In this episode of Exquisite Education, Andrew and Beatriz consider what we might understand by the term ‘creative assessment’. They discuss this in relation to a new sector-wide initiative that invites any educator to discuss and share ideas and practice relating to creative assessment by writing a blog post.
Beatriz Acevedo and Andrew Middleton play the surrealist game of the exquisite corpse to talk about creativity, engagement, playful learning, active learning, and everything in between.
In higher education assessment is recognised as a driving force for student engagement and curriculum design. How does this tally with a desire for active student-centred learning? How can it accommodate the artistry in the academic practitioner who seeks to create a learning environment that motivates each and every student?
Myself and Professor Chrissi Nerantzi, and colleagues, are running a blogging activity and we would like to invite you to contribute.
We are starting with a call for blog posts/short articles (500-800 words). Examples of practice, ways of rethinking assessment design and its pedagogic purpose, or anything that relates to the assessment journey (e.g. briefing, marking, feedback, etc). Chrissi leads the CreativeHE network and has been involved in my Media-Enhanced Learning Special Interest Group (MELSIG) over the years. Digital media provides many good examples of how assessment can be reconfigured creatively to engage students more intimately and powerfully in formative learning experiences – so I hope to see some contributions that include ideas and practices that incorporate video, audio and graphical media.
If successful, we are hoping that we may work with contributors to develop a book around ideas and practices eventually.
Do consider contributing – submissions are due by the end of January and please let colleagues know if you think they will have something to share.
Transgressive learning is a term associated with sustainability. Wals (2021), for example, discusses the Power of Transgressive Learning in an excellent post. My own interest in the term, however, came from reflecting on educational work I am currently involved in on spatial fluency and agency in learning and from thinking about how the education system we have is one built upon a reductive history of inevitabilities.
What if… we challenged everything we assume? As an academic developer and innovator by instinct, I like to critically and constructively review the systems we use. I tend to find good ideas by not only thinking outside of the box, but by looking and positioning myself outside of the box – an ‘outsider’ attitude (Rader, 1958). My current ongoing research into Studio for All, for example, asks ‘what if all disciplines had studios rather than classrooms?’ My research into Spaces for Learning in Higher Education continues to posit that formalities dominate and constrain pedagogic design, whereas active and experiential learning flourishes through ecologies of non-formal association.
Wals (2021) paraphrases Lotz-Sisitka et al. (2016) and says,
Transgressive learning, disruptive capacity building, and pedagogies of resistance can be characterized by learning processes and contexts/environments for learning that invite a counter-hegemonic response that seeks to unearth and uproot mechanisms of exploitation, oppression, extractivism, colonialization, and marginalization.
(Wals, 2021)
While this points to acts of sustainability, transgressive learning is a term, for me, that has wider value, although I recognise its importance to the discourse on sustainability and Education for Sustainable Development.
It works in a broader sense for the following reasons:
Co-operative pedagogy – as an advocate of active learning, I believe that learning with (collaboration) and learning alongside (co-operation) others in acts of co-construction (social constructivism), co-production (equitable exchange for mutual benefit), and co-creation (acts of learning through collective making and evaluation) suggest a rich and inclusive learning paradigm for any student in higher education. A commitment to such student-centred pedagogic design and practice still requires courage unfortunately because teaching this way transgresses the organisational systems that influence and often determine the thinking and behaviours of teachers and students. Transgression, here, equates to disruptive innovation in this sense: it is a way of valuing pedagogy as a high-quality outcome of imaginative analysis rather than a matter of conformance and delivery constrained by organisational needs for education.
