Scholarship in Media Arts & Humanities

By Victoria Grace Walden, Senior Lecturer, Director of Learning Enhancement

So often online learning is discussed as a ‘deficit’ model (Darabi et al 2010, 216). It is compared to in-person, campus teaching, which it can never be identical too, therefore it is perceived as lesser. Critical digital pedagogues, Maha Bali and Bard Meier (2014), however, argue that presumptions that online learning should look like in-person learning are informed by three (incorrect) assumptions:

1. ‘that text is less personal’ [than audio-visual]
2. ‘that immediacy is inherently more valuable’ [than asynchronous]
3. ‘and that approximating face-to-face is beneficial’.

They celebrate asynchronous learning for the ways it promotes ‘deeper reflection’, during which powerful learning is happening; it is just learning that the instructor cannot see or monitor.

In August 2021, I had the pleasure of attending the Digital Pedagogy Lab , founded by Sean Michael Morris with threads by a variety of contributors, including Bali. Morris, Bali and colleagues run the Hybrid Pedagogy open journal, which focuses on Critical Digital Pedagogy – heavily influenced by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Henry Giroux. Essentially, the work of the journal emphasises the humanness at the centre of (digital) learning.

Media Education Theorist, Julian McDougall, argues ‘that online learning spaces can be productive “third spaces” if they are charged with creative, productive possibilities, combined with an ethnographic turn in curriculum design’ (2021, 2). He argues against the idea of online learning spaces providing ‘supplementary’ materials to the physical classroom (2021, 3). Instead, following thinkers like Bali, he suggests a need to think about how students’ personal learning journeys might take shape across, through, and combining different spaces.

Another influence on McDougall’s work is that of Arndt et al. (2020), who argue that online higher education, just as with offline, needs to be understood as relational, which emphasises the ethics embedded in learning design. In this sense, notions of student ‘engagement’ and ‘presence’ refer to how their ‘relational energy’ is generated through their personal learning journey (McDougall 2021, 25).

As we transitioned back to on-campus teaching as the dominant form of engagement with students, I wanted to think about what I could take form my experiences of remote, online teaching during the pandemic to inform an inclusive, blended approach going forward. I was conscious that not all of our students would be able to be on campus for the entire term – how could I created a learning experience that was as accessible as possible to all students?

What I did

Design your own blended learning journey

Acknowledging that each student will create their own personal journey through the module, I decided to design each week with a ‘menu’ of learning options (some online and collaborative; some online and solo; some offline and solo; some on campus together). Each week was divided into five sections:

Challenge Yourself to Learn Something New

• Complete the readings.
• Engage in asynchronous reading discussions using Talis Elevate through questions I tagged to certain places in the readings or download the readings and look at them independently.
• Attend the seminar, lecture and workshop this week.

Check your Learning

• Review or contribute to the weekly glossary.
• Test your knowledge of terminology using games on Study Stack

Practice

• Complete the weekly thematic task, such as log your engagements with news (Week 1). This gave space for quiet, offline, solo work.

Engage with your Learning Community

• Discuss readings on Talis Elevate.
• Participate in discussion forms.
• Add questions or your own case studies in advance to each seminar group’s Padlet.
• Meet with your study group online or offline to discuss your practice task(s).

Reflect on your Learning

• Reflection questions and tasks to guide students to creating and maintaining goals, such as creating their own study schedule to project manage their own learning.

In structuring support for students’ personal learning journey, I wanted to ensure that tasks were not divided into in-person or offline tasks, and online learning. I also wanted to avoid the idea that online learning is supplementary to offline. The use of headings designed to encourage challenge, assessment, practice, community, and reflection were the driving forces under which a range of online and offline activities were included.

