in some cases slight rewrites and in others wholesale rethinking. Yes to 3 and 4, you have to tell your story with passion to take people with you. I am a believer in passion – it rubs off. It is always important to comment and connect with other speakers, to recognize common ground. Art is a serious matter but sometimes laughter and humour can emphasis your point. It can also help with connecting with the subject and help with remembering the content of the presentation at a later date. No you should never read what is on the screen. Why would you do that? The screen offers the potential to take people on a journey; the text can be more appropriately disseminated through email or old school handouts. So TED has changed my way of presenting. No but reflecting and analyzing what works has supported decisions already made and informed and supported the direction I need to take.

Critically evaluate your current practice and identify areas for enhancement.

Attempting to explain something to somebody who has never undertaken the activity you are trying to explain requires skill and if this is not available then training is required to deliver this service. We are no longer working with students who ‘learn like we used to’ – whatever that means – the need to understand how the student in front of us learns is essential if we are to teach them with any degree of success. It is thought that without an appreciation of how students experience learning, specifically the learning experience of the course they have signed on to, any methodological choices made in their teaching risks being initially ill informed and eventually creates a negative experience. This miss directed use of resources would eventually lead to inappropriate and potentially harmful activity leaving generations without their voice, a lack of understanding led by the experience of hierarchy or lack of empathy is a real issue.
Or has current thinking around teaching become misdirected. Has the role of teaching been undermined and are teachers deferring to a student body that are themselves lost and confused with the lack of direction offered to them from individuals who are supposed to be leading them. This circular conundrum can only lead to an intellectual and moral vacuum. It would appear that nobody is making the connection between the body politic and what is happening in our educational institutions. A lack of discipline and direction is at the root of this problem. This talk of discipline is interesting and would seem to be at odds with ideas of happiness, a concept I have been looking at as a result of my research around Buddhist monks. Reading Gilbert (2009) and Richard (2008) has confirmed my belief in the relationship between happiness and empowerment. Studies undertaken by Gilbert reveal that those happiest are those who feel they have power over decisions that are made which affect their lives. I have decided not to complete timetables around the use of time within the sessions where there is flexibility. I intend to finalise the use of the time through discussions with the students. Thus empowering them and in theory providing happiness.

This idea of recognising, utilising, encompassing and seeing potential in a state of change is something that I have recognised in my role within community development and place forming projects over the past 20 years. But now this thinking has encompassed my practice as a teacher. I used to consider the creative possibilities for learning and teaching to be closed – this is no longer the case. There is a desire to accomplish what I value through actively considering the idea of the 4 lenses of reflection defined by Brookfield (2007). The idea, that of learning to see our autobiographies as teachers, by seeing through the eyes of our students, by measuring against our colleagues experiences and by exploring theoretical literature I can see the potential to grow as a teacher and indeed as a person was a revelation.

I arbour the brutality of socialisation – I recognise the issue of my own autobiography - of poor teaching and a lack of care from 70s comprehensive educational system and then a reliance on ‘the system’ and a denigration of responsibility within my own latter role as a teacher.
I realised that I have been attempting to get to know my students as people – to see through their eyes. Whilst exploring these connections to my students through asking questions which enquire into their lives during pre and post college hours, beginning to see them as whole rounded people. I believe this information will enhance my teaching because by understanding the context of my students learning it will inform the educational journey they are on, which in turn will support my decisions in how they should be taught. So my students become individuals.

With the interactive learning and individually led learning that we are advocating we are building a generation of learners, who in theory don’t sit and wait to be told, or even read the manual but whose first instinct is to engage. We are equipping them for change and adaptability within a future of lifelong learning. They are able to become active in the engagement of problem solving and the provision of solutions. It is exciting to consider the opportunities and possible careers they will build with this new way of thinking and subsequent behaviour – one can’t help but look to models evidenced within the science fiction genre. At its core with its reflection on the now, projected into the future and vice versa it would have been near impossible for previous generations to envisage the patterns of behaviour we are now engaged in that to us have an everyday occurrence - checking emails, using mobile phones, etc (although
Star Trek did have the communicator). It is exciting to project where we might go with this new thinking, where working together and with a common goal will present new possibilities.

How do you learn? What do you value? I have been attempting to develop what Marton (1988) calls a ‘phenomenography of learning’ in an attempt to support my students learning with a more specific course of learning. The PgClt course has given me the language and more importantly through the reading material I have been pointed towards and the specific research I have undertaken a new context in which to understand my practice.

Use appropriate theoretical principles to design and propose a small-scale action research project within a particular sphere of professional practice

When considering the development of a series of workshops to explore and illustrate problem solving and lateral thinking I looked into my own visual arts practice. Examining past sketchbooks and written documents created when I have undertaken collaborative residencies. Workshops with dancers and musicians in particular support my current interests in ideas related to the hybrid and collaboration. Sound and movement have more in common with the idea of book than the contents of book; words and pictures. When reflecting laterally on the book and the idea of what a book is concerned with one comes to the conclusion that it encompasses concepts such as sequence, control and the ordering of space in time. The book itself is a hybrid composite artefact constructed in sympathetic collaboration with a range of artists and crafts people working together. The writing, reading and general research I have undertaken on the PgClt course has reinforced and supported what I already did within my role as a teacher. This has given me a new confidence to take control, of my job, that of teacher but also coordinator of that teaching, to understand my position within the structure of learning within both University and National frameworks and a recognition of European initiatives such as the Bologna agreement.

