Policy documents are said to be
rational drivers of accountable, publicly funded processes. Policy shapes and re-shapes the educational
landscape in the UK
Policy players in UKHE:
Government, HEFCE, JISC, HEA, QAA, Institution
The Digital Now
Teaching and learning is
undeniably set in a landscape shaped by the ubiquity of ICT. As practitioners,
most of us will want to embrace aspects of the digital to be current and
relevant. At the same time, the what, when, where and how of Technology
Enhanced Learning (TEL) is also formally inscribed in – and shaped by -
Government and Institution Policy documents. This article explores both
Government and Institutional e-learning policy through the prism of policy
critique and e-learning practice. The Appendices constitute two papers
previously written on E-learning Policy and Practice.
“The Strategic Management of Pedagogy
… [G]overnmental policies that were intended to enhance the
quality of Higher Education have added to the process of top down management …
In particular, pedagogy, once purely the concern of the academics directly
involved in course delivery, has now become an issue for strategy. The Higher
Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has linked elements of University
funding to the creation and implementation of Teaching and Learning Strategies.
The consequence of this is that, in many institutions, pedagogy has been placed
in the hands of strategic management for the first time.
Moreover, with the choice of pedagogic approach a matter
of strategy rather than tactics, the lecturers’ primary tool (pedagogic
approaches) for coping with the current push for Mass HE and Widening
Participation, and the consequent increasing student diversity and numbers, is
being taken out of their control. Although some degree of latitude does remain,
the choice of teaching techniques is becoming constrained by the decisions of
senior management. In line with other trends towards centralisation, the
establishment of such strategies seems likely to promote further conformity in
order to establish common standards.” (Sinfield, Burns and Holley 2004 in
Satterthwaite, Atkinson and Martin (eds) 2004; 141)
It could be argued that knowing
policy allows us to better meet our obligations as public servants; understanding
policy in the University context allows us to demonstrate that we are meeting
our targets; critiquing policy allows us to act with agency in our own
practice.
What is policy anyway?
Policy is not one easily
definable thing:
- Policy as strategy…
- ‘Our policy for investment in future
growth is…’
- Policy as position…
- ‘Our policy on migration is….’
- Policy as procedure…
- ‘The grievance policy says….’
‘Public policy focuses on what
Dewey (1927) once expressed as “the public and its problems”. It is concerned
with how issues and problems come to be defined and constructed and how they
are placed on the political and policy agenda.
But it is also the study of “how, why and to what effect governments
pursue particular courses of action and inaction”’ (Heidenheimer et al cited in
Parsons 1995: XV).
It is assumed that policy is rational – and that it emerges
from a process that could be summarised as:
- Problem formulation: Solution formulation
= PolicyA.
- PolicyA trialled; evaluated; and refined =
PolicyB.
- PolicyB formally implemented.
However, ‘It is a common experience to find that
little attention has been given to problem formulation in policy making’ (Pratt
2006:14). More commonly Government Policy seems to start with solutions
– and evaluation focuses on whether the policy has been implemented – and not
on whether it solves the problem for which it was supposedly designed
(Schwabenland, LondonMet MBA programme 2012).
Government E-learning Policy
My starting point for engaging
with E-learning Policy was an analysis of Government Policy as encompassed in
its 2005 (revised 2008) policy document, ‘Harnessing Technology’. I analysed
this document to see what it was ‘really’ saying about ICT and University
learning, teaching and assessment. For full text, see Appendix 1: Sinfield,
Burns and Holley (2009) ‘A journey into silence: students, stakeholders and the
impact of a strategic Governmental Policy Document in the UK
Critique of Policy
Whilst E-learning, ICT and the
Digital offer the potential for enhancing the education landscape, ushering in
a more multimodal LTA age; the Government ‘Harnessing Technology’ document offers
no vision of education or aspiration for e-learning other than to service the
needs of business.
‘Harnessing Technology’ seems
only to celebrate that ICT will offer choice of when and where we learn –
without mention of the ‘what, the why and the multiplicity of hows’ that
we learn. The student stakeholder is not addressed in the document except in
terms of deficit. Where students are ‘hard to reach’, they are diagnosed as
cognitively impaired or as having Special Education Needs. No mention is made
of community or classed positions of exclusion. The suggestion is that deficit
students can be plugged into ICT packages to be ‘fixed’.
The document speaks repeatedly of
‘training’, where arguably any expression of the self might be considered
subversive, as opposed to ‘education’, where deep learning involves integrating
new knowledge with the self in deep, critical and constructivist ways. Of
technology itself, the document only argues that there need to be ‘safe’
purchasing decisions. The policy focus is not on meeting the needs of society
as a whole nor on ICT fulfilling the wants of the individual learner – but on
meeting the ICT needs of business.
Typically early innovators and
champions of e-learning are (happily) unaware of this policy and these
reductive visions of e-learning; but this reductive vision exists. If we want
more from e-learning, we will have to re-define and re-colonise this landscape
for ourselves.
It doesn’t have to be like
that: re-defining Policy – re-claiming the vision
We did not accept that our
blended learning adventures had to be narrowly defined by reductive Government
Policy and set out to explore and re-define this landscape for ourselves. See Appendix
2: Burns, Sinfield and Holley (2012) ‘The Shipwrecked Shore – and other
metaphors: what we can learn from occupation of – and representations in –
virtual worlds’ In Investigations of University
Teaching and Learning 2012.
Our Adventure
In our practical application of
embedded study and academic skills and digital development, we worked with
Computing tutors to deliver a module to first year programmers, computer
scientists and animators. F2F tuition
included delivering positive and empowering academic practice (we had these
first year students critically analysing tough academic papers together and
producing collective notes); there was also collective activity in SecondLife, (www.secondlife.com),an immersive 3D world:
“As staff, we represented a
fluid and participative knowledge-landscape not in a realist, mimetic
representation of a classroom or a lecture theatre, but in the seashore, the
deckchairs and the puzzles. When delivering new ‘supplies’ to our students, we
shipwrecked a seventeenth century galleon on our twenty-first century beach.