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Using the UK Professional Standards Framework (PSF) to ensure good practice and excellent student experience. This teaching practice outlined in this blog post is informed by the highlighted areas:

Areas of activity

• A1 Design and plan learning activities and/or programmes of study
• A2 Teach and/or support learning
• A3 Assess and give feedback to learners
• A4 Develop effective learning environments and approaches to student support and guidance
• A5 Engage in continuing professional development in subjects/disciplines and their pedagogy, incorporating research, scholarship and the evaluation of professional practices

Core knowledge

• K1 The subject material  
• K2 Appropriate methods for teaching, learning and assessing in the subject area and at the level of the academic programme
• K3 How students learn, both generally and within their subject/ disciplinary area(s)
• K4 The use and value of appropriate learning technologies
• K5 Methods for evaluating the effectiveness of teaching
• K6 The implications of quality assurance and quality enhancement for academic and professional practice with a particular focus on teaching

Professional values

• V1 Respect individual learners and diverse learning communities
• V2 Promote participation in higher education and equality of opportunity for learners
• V3 Use evidence-informed approaches and the outcomes from research, scholarship and continuing professional development
• V4 Acknowledge the wider context in which higher education operates recognising the implications for professional practice

By John Walker, Lecturer in British Sign Language

I strongly recommend watching the video to see the significance of visual communication illustrated. If the subtitles do not appear immediately, please hover your mouse over the bottom of the video screen and click on ‘CC’. For those with specific accessibility needs, a transcript is also available here.

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Using the UK Professional Standards Framework (PSF) to ensure good practice and excellent student experience. This teaching practice outlined in this blog post is informed by the highlighted areas:

Areas of activity

• A1 Design and plan learning activities and/or programmes of study
• A2 Teach and/or support learning
• A3 Assess and give feedback to learners
• A4 Develop effective learning environments and approaches to student support and guidance
• A5 Engage in continuing professional development in subjects/disciplines and their pedagogy, incorporating research, scholarship and the evaluation of professional practices

Core knowledge

• K1 The subject material 
• K2 Appropriate methods for teaching, learning and assessing in the subject area and at the level of the academic programme
• K3 How students learn, both generally and within their subject/ disciplinary area(s)
• K4 The use and value of appropriate learning technologies
• K5 Methods for evaluating the effectiveness of teaching
• K6 The implications of quality assurance and quality enhancement for academic and professional practice with a particular focus on teaching

Professional values

• V1 Respect individual learners and diverse learning communities
• V2 Promote participation in higher education and equality of opportunity for learners
• V3 Use evidence-informed approaches and the outcomes from research, scholarship and continuing professional development
• V4 Acknowledge the wider context in which higher education operates recognising the implications for professional practice’

By Lisa Peck, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Practice.

The exercise ‘Caretaking’, developed by the late Ali Hodge, involves a group working together to support one central player. In an empty studio this person wears a veil over their head to mask the dominant facial communication. They move freely around the space, changing direction, tempo and rhythm and launching themselves forwards, backwards, sideways, giving up their weight and balance to be ‘caught’ or supported by the others who are their caretakers. The group have to be fully present to each other moment to moment, working with deep listening, with eyes and ears, responding and adapting together to the needs of the individual through touch and weight transference. It is an exercise that tests and develops many techniques – spontaneity, impulse, agility, rhythm, balance, weight and release. At the same time it taps into another layer of learning – personal/social knowledges, attitudinal qualities or transferable skills that improve our ability to be together in the world; how to be in a constant state of becoming; how to live with uncertainty together. To my mind, offering students this learning is more important than technique. Caretaking is an example of embodied learning.

In many ways, teaching embodied critical pedagogy in the academy operates as a type of activism. It resists and dismantles the Cartesian dualism that maintains that certain types of knowing have greater currency. My position is that knowledge is a felt sense. We feel something to be right or wrong through our body.  Knowing something comes to matter when it changes your choices, your actions, your movement. That’s when teaching has the potential to, as Michel Foucault says, ‘practice freedom’ (1997). In my pedagogy I work from the phenomenological position of the body-mind, (Merleau Ponty, 2002) recognising that our bodies think, and we need to learn to listen more deeply and see more clearly. Alva Noë explains

We spend all our lives embodied, environmentally situated with others …dynamically coupled with the world

(2009, 181)

In performance teaching we attune our students to this reciprocal encounter, our relationality to time, space, place, each other, human and non-human objects. Importantly, this taps into left brain and right brain thinking, remembering that we are embodied and em-brained. From a neurological perspective, the left hemisphere sees things as abstracted, broken in parts, its main concern is for utility; the right hemisphere perceives things as whole, in their context, with an affinity for openness and connection (Iain McGilchrist, 2010). This side of the brain enables empathy and emotional understanding.