One stream of feedback from the research I undertook at the beginning of my action research, when attempting to gather comments from the students as to their thoughts around PDP was a general commentary around the impenetrable language used by teaching professionals. This is of course something already recognised and an issue I have identified myself within the institutions I am associated with both as a student and a lecturer. In my position as Senior Lecturer on the BA Textiles course I was invited to be on the panel rewriting the learning outcomes as part of the revalidation of the course. I attempted to bring a level of plain English to the proceedings. This intention has continued in the session created for the BA Textiles PDP titled learning agreements. It attempts to provide the students with the tools to deconstruct the handbook into a language they understand. This bridge or conduit between distinct positions or recognised differences, in this instance between academic and the practical, is a position I am familiar with, in my practice within community engagement situations of public art commissions. The role of the Lead Artist according to the Introduction and overview from Public Art South West (2009) is to facilitate the “master planning of design teams to comment upon and add to the design process, not necessarily resulting in specific commissions. To produce public art commissioning strategies, including briefs for recommended commissions. Oversee the recruitment and work of commissioned artists. Possibly undertaking commissions themselves. To lead teams of other professionals such as architects, lighting designers or structural engineers to respond to major commissioning briefs. To work alongside Public Art Consultants to comment upon and bring an additional creative dimension to strategies for delivery, for example in regeneration schemes.”

Reading Buckley (2007) it appears that one the main problems with implementing PDP for people teaching in Higher Education was their inability to define, both what it is and more importantly what it was for. This resulted in a variety of distinct practices and interpretations. But the basic problem appears to be that it is difficult to set learning outcomes and therefore assess with parity or indeed create meaningful learning outcomes full stop. The documentation around PDP appears to be around apportioning responsibility for delivery. This ‘top down’ initiative instigated through a need to present a route to employment from the government but delivered by a group of people who do not value or understand the need or the instructions.

There is much writing about PDP and its relationship to employability, especially the paperwork emanating from government education departments including the user guides published by the Generic Centre of the Learning and Teaching Support Network. One could argue that this is a slippery slope. It could be useful to look at how Local Arts Authority Administrators have spent a decade explaining the value of the arts through their role in the social fabric of our society be it health and social services or behaviour and public order. This argument is then used to raise money by illustrating how the arts can decrease mental health levels through dance workshops or reduce knife crime with drop in graffiti workshops. No. Arts Administrators have started to support value and promote the arts because they are valuable – in themselves. It is beholden to those of us who work in institutions that are involved in the teaching of art and its inherent values to follow a similar route if we are not to forget why we are involved in art.

The concept of assumed knowledge is ingrained within institutions of higher education that are engaged in art training. The data gathered by NUCA HR illustrates that the majority of the tutors who are currently teaching on graduate and post graduate courses at NUCA have themselves attended art education institutions. In fact it is now impossible to apply for a teaching post and then work within such institutions without passing through this particular eye of the needle. We are in essence a closed society talking mainly to ourselves. The majority of attendees on the PgClt Course is evidence of this fact.

To know who you are could be seen to be at the core of human development – with the answers to the question who am I? Anything can be accomplished. The discovery of one’s own ‘authentic voice’ could be perceived to be at the heart of any critically reflective process but is this in turn just a reflection of the current values we place on self – this century of self. 2,500 years ago the Buddha said that when we learn to accept things as they are we are on the road to finding happiness. When we cease to strive for happiness in the future we find it in this moment. Getting what we want doesn't make us happy, being happy with what we have does. Craving causes misery, acceptance and peace makes us happy.

Brookfield (1995) in becoming critically reflective states that ‘When we practice critically we regard curricula as constructed and therefore can be deconstructed and dismantled and re framed by one’. This reflection as manual of dissent sounds like a call to arms – to man the barricades. But I am drawn to The book of 5 rings by Miyamoto Musashi and the tenet to merge with your enemy and destroy from within – keeping your friends close but your enemies closer as Marlin Brando in the Godfather would of said. As teachers we are easy targets in today’s economic climate to isolate, blame and then make inconsequential. Old strategies must be employed with new rigour – be ever watchful.