Arguably form and content are matched and merged conveying a message about
education appropriate for the 21st Century – and for our digital
worlds. In this scene, epistemology and pedagogy are disrupted: ‘grounded’ to
be de-centred, disembowelled - in a postmodern playground redolent of leisure
activity - deckchairs and bonfire on the beach; transected by space and time –
the galleon and its bounty. This narrative tableau has potential to transform
production and ‘consumption’ of education: students explore the shipwreck; they
‘salvage’ the goods; they sit around the campfire, solve puzzles and discuss
their learning; they stake claims in the landscape and build their own spaces
and their own objects. They become both producers and consumers of knowledge in
an unbounded/bounded meaning making process.”
Our
conclusions were that constructing different learning spaces is not necessarily
safe, it can indeed ‘disrupt’ the traditional learning
landscape, and in very powerful ways: student learning can be enhanced in ways that
transcend the scope of Government Policy to date.
Not everybody wants a
SecondLife
Admittedly
SL is a niche space for most lecturers, for ideas on developing successful
experiences in your VLE, see also Sarah Ramsden’s HEAcademy article on using VLE to build student
relationships and meaningful learning encounters:
Institutional Policy
CELT Guidelines:
The Londonmet institutional e-learning
policy document sets a Minimum Standard for VLE presence and use. Every module
must have an active WebLearn presence and staff are expected to routinely use
ICT where they are necessary and appropriate to extend and enhance
student learning.
Digital Literacy (DL) for
students is defined – instrumental, informational and strategic – and is to be
addressed by staff within and outwith the curriculum – from induction onwards.
The minimum guidelines state that staff will be adequately resourced and
supported in their own digital development – including via CELT (though in
actual fact it mentions many elements of the new CELT that have been heavily
cut – for example the LDU and the Writing Specialists) – and with timetabled
time for Professional Development.
Safety is again addressed such that access to external resources and
links should be accessed from the WebLearn shell – and tutors are exhorted to
consider issues of induction, communication, assessment and feedback from
within WebLearn itself.
Risks to the University include
issues of Data Protection and require compliance with HEA, HEFCE, JISC and QAA
Policies and Practices:
HEFCE: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/hefceframework.aspx
and http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/projects/UKOnlineLearningStudy-FinalReport-Mar10-FINAL-FORPUB.pdf
QAA: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/Publications/InformationAndGuidance/Pages/Code-of-practice-section-2.aspx
and
‘It’s my own messy chaos’
As an
academic who entered University to embrace the freedom it seemed to offer with
respect to the development of both curriculum and pedagogic approach, I feel
liberated when institutional policy documents are not over-directive in the way
that I implement TEL in my own practice. At the same time, Government ICT
policy exists and de facto and de jure sets the scene in which I operate
– and, I would argue, is reductive both in terminology and direction.
‘Harnessing Technology’ demonstrates no understanding of the ‘widening
participation’ student with whom I choose to work; neither does it appear to
capture the dynamic potential of the digital. Yet this (and all policy
documents) can be harnessed to ‘terrorise’ the individual lecturer who
navigates terrain with which they feel uncomfortable, unfamiliar and perhaps
under-prepared. When it comes to TEL, no matter how great our discipline
knowledge, our engagement with our students and our contribution to our
Departments, we may feel constantly that we are ‘not good enough’. This might
be a salutary reminder of how our students feel much of the time (!); but it
does little to create a positive and experimental learning and teaching
culture. Foucault of course would say that if tutor terror is the outcome of
the policy, then that is the ‘point’ of the policy, and there is much mileage
in that for me. At the same time, practitioners, technology champions, TEL
teams in universities everywhere, want to engage with the digital reality we inhabit;
we want to positively and richly colonise this space. We just do! Perhaps the point of understanding policy is
to outpace it, to smooth out the negative and unhelpful striations of reductive
policy and re-territorialise this space as pedagogic and curriculum nomads
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 2005).
The way forward
University lecturers are
assessed in Peer and Performance Review with respect to innovative TEL;
practitioners wishing to excel might consider joining or setting up Communities
of Practice within the University to set their own agendae and goals. If you
are interested in being part of such a group, please email: s.sinfield@londonmet.ac.uk .
If you want to join a larger
conversation about successful learning and teaching practice, do join www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ldhen the
Learning Development discussion group which is exceedingly supportive in all
areas of LD work including TEL.