Returning to our exercise, in Caretaking, students are working with both sides of the brain simultaneously to facilitate instinctive responses. Between the two contesting responses space is made for something else to come into being. I see this ‘something’ as powerfully productive and deeply political, what Hannah Arendt might call ‘plurality’, where each individual is unique in their difference and yet simultaneously in collaboration (2000). I think this is what Roland Barthes is pointing to in How to Live Together when he identifies ‘idiorhythmy’ as an essential material for human progress (2013,6).

Drawing on Eve Sedgewick’s thinking beside as an alternative to paradigms of thinking beyond (2003,8), I teach techniques such as: being grounded, being ready, polyphonic attention, and working with impulse, tempo, repetition, proximity, duration, kinesthetic awareness, and reflection. These techniques are taught beside qualities and attitudes such as: how to listen, to see, to empathise, to collaborate, to be with uncertainty, to disagree, to work with spontaneity, instinct, impulse, resonance and resilience, to be confident in not knowing, and to be reflexive and reflective.  As I list these knowledges it strikes me that, whilst I associate these with practice, these qualities are equally necessary for effective critical thinking, research and writing. My frustration is that assessment criteria all too often fails to acknowledge and reward this learning which, I concede, is tricky to do; how do you assess empathy? Nevertheless, these feel like conversations we should be having.

It’s taken me time to be clear about what I’m teaching and why I’m teaching it. How I teach is an ongoing investigation. Certain ways of learning dominate performance – I facilitate students to learn through play and through failure – which needs to be held carefully as individuals experience these ways of coming to learn differently. My feminist pedagogy works from an affirmative politics, which I have termed via positiva (Peck, 2021);this requires you to enable the possibility of the student becoming an autodidact whilst (vitally) supporting them generously, finding the pleasure whenever possible in the learning exchange and working from what Rosi Braidotti terms

‘the positivity of difference’

(1994. 161).

It’s in those spaces between – whether face to face or virtual that the most exciting and transformative learning can emerge.

I’m committed to an ongoing study of how these spaces between are structured in our teaching, through our language (verbal and non-verbal), and the empathy/emotional resonance that this produces. My current research is concerned with the ways we attempt to practice freedoms in our teaching – not so much what we teach, but how – the strategies and structures we work with and the dispositional qualities that are produced.

Somewhere in all of this I know, in my felt sense, that love is a necessary material.

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Using the UK Professional Standards Framework (PSF) to ensure good practice and excellent student experience. This teaching practice outlined in this blog post is informed by the highlighted areas:

Areas of activity

• A1 Design and plan learning activities and/or programmes of study
• A2 Teach and/or support learning
• A3 Assess and give feedback to learners
• A4 Develop effective learning environments and approaches to student support and guidance
• A5 Engage in continuing professional development in subjects/disciplines and their pedagogy, incorporating research, scholarship and the evaluation of professional practices

Core knowledge

• K1 The subject material 
• K2 Appropriate methods for teaching, learning and assessing in the subject area and at the level of the academic programme
• K3 How students learn, both generally and within their subject/ disciplinary area(s)
• K4 The use and value of appropriate learning technologies
• K5 Methods for evaluating the effectiveness of teaching
• K6 The implications of quality assurance and quality enhancement for academic and professional practice with a particular focus on teaching

Professional values

• V1 Respect individual learners and diverse learning communities
• V2 Promote participation in higher education and equality of opportunity for learners
• V3 Use evidence-informed approaches and the outcomes from research, scholarship and continuing professional development
• V4 Acknowledge the wider context in which higher education operates recognising the implications for professional practice

By Sue Robbins, Senior Lecturer SCLS, Director of CPD

Evidence from educational psychology tells us that talking about our learning helps us process it (Resnick, et al. 2017). I run a daily drop-in service to support Academic Development (a core module of the Central Foundation Years) that draws on dialogic theory, an approach and a professional outlook which suggests that ‘we learn not so much by replacing wrong ideas with right ideas, but more often by augmenting existing perspectives with new perspectives which enable us to see further or better or just differently’ (Wegerif 2016). The ‘Thinking Together’ pedagogy developed by Alexander, Mercer & Dawes in the early 1990s harnesses the power of talk to stimulate and extend thinking and advance learning and understanding. It ‘requires us to rethink not just the techniques we use but also the classroom relationships we foster, the balance of power between teacher and taught and the way we conceive of knowledge’ (Alexander, 2010).