Wednesday 14 October 2009

Profile 2

CLTAD Pg Cert Profile 2 Les Bicknell

The purpose, for myself, of signing up for the Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching course has, to a large part been accomplished in that I am beginning to ask questions again. My teaching practice has been re-ignited – there is energy and creativity where there was duty and a job. Attending the 3 days residential element was an intensive experience – being presented with a range of often conflicting educational theories and ideas enabled me as a student to navigate my own path through the words. On reflection this experience has been not unlike a compressed version of the undergraduate student experience – one of being given information, again much of it diametrically opposed. The student moves from being passively presented facts and figures and then undertaking given tasks – effectively a surface activity lacking the depth of real engagement. To the student taking control, developing his or her own learning and being proactive in the pursuit of information. This for me was highlighted when my ‘off the record’ comments about sitting back and not being in charge were made known to a wider audience in Susan’s introduction.
I feel invigorated with much of the passion when I first started teaching but its now stronger, experience without the innocence. I have taken control of my teaching – this is with generous support from my line manager who at present appears to of recognised my enthusiasm and given me a blank slate with which to review, rethink and remodel my role on the course. I have been considering and reflecting on my many roles within the course and feel that I now have the academic tools to begin to engage in general but also with specific reference to the Personal Development Profile and its delivery. I am beginning to understand and value this key to learning, encompassing as I believe it can the deep question of who we are and where we want to be. The concept of reflection has at its core true learning and it is this that needs to be addressed, especially within the current climate, there is more than ever a need to teach how to learn within the context of limited support and resources. This revelation was cemented when I found myself in the textile office in Norwich University College of the Arts talking with and supporting my fellow textile staff team members. A condition of the award is the rewriting of the learning outcomes in relation to the school and university aims. I was surprised to find myself able to engage with and often direct the educational debates that we as a course are currently involved in due to the course being revalidated. The session on the residential course on team building observations brought a new dimension to my understanding of the roles played out by the various members of the textile team. This insight enabled me to reconsider and reposition my role. This has been positive for all concerned the course, the team, individual team members and myself. To add to this I have been reflecting on a series titled The Wire. The Wire is a HBO police drama series set in Baltimore Maryland which at its core is an examination of how institutions mould or are moulded by the individuals within them. It is easy to project reasoning from your armchair onto fictional characters – to solve their issues and problems. It is possible to match the characteristics of the individuals around you onto the characters in the fictional world of a television program. My line manager becomes Officer James "Jimmy" McNulty played by Dominic West. A risk taking rule breaker and a co-worker takes the form of Officer Beatrice "Beadie" Russell played by Amy Ryan. A dedicated cautious professional. When undertaking this exercise it becomes easier to envisage a route to solving personal or team issues. This ‘mirror’ can also be interesting when identifying oneself.
The whole concept of constructive alignment and further reading around the idea of a golden thread has given me a new insight into the structures I have been working with over the past 15 years. My relationship to strategies around teaching and learning has been passive. I have understood only the course documents that I have been working with at that moment in time. That might be the learning outcomes of a specific unit within an assessment context or aims and objectives within a briefing for the beginning of a semester. But I now see the documents joined up, linking with each other they make a new sense, richer, deeper. There are patterns revealing themselves and I can see myself fitting within them. Reading chapter 2 of Becoming a Critically a Reflective Teacher - Becoming Critically Reflective – a process of learning and change (1995) the idea that course documents especially learning outcomes, aims and objectives are manmade, constructed through discussion and I can play a part in remodelling these – if I so wish.
Within my role as a Senior Lecturer on the Textiles BA I have responsibility for the Virtual Learning Environment student experience. As a result of attending the PgCLT course I have developed a clearer overall approach to both the ‘physical’ layout and actual content of the VLE course. This is as a result of really considering how the students I work with actually learn. What is their experience of learning and being taught? What are their expectations? What do they want from the course? As an element of recent group meetings or seminars that I run I have been asking these questions – the answers when reviewed will form part of a brief for the redesign and new approach to what, how and why we will deliver the PDP. There have been a number of conceptual rethinks around our approach to the VLE within the textile team already. These have derived from notes I made during the residential element of the course from several discussions with fellow students about their experiences of using various VLEs. I have been looking at numerous software add-ons to make moodle more approachable or more accessible to the students. As a part of this research I have been working with Slideshare, a piece of software which enables you to post PowerPoint on the Internet. It is easy to use and rather than posting the whole presentation within Moodle, a time consuming exercise with issues around storage capacity, a simple link can be posted which the students can follow.
Reading Richardson (2005) and attempting to consider the student experience has led to a more transparent approach, using clearer language and addressing their requests within 24 hours. All this has led to an obvious yet interesting outcome - an extended workload. The students are much happier, clearer in their role and have a strong sense of being cared for. I meanwhile leave over an hour after I am being paid and this work has bled into days when I am not at college thus my practice is under threat and projects I am working in outside the University are being compromised. This is a situation I believe will evolve and possibly be resolved when a number of proposed strategies and systems are put in place and it is something that at present is at an acceptable level. Hopefully the concept of exponential growth will occur with the work I have undertaken – especially if the process is to become sustainable. I am involved in discussions about how to use my hours more strategically – looking to my strengths and actively repositioning my role on the course.
I am currently developing opportunities for supporting students learning by recognising shared interests, developing informal peer assistance groups who will support each others learning whilst reducing student/lecturer contact time. As Davies stated the links made by the students are richer and deeper as they take ownership of their own learning – developing ways to learn together, often slower, but an activity which will be more rewarding and long lasting. I have been influenced by the work of Sugata Mitra – he talks about and promotes strategies to enable children to teach themselves within groups. He works with children in isolation and poverty in remote rural areas of India and provides stark evidence for the value of group learning.
I am in the process of keeping a reflective journal, this is something new to my practice. As an artist I have been working with the idea of the sketchbook in some form for over 30 years but the specific remit of the journals intention and purpose has enabled me to consider my role within the course. If I note on 30.04.09 I was as part of a revalidation meeting/conversation when my newly acquired knowledge around learning outcomes became relevant. This was specifically looking at the verbs, as recommend by Davies in his presentation titled Outcome led learning in Art and Design which gave a direction to the discussion and supported the writing of the new document.
My responsibility around the design and planning of the BA Textile Course has not changed but my engagement with it has. With the support of the PgCLT course and the reading material I have been directed to I have been able to support the course team. My specific reading around learning outcomes especially both the article itself and Carol Carters review of Hussey and Smiths The Uses of Learning Outcomes (2003) has informed the discussion. I have understood the connections between the project, unit, year, course, school and university learning outcomes. This is again an idea embedded within the concept of the Golden Thread, but this is an idea lacking at the NUCA and this omission in itself illustrates a gap in how we as members of staff could measure the activities we are engaged in.
I have been in conversation with a fellow member of staff – Senior Lecturer Jill Rodgers and we are working together collaboratively to consider all the written elements of the course from the learning agreements, tutorial forms, reflective essays and the PDP. We are looking at how to streamline the experience for the student, developing a clear strategy, which will outline the different reasoning behind each aspect of the writing.
Initially we began by analysing the learning outcomes attached to each submission, looking at why and what they are learning. Why are we asking the students to undertake certain pieces of writing? What do we expect of them as students? When we cross-referenced the documentation it became obvious that there was duplication. We are now beginning to deconstruct the various written elements of the course and asking how the individual learning outcomes could, perhaps be embedded within the student’s practice in a holistic form and along the way attempting to instil that reflection is a process not an outcome?
I am currently in the process of organising the end of year shows for all years. I have specific responsibility around the 3rd year final degree show. In previous years this has entailed an element of tension on behalf of the students. This year by reflecting on the students perspective I have been especially clear in my directions to the students – this transparency has enabled the individual students and the group as a whole to address the issue of the final show with a calm determination. Meetings have been used give a voice to individual students fears and requests. The use of notice boards and the VLE to disseminate information has been very successful and will be a model for forthcoming years.
The research that I am engaged in on a daily basis has become more consciously strategic since embarking on the course. The subjects were and still are wide ranging due to the nature of my practice encompassing as it does at the moment; granite sandblasting methods, the history of the first production line, the effect of textile activity within the development of cities and training on AVA. This heightened awareness of critical learning and reflective processes has in effect given me time, time to work faster, more direct and therefore more effective.
On a person level the session on different types of learners and my reading around the subject especially rereading Biggs solo taxonomy has enabled me to support my eldest child’s GCSE options choice. Looking at and completing the approaches to studying questionnaire – supplied at the residential element of the course - led to a full and frank discussion around the type of learner he was within each subject. This enabled me to support his decisions by matching learning types to the specific teaching experience within each subject. Sad but true.
The need to develop separate strategies or approaches for each subject was interesting – it was evident that as Gibbs states in Innovative Assessment in Higher Education (2006) “students are as strategic as never before, and they allocate their time and focus their attention on what they believe will be assessed……..assessment frames learning. “
My child has been in training - learning within this framework for 9 years – no wonder he is strategic or the students I encounter in my teaching capacity..