Useful Resources
CELT Guides to LTA – complete set
can be accessed: https://metranet.londonmet.ac.uk/celt/learning-teaching-assessment/staff-guides-resources.cfm
Individual Guides indicated below:
Teaching for student engagement: https://metranet.londonmet.ac.uk/fms/MRSite/psd/hr/capd/good-practice/Staff_Guide_Teaching_for_Student_Engagement_June_%202011.pdf
Quick Guide to Blended Learning: https://metranet.londonmet.ac.uk/fms/MRSite/psd/hr/capd/good-practice/Quick_Guide_to_Blended_Learning.pdf
Quick Guide to Embedding
Information Literacies: https://metranet.londonmet.ac.uk/fms/MRSite/psd/hr/capd/good-practice/Quick%20Guide%20to%20Embedding%20Information%20Literacy%20in%20Your%20Modules%20(Library%20Services).pdf
Quick Guide to Compiling Module
Resources Lists: https://metranet.londonmet.ac.uk/fms/MRSite/psd/hr/capd/good-practice/Quick%20Guide%20to%20Compiling%20Module%20Resource%20Lists%20(Library%20Services).pdf
Guide to Giving Feedback: https://metranet.londonmet.ac.uk/fms/MRSite/psd/hr/capd/good-practice/Feedback%20via%20WebLearn%20table.pdf
Guide to Blended Learning Tools
in Large Groups: https://metranet.londonmet.ac.uk/fms/MRSite/psd/hr/capd/good-practice/BL%20tools%20for%20LG%20sessions%20(fv).pdf
Staff Guide to Embedding Academic
Literacies and Learning Development: Staff Guide to Academic Literacies and Embedding Learning
Development-1.doc
Appendix 1 Full text
Sinfield, Burns and Holley (2009)
‘A journey into silence: students, stakeholders and the impact of a strategic
Governmental Policy Document in the UK’In: Social Responsibility Journal,
Vol. 5 No. 4, 2009 pp 566-574
Keywords: Analytical tool,
E-learning, stakeholders, students, government e-learning strategy
Abstract
Within the context of the British University
system, electronic learning (e-learning) strategies within the UK
Introduction
‘The powerhouses of the new
global economy are innovation and ideas, skills and knowledge. These are now
the tools for success and prosperity as much as natural resources and physical
labour power were in the past century. Higher education is at the centre of
these developments. Across the world, its shape, structure and purposes are
undergoing transformation because of globalisation. At the same time, it
provides research and innovation, scholarship and teaching which equip
individuals and businesses to respond to global change. World class higher
education ensures that countries can grow and sustain high-skill businesses,
and attract and retain the most highly-skilled people. It endows people with
creative and moral capacities, thinking skills and depth knowledge that
underpin our economic competitiveness and our wider quality of life. It is
therefore at the heart of the productive capacity of the new economy and the
prosperity of our democracy.’ David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Education,
Speech at Greenwich
University
In the United Kingdom (UK),
Higher Education (HE) is being positioned as the new global business, and the
power relations between its various stakeholders – society, the business
community, management, staff or students – makes this not only uncharted but
contested ground. This paper maps the new terrain with a focus on, and analysis
of, one key government policy document that locates Information and
Communications Technology (ICT) at the heart of provision for children and
families in the UK
The UK UK
However, in the UK, the use of
central funding to promote a competitive and expansionist market in Further and
Higher Education has already radically altered the culture in many institutions
where governmental policies that were intended to enhance the quality of Higher
Education have rather added to a process of centralisation initiated by
Margaret Thatcher from 1979 (see Sinfield et al 2004, Burns & Sinfield
2004):
‘During the 1980s the dominant
ideology, especially in Reagan’s USA and Thatcher’s UK, became free market
economics, also referred to as laissez-faire or neo-liberalism. The main thrust
was towards ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state’. State intervention was
to be reduced, nationalised industries were to be sold off to the private
sector, private industry was to be given a free reign with the economy. As
private industry and its capitalist owners became richer, the rest of us would
also benefit, as wealth gained at the top ‘trickled down’ through the system to
the rest of us’http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/eu.html
In particular, pedagogy, once
purely the concern of the academics directly involved in course delivery, has
now become an issue for strategy, directed by Government policy. Indeed, the
Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has linked elements of
University funding to the creation and implementation of teaching and learning
strategies– and e-learning strategies, whereby universities in the public
sector must comply if they seek to receive Government funding.
It is in this context that this
paper raises questions about power and the role of stakeholders in the
formulation and implementation of a wide ranging policy that arguably seeks to
focus Higher Education towards the needs of industry. By doing so, it attempts
to unpick Government attitudes towards education, e-learning, the student
(learner) and ultimately towards education and society itself.
Analytical tools
‘Post-structuralists treat
regimes of truth as real, material, cultural artefacts, which are sustained in
discourse and as such can be explored’ (Crowther & Mraovic 2005; 80).
Crowther and Mraovic (op cit)
offer a paradigmatic model with respect to the application of the critical and
analytical tools of literary theory to organisational documents with a special
focus on accounting documentation. The authors provide an informed overview of
the theoretical field alongside a discussion of the ‘myths’, ‘truth’ and ideological
signs of organisational documentation. Citing Levi-Strauss (1980) and Leach
(1982, 1983) they argue that ‘to decode the message embodied in the myth as a
whole [one] must search for the structural pattern underlying the entire series
of metaphors’ (Crowther op cit; 77) where language is the ideological sign …
[offering] concrete not abstract views of the world … inseparable from the
social praxis and class struggle’ (Ibid; 93). This model offers an explanation
at organisational level, and we have developed this work further to explore
societal issues via the critical analysis of a government document. The
framework for our analysis suggests that the government text in question offers
a series of metaphors that construct myths around education.
Macherey’s essay ‘The text says
what it does not say’ (in Walder 1990) where he argues that it is ‘useful and
legitimate to ask of every production what it tacitly implies, what it does not
say … for in order to say anything there are things which must not be said (Ibid; 217) (his italics),
is a starting point for our analysis. All works have their ‘margins’ –
the incompleteness that reveals their birth and production… What is important
in the work is what it does not say… what the work cannot say … because there the elaboration of the
utterances is acted out, in a sort of journey to silence’ (Ibid; 218). Macherey
himself posits the use of Nietzsche’s key questions when exploring any text –
and indeed these are questions that can be applied most tellingly to the document
we investigate: What is it meant to conceal? What is it meant to draw our
attention from? What prejudice does it seek to raise? (Ibid – and drawn from
Nietzsche The Dawn of the Day, section
523).
For Nietzsche shows that texts
cannot do anything but lie. Therefore to judge the truthfulness of a text it
has to be treated as a lie. Our government document both conforms to and
extends the Nietzschian doctrine – dictating imperially from on high and
embodying the rationale that if all statements offer fragments and lie, then
this will constitute a big lie, atomised into as many parts as possible: the
citizenry can only pay homage to that which would exclude them. The
aesthetics of the text can further illuminate this (Eagleton1986) and expose
the flawed and failed ideology of the project, what Noble (2002) describes as
fragments that cannot constitute a whole. However, as Macherey points out, all
texts are incomplete, but they can offer a sense of the whole. ‘Harnessing
Technology’, as with any corporate document, sets forth a future that is going
to improve, where the shortcomings of the past are superseded by technological
and management utopianism: where ‘things can only get better.
