Design for Learning (could do better!)

Academics, eh? We may be great teachers. We may be great researchers. We may even be great managers and administrators. But that does not make us great educational designers....and I write this as someone who trained and worked as a designer before I stumbled into teaching design and some other subjects in higher education. Once inside academia I was immediately struck by the fact that a great number of things just didn't seem to work very well. I was surrounded by talented, skilful, intelligent, committed and passionate colleagues who appeared to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy just getting things to work for them and their students.

It didn't take me long to work out that the cause of all this inefficiency and waste and the bang-head-on-desk frustration that resulted, was frequently and simply, bad design. The plethora of complex systems, labyrinthine processes and perplexing protocols that extend to every corner of our educational endeavours all too often have been created by individuals and groups who - with the best will in the world - are not well acquainted, if at all, with the basic principles of good design.

An awareness and appreciation of concepts such as 'good design enhances the users' experience', or 'good design is logical e.g. form follows function', or 'good design is minimal design e.g. as little as possible but as much as necessary', or 'good design is consistent right down to the fine details' was and is often entirely lacking.

There is also an aesthetic quality to good design, but I've yet to hear or read that word, or anything similar, when it comes to discussing the crucially important task of designing the educational experiences of students.

If we are to be architects of educational experiences, then we must accept that not only do we need to embrace the principles and practices of good design, but - crucially - we either need to become skilled educational architects and designers ourselves or ensure that at least some of us have or develop those skills so that we can help our colleagues and institutions to create and support the wonderful educational experiences that our students truly deserve.

(Paul Kleiman Design for Learning)

On creativity: is 'might' the answer...as well as the question?

The eminent, and now sadly departed, educationalist Dorothy Heathcote used to say that the most powerful word in education is the word ‘might’.

Asking a student ‘what MIGHT be the answer?’ rather than ‘what IS the answer?’ opens up the possibilities, the questioning, the pondering, the wondering...the creativity.

But most of the time we don’t do that.

Our handbooks say things like (and I know, because I’ve written them as well) “On the completion of this module/course/program the student WILL be able to demonstrate a, b, c, d.....”

We don’t write “On completion of this module/ course/ programme the student may be able to do THIS pretty well, but they also might be able to do THAT even better, and what’s more, they may be able to do stuff we haven’t even though of yet”.

But that sort of language and thinking doesn’t go down too well at the validation board, or with the quality assurance people, or with the policy makers, who require everything to be identified, categorised and pinned down, like a collection of dead butterflies.

How can we/do we - in education - break out of the ever tightening circle of predict and provide, control and compliance?

* * * * *
(Dorothy Heathcote's obituary in The Guardian)

Why am I stumbling with confidence?

A few people have asked me why this blog is called 'Stumbling with Confidence'?

The phrase stems originally from my research into university teachers' conceptions and experiences of creativity in relation to learning and teaching, and I have used it in various papers and conference keynotes.

My research entailed interviewing a number of colleagues from across a range of disciplines - from the arts to the sciences and various disciplines in between. I would always start the interview by asking them to tell me about an experience in learning and teaching that they would consider was a creative experience for them. In a number of cases that question prompted a sort of rabbit-in-the-headlight stare, as if to say "What the hell has creativity got to do with teaching?". But inevitably they would eventually identify and begin to talk about a particular experience.

At some point I always asked them what prompted them to go down that particular road? Almost everyone I interviewed either said, or said something along the lines of 'I stumbled across something'.

Probing deeper into this revealed that the mere act of 'stumbling across something' is not sufficient in itself. After all, we stumble across potentially useful stuff all the time. The key factor in enabling them to seize the moment was a sense of confidence: the confidence to believe it might be the right thing to do, the confidence to believe it might just work, the confidence to believe that it was worth whatever risk was attached to it, the confidence to believe it was worth giving it go.

As the debates swirl around skills v. passing exams, education for life v. training for work, the intrinsic value of education v. its extrinsic worth, very few seem to be talking about attributes like confidence, and asking how we might educate and work in partnership with our young (and often not-so-young) students to enable them to face - with a steadfast eye, a steady hand, and a keen, informed, open mind - the uncertainties that a complex, rapidly-changing world will inevitably throw at them.

The poet Antonio Machado famously wrote:

Wanderer, there is no path.
The path forms itself as you walk it.

Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.

