Invitation to join the open course: Creativity for Learning in Higher Education, MMU

This autumn I am mostly joining in with Chrissi Nerantzi's open course: Creativity for Learning in HE. Like everybody else I am much too busy and have so much to do I daren't even think about it all... BUT if I don't make time for this - then what's it all about anyway?

So - I am sharing this invitation with you  whoever you are! And hope that you too will make the time - take the leap - and join us... Come on in... the water's lovely!!

Here's Chrissi's invitation: 

Dear colleagues,

The Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom will be offering the open course Creativity for Learning in Higher Education. I’d like to invite individual colleagues from across the HE sector and groups of colleagues from the same institution and their tutors to join this course as part of their CPD given them the opportunity to spice up their teaching.

We will explore the following themes:

·         Conceptualising creativity in higher education

·         Enablers and barriers of creativity in higher education

·         Learning through play, games, models and stories

·         The role of curiosity and other intrinsic motivations for engagement

·         Developing creative methods and practices

·         Evaluating a pedagogical innovation

This course will be used as a case study for my PhD research in open cross-institutional academic development, with a focus on collaborative learning and I would like to invite learners to participate in this study.

The open course site for Creativity for Learning in HE can be accessed at https://courses.p2pu.org/en/courses/2615/creativity-for-learning-in-higher-education/

The facilitated online part of the course will be offered over 8 weeks starting on the 28th of September 15 until the 20th of November. Participation is flexible and can be fully tailored to personal and professional circumstances and time available. Collaborative learning opportunities will be there as an option for those who wish to learn with others.

I hope this sounds interesting and useful for you and colleagues. Please share this invite with others who might also be interested and access https://courses.p2pu.org/en/courses/2615/content/5638/ to get started and connect with other learners in our online community at  https://plus.google.com/communities/110898703741307769041 Really looking forward to seeing you there.

Please note, ethical approval for this study has been granted by Edinburgh Napier University and further details about the project will be shared with group/course/module/programme leaders who are considering joining us with a group of colleagues.

Thank you for considering this.

Best wishes,

Chrissi (Nerantzi) from CELT, MMU

#rhizo15 W3: Here come the CONTENT

Where are we? What week is this? Who am I? Am I the sum of my content?

It's Week 3 and the Dave has asked us to consider content and its role in education:

I’ve always been a little confused by the word ‘content.’ There is something lonely and unconnected about the word somehow, when I hear it used with reference to what happens in learning. I imagine a lone student, huddled away in a dorm room, reading sanitized facts in the hopes of passing a multiple choice quiz. The content somehow merging with the learning objective and the assessment to create a world where learning is about acquiring truth from the truth box. … So what happens when we peek under the word ‘content’ to see what lives there? What does it mean for a course to ‘contain’ information? What choices are being made… what power is being used?

See: http://rhizomatic.net/2015/04/29/week-3-the-myth-of-content/

I remember teaching my evening Access students (Access = an alternative route into HE for ‘non-traditional’ students who did not have previous academic success or induction) a short Media course that I had designed shortly after taking my own Masters: Film and Television Studies for Education. So excited was I by all that we had read and said and done on THAT course that I tried to shove all of its content into one six-week programme!

Of course, my idea of ‘content’ is not so much me telling – it's discussion, seminars and presentations - a bit of ‘doing’ things – so perhaps not too bad. But – PHEW – you know?

So here we are in the rhizome considering CONTENT – and the tensions of content in education. When we recently presented on our Becoming module, our audience was positive but still they wondered, how had we got away with so little ‘content’? 

And there we have it. 

How, in this surveillance, measurement and target-driven culture, had we managed this?

In this - the students have developed friendship groups and CoP. They have worked together - and creatively alone. The one who definitely HATED blogging has developed the most creative blog EVER (https://noblechloe.wordpress.com/) – with feedback from other students around the world who have taken part in her 30-day drawing challenge. The students have felt and shown their engagement, their commitment, their industry – their pride and joy.

So why do even people who approve, think this is so transgressive? Why are we supposed to feel that we have ‘got away’ with something?

The ignorant school master?

When I first started teaching English Literature A’ levels in the 1980s, we had three three-hour externally set exams that we had to aim for – and these outlined our general content. We had to cover Shakespeare and Chaucer; nineteenth and twentieth century literature; and poetry and prose. There was choice in which texts we chose to focus upon and as tutor I tended to choose the most accessible and the shortest texts. It was an evening class and instead of two years, we had six months to cover the syllabus!

I never taught this class – we discussed and discussed and discussed – and the discussions improved when I discovered the pyramid (think/pair/share) method. The students presented on different topics – and we predicted potential questions on the forthcoming papers – and discussed possible answers.

This to me is no different really from what I still believe to be good ‘teaching’: the course itself emerges from the engagement of the participants. Sometimes you are all signed up for something that has a structure and a quite loose content (the old A’ level literature programme) – sometimes the structure and content are even looser (like Becoming): a TITLE, really BRIEF Learning Outcomes and, in our case, three portfolio items, one research project and an essay… Sometimes you are asked to teach a course or a module with a very fixed pre-ordained CONTENT all spelled out in tightly worded Aims and Learning Outcomes – where each week the Content and extensive reading have been sketched in by another. Even then, you can hack it, flip it, re-work it: get the students to make posters, run workshops and give presentations...

