Category: Uncategorized

Mike Neary has signed a contract with Zero books to publish a monograph on the topic of  Student as Producer and how it extends beyond the University of Lincoln.

Student as Producer – How Do Revolutionary Teachers Teach?

ABSTRACT

This book seeks to recover the idea of the university as a progressive political project. It does this through an engagement with the radical history of higher education, a review of the work of revolutionary teachers, e.g. Hegel, Vygotsky, Friere, Ranciere, Illich, hooks, and a dialogue with the movement of opposition against funding cuts to universities in the UK and around the world.  The book provides an  account of the way a group of  academics and students are attempting to construct a radical form of higher education out of the ruins of the current arrangement. The book provides a compelling account of how revolutionary ideas, e.g., melancholia, magic, comedy and poesis, can be used to reinvent the university as the highest form of social knowing, grounded in a project to confront the many global emergencies that define the contemporary world.  These ideas are used to frame a range of radical practices and principles on which to base revolutionary forms of teaching. These practices include interruption and astonishment,  dissolving the difference between manual and intellectual labour, experimenting with history and  encouraging the positive power of negative thinking ( dialectics), i.e., not teaching, so that we all might learn.

Student as Producer is impacting outside as well as inside the University of Lincoln: on line and in the classroom.

On line

Student as Producer is viral, if not yet contagious. Student as Producer is  posted on the Finnish Wikiversity site. On this site, Student as Producer is posted alongside some of the leading protagonists in critical and progressive education, including Paulo Freire, Jaques Ranciere and  Ivan Illich.

Student as Producer can be found on the sites of some of the webs most prominent bloggers on higher education, including Glenn Rikowski’s  All that is Solid web site and  Stephen Downes’ blog.

 

Student as Producer has a presence on the websites of leading universities that are partners in the project. Warwick has established a Student as Producer fund as part of their newly created Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning.

Student as Producer is discussed on   De Montfort University’s Learning Exchanges blog as  ‘Reflections on the Socio-Historical Moment of Technology in Education’. In this blogpost the principles that underlie Student as Producer are set alongside ideas generated by some of world leading critical theorists including  Slavoj Zizek and  John Holloway.

You can find Student as Producer on the University of Nottingham’s webpages. I recently gave a talk on the subject of Student as Producer to the University of Nottingham’s School of Education. A video recording of the talk can be found on the Learning Science Research Institute’s webpages.

Multiple references to Student as Producer can be found on Twitter – where it now has its own hashtag  #studentasproducer

In the Classroom

In classrooms and lecture theatres Student as Producer has been discussed at workshops and presentations. Most recently I gave a talk to a group of students at a conference organised by the Really Open University in Leeds. The title of the conference was ‘Re-imagining the University’.

I have accepted a number of invitations to make keynote addresses on Student as Producer at various  conferences, including the Standing Conference for the Head of Media Services ( SCOMS) at the University of Newcastle in May, as well as to a conference about improving quality in Teaching and Learning at De Montfort University in June 2011.

All of this, together with other work that the University is doing,  creates an awareness that something special is happening at Lincoln.

Professor Mick Healey is the world’s leading authority on research-engaged teaching, with a series of seminal publications on the research-teaching nexus ( Healey and Jenkins 2007,  2009). Mick has agreed to be the external evaluator for Student as Producer.

Mick came to Lincoln last week to run a session on setting up an evaluation framework for the project. The workshop was attended by Dan Derricott, Vice President for Academic Affairs at the SU, Professor Scott Davidson, Deputy Vice – Chancellor for Teaching Quality and the Student Experience, Karin Crawford, Principal Teacher Fellow in Heath Life and Social Sciences, Andy Hagyard, Co-ordinator for Student as Producer, Ian Snowley, the University Librarian and myself.

Mick suggested that we use a  a ‘theory of change’ (ToC) approach (Hart et al., 2009), which may be used to explain how and why a project realizes the results it achieves.  The ToC approach attempts to develop an understanding of the relationships between outcomes and the activities and contextual factors which may influence the outcomes.  One of the attractions of the ToC approach is that it may be used to extend our understanding of a project, rather than audit it.  Hence the key question in our case might be, for example: “What have we learned about making research-engaged teaching and learning an institutional prioirty?”.  It is essentially a narrative approach, which tells the story of the project.

By completing the components of the framework (see below) at the beginning of the project it can provide a road map which can be elaborated on and altered during the life of the project.  The process of developing the framework also encourages a conversation between the team members and hence promotes a greater shared understanding of what the project is trying to achieve and how will you know if it has done so.

Components of Theory of Change

1.    Current situation

2.    Enabling Factors / Resources

3.    Processes / Activities

4.    Desired Outcomes

5.    Longer-term impact

6.    Unexpected outcomes

Professor Phil Levy (Sheffield), a member of the Student as Producer Steering Committee, used the ToC approach to evaluate one of the Centres for Excellence Projects (CILASS, 2010) and then also applied it to Angela Brew’s ALTC Teaching Fellowship project (Levy, 2010).

Together with Mick, colleagues from Lincoln spent the morning working through aspects of the proposed framework to test its suitability. By the end of the workshop all agreed it would work for Student as Producer and that is should be developed further at the forthcoming Project Management Group.

References

CILASS (2010) CILASS Evaluation http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ibl/cilass/evaluation.html See the text and two video clips

Hart, D., Diercks-O’Brien, A.G. and Powell, A. (2009) Exploring stakeholder engagement in impact evaluation planning in educational development work, Evaluation, 15: 285-306

Healey, M. and Jenkins, A. (2009) Developing Undergraduate Research and Enquiry – http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/York/documents/resources/publications/DevelopingUndergraduate_Final.pdf

Healey, M.. Jenkins, A. and Zetter, R. ( 2007) Linking Teaching and Research in Disciplines and Departments  http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/York/documents/LinkingTeachingAndResearch_April07.pdf

Levy, P (2010) Evaluation in Brew, A Fellowship Final Report http://www.altc.edu.au/resource-enhancing-undergraduate-engagement-research-enquiry-macquarie-2010

Interest and awareness in Student as Producer is growing across the University following the highly successful launch event. Mike Neary and Andy Hagyard have been touring the campuses talking to colleagues in both academic departments and professional support. So far we’ve been invited to meetings with ICT, Enterprise, Marketing, Programme Leaders in Art & Design, as well as Teaching & Learning Committees in HLSS and Business and Law: many more meetings are planned for the coming weeks. We’re also busily recruiting students to act as Student as Producer ambassadors.

The key message is that this is an institution-wide initiative that will impact on every aspect of university life, not just the taught curriculum. While there are plenty of questions to be answered, there is also a growing sense of excitement surrounding the opportunities that Student as Producer can provide.

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.’