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Student as Producer  is not only  about encouraging students to produce products, whether in the form of artistic objects and/or research  outputs.  Student as Producer extends the concept of production to include ways in which students, as social individuals,  affect and change society,  so as to be able  to recognise themselves in the social world of their own design.

Yesterday’s events in London at the demonstration against proposed cuts in higher education is a good example of this in practice. For an account of what happended please read on.

History ( Change) in the making

I stood on the small roundabout on the north side of Lambeth Bridge. I felt the march stream past me on either side of the road. There were some banners identifying  institutions, but this was not a day for making distinctions. This was the university as one voice, against the cuts. The idea of the idea of  the university in action: noisy, vibrant, funny, intelligent, angry, passionate, daft, serious, worried, critical, exhilarating, musical,  articulate, smart, powerful, thoughtful,  calm, considered, beautiful, ugly, civilized, urbane, irritating, pushy,  cultured, anarchic, compelling, conflicted, logical and rational. A long stream of academics and students, mostly students, as far as the eye could see and beyond, spread across the road stretching up one length to Trafalgar Square, and up the other length to Millbank and the Vauxhall Bridge Road.

The police looked overwhelmed. They were wearing their ‘Police as Service’ gear: high visibility yellow  jackets, and flat caps, a long way from the Robocop, ‘Police as Force’ uniforms of the G20 demonstration. The police blog sites about the event complain about the failure of leadership and poor planning by their superior officers. Ironically they point out that the lack of police presence was a result of their own 25% cuts in funding.  How do we reconcile the fact that the police are at the same time  ‘servants of the community’ and a ‘force against the civilian population’?  For the best attempt to deal with this contradiction see Mark Neocleous’s The Fabrication of Social Order, where he deals with ‘police’ as a theoretical and political concept.

Our coach had taken a wrong turn and dropped us off at the end of the route at Tate Britain. I walked the march from back to front with a group from Lincoln. We set off towards the front of the protest and met it coming towards us. We carried on against the flow, bumping into friends and colleagues and ex-students from other institutions along the way. It took us more than an hour to get to the back of the long queue, which by this time was not so much marching as shuffling. The route of the march was not long enough for the crowd to stretch its legs. We were bottlenecked from the beginning. After about 10 minutes of shuffling forward, stewards with loud hailers told us the event was over and that we should disperse and go home. It felt like it was over before it got started. We didn’t want to leave. Eventually we met colleagues from Lincoln coming the other way. We left, reluctantly, to find the coaches to take us back to Lincoln. I never got to hear the speeches. I wasn’t too bothered, I’d heard all I wanted to hear ‘No ifs, No buts, No to education cuts’.

I managed to find a Lincoln coach to take me back to the University. It wasn’t the one I came on, but I was too tired to care. The Lincoln SU steward did a great job in a difficult situation. Making sure all the students were back on the bus, and that the ones who didn’t show were safely on other Lincoln buses. The driver, after a long day, was keen to get going, but the SU steward made sure he knew where all his charges were, and only then did instruct the driver to take us home.

On the way back on the coach and throughout the day I talked to students about the event. This was their first experience of direct political action. They were exhilarated. One student talked about how she read about this kind of thing on her course but this was the real deal, and she was in the middle of it. Some had been at Millbank when the protest kicked off. They were not sure how to think about it. They did not condone flying fire extinguishers but they could sense the power of defiance in what for them was a just cause. They had the photographs on their digital cameras to prove it. They were worried that the media would focus on events at Tory HQ and miss the point of the day, which for them had been a deeply significant event. These are not privileged middle class kids, but a group for whom the lack of money is a constant grinding relentless reality.  These are not even the students who will be charged the proposed new fees, but still they felt the need to defend free public higher education.   I was reminded once again how the power of money has so overwhelmed human sociability that it now seems like  a natural phenomena, rather than the outcome of an oppressive  social process.  And, as such, it appears impossible to resist.  The latest example of our obsequiousness to the power of money is demanding that undergraduate students take out a mortgage on their own lives. For anyone interested in thinking more about the politics of money you can read a book I co-authored Money and the Human Condition.

Some of the students  worried that the day had not achieved very much. I told them that what they had done was important and admirable. They had been the main actors of an important public event which was attracting national and global attention, and that this is how history is made. All said they were glad they had been there.

I felt proud of them and proud of the way in which the University had made it possible for us all to attend an event of national importance. Some institutions had insisted on it being taken as  a day’s leave and did not give the level of support that we had to attend.  The numbers  of the Lincoln students attending was impressive. As for academic colleagues, it was great to spend time together on a common cause that extended beyond the interests of our own institution,  but it felt like we could have done with more of us being there.

When I got back home the late night news focused on the events at Tory HQ. Elsewhere students and academics  have set up a free university on Parliament Square, all are welcome to attend. As the headline in the Guardian put it this morning ‘This is just the Beginning.’