Ending 1
What kind of teacher am I? Has been an interesting question to reflect on. Why am I good with certain students and with others I have difficulty spending time in their company? I have been looking at my relationships with members of my tutor group. Working with Entwistle’s (1988) cataloguing methods it became evident that there is a degree of conflict with certain teacher – student types. I either need to consider very different approaches to individual students or to ask for a reallocation of the students within various tutor groups. This is also an appropriate comment on parenting – although more challenging to reallocate!

Ending 2
What kind of teacher am I? Has been an interesting question to reflect on. Why am I good with certain students and with others I have difficulty spending time in their company? I have been looking at my relationships with members of my tutor group. Working with Entwistle’s (1988) cataloguing methods it became evident that there is a degree of conflict with certain teacher – student types. It is obvious if I consider the ramifications around reallocation in relation to my children that as a teacher it is my responsibility to consider very different teaching approaches to individual students and their individual needs. Maybe the re-evaluating of my relationship to responsibility has been the most interesting outcome of the PgCLT so far.

“Be the change that you want in the world.” Mahatma Gandi
Bibliography

Biggs’ structure of the observed learning outcome (solo) taxonomy
Teaching and Educational Development Institute The University of Queensland Australia

Carol Carters (2003) review of Hussey and Smiths The Uses of Learning Outcomes

Davies (2009) Outcome led learning in Art and Design.

Entwistle, N. J. (1988) Styles of learning and teaching: an integrated outline of educational psychology for students, teachers and lecturers.

Gibbs (2006) Innovative Assessment in Higher Education

Hussey and Smiths (2003) The Uses of Learning Outcomes Teaching in Higher Education, Volume Issue 3 July 2003 , pages 357 - 368

Richardson, J.T.E. (2005) 'Students' approaches to learning and teachers' approaches to teaching in higher education'

Stephen D. Brookfield. (1995) Becoming a Critically a Reflective Teacher - Becoming Critically Reflective – a process of learning and change

http://www.hbo.com/thewire/

http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=5433140

http://www.TED.com/
http://www.ted.com/talks
http://www.ted.com/search?q=Sugata+Mitra

http://simoja.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/wk12-a2-richardson-2005/

profile 1

PgClt Pg Cert Les Bicknell

action research 2009/10

Interrogating the value of constructive (un)alignment: towards a celebration of troublesome knowledge in a golden era of bureaucracy and fear.

Issue
Students have a poor relationship to critical reflection. This activity is located within their Personal Development Planning (PDP) the value and purpose of which is misunderstood.

Proposal
My proposal is to develop a system, which enables and supports the development of critical reflection and constructively aligns the PDP for both the student and staff attending and working on the BA Textiles Course at NUCA.

Aims
To enable students to undertake PDP successfully and for the staff to assess efficiently.