Students on the Academic Development module are engaged in a small research project that culminates in a discursive essay. Many attend the drop-in sessions because of ‘the struggle involved in writing at the intellectual and emotional levels, as well as the struggle for recognition, “voice” and legitimacy.’ (Burke, 2008). Aware that teachers’ voices tend to have authority within dialogic spaces I used Lizzio’s 5 Senses of Success framework (2006) to develop a methodology for the drop-in sessions that would allow me to use that authority to open up possibilities for learners to speak.

Lizzio’s framework grew out of research which found there are consistent needs and concerns that students experience as they commence university, outlined in the graphic.

The daily drop-in sessions form part of a proactive approach to supporting students based on an expanded notion of good teaching beyond classroom pedagogy that links teaching and learning to student support as well as fostering social inclusion. The sessions run throughout the year and can be attended on a voluntary basis as often as a student elects. They are not conceived of as remedial, or targeted at students with a Widening Participation background, but are positioned as a service for all students – what Kift et al. (2009) call an ‘everybody’s business’ approach to transition pedagogy. The underlying assumptions are that ‘learning in higher education is a complex social and cognitive process of discovering and mastering… the knowledge-making rules and practices, values and roles that characterise the disciplinary cultures of the various fields of study’ (Warren 2002), and that all students benefit from 1:1 conversations about the process of adaptation required as they transition into HE.

Students who drop in are invited to talk about where they are in the research/writing process and how they are experiencing it and we discuss how they might proceed. We stay rooted in their experiences and explore what may be at stake for them in this specific context (Lillis & Scott 2007). No registers are kept so that no student feels that asking for help will in some way count against them. This video introduction (on the students’ Canvas site) summarises the approach.

The familiar problem of students who would likely benefit from support often not accessing it has been addressed to an extent by the broad range of Central Foundation Years stakeholders who regularly incorporate mention of the service into their own conversations with students – the Academic Development tutors refer students, as do Academic Advisers, the Academic Success Advisers, the DTL and DoSE and the Professional Services team. Students often turn up following a progress committee meeting and in conversation we are often able to identify barriers to progress and discuss ways to overcome them.

Working in this way allows for a different approach to feedback that focusses on what students do, and how they process and act on feedback, rather than what we do. The impact of the drop-in sessions is routinely mentioned positively in Module Evaluation Questionnaires and by the student reps, and students have nominated them for a teaching award in each of the last 3 years. They continued to be well attended through the emergency pivot online (Wegerif on why dialogic teaching is still relevant in the digital age). The following comments demonstrate the way students experience dialogue and their ability to absorb and learn from feedback:

Sue gave me detailed feedback on what I wanted from her, and we were able to have an actual conversation about it which really helped me as I think it allowed me to open up more about the problems I was having.

Sue gave me the start I needed to think for myself in terms of the [essay] question. She asked me the right questions that lead me onto the right path.

I honestly was considering dropping in just to talk because she makes you think and she’s really nice. It was probably the only time I felt like I was actually in uni/like I actually met a tutor.

You can see more responses here from the 2020/2021 cohort (though only 13 respondents… it is very difficult to persuade students to give feedback). Do get in touch or leave a comment below if you’d like to discuss.

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Using the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF) to ensure good practice and excellent student experience. The teaching practice outlined in this blog post is informed by the areas in italics:

Areas of activity

• A1 Design and plan learning activities and/or programmes of study
• A2 Teach and/or support learning
• A3 Assess and give feedback to learners
• A4 Develop effective learning environments and approaches to student support and guidance
• A5 Engage in continuing professional development in subjects/disciplines and their pedagogy, incorporating research, scholarship and the evaluation of professional practices

Core knowledge

• K1 The subject material  
• K2 Appropriate methods for teaching, learning and assessing in the subject area and at the level of the academic programme
• K3 How students learn, both generally and within their subject/ disciplinary area(s)
• K4 The use and value of appropriate learning technologies
• K5 Methods for evaluating the effectiveness of teaching
• K6 The implications of quality assurance and quality enhancement for academic and professional practice with a particular focus on teaching

Professional values

• V1 Respect individual learners and diverse learning communities
• V2 Promote participation in higher education and equality of opportunity for learners
• V3 Use evidence-informed approaches and the outcomes from research, scholarship and continuing professional development
• V4 Acknowledge the wider context in which higher education operates recognising the implications for professional practice