Case study – analysis of policy
document
To open our analysis of ‘Harnessing
Technology’ we begin with the first paragraph of that Executive Summary,
entitled, ‘the technology context.’
Digital technology is already
changing how we do business and live our lives. Most schools – and every
university and college – now have broadband access. Teachers increasingly use
information and communications technology (ICT) to improve their own skills and
knowledge – and bring their lessons to life. People working with children,
families, young people, and adults are testing out new and better ways to
deliver services, with common processes supported by technology. The technology
is making many administrative and assessment tasks easier (p.4).
Or to re-emphasise:
Technology changes how we do business; teachers use this to increase their skills, others to deliver services and the technology is making many administrative and assessment tasks...
Once we re-emphasise, this
becomes a fundamentally accurate opening statement – ICT is indeed about
servicing business; everybody must increase their skills (whither knowledge,
transformation, transcendence?); and rather than rounded subjects (Crowther op
cit) we are instead reduced to recipients of services: learners are constructed
here – and throughout the text – as needy and in need of support VIA ANY
MECHANISM BAR A TUTOR. Finally, strategic approaches – as generated by
government and business – have increased administration and assessment
exponentially – without increasing resources, time or e-administration.
‘Freedom’ is mentioned in the
third paragraph, not in reference to academic freedom or freedom to research or
the freedom to discover meaningful curricula with which to engage the
disenfranchised (rather than the individually needy), but in terms of the
haphazard way that incompatible systems have been purchased by institutions
because they had the ‘freedom to buy [their] own system and support services’
(p.4). Hence the need for ‘A strategic approach to ICT’ which entitles the
fourth paragraph wherein are laid out the goals for e-learning which are to:
- Transform teaching, learning and help to
improve outcomes for children and
young people, through shared ideas, more exciting lessons and online help for professionals
- Engage ’hard to reach’ learners,
with special needs support, more
motivating ways of learning, and more choice about how and where to
learn
- Build an open and accessible system, with
more information and services online
for parents and carers…and more cross-organisation collaboration to
improvepersonalised support and choice
- Achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness, with online
research, access to shared ideas and lesson plans, improved systems and
processes … shared procurement and easier administration (p.4)’ (our
emphases).
Where the individual learner is
constructed only in the deficit, having individual needs requiring individual
support, hiding/denying that whole groups and classes of people are typically
excluded from education because of their class or group position – not because
of individual flaws or lack of aspiration.
Special needs stakeholders
Again we can see the emphasis on
‘help’, ‘support’, ‘information and services’ – but interestingly we also get
the elision of hard to reach learners (surely an oxymoron then?) with special
education needs. This particular elision or cathexis runs throughout the
document and serves to mask the real alienation of those who do not consider
themselves to be stakeholders in Blair’s new model labour Britain. See also
p.19’: …but those that need the services most … least likely to use them…
[must] make them accessible to all including people with disabilities’. For
with ICT it is possible to (p.20) ‘customise … especially valuable for people
with motor, visual or hearing difficulties’ and p.27: ‘New technology can
transform the experience of learning for all, but has particular impact for
those who might otherwise be excluded or even unwilling to access learning.
Learners with special cognitive disabilities…’ and p28: ‘for learners with
special needs, these aids can take them from total disengagement to eager
participation’ and p44: ‘games technology could help motivate many pupils,
including those with special needs who are turned off traditional lessons’.
However, there is little evidence
that these are effective, nor that those groups familiar with IT games show
more inclination to engage with ICT for educational purposes than previously
experienced pedagogical devices.
Not only does this language of
neediness and support set up a Foucauldian medical model discourse of education
with the ‘learner’ as the special needs patient, it also fundamentally
inscribes the ‘learner’ as an object, the passive recipient of courses and
support that have been devised by the un-named and the unidentified, superior
‘other’. ICT is bruited because it is ‘engaging’, by this the document means
interactive – where we have the sense that the physical interactivity of the
computer-game-like skills package is offered instead or in place of
intellectual engagement, of engagement with academics, of engagement with other
students – or even the engagement in haptic or kinaesthetic activities relevant
to one’s subject – the dissection required by the student doctor or the
laboratory experiment by the engineer.
Learning, it is flagged up here,
is to be opened up through e- and distance learning packages so that we can
choose how and where to learn,
and even when we learn, but nowhere is there to be choice
or discussion about what and why we learn. The sole solution to all our
skills – not education – problems is pedagogical innovation, the development of
‘new kinds of pedagogy … to succeed in innovating and transforming teaching and
learning’ (p.28). Indeed, the document records an intent to (p.5): ‘transform
the experience of learning’, through p.6 ‘flexible learning packages … [that
meet] learners’ needs’ with ‘richer curriculum materials’ – rather than a
richer curriculum. Flexibility is reified as a good in and of itself.
Flexibility means that courses can be wholly or partly online (pp 6, 26, 27) –
such that students will not need to queue to register (p.9) – as institutions
re-think their boundaries (p.10) and the government expects ‘the
technology to transform the way we engage and involve children, parents,
learners, and the wider community’ (p.18) – engage in what or
for what purpose is unclear, for the goal seems not to be expressed till page
27 where the document avows that: ‘Learners and employers want us to help
improve their skills … making it easier for them to solve problems, manage
information across networks, and understand how to use and apply ICT to their
circumstances’. If a definition of education is to be inferred here it must be
that education equals technology – and that e-learning is the problem free
solution to all our skills’ ills, especially when ‘education and industry
working together, through shared e-learning resources and support, will
contribute to the aims of our Skills Strategy to improve basic and higher level
skills, across the workforce, throughout life (p.6)’.