At least one of our tasks as educators is to ensure that we have done our best to enable our students - as each forms amd forges their individual path - to stumble confidently towards not only whatever lies around the next bend but beyond the horizon.

(The photograph is of the Austrian Alps, taken at the top of the Grossglockner High Alpine Pass when I was stumbling around Europe in my student days).

Why is it so damn hard to get rid of books?

There it sits in the middle of our hallway, awaiting departure to the local charity bookshop. A box full of books. Behind the picture is a tale of heartache and hesitation, each book the cause of ineffable uncertainty.

Why is it so damn difficult?

Stanislavski, the great theatre director, started his 'method' of actor training by asking the question 'What if?'. Well, even the odd duplicate book (e.g. the Vera Brittain 'Testament of Youth'), which ought to be a straighforward job of straight into the box, proved problematic.

"OK, we don't need two of the same....but what if?....". And a whole number of possible scenarios unfold as the book in my hand hangs in limbo between shelf and box.

We have far too many books. No. Correction. We have far too many books for the size of our house (and it's not a small house). And we have books that we shall never....sorry....that it is highly unlikely that I or we shall ever read again. But yet, as the eye and the hand travel across the serried ranks of fact and fiction, art and science, politics and philosophy, plays and poety, education and entertainment, and a plethora of other categories including miscellaneous, it is so easy to keep on moving, to avoid the obvious decision, to keep the box's destiny unfulfilled.

Admittedly, there's one decision that is easy to make: it's not my book. It's my wife's or my daughter's or my son's. (The last of those has, anyway, always taken a minimalist approach to books - at least in tangible paper form. The shelves in his room are, however, full.....of my books).

Recently I read an article by someone who had managed to get their collection of several hundred books down to 20. Their 'light bulb' moment was the realization that "I was not so much attached to the stories and words themselves, but the physical books sitting on the shelves. Once I had that realization, I began to let go of some of my books".

My problem is precisely that I AM attached to the fact of the books sitting there on the shelf. Their very presence comforts and reassures me. But it's a bit more than that. Each one - and I've read or certainly delved into all of them at one time or another - contains a little bit of me, my history. Each title contains and reflects back to me a fragment of my life, a moment in time. Each one has - to a lesser or greater degree - a sort of Proustian 'Madeleine' biscuit effect, conjuring up the past.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding the above, I managed to fill that single box. The key to selecting those few books (and I inspected every shelf we have) was that each one was entirely silent in relation to my life. A closed book, literally and metaphorically.

It seems once I get beyond the obvious 'keeps'...and I suspect there's already too many of them, I'm stuck with 'emotional resonance' as the key criteria. Perhaps books, like dogs, are "not just for Christmas but for life".

A Taxonomy of (unpleasant) Pressures - why it's becoming even harder.

Terran Lane, a tenured associate professor in the US, recently moved from academia to industry. His move caused consternation amongst his friends and colleagues: "voluntarily giving up tenure is roughly akin to voluntarily giving up a lung". On his blog - which went viral - he made a list of the "forces that are making it increasingly unpleasant to be an academic in the US right now". Here's that list: it sounds remarkably familiar:-

- the difficulty of making a tangible, positive difference in the world;
- struggles with workload and life balance;
- increasing centralisation of power into university administrations and decreasing autonomy for academic staff;
- a strained funding climate that is trapping academics between dwindling central funding and intensifying university pressure-to-be-funded (generate income);
- specialisation, narrowness of vision and risk aversion within academic disciplines;
- poor incentive structures;
- moves towareds mass production and automation of education;
- salary disparities between the academy and industry;
- the rise of anti-intellectualism and anti-education sentiment.

The creation of that list "turned into not just a dissection of dissatisfactions with the system, but a cry for loss for a beautiful institution that I have loved and outrage at the forces that are eroding it".

Those of us who work in higher education in the UK may well nod our head in agreement with most if not all of that list, and may regard it with a sort of 'If not now, when?' attitude. Meanwhile, as the juggernaut of centralised conformity rolls seemingly inexorably towards us, many of us - on a day-to-day-basis - are creating, planning and delivering wonderful, creative, innovative, exciting, relevant learning experiences that defy the forces of 'command and control' and the stultifying blanket of conformity.

About ten years ago, at a European conference on the future of arts education, I happened to be standing in the coffee queue next to the German Federal Minister of Education who had just given a keynote address. After an exchange of introductions, and having established I was from the UK, he went on - in a light-hearted way - to list some of our structural problems (transport, health, etc....it was a time, admittedly, when nothing seemed to be working properly).