Student as Producer Launch

Student as Producer got off to a great start last night at the official launch in MB1019, the ‘Learning Landscapes’ room. The event was packed, with more than one hundred people and all of the seats taken. There were colleagues and students there from all over the university.

Click here for photographic slide show.

There was a real sense of excitement. Someone said ‘It feels  like we are  involved in something dynamic and important’.

The day had been spent putting up the new exhibition stand  in the Atrium and giving out flyers. Some of the students did actually make the flyers into paper aeroplanes, which looked good and which flew reasonably well. The new stand was a focal point of the launch.

Mary Stuart, the Vice Chancellor, kicked the event off. She said how excited she was by the project and how important it is in defining Lincoln as a very special type of university, where the relationship between staff and students is very important; and where we aim to celebrate students as producers and contributors to the academic mission of the university, and not simply as consumers.

I spoke after Mary. I started with a long list of thank yous to colleagues and students who have been working with me on this project over the last three years. I forgot to mention Scott Davidson by name. I want to thank him now for all of his support for Student as Producer, and to say how great it is to be working closely with him on this agenda.

I said that Student as Producer works on a number of different levels:

Firstly, it is great to be engaged so directly with students, working with them to develop a programme across the university in which ‘studentness’ is such a central issue.

Secondly, I spoke about the way in which this project attempts to address the dsyfunctionality that lies at the core of higher education, i.e., the way in which the key activities of teaching and research often work against each other. Student as Producer deals with this issue by attempting to reengineer the relationship between teaching and research, by including undergraduate students as a part of the academic project of the university, and for this to be made real by having more research and research- like activities within the curriculum, as well as involving students in the design and delivery of their own teaching and learning.

Thirdly, I spoke about how good it was to develop the work we all did on the Learning Landscapes in Higher Education project by linking it with Student as Producer. The ways in which we are now developing the curriculum across the university has very profound implications for the way in which we design our teaching and learning and research spaces.

Fourthly, I referred to the current political context within which we are operating. Student as Producer is a critical response to the attempt by this government and previous governments in the UK to define our undergraduates students simply as consumers of higher education. Student as Producer is a very practical response to the politics of consumerism, but it is also an intellectual and academic statement about the in the way in which academics work with undergraduate students.

Key to the articulation of Student as Producer is the way in which we draw on the radical traditions within teaching and learning that emerged during the 20^th century to inform what we do. I have written elsewhere with Andy Hagyard and Joss Winn about the way in which the slogan Student as Producer is based on Walter Benjamin’s paper, written in Germany  during the 1930s, at a time of very real social, political and economic crisis. Benjamin’s main point in that article is to discuss the role for radical intellectuals in making a progressive contribution to the development of a democratic society based on the principles of social justice.

Benjamin, following Brecht, argues that one way to do this is by enabling those who regard themselves as the passive objects of history to see themselves as active participants in a social world of their own design – as subjects of history – the active producers of a social world that they have made.

He sums this up in a statement:

‘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’ ( Benjamin Author as Producer 1934).

The statement is printed on the Student as Producer exhibition stand.

My final point was that Student as Producer is about teaching and learning and its relationship to research, but it is also asking a more fundamental question about the meaning and purpose of higher education in the 21^st century. Through the way in which we are developing the notion of Student as Producer we are attempting to come up with some answers.

We then had a presentation from some students from the Business School. They talked about their direct involvement in the University’s Open Days, and how they present their work to prospective students so as to give them a very real sense of what it is like to be a student at Lincoln. They had some of their work on display around the room.

The final presentation was from Andy Hagyard, who is the Co-ordinator for the project. Andy gave details about some funding that Student as Producer is able to provide for staff and students to develop their academic work. These funding streams include £1000 bursaries for students to become part of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Scheme (UROS), as well as the Fund for Educational Development ( FED) which is able to provide awards of up to £3000 to support curriculum development in the way of Student as Producer.

When Andy was finished I thanked everyone for coming and for making the launch such a great success. I said that I was looking forward to working with staff and students on Student as Producer. My final words were to encourage everyone to eat some of the big cake. Which they did. And I did. It was delicious.

My overwhelming feeling following the launch is that Student as Producer  is about much more than curriculum development. It is an act of resistance.

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The stand will be used extensively for Student as Producer promotions around the university, and for external events.

It will be first seen in public at the launch of Student as Producer on the 8th of November, after which it will go on tour of all the university’s other campus locations.

Modelled on a well-established student conference in the US, the first British Conference of Undergraduate research will be held on April 19-20 at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston.

This is an exciting opportunity for undergraduates to present their research and experience a real conference environment, and one that the Student as Producer project is keen to support.

Visit www.bcur.org for full details. Please note the deadline for proposals is December 3rd.