At best, the processes are the same and the course emerges…

Zen and the loss of the ego?

Rancierre’s Ignorant School Master?

If we are all lucky.

Postscript: Our presentation was at an ALDinHE Conference (www.aldinhe.ac.uk) and you are all welcome to join. At least join our jiscmail discussion forum – you would be so welcome: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ldhen.

#rhizo15 Blog #2: The Counting!

This week Dave asks us – if you can’t measure learning – what can you count?

http://rhizomatic.net/2015/04/22/learning-is-not-a-counting-noun-so-what-should-we-count/

Or as Dave says it:  

This week’s challenge Get out there and count! What can we measure that isn’t learning? Think about all the other facets of the human experience… can we do better? What about all the fancy tools we’ve seen… can they help? Should we throw it out all together? Can we help people measure themselves? Is there a better way of looking at it? Be theoretical. Be practical… but GRADE ME!

The naming of parts

This takes me back to last week and ‘The Naming of Parts’. The Henry Reed poem has the voice of the drill sergeant naming parts – even those parts that ‘you do not have’. The responses are the poetic thoughts of the men – in the garden amongst the coral flowers – the almond blossoms - the bees – easing the spring. That poem captures the dichotomous nature of education for me – on the one hand the percussive naming of parts; the taxonomies; the hierarchies; the lists; our places on the lists… on the other the joyous wandering.

In the end it is the reason I dropped out of school. I was studying botany, zoology and chemistry (and not allowed to combine these with English Literature – for that did not fit!) – and oh it was all about the naming of parts: family - phyla – genus… the whole nine yards – and for what and for why?

Like Piaget and his hierarchy of learning: enactive – iconic – symbolic – going upward – leaving the doers behind. Of course. 

A perfect model for a measuring system.

Ironic that I’m currently teaching on a module: ‘Managing the Assessment and Feedback Process’ – and one assignment that we set is that participants have to determine a group project on an assessment-related topic and they have to generate measurement criteria for their group presentation.

What a fraud am I?

My criteria would be:

Fail: did not meet the criteria

C: met the assignment criteria

A: met the criteria – and demonstrated engagement, joy and/or enthusiasm.

B: not sure about B – more than a C – not enough joy for an A.

Bonus: Bonus marks are available for something special or interesting. Capturing bonus marks means that you could score 100% for this assignment.

I don’t suppose we’d get that past the Validation Panel.

Funnily enough we’re trying to do something a bit like this on our first year module, Becoming an Educationalist. We have set several projects for the students to do – including taking over three weeks of the course for their ‘Performances’. (For this week’s performance, check out this student blog: https://becomingeducational.wordpress.com/2015/04/24/learning-log-week-26/ .) It is a year-long module and we set a Research Project and an Essay – but we’ve also allocated 30% of the marks for three portfolio items - and said to the students that they can submit anything – a blog post – a piece of art – a notebook… anything that reflects their best learning experience – anything that showcases their creativity – talent – engagement – joy. And of course this is really confusing. And of course – we try to be helpful. But not to say so much that we generate another form of strait jacket – we want the bees and the flowers – and not the naming of parts.

Postscript:

For those who fancy a course video – here’s a Yale one on Zizek, D&G and the rhizome: http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300/lecture-15

For those who fancy an even better course video – here’s Zizek on the Internet:

http://www.critical-theory.com/slavoj-zizek-reacts-to-the-internet/

#rhizo15 And so it begins…

So we start with a little challenge:

http://rhizomatic.net/2015/04/14/learning-subjectives-designing-for-when-you-dont-know-where-youre-going/

I remember training to teach and being told to write my Aims and Objectives – that got me right there – Aims and Objectives? Aren’t they the same thing? Apparently not – we could separate them out – parse and refine them down to the nth degree… Well they could 

– and we could 

learn to play the game.

And given that it is such a tricky game – surely it is a good idea to let people know 
roughly 
Where we were going?

Wasn’t that fairer?

Didn’t that help those not groomed from birth

To succeed

In this game

To make sense of it – didn’t it level the playing field?

(They sold the playing fields!)

Naturally resistant

(they called me a working class zealot – and my mate Elizabeth is so proud of that for me – thank you Elizabeth!)

I never really understood that these really were boundaries, borders

THEY SHALL NOT CROSS!!

It was so obviously MORE

A jump off point

Fly from here

Ride those dragons!!

Build habits

Of fun and fury

Of risk and danger

Of trial and error

Let the games begin

Woo hoo #rhizo15!

Check it out:

http://rhizomatic.net/

Join in the conversation:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/rhizo15/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/rhizo15dg/

Bonus – cos it seems to fit – Henry Reed and ‘The Naming of Parts’ – you can listen to it as well:

http://www.solearabiantree.net/namingofparts/namingofparts.html