History – national context
“Personal Development Planning (PDP) was first conceived by the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, published as the 1997 Dearing Report (NCIHE 1997). Initially envisaged as a two-part means for recording student achievement, the proposed Progress File emerged as part of a national strategy for equipping the UK as a learning society over the following decades. In the 11 years since the report was published, PDP has evolved within a dominant context of employability and skills development, from a planning and recording tool aimed at linking formal and informal learning to one geared towards the needs of the UK as part of the global economy.”
Buckley. (2008) PDP: From introduction to the present.

The context of employability is something I will address alongside the idea of ‘skills development’ an open ended phrase which eventually I will knowingly explore and exploit with a particular vision.

History – local context
Within the past 5 years PDP at Norwich University College of the Arts, formerly Norwich School of Art and Design on the BA Textile course, formerly BA Contemporary Textile Practices, formerly BA Textiles has had a fractured and chequered past. Its initial introduction in September 2003 was confused. The concept of PDP was conflated with diary and sketchbook. This saw the staff having to read endless angst ridden youthful tales of worthless boyfriends and isolation amongst shopping lists for make up and the occasional idea relating to the students work thrown in.
Over the next 4½ years this poor practice continued even with focused and specific briefings that attempted to direct the confused and overloaded students to be more rigorous in their reflection. This initiative recognised their inability to undertake reflective thinking but did not provide the skills, which they obviously lacked. These briefing sessions were supported with examples of good practice; showing the more successful PDPs of the previous year’s students and they also examined some writing undertaken by artists. But the sessions did not teach them how to truly approach the task or actually undertake it with any meaning.

Action Research Proposal
My proposal was to develop a system, which clarified the PDP for both the student and staff attending and working on the BA Textiles Course at NUCA. This intervention would bring clarity and a connection to PDP for the students.

This streamlining would enable students to complete their PDPs without student confusion and enable staff to assess in a shorter period of time whilst delivering appropriate feedback.
The concept of constructive alignment, specifically Brookfield (1995) Becoming a Critically a Reflective Teacher - Becoming Critically Reflective is a key text. This identifiable and highly directed learning process encompasses the idea of supporting learning and change through the development of systems and structures to support communication, learning and understanding. This directed experience would seen to be at odds with the idea of the student learning through the individual student identifying their own learning needs but I was drawn to this idea as it was an opportunity to use good design to problem solve, something I take from my work within the public art arena. Biggs (2002) in Aligning the Curriculum to Promote Good Learning actually talks about trapping the learner who then cannot escape without learning what is intended which appeared to fit with the students relationship to learning – if it is not to be assessed it is not recognised as having worth.

I started the task by gathering student feedback on their current attitude to PDP. Working in small groups they answered a set of questions appendix 01 and fed them back to the group for discussion, which was very lively and on the whole negative towards the idea of PDP. appendix 02 Examples of comments include “a good waste of paper”, “life’s too short to do something that isn’t marked”, “PDP is ambiguous I don’t know how to answer it” and “just tell me what to do and I can get on with it”. From this evidence it was identified that the students did not understand PDP and therefore engaged poorly in reflective action.
At this time (July 09) within NUCA the PDP was marked separately. This was an important consideration when I set out to rethink how both students and staff could engage in PDP.

There was a need for simplification and transparency to be instigated. As a way of streamlining the whole process I decided that the students would be asked to create a separate text, which would be the only item assessed.

This writing would directly address the learning outcomes. appendix 03 Using our VLE Moodle system I developed a process for the students to complete their PDPs with the minimum of fuss.

Over the year a system was constructed where students were given the opportunity to write their response to 5 questions which mapped the requirements of the 5 learning outcomes. The students receive feedback from their cohort and the tutors, (if posted within a specific time frame). appendix 04

At the assessment point they were asked to write a 700-word statement which would need to address the 5 learning outcomes. Their previous 5 answers could be cut and pasted to create this new text, which were in turn cut and pasted from their blog, which they were encouraged to undertake. A diagram explaining this formed part of a presentation to the students. appendix 05

This successful pragmatic, aligned solution meant that the staff no longer had to read the students rambling journals and the students knew precisely what was asked of them. This was my action research project and as the statistics illustrate it was a successful activity.