A semblance of an heteroglossic
approach is contained in the document, one that has not only been corralled but
one that completely misses the point of language and the dialogic.
Instead of using language as the touchstone of knowledge, a social construct
that contains rich diverse voices and the sum total of all knowledge, with
language being the mechanism of its transmission, a few case studies are
rounded up, with voices that are de-contextualised and disembodied. With
respect to the e-Delivery of courses, no evidence base is drawn upon other than
the example of an English GCSE that moved on-line with the assurance that
enrolment and pass rates improved. No mention is made of the resources that
must go into designing an on-line course – nor those that are required to run
and maintain such a course – especially where detailed formative feedback is
required by students. This silencing is necessary to further deny the role that
e-learning plays in enabling the marketisation of education as a global
commodity (Noble op cit) and the de-professionalising of the academic in the
new university reality where for (non-traditional) students, already
dismembered by the discourses of derision prevalent in the wider community –
and the deficit discourse about learners, e-learning and education set up in
the ‘Harnessing Technology’ document – university is no longer a place to dally
after a lecture or seminar, to visit the library, to discuss big ideas in the
canteen or to join extra-curricular societies for present interest and
long-term networking and career opportunities.
And what does e-learning offer
(our) university students? Well of course it can ‘support learners’ (p.56) with
‘appropriate business models for sharing resources’ (ibid). Indeed ‘Schools,
colleges, universities can work more closely together to meet the needs of
individual students who want something other than the traditional campus-only
experience (ibid)’. Thus the mass are to be offered resources and e-learning
opportunities rather than what the policy writers would recognise as an
educational or a higher educational experience. Proof if more proof were needed
that silencing the student stakeholder and denying their dreams does indeed
impede the function of the educational organisation. How would the members of
the UK
Discussion
The ‘Harnessing Technology’
(2005) document is brief constituting just 73 pages including Secretary of
State’s foreword (she is very excited) and glossary. Most disturbing are the
lack of any vision of education, the emphasis on skills and on the continued reference
to learners rather than students. This use of the language of
student-centeredness (see Rogers 1902-1987) gives us an experience of what Lash
(Giddens, Beck and Lash 1996) calls hermeneutics and its double.
Thehermeneutic allocated to the student is not one that engages thinking,
reflecting and then acting; that embraces the modern and that acknowledges
contingency and risk via expert systems (Ibid). Instead we are given a
perverted hermeneutic and its double, not one of education but skills and its
double, training. Not ‘education, education, education’, but training and
skills. This constant hermeneutic and its double undermines the
achievement of those (Widening Participation) students that have grasped the HE
challenge and echoes hollowly around the global modernisation project: further
marginalising those already marginalised, further dismembering the subject
student.
For in this policy document
training and skills replaces Gidden’s reflexive agent and reduces the student
to automaton (Noble op cit). Skills’ training becomes the expert system,
and the text means the opposite of what it says. Where previously the term
‘learner’ has been used to indicate that learning was an interactive, social
and constructivist process – here the term is used to atomise the individual
away from its community and the strength that that might confer. Further, in
using the term ‘learner’, the student is excised from the debate – or reduced
to a lack; again we see the paradox of the document: on the one hand it mystifies
its ideological project but in the process it reduces itself to hysteria;
citing that for which there is no evidence. The project the document
offers could be one that embraces the reflexive modern, instead it is reduced
to a Freudian construct, hysterical, bipolar, unable to let go, to move on.
This failure to let go is not a healthy mourning of the past (Atkinson 2006)
but a blindness that damns us to endlessly repeat it again and again.
To compound this reductionist
view of the learner (as needy, deficit and atomised – classless – dislocated
and dismembered), we also have a reductionist view of education per se, for, as
indicated, what is strikingly absent from this document is any aspirational
definition of the term education. This is apparent from an analysis of both the
condensed text of the Executive Summary (pp 4-7) and of the expanded text of
the Report proper and accords with Noble’s (op cit) assertion that e-learning
is inextricably bound up with the denaturing and de-professionalizing of higher
education. Noble argues that whilst e-learning is akin to training, which is
purely for the benefit of others and where any assertion of the self would
become a subversive activity, ‘education’ involves the integration of knowledge
with the self – where knowledge is defined by and helps to define the self. He
stresses that whilst typically the push for e-learning is predicated upon a
belief in cost cutting, staff reduction and so forth; education relies on the
quality of interpersonal relationships offered – and that to date educational
research has at least demonstrated that good education requires a labour
intensive, personal relationship between students and quality academics. In the
‘Harnessing Technology’ document, as there is no mention of education research
– neither is there reference to previous research or projects bound up with
promoting e-learning; instead there is a relentless percussive reiteration of
the ‘skills’ refrain, where ICT skills are to service the needs not of the
individual – but of industry. This documentation is indeed Noble’s vision
manifest in government text – silencing, disassembling and de-skilling the
academic professional alongside the new ‘learner’.
Pedagogic choice becomes a matter
of strategy, rather than tactics, and e-learning facilitates what Noble
(2002:3) argues is the increasing commodification of education; offering
educational experience that has been disintegrated and distilled into
‘discrete, reified, and ultimately saleable things or packages of things’. The
first step in this process is the assemblance of the course into packages:
learning outcomes, syllabi, lessons, and exams. These commodities are
subsequently removed from their producers, the teachers, so they are given an
independent existence apart from the creator. This constitutes the alienation
of ownership as control of the course material is surrendered. The final step
is the assembled course sale, in the market place, for a profit, thus teachers
become producers, students become consumers and their relationship takes on not
‘education, but a shadow of education, an assemblance of pieces without a
whole’ (Noble 2002:4).