Self-determined learning – heutagogy in action (Hase & Kenyon, 2015) and self-determined learning theory (SDT) (Ryan & Deci, 2000) focus on agency from the perspective of intrinsic motivation. This leads to understandings of the value of developing learner agency and confidence so as to foreground a student-centred pedagogic design. In short, if we focus on teaching students to negotiate and navigate, or critically explore, evaluate and experiment with knowledge, we are equipping them for learning and equipping them for life. One way of articulating this is through the idea of spatial fluency in which we see education as a space to be explored. (Spatial fluency is a key focus for me at the moment [Middleton, 2023]). Spatial fluency has acts of boundary crossing, polycontextuality and liminality (Araos Moya & Damşa, 2023; Daskalaki et al., 2016; Engeström et al., 1995), embodiment (Cox, 2018), and communitas (Turner, 2012) as central concerns. It recognises that real acts of learning come out of authentic experiences and moments as determined by each learner/actant (Jóhannesson & Bærenholdt, 2020). These may, for example, be in the classroom, be in acts of crossing physical or metaphorical thresholds (liminality), be in non-formal adjacent spaces and situations (e.g. cafes and third places), in third spaces (commitments to beyond home and study situations like work, caring, sport, and leisure), or at home.
Transgressive learning, then, encapsulates ideas about developing the agency of students as self-determined learners in a co-operative ecosystem. This indicates a non-dualist and ecological view of spaces for learning with implications for how education conceives the learning environment and communicates the value of non-formality.
References
Araos Moya, A. and Damşa, C. (2023) ‘Affordances and agency in students’ use of online platforms and resources beyond curricular boundaries’, Learning, media and technology, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–16. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2023.2230124.
Daskalaki, M., Btler, C.L., & Petrovic, J. (2016). Somewhere in-between: Narratives of place, identity, and translocal work. Journal of Management Inquiry, 25(2), pp. 184-198
Engeström, Y., Engeström, R., & Kärkkäinen, M. (1995). Polycontextuality and boundary crossing in expert cognition: Learning and problem solving in complex work activities. Learning and Instruction, 5(4), 319–336. https://doi.org/10.1016/0959-4752(95)00021-6
Hase, S. and Kenyon, C., eds. (2015). Self-determined learning: Heutagogy in action. London: Bloomsbury.
Heila Lotz-Sisitka, et al. (2016). Co-designing research on transgressive learning in times of climate change. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 20, 50-55.
Jóhannesson, G. T. & Bærenholdt, J.O. (2020). Actor–Network Theory. In: A. Kobayashi, ed., International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition).
Middleton, A. (2023). Spatial fluencies: more than spaces, more than literacies. Landscapes of Learning for Unknown Futures – Symposium 2: Flexibilities, 14 June 2023. Society for Research into Higher Education.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68
Turner, E. (2012). Communitas: The anthropology of collective joy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
The penultimate episode of Happy Valley on BBC TV included a very tense scene that helps to explain polycontextuality and why it is useful for educators.
It seems like the whole country was gripped by Happy Valley – a psychologically charged drama about a police woman and a psychopathic murderer. Apologies if you haven’t been watching, but if you have you will remember the scene in which the murderer, Tommy Lee Royce (aka TLR), communicates with Ryan, the police woman’s grandson using a games console. By the way, Ryan is the estranged son of the murderer.
The scene shows Ryan and TLR in their respective places or situations – Ryan in the privacy of his temporary bedroom in his family’s secure safehouse and TLR in his temporary hideout. In each case the context is heightened by the way the respective sets have been shot to reinforce the danger, isolation, and darkness that both characters share.
The tension in this scene comes from the illicit connections they make through the games device. That connection becomes a third place of complicity: TLR, the murderer, seeking to recruit his offspring to his cause and Ryan, the son, desperately trying to understand who he is as a growing adult devoid of any parents (TLR had been responsible for Ryan’s mother’s suicide shortly after he had been born).
The digital network connection between their respective rooms is full of life and threat, therefore. They tentatively begin to type and talk, establishing and committing to a forbidden pact of being in touch with each other on their own terms
Polycontextuality
The dramatic scene above rveals the authenticity of digital connectivity as a valid and vital space situated within other realities.
Each person breathes from different air and senses their respective spaces in their own way. What happened before and what will happen next (their circumstances) are unique and remote, in many ways characterised by and sharing a common disconnection. But the vibrancy of the moment comes from the experience they make together in their digital space..
