Student as Producer (Warwick)

Student as Producer: reinventing the undergraduate curriculum

Context of Higher Education : no consensus

Innovation: pedagogy and politics Independent Study

Teaching Space

Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research

Teaching in Public


No consensus about the ‘idea’ or the ‘uses’ of the university (Newman, 1873; Kerr, 1963)

‘realised and reshaped’ (Barnett, 2000; 2005) ‘rethought’ ( Rowland, 2007)

‘redefined’ (Scott, 1998)

‘neo-liberal’ (Callinicos, 2007)

‘ruination’ (Readings, 1996)

‘death’ of the university (Evans, 2004).


Independent StudyIntellectual history: Pedagogy and Politics

Humboldt’s Berlin University, 1813 Benjamin’s, Author as Producer, 1930s Debord’s, Paris, France, 1968 North East London Polytechnic 1977 Barr and Tagg’s ‘productive learning’ 1995 Boyer’s ‘Scholarship of Engagement, 1990s


The Polytechnic Experiment 1965 -1992

North East London Polytechnic

a course to embody ‘left-wing’ ideals

Independent study Module 1974 – 1991: ‘a completely different approach to Higher Education’ - to meet the needs of the new type of student (Pratt, 1997: 138)

Robbins, D. (1988) The Rise of Independent Study: the politics and philosophy of an educational innovation, 1970-1987


Humboldt’s Berlin University, 1813

“It is furthermore a peculiarity of the institutions of higher learning that they treat higher learning always in terms of not yet completely solved problems, remaining at all times in a research mode [i.e. being engaged in an unceasing process of inquiry].

Schools, in contrast, treat only closed and settled bodies of knowledge. The relationship between teacher and learner is, therefore, completely different in higher learning from what it is in schools.

At the higher level, the teacher is not there for the sake of the student, both have their justification in the service of scholarship.”


Benjamin, W. ( 1930) Author as Producer

‘What matters is the exemplary character of production, which is able, first, to induce other producers to produce, and, second, to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better, the more consumers it is able to turn into producers – that is, readers or spectators, into collaborators’ (777)


1968

‘We work, but we produce nothing’ (p.41)Cohn-Bendit, D. (1968) Obsolete Communism: the Left Wing

Alternative

Debord, G. (1970) The Society of the Spectacle


‘When people are thrust into history and forced to participate in the work and struggles that constitute history, they find themselves obliged to view their relationships in a clear and disabused manner.

This history has no object distinct from what it creates from out of itself, although the final unconscious metaphysical vision of the historical era considered the productive progression through which history had unfolded as itself the object of history.

As for the subject of history, it can be nothing other than the self-production of the living — living people becoming masters and possessors of their own historical world and of their own fully conscious adventures’ (Debord, Society of the Spectacle)


The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

‘The most important obligation now confronting colleges and universities is to break out of the tired old teaching versus research debate and define in more creative ways what it means to be a scholar’ (Boyer, 1990: xii)

The scholarship of discovery – research The scholarship of integration – interdisciplinary connections The scholarship of application/engagement – knowledge applied in

wider community The scholarship of teaching – research and evaluation of your own

teaching

Brew – the core characteristics of academic professionalism

Boyer, E. (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities for the Professoriate, University of Princeton


Productive learning

From teaching to learning: a new paradigm for undergraduate education, R Barr and J Tagg 1995

http://critical.tamucc.edu/~blalock/readings/tch2learn.htm

From instructional paradigm to learning paradigm for productive learning


Warwick and Brookes: Sociology/Built Environment

Research-based learning

Academic Fellowships, £10,000

Student Research £1,500

Redesign spaces in which student learn


Students as Producers

Reinvent the relationship between teaching and research by bringing students more closely into department research cultures

Research–ledResearch–led: : subject content of teachersubject content of teacher

Research–basedResearch–based: : students doing researchstudents doing research

Research-orientatedResearch-orientated: : how knowledge is produced how knowledge is produced

Research-informedResearch-informed: : researching teaching and researching teaching and learninglearning


Undergraduate Research ScholarshipScheme ( URSS) [ 8-20-58]

Research placement for student ( 2nd yr) with academic

extra curricula

£1,500

10 weeks in summer vacation


Student Projects

Universities Plc – learning enterprise in HE (documentary) Sort’d – community education with young offenders Water schemes in rural Africa Gender and US sports Twentieth Century oral history Legacy of Solidarity Womens microcredit in Africa Democracy in Venezuela Tanzania literacy schemes Broadcast student writing


Centre for Human Rights in Practice

‘The key issue is that students feel as if they own the projects and the research and to use it as they see fit. The problem with most teaching on modules is that students to the work for assessment and write it up in the way in which they feel the marker wants it to be done. But with this work they are released from that constraint and take ownership of the whole process so that it is not just research but a whole learning experience…it’s life changing stuff…Leading to the development of community projects in their own way and by making their own connections’.

‘At the department level it is beginning to have a real impact, colleagues can see …there is a sense of real exposure to real things that are happening and that they are already teaching about…it’s a natural fusion of their own research and what students can get into…’

Short-listed for the National Law Teacher Award, 2007


History: Galleons

The point is that there is the space for the students to adapt the module in ways that they are interested in. The students who are doing this approach the subject in a different way, because they know that their research is being taken seriously, and that it is making a serious contribution to the course as a whole, and in that sense the module is very much doing what I want it to.

This means that their approach is more critical and engaged and that they have a real sense of ownership with the ability to change the module, and not simply passively listening to what we tell them.


Students

I think it’s a really good idea, with freedom to develop ideas and to get involved. In normal lectures and seminars there is no real input from the student, its more like school, where you are told what to do and what to write, but this is more like proper research, encouraging new ideas and not depended on secondary material.

It makes everything more diverse and the module is very much student led, everyone has real input and can make lots of different suggestions in a more relaxed and productive environment. The world has changed and it is important that methods of teaching reflect that change.

The Reinvention Centre at Westwood

Complexity not Flexibility

Democratic

Grounded

Technologically enabled

Acoustics

Light/Colour

Collaboration

External Partners

HEA Subject Centres

Ruskin College UWE Aston City, U., HK Anglia Ruskin Sydney UCE Queens, Belfast


Teaching in Public

Students as ‘first public’ Public Sociology (Burawoy, 2004) Teaching as Public Space Academics as Public Intellectuals HE as ‘public good’: reinvent

university

Student as Producer (Warwick)

Education

Transcript of Student as Producer (Warwick)