Evaluation (1)
Unfortunately on reflection I realised that this travesty of surface learning, constructed for all the right reasons was to fundamentally misunderstand the value of PDP. The PDP’s relationship to assessment is the factor that students consider; they review the learning outcomes and attempt to fulfil them without engaging fully with the actual learning opportunities that engaging rigorously with the idea of PDP and reflective thinking can offer.
We had created a limited learning strategy which in turn delivered a poor learning and teaching experience. Although it attempted, through good intentions, to solve the problem of a misunderstood concept (PDP) which had been delivered to a confused body of people, (students) which needed to be assessed within a limited time scale by a time poor group of people with forms to complete (staff). The aligning of the exercise was successful. The tutors were able to assess the PDP’s quicker with a rigorous attention to the assessment criteria and the formal feedback was specific and directed to the Learning Outcomes. The students as a whole had a directed, successful experience. They had a defined task, which they understood and fulfilled to a higher degree than previous years. The PDP mark contributed to 20% of the final assessment in the final units of year 1 and 2 and was marked separately with its own set of learning outcomes. The cohort that undertook the PDP before the streamlining exercise attained an average mark of 47 in the academic year 2007/08. The following year, 2008/09, post streamlining, the same group attained an average mark of 53. This is a 6% increase. The 1st year cohort for 2008/09 who was introduced to the streamlined concept as part of the final unit briefing achieved an average mark of 59. This is a 12% increase.
This increase in the marks and the increased engagement of the students with the VLE could be viewed as a success and in fact has been recognised by the management at NUCA through the awarding of a Teaching and Student Support Award for my work on PDP through the VLE. This was awarded in recognition of staff contribution to a high quality student experience at this year’s graduation ceremony.
This success is recognised in the unsolicited student comments I have received – an example of which is, “I have found that reflecting on my work up until now, has allowed me to look at the year as a whole and remind me what has been successful this year and in a wider sense I have been able to establish unsuccessful and successful areas of my projects and by seeing this it has made me question why this could be, it has also allowed me to begin to draw links…much of this year I have been worried about the rate I am progressing but this has allowed me to see where I have developed from last year”. Student Email 08 05 09. Feedback from a meeting with the students after the assessment led to a number of positive comments about the process including “5 tasks is okay – concise and easy enough to complete. Too much convoluted language in the briefs”, “Just have 5 tasks”. appendix 06
But this approach allowed and supported surface learners to strategically engage with the PDP. Deep learners were also misdirected as they could not fully engage with the program as the systems we initiated were so specific, being closely tied to the assessment criteria and learning outcomes. The student therefore developed little or no understanding of the true value of reflective thinking, which is at the core of the PDP experience. I also identified through Hussey and Smith (2002) that the learning outcomes facilitated a management process rather than educational. As a result of my reflection I decided that a new strategy had to be employed both as an extension to the outcomes of my action research project but more importantly to develop an appropriate and fit for purpose system for the students to undertake PDP and reflective practice.

Conclusion - Action to be undertaken as a result of the action research project.

Proposal
To develop a system, which enables and supports the development of critical reflection and constructively unaligns the PDP for both the student and staff attending and working on the BA Textiles Course at NUCA

Aims of the proposal
To deliver a framework for the students to look into themselves. It is to be a vehicle to enable them to define, who they are, recognise what they could be and take control and responsibility for their learning and ultimately their lives.

More context
In the teaching year 2009/10 BA Textiles will be working with another new framework. Within this structure we are no longer assessing the PDP as a separate entity. It is to be marked from within an embedded position; the students will need to consider how to work with the concept of reflection and the staff will have to recognise the student’s reflection embedded within their work.

I have developed a PDP strategy that is robust and focuses on the needs of the student and would be successful with or without an assessment. For it to be valued, valuable and sustainable it needed to be a creative experience to equip them both within and after the course.
The context is that we have to accept that students will develop strategies to undertake the course we have to develop a strategy equal to their strategic thinking, which will support the individual students learning. This is all within an altered educational paradigm that of moving from exclusion to inclusion, massification; an intention from the government that 50% of school-leavers will attend higher education by 2010 as opposed to a lack of any targets in 1982 (the year I went to College) where 12% of school leavers attended higher education. The range of education opportunities, cultural backgrounds and general life experiences our current cohort have is vastly different from any time before and it is our responsibility as lecturers to engage in creative, flexible thinking to deliver this inclusive policy to further the cause of societies development.

I will develop a program of activities, which at their core will rethink philosophically how the course approaches PDP and as a result of this decide the content and delivery of the PDP within the BA Textile course. The aim is to instil in the student’s minds that PDP is a process not an outcome. The initial idea is to make the process rather than the outcome of PDP mandatory attempting to present to the students a more meaningful experience. There will be no separate assessment but attendance at the teaching sessions would be noted and marked.
I have used the feedback I gathered from the initial session as a starting point for the reorganisation of PDP. Here I will outline the proposed sessions and the thinking behind each one. The PDP needs to be seen to be useful yet also integrated with the program – it needs to be sustainable, filling gaps not create more work for the staff and students.
Students need to become engaging in and see the worth of PDP. One very practical strand of thinking to sell the idea to students would be to address the issue of employment. The inaugural Student Living Report, conducted by MORI and commissioned by The UNITE Group plc highlights students concerns around money and employability.

"Today's students focus on gaining good qualifications to help them find the right job. While they are happy with their choice of university and recognise that university studies are a wise investment in their future, they are worried about their debts."
Professor Sir Worcester, Robert. Chairman of MORI.

University is seen by those entering it as the gateway to their future; this includes a way for them to develop their job opportunities, increasing their knowledge and the essential skills to prepare them for their future life. This issue could be exploited to initially engage with and connect the student to PDP by presenting them with an understanding of how PDP links with the world of work and how engaging in PDP fully will enhance their employability. Edwards (2005) The Higher Education Academy Paper – connecting PDP to employer needs and the world of work outlines how the activities within PDP relate directly to the needs of employees. When asked what they looked for in potential employee’s employers listed.
Flexibility, adaptability and the capacity to cope with and manage change, self motivation and drive, analytical ability and decision making, communication and interpersonal skills and team working ability and skills.
These skills and attributes recognised as valuable by employers are the very ones that are developed by a rigorous engagement with reflective thinking within the PDP framework. Although in the light of both current and historical employable rates for art college graduates, specifically at NUCA, it would appear that another role for PDP needs to be developed.
Unable to gain more recent data on student specifics at NUCA, in itself an interesting factor, I looked at Knight (1996). The work focused on notions of success in art graduates at what was NSAD. She found that only 3% of graduates from 1991 – 94 were making a living selling their work. This would appear to clash with how the college presents success to students – artists attached to galleries as models holding forth.