He then went on to say that he had a serious question: "For the last 30 years or so, until reunification, our economy was good and many good things both promoted and flowed from that. Yet, culturally and artistically we produced relatively little of world class. Over the same period, in the UK your economy has never been strong, yet you have consistently led the world in music, design, fashion, theatre, etc. My question is what is it that you are doing, or maybe NOT doing in your education system that has allowed you to achieve that?"

I didn't - standing in that coffee queue - have a coherent, evidence-based answer. But I did say that perhaps it was to do with the fact that we have a long and honourable tradition of non-conformity in the UK combined with a high tolerance of eccentricity.

Is that true...and if so, does it still hold true? Or, in our education systems, have we lost - or are we losing and/or having taken away from us - the very attributes that enable us to lead the field in creative and cultural endeavour and achievement?

* * * * * * *
Terran Lane article in Times Higher Education

The Death of a Baby, the Kindness of Strangers, and a Seasonal Message

The reporting around the recent sad death of Poppy, the baby daughter of Gary Barlow and his wife Dawn, brought back a lot of memories and thoughts about the death at birth of our own baby boy - known to all and sundry as 'Rocky' (real name Alexander) - in January 1990.

In 2000, BBC Radio 4, as a complement or counterpoint to the traditional Queen's Christmas Message, offered a listener an opportunity to deliver their own seasonal message to the nation. It was coming up to the anniversary of Rocky's death, and so I wrote something down and emailed it off, thinking that'd be the end of it. A couple of weeks later, just before Christmas, I got a phone call to say my piece had been selected. So I recorded it, and it went out, and it seemed to have had some impact.

The spate of news articles and comment following Poppy's death made me go back to see if I could find my original recording. Well, I found it and decided to go public with it via a YouTube video.

Here it is:
The Kindness of Strangers
URL: http://youtu.be/m3pqCtqGaSAa

I also wrote a companion piece which, until now, has never seen the light of day:

The cemetery where our baby son is buried is a relatively new one, and for a number of years his grave lay alone in the children's section, by the fence on the far side of the cemetery, well away from the small but slowly increasing number of adult graves.

If we decide to visit - which we do once or perhaps twice a year - then we'll bring our thoughts, some cleaning materials, and four small stones. Our thoughts are our own, but we'll use the cleaning stuff to clear away the debris and discolourations left by the seasons, the overhanging trees, and the local wildlife - both animal and human.

And when we're ready to leave, and as flowers are not encouraged, we'll follow Jewish custom and place the four stones on the grave: one each for my wife, myself and our two surviving children as a sign of respect and remembrance.

Some time ago, at the same cemetery, I attended the funeral of an elderly member of our community. At the end of the service, as people drifted away, I headed across the open expanse of grass towards the children's section and our baby's grave. We hadn't visited for a long while, and I was expecting to see the usual untidiness. However, as I approached I noticed that the grave looked particularly clean and tidy. As I got nearer I saw that someone had left a single stone by our son's name. This perplexed me as I knew that the stones we'd left ages before would have disappeared, and I knew of no one else who might wish to visit.

Standing there, lost in thought, I became aware of someone approaching. I turned to see an elderly lady who must have been at the funeral. She touched my arm and asked, in a precise English still tinged with the German of her youth "Are you the father?".

Managing to suppress the urge - even in that situation - to make a smart-alec and totally inappropriate response, I answered simply that I was.

She smiled and said, "I'm so glad. I wasn't sure if there was family, and I couldn’t bear the thought of this little chap all alone over here".

It turned out that on her regular visits to her husband's grave, she would come over to our baby's grave, clean up what she could, say a little prayer, and leave a stone as a sign that someone had visited , that someone cared.

In a time of increasing fear for ourselves and for the world at large, it is all-too-easy to turn in on ourselves and focus on that which is ours. We forget at our peril that it is so often the kindness of strangers, the selfless reaching out to help others, that is a real force for good in the world. If, when doing nothing is by far the easier option, we each made that extra effort to help the stranger, to welcome the 'other' then we might go some way to mend at least some of the many wounds and sorrows of our age and our planet.

Three Years Later......

Well doesn't time fly! I created this blog, with good intentions, almost exactly three years ago. My good intentions lasted precisely a month. But if at first you don't succeed etc. etc. So here we go again....