ICT, e-learning, has moved from
being associated with peripheral innovations and developments to affecting all
aspects of learning and teaching. Disempowering strategies such as those
outlined in ‘Harnessing Technology’ represent for Conole, Smith & White
(2006; 12) ‘knee-jerk policy which does not take account of evidence
emerging from research’ but which have a huge impact on students, especially
those who already come into University with low self-efficacy, and can add to
the struggles identified by writers such as Anie (2001) and Leathwood (2003)
faced by widening participation students in ‘this new cold climate’ (Sinfield,
Burns & Holley 2004:143). Conole et al (op cit) suggest that the
implementation of ICT within education requires ‘measured and reflective’
approaches that include the human aspects of implementing e-learning; they
critique the government document as ‘naïve’; however, our analysis of that
document would argue for a more sinister reading. E-learning is inscribed in
this text in such a way as to silence students, to de-professionalize the
academic and to reduce education to skills. The human, rather than needy, learner
and his/her learning wishes, do not enter the debate at Governmental level. No
wonder ‘that resistance regularly occurs …’ Akerland & Trevitt (1999:97).
Conclusions
The dismembered student and a
dismembered practice emerge from dismembered discourse via this
documentation. The student is moved to the periphery or centred to be
damned. The policy and the practice it is designed to engender are
stilted and afraid, halted by a double hermeneutic that will not embrace risk
or dynamic (curriculum and student): an aesthetic that crumples and can not
hold its own project together. The report breaks down into banal
sentimentality and relies on dismembered voices that mask and neutralise not
only those in the text, but all those stakeholders whose voices need to be
heard.
The government strategy document
can be seen as a script determining the interactions between participants and an instrument to diagnose their power
relations (Crowther op cit; 93). The authors position themselves implicitly and
explicitly as decision makers and, utilising the masks of heteroglossia, their
monologic document reinforces the position that their ‘knowledge enable[d] them
to make decisions on behalf of other stakeholders’ (Ibid; 84). The
culminating statement of the text in its mindless vacuity attempts to prove
that ‘the past has no place in determining the future … instead, the future is
all that matters’ (Ibid; 89); whilst being condemned to repeating that very,
mechanical past.
If we return to Nietzsche’s
questions: What is it meant to conceal? What is it meant to draw our attention
from? What prejudice does it seek to raise? We can see that whilst Blunkett did
at least state that:
‘World class higher education
ensures that countries can grow and sustain high-skill businesses, and attract
and retain the most highly-skilled people. It endows people with creative and
moral capacities, thinking skills and depth knowledge that underpin our
economic competitiveness and our wider quality of life’ (Blunkett op cit).
‘Harnessing Technology’ conceals
any iteration that education might work towards developing ‘creative and moral
capacities’ or ‘depth knowledge’. By appearing to be learner-centred our
attention is drawn away from the fact that that learner is dismembered,
dislocated, atomised and silenced. Whilst the prejudice raised is that such a
fractured and pathologised object deserves no voice and is fortunate to access
on-line training in the Skills necessary to service Business.
To conclude, this paper has
explored how the rhetoric, structure and aesthetic of this government policy
document have rendered the student peripheral, absent, passive, problematised
and silent; with ICT being offered as a panacea, thereby further dismembering
the student. The skills process offers a Utopian future where ‘learners’ can be
handed piecemeal to various agencies to be fixed. These agencies, also
dismembered entities, will run the gauntlet of quality assurance and, of
course, their services will be available and traded on-line, further rendering
the on-lookers neutralised, passive and, instead of the second coming, waiting
for a Pop Up or special offer to inform pedagogic practice.
‘Harnessing Technology’ has an
aesthetic that suits its purpose – to fracture the ‘learner’ (student) such
that the fragmented and decontextualised ‘education’ facilitated by a
de-natured and safe ICT can be accepted. The monologic document offers only a
semblance of heteroglossic voices, voices that have themselves been
dismembered, rather than drawing on voices containing the characteristics of
human discourse present in the 21st century:
voices that embrace risk and contingency, that are fighting passionately to
embrace agency. These are the students that are contributing to the
government’s 50% target for HE participation, it is they who carry the greater
risk, it is they who embrace modernity, it is they that should be supported –
and it is they that are silenced. Where silencing the student as stakeholder in
HE works to de-nature HE itself.
References
Anie, A. (2001). ‘Widening
Participation – Graduate Employability Project’, University
of North London (now London Metropolitan
University
Akerlind, G.
S. Trevitt., C (1999). ‘Enhancing Self-Directed Learning through Educational
Technology: When students resist the change.’ Innovations in Education and
Teaching International 36:2.