The acquisition of skills is seen to be an important factor – there is a view from the student body, noted within feedback systems both official and anecdotal, that little is actually taught at degree level. This perception is evidenced through discussions in individual and group tutorials, reflective essays and committee reports. This has been noted and is a key factor in the development of the new systems that will endeavour to teach the students how to think reflectively – how to engage with the process of critical thinking so that it not only makes sense but so that the student can use it to heighten their potential. The need to actually teach students skills around reflective thinking has led to the creation of 16 specific sessions, appendix 07 which will start in the first week of the first year and continue, into the second year. The sessions, lasting between 1 ½ and 2 hours are mapped closely onto the course structure so that the sessions have practical examples to hand and specific issues to solve within the experience of the course. These sessions address recognised needs from the curriculum and the learning outcomes written within the associated documentation: presenting a way of navigating the course and of student requests detailed in feedback sessions and formal evaluation points within the course.
After each session there will be an opportunity for extended learning by utilizing the VLE. There will be a set task that will evolve from each session. It will require the student to reflect on the activity and post a response to a specific forum on Moodle. This activity will act as a form of formative reflective activity, illustrating learning and enabling the group to share experiences and for tutors to follow up any issues.

The new PDP support framework I have instigated has grown out of discussions with students and developed from the research I have undertaken around the concept of reflection. I have specifically been looking at how reflective thinking can be embedded within a creative practice to inform the PDP element of the undergraduate framework within the BA Textile course at NUCA. I have also directed my energy to position PDP at the centre of thinking within the course structure. appendix 08

This idea of repositioning, placing the idea of reflection at the centre of ones practice means that both during and more importantly as a legacy after the course, the individual is enabled to continually develop their own creative journey, either as a professional practitioner or an educated audience member.
My overall approach to rethinking the PDP has been informed by reading a wide range of material. Initially Buckley (2008) was particularly useful. Her overview gives an understanding of the context of PDP both from a historical perspective, recognising a need to introduce such a structure, and the contemporary concerns of how to embed reflection into ones practice.

Framing thinking
This section of the paper outlines the intention and research that has informed the individual PDP sessions.
The professional practice aspect, that of considering the role of the artist in society and looking at how to develop a responsible curriculum to underpin a students learning towards employability, was informed by Edwards (2005). His work ‘Connecting PDP to employer needs and the world of work maps the research he has undertaken in a very pragmatic way. It makes connections between PDP and the ‘real world’, seeing reflection as essential not an ethereal distraction from the ‘real work’.
Particularly useful was the work he has undertaken on recognising the specific skills that employees are seeking. These skills which are embedded within PDP reaffirmed the deep value I set on lateral thinking, problem solving and the wider approach to creative thinking that I espouse to my students.
The case studies within Connecting PDP to employer needs and the world of work were useful in that one of the valuable aspects of undertaking extended learning, especially the PgCLT has been the connection with other members of the teaching profession – exchanging how we undertake our jobs. The case studies were a direct insight into how to do and also through reflection more importantly how not to. Andrew Holmes at the University of Hull outlines very succinctly the issues that the PDP has to address for the professional. On a wider issue Dr Jayne Stevens at De Montford University writes about how PDP eventually provides the engaged student with the confidence to develop their own learning programme and be less reliant on staff feedback. This is something that I am working towards, developing a culture of support within the student body enabling them to realise that their vision of where or who they want to be is their greatest asset.
Studies undertaken by Mitra (2007) outline the value of learning in groups. His research shows that when individuals learn within a group situation, sharing knowledge and developing their own systems for learning their individual learning is more rapid and more developed. Through a deep engagement with the process of learning they develop ownership and responsibility of their own learning.
The case studies within the work undertaken by Edwards (2005) was instructive when setting out an initial session, which will introduce the students to PDP. Holding the student’s attention is essential. It is important to outline clear directions to new students to instil rigour within the systems that are set up, presenting consistency. This request is outlined in student feedback regularly but in this instance the comments within the feedback session around consistency was important.

The work of Etcoff (2009) around the pursuit of happiness shows that people are happiest when “in flow with others”, be that engaged in sport, sex or collaborative art workshops. In this century of self where the individual is at the centre of themselves and the world that surrounds them. The individual in pursuit of their individuality would appear to be at odds with us becoming happier as a society. Computerised text analysis of suicide letters notes the proliferation of the first person singular. The argument that not only do individuals learn at a deeper level within groups but they are also happier is the reason for the promotion of group work within the PDP proposals. It was also both a practical solution of dealing with increased student numbers and an intelligent way of devolving responsibility away from the tutor and onto the student.

Overtly practical aspects were underpinned by a more holistic approach to reflection through my reading of Buddhist literature notably the concept of the three characteristics of existence, that of impermanence (Anitya), suffering (Duhkha) and notself (Anatma). These three characteristics are always present in or are connected with existence, and they tell us about the nature of being. Through reflection they can help us to know what to do with our lives.
Exploring the interconnectedness of disciplines, that of using one specialist activity to inform another has been something I have embedded into my own practice.
When developing a specific workshop to explore and illustrate problem solving and lateral thinking within an interdisciplinary context. I wanted to look at strategies that delivered actual solutions to real problems within a framework that the majority of students would understand. Design with its formal structural system, which includes concepts such as the brief, client, and presentation, appeared to fit the current structure of learning outcomes and assessment criteria. But the BA Textile course sets out to encompass fine art thinking and activity so the starting point for research had to be outside an art school discipline.

Management theory books and ‘how to’ bibles by the likes of Paul Arden (2003) and Levitt and Dubner (2005) present interesting solutions. Sutton (2002) provided a number of non-textile examples, which could be easily explained and understood, as they were so extreme and outside the experience of the student’s lives. This will enable the students to reflect on their own practice developing an ability to recognise opportunities with which to develop questions which can be creatively solved, lateral thinking providing answers.

The idea of providing skills for the student to undertake reflection is important but needs to be balanced with a wider appreciation of reflection. I rethought Brookfield’s ideas around the 4 lenses set out in becoming a critically reflective teacher and rewrote them to fulfil the needs of graduate students providing them with the basic tools to begin the reflective journey and embedded them within the seminar titled 04: Reflection.

It is important to remember that we as lecturers are humans working with humans. I think the relationship between emotion and reflection is important to consider. The analytical nature of Dewey’s (1933) 5 phases or aspects of reflection are useful but the workshop that specifically focuses on reflection will look to the work of Boud, Keogh and Walker (1985). They reworked Dewey’s five aspects into three – returning to experience, attending to (or connecting with) experience and evaluating experience. By putting the students at the centre of the experience they will connect with the idea and become responsible for their own reflection – it has to come, initially, from memory, from before, the past connecting to the now, the present and projecting into the future, next.

The work undertaken by Maddocks and Newbold (2005) looks at the links between learning agreements and the PDP. Acknowledging that students are strategic learners, looking to the learning outcomes to define their learning needs. It was difficult to consider this aspect when setting out to develop a community of practice as set out by Wenger (2007) as the students see themselves as individuals and if allowed to determine their own learning it would focus on the inevitable. Hussey and Smith (2003) cemented my belief around the idea of valuing what is unknown. ‘the most fruitful and valuable feature of higher education is the emergence of ideas, skills and connections which were unforeseen even by the teacher’ (p.228) – this relates to the idea of troublesome knowledge which is a concept I am embedding within the sessions and gravitating towards. My role is caught between what Laycock (2009) outlines as a liberal approach to facilitating and an enabler of students to build critical learning communities

This hierarchical repositioning for educators is a challenge in a paradigm of test scores, assessments on the one hand and self determined ownership of learning on the other; can they be part of the same equation?

It was when looking for an entry point for the students understanding of the value of reflection that I considered the concept of critical moments. It was important to give students the tools to build a system which is sustainable and engages long term the idea of the significant moment. Brookfield (1995) was instructive enabling me to recognise that the critical incident Questionnaire is a key tool. This leaves me to postulate that this revelatory moment is when actual learning takes place, the active acknowledgement of a before and after. The critical incident questionnaire identifies the friction of learning where new concepts and ideas rub up against ones established paradigm. It is the process of moving from knowing without questioning to not knowing to renewing knowing.

The thinking behind the seminar 03: Who are you and how do you think? came from a number of sources. Biggs SOLO taxonomy approaches to studying questioner, was very instructive to my own practice so I reformed the questions for undergraduate students and it becomes a focus for the session. The experience of teaching within a context of lower resources and less student/lecturer contact time framed a need for students to consider their relationship to the idea of developing their own responsibility for their learning. It is essential for individuals to know themselves and their practice if they are to work to their potential. Know thyself could be the first rule or at least an underlying principle of the seminar.

Proposed Evaluation to be undertaken as a result of the action taken after the action research project.
I will undertake a rigorous evaluation process which will include peer assessment both as an interim measure so that any regulatory issues can be resolved and then again after they have been delivered to look at the content in relationship to the student experience, the course documents and the assessment marks. The interventions will be discussed with focus groups made up of students from first and second years. I will ask two sets of questions. The second years will be presented with the same set they had a year ago appendix 01 and the first years will be asked questions which enable the students to review their relationship to reflective thinking and consider how the sessions have supported their learning. appendix 09 The outcomes from these discussions will inform the ongoing development of how reflective thinking is delivered and embedded within the BA Textile course at NUCA with specific reference to the PDP element of the course.

Reflection
I believe that the proposed extended reframing intervention will deliver a more rounded creative individual more able to function successfully within a world requiring flexible thinking and an ability to learn from and encompass constant change. The criteria around success for this intervention of the intervention could be if the students ask more interesting questions i.e. become more interesting rounded people rather than the focused narrow individuals that they are.
The work/life balance is a factor often talked about with students. I talk about one becoming the other. Questions around how the student wishes to live their life has taken over from what do you want to do after you leave college? The interconnected, overlapping nature of creative activity can be reflected on and in a relational context the liminal space that is the edge of definitions can be defined and redefined with each action/experience. There is no then only the now. The artist Roger Ackling summed this up when he questioned where the work is, that he had possibly failed to identify the real work over the past 30 years. He went on to explain that possibly the work was not the drawings he made with a magnifying glass from the power of the sun but the smoke generated as he created them. This open thinking derived from stillness and deep focused questioning is something I believe we should all strive for. Maybe a question for us all – where is the work?