Atkinson D (2006) ‘School art
education: mourning the past and opening a future’ IN JADE 25.1 (2006)
Blunkett, D. (2000) Secretary of
State for Education speech given at the University of Greenwich
Burns T & Sinfield S
(2004) Teaching, Learning and Study Skills: a guide for tutors London
Conole, G (ed) two chapters –
Chapter 3 Political context Grainne Conole, Su White, Helen Beetham, chapter 5
Understanding organisational cultures, roles and identities in Grainne Conole,
Francis Deepwell, Su White, Martin Oliver (in press 2006)
Crowther D & Maraovic B
‘Network semiology: a vehicle to explore organizational culture’ IN Crowther
& Jatana (2005) International Dimensions of CSR
Vol 11 Hyderabad
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Skills (2005) Harnessing Technology: transforming learning and children’s
services
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Foucault, M, (1980) Power/Knowledge, Brighton
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(1996). Reflexive Modernisation Pollity
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(2003). ‘” It’s a struggle”: the construction of the ‘new student’ in Higher
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Appendix 2
Burns, Sinfield and Holley (2012) ‘The Shipwrecked Shore – and
other metaphors: what we can learn from occupation of – and representations in
– virtual worlds’ In Investigations of University
Teaching and Learning 2012
Abstract
In cyberspace, it is well known,
one’s body can be represented by one’s own textual description: ‘the obese
can be slender, the beautiful plain’, (Turkle1999: 643).Our case study (cf Stake
1995) sought to explore the opportunities offered to students when they come to
class in a virtual world and a differently created learning space. We consider
Bullinghurst and Dünsers(2012) work on augmenting reality for learners to
combine the ‘real and the virtual’ to enable students to deal with the
abstract. This paper explores student representations in Second Life, a 3D
immersive world (www.secondlife.com),
and as we engage, we see that the virtual not only enhances both curriculum and
practice, but an emergent scope for visual hermeneutics as both a digital
literacy and analytical research tool. The focus of the case is a first year
FoLSC group of students, based in Computing, and a first year module with
embedded study and academic skills. Our conclusions suggest that offering
learning opportunities in different spaces, can, indeed, disrupt – but in a
powerful and positive way
Keywords: Digital Literacy,
Identity, Second Life, Study and Academic Skills, Virtual World
Introduction
“Cyberspace opens the
possibility of identity play, but it is very serious play.”(Turkle, 1999:648)
Billinghurst and Dünser (2012)
state that augmented reality supports the understanding of complex phenomena by
providing unique visual and interactive experiences that combine real and
virtual information and help communicate abstract problems to learners. With
educational paradigms shifting to include ‘online learning, hybrid learning and
collaborative learning ‘(NMC2012:5); the NMC report points out that
institutions that support their learners by offering affordances other than
physical campuses leverage the online skills that learners bring with them to
academia. Second Life is a ‘virtual world’, an electronic environment that visually
mimics complex physical spaces, where people can interact with each other and
with virtual objects, and where people are represented by animated characters
called avatars (Bainbridge, 2007). We wanted to use these emerging technologies
to solve pedagogical problems in learning and teaching; and to do so, we wanted
to integrate them with the curriculum (Glynn and Thorn 2011).We wanted to
explore how emancipatory practice can be developed in tandem both in the
physical classroom and in the 3D Virtual world of Second Life (SL). At the same
time we wanted to demonstrate that far from being a remedial outpost, academic
and digital literacies can be covered in dynamic and empowering ways – and as
an aspect of a fast changing education model. This paper focuses on the digital
elements of the course concerned.
Context
The focus of the case is a first
year FoLSC group of students, based in Computing, and a first year module with
embedded study and academic skills. An unfortunate perception of ‘skills’
modules can be that they have a remedial purpose: being designed to ‘fix’
deficit students as they enter the academy from non-advantaged backgrounds. In
order to overcome such deficit perceptions, Computing and Learning Development
staff worked together to develop an empowering module that harnessed the best
ideas and research-informed practices from both their worlds.
Both the classroom and the SL
experiences were designed to enhance student engagement by being meaningful –
and playful; by being authentic and engaging – and also immersive and active.
Winnicott (1971) argued that play is important in counteracting the implicit
threat that occurs when we are in transitional spaces – between worlds, between
social classes and in alien educational settings. Dewey (1938) advocated truly
active learning, valuing participation, democracy and democratic values; where
cognitive engagement is matched by affective and behavioural features. Thus the
students found that instead of being route marched through a series of generic ‘study
skills’ type exercises – paper based or online – multiple choice quiz or drag
and drop test (all designed to mend their deficits);
they were taught empowering and active and successful study practices in the
physical classroom; and in SL were invited to create their own avatars and
navigate round a beach space, encountering challenges and solving problems.
They were encouraged to play and actively participate in creating and
inhabiting their own learning spaces – and their own learning (http://slonthebeach.blogspot.co.uk/ ).
The Case Study: The Shipwrecked Shore
To explore the opportunities
offered to students when they come to class in a virtual world and a
differently created learning space, we created an active and reflective space
in SL – that disrupted expectations and enabled ‘difference’. First, we built
reflective spaces on a beach, with a virtual sea and virtual waves washing up
and down. When students fed back that this space was perhaps a little bit too
empty and undefined, we built bonfires and deckchairs to enable the students to
use the beach as a reflective space. To provoke active reflection on different
elements of course content, we distributed various puzzle cubes about – with no
instruction or explanation: students had to work in groups pooling their
different talents and skills to de-code the puzzles. Students moved on to
building their own spaces in SL: claiming and transforming their own places,
making their own marks on the educational ‘landscape’. This is a virtual world
away from a test designed to check that set learning outcomes have been met:
here the social construction of meaning and knowledge was played out through the virtual student bodies – in participative,
collective endeavour.
Our visual hermeneutics
As staff, we represented a fluid
and participative knowledge-landscape not in a realist, mimetic representation
of a classroom or a lecture theatre, but in the seashore, the deckchairs and
the puzzles. When delivering new ‘supplies’ to our students, we shipwrecked a
seventeenth century galleon on our twenty-first century beach. Arguably form
and content are matched and merged conveying a message about education
appropriate for the 21stCentury – and
for our digital worlds. In this scene, epistemology and pedagogy are disrupted:
‘grounded’ to be de-centred, disembowelled – in a postmodern playground
redolent of leisure activity – deckchairs and bonfire on the beach; transected
by space and time – the galleon and its bounty. This narrative tableau has
potential to transform production and ‘consumption’ of education: students
explore the shipwreck; they ‘salvage’ the goods; they sit around the campfire,
solve puzzles and discuss their learning; they stake claims in the landscape
and build their own spaces and their own objects. They become both producers
and consumers of knowledge in an unbounded/bounded meaning making process.
And what of the students
themselves?
We wondered if the creative use
of SL space would change how our students felt about education and studying –
and perhaps how they felt about themselves as learners. We used Shields’ (2004)
model of Lefebvre and Soja’s Trialectic as way to explore the challenges of
conventional spaces and the potential of virtual spaces. We gained a
temperature reading of how students operated in these spaces by analysing how
they represented themselves – the avatars they created for themselves – in this
new learning environment. All students gave informed consent for us to use
their avatar images for the purposes of knowledge transfer. Given that, amongst
other things, our students appeared as a Klingon; a female sea captain; and a
bumblebee – we argue that alternative spaces can indeed be alternatively
inhabited and prove to be emancipatory and empowering as learning spaces. The
relative anonymity of life on the screen gives one the choice of being known
only by one’s chosen “handle” or online name gives people the chance to express
often unexplored aspects of the self (Turkle 1999:643).
If the First Space of Soja’s
Trialectic can be taken as our common sense understanding of physical space;
Second Space becomes the rules that are attached to or are mediated by our
apprehensions of the First Space. Typically, we apprehend the ‘real’ world as
autochthonous (sprung from the earth itself) rather than ‘man’ and ideology
made. For students, especially those from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds, this
can refer to the typical lecture theatre and computing lab – and of how the students’
‘feelings’ of discomfort, of not belonging, of disempowerment – are
naturalised, with the student and not the constructed space
and its power being the ‘problem’.
Third Space offers the
possibilities of re-imagining space and occupying it differently now and in the
future. For Lefebvre, the proposition is that third space is a social
morphology:
“Vis-à-vis lived experience,
space is neither a mere frame, after the fashion of the frame to a painting,
nor a form or container of a virtually neutral kind, designed simply to receive
whatever is poured into it. Space is a social morphology: it is to lived
experience what form itself is to the living organism, and just as intimately
bound up with function and structure” (Lefebvre, 2003:93-94)
Thus our case study was designed
to see how students constructed themselves within the Second Life learning
spaces that were offered to them – and to consider by discussion and analysis
of their avatars how powerfully they occupied this space.
Mini-case one: the Sea
Captain
One student built her own sailing
ship in SL, not sailing on the sea, however; if you look closely you can see
the grey ‘stone’ of a building behind her – with the sea further behind – and
below. . This throws up some challenges for us viewing the avatar in ‘her’
space. She is blond, pigtailed and in jeans: Barbie on the poop deck? And yet,
the avatar is role playing ‘Captain’, and thus challenging possible
femininities/masculinities – and the stereotype male role model – just by being there an (assumed) woman on the bridge of a
ship. At the same time as wearing her branded tee-shirt, her reflexive device
showing her links with her University, the expert institution, she is
challenging and oppositional to the ‘blue stocking women’ from Russell Group Universities;
adopting a classed, gendered position within her learning space. Here we can
argue that Soja’s ‘Third space’ produces what might best be called a cumulative
trialectic that is radically open to additional otherness.
Mini-case two: the Klingon
This student had to invest time
and effort to purchase and then build up the Klingon avatar over his own
initial ‘human’ avatar. In SL he had the confidence and courage to adopt this
very powerful, but very unusual, look; and one reading of this avatar would be
that this student built himself a strong avatar that allowed him to act
powerfully within the learning environment. At the same time, there are
those that might read this student’s choice of avatar as oppositional to
University culture, that this presented an implicit challenge to the activities
that were supposed to take place in this learning space. However, this was a
student who already had experience of virtual worlds through gaming and he
shared thiswith his fellow students, enabling them to develop
their SL building skills for their benefit on this module. This can be seen as
a positive third space endeavour: as the avatar changed into the Klingon, there
was an enactment of potentiality, that change is
possible: that nothing is fixed and fluidity is a reality.
Mini-case three: the Bumblebee
“It’s not easy to find a single
reason why I chose that Avatar – I partly chose it because a bee is quite an
out of the ordinary avatar in SL… and it’s such a big, rather clumsy but at the
same time beautiful bee – it’s made up of a lot of complex shapes/pieces – it
must have taken someone a long time to make and design it…
And it takes a long time to
build up over my original avatar, so I get to appreciate the complexity every
time I change into a bee, and see the transformation in slow motion (also a
little bit grotesque).
When I’m flying it buzzes its
wings, unlike people avatars whose arms don’t really do anything.
Finally I really enjoy seeing a
bee sitting in a lecture theatre for example. There is something a little
bit absurd about virtual worlds, and I like to make the most of that ” Student
C
Here we can see how the student’s
choice of avatar allows a different entity into the learning space. The
bumblebee avatar represents a very thoughtful and controlled choice of
something natural – but potentially out of place in the ‘real’ University. It
also represents an additional investment of time by the student in herself and
in her learning: for this construction of something that is both beautiful and clumsy
and grotesque all at the same time is time-consuming. Arguably the learning
space is itself transformed by the actions and choices that the student makes
about herself in that space. A space that
can be experienced as traditionally passive, controlled and controlling, with
the mind and body being acted upon,is
transformed into a space that can be used as a tool for thought and action in
powerful, nuanced and quite humorous ways.
Concluding comments
The ambiguity of the virtual
world is not to be ‘designed out’- instead, it ‘renders strange’ the
conventions that underlie teaching, including teacher roles and student roles,
classroom layout and assessment practices (Carr 2012: 13).In SL, the themes of
physical and pedagogic spaces have been drawn into a new debate: what happens
when we and our students leave our physical presence and start to engage with
our learning in cyberspace? Our study has offered some small scale insights
into this wider debate by exploring the possibilities students may find in inhabiting
a ‘third space’. Our reading of our students’ avatars indicates that whilst
policy documents constrain funding of, recruitment to and space within
Universities, particularly for non-traditional students, this can be positively
disrupted – in powerful and empowering ways.
References
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Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds. Science, 317(5837), 472-476
Billinghurst, M. & Dünser, A.
2012. Augmented Reality in the Classroom. Computer, 45(7)
56-63
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