For the educator, polycontextuality explains how the digital tools we use can act as portals to intense situations. They are spaces to go to (they have utility), but they are also places in which life’s circumstances find focus and connection in and amongst everything else that may be happening and which may hold significance for the learner.
Existing in many contexts, therefore, helps us to understand the value of learning ecologies too – that we exist as dynamic entities in constellations and assemblages. We are imbued with value and living affordances, wittingly and unwittingly – we exist, therefore we are!
The connection is not a third place as meaning a home from home neutral space (Oldenburg, 1998), but it forms a different kind of third situation; one that can take a dominant role in moments of vibrant exchange and which, therefore, needs to be understood for its social significance.
The discussion channels used by educational developers have been dominated by the topic of ChatGPT since the New Year. There are two dimensions to this: concerns over academic integrity and the opportunity ChatGPT and other AI tools bring to assessment.
Addressing anxieties over concerns about academic integrity is more urgent. Our academics need to be aware of the risks and have strategies for managing them so their confidence in managing the integrity of assessment is not undermined. It is less urgent we explore the opportunity that AIs like ChatGPT bring. However, the latter supports the former – the design of smart assessment will ensure that we are assessing the right things: actual student work and criteria that evidence learning, rather than engagement or delivery of assessment artefacts or products.
Smart assessment is authentic assessment. By this I mean we need to use methods that challenge students to think through and deal with problems that have demonstrated: personal agency within the task; currency; require inquiry investigation and deduction; are open-ended and not definitive; are likely to be socially mediated or negotiated.
This is not new. Smart authentic assessment is reflected in a curriculum designed around student-centred active learning and the above list echoes the components of authentic learning as proposed by Rule in her 2006 editorial ‘Components of Authentic Learning’ where her review of literature defines authentic learning as,
real-world problems that engage learners in the work of professionals; inquiry activities that practice thinking skills and metacognition; discourse among a community of learners; and student empowerment through choice.
Rule, 2006
There are significant implications in revising or adopting an active and authentic assessment strategy, not least that this qualitative approach needs to be manageable. A quick ‘solution’ to manageability may be to have two components to an assessment – perhaps even an additional small qualitative approach.
The ideal assessment method is not something that scales: the viva voce. However, it gives us a clue to other manageable methods: the viva validates a more substantial piece of work giving the assessor confidence of the authorship of the dissertation.
With that model in mind, we can be less concerned about the authorship of a substantial submitted artefact if we can find straightforward and manageable ways to assess a student’s understanding of their substantial submission. Methods including self- and peer- assessment may be helpful here, but also techniques such as multiple choice or short essays can be used. Using and assessing peer feedback is another approach that springs to mind.
Smart assessment focuses on the experience of learning and a student’s justification or defence of their argument or rationale. We need to assess the student’s role in the experience e.g. solving a current problem, undertaking a project (the process, not the product), examining case studies, conducting context-specific case studies, assembling a portfolio of evidence and analysing it, etc. We need to look at:
What process did you follow and why?
What decisions did you take in your study, why, and which decisions were good/bad and why?
What theoretical frameworks did you use? Why? Were they reliable? Why/not?
This requires we focus on:
the learning and assessment process and accumulated evidence rather than end-products of learning (learning is an active state, not an end state!)
the marking criteria so that it reflects the student’s explanation and reasoning for their action – how and why they arrived at a conclusion or solution and implications (further actions needed).
embrace and value nuance and complexity (found in current and local contexts or situations) and the student’s active engagement and agency over the task.
the justification of selected references (they must decide what was most useful and why)
how assessment should accommodate diversity and not uniformity – with the diversity of possible responses reflecting the diversity of the participants.
These foci help us to imagine assessment methods can reflect the richness of our subject, are part of a learning-centred design, and are manageable and rich experiences for all.
Richard Serra ‘The Matter of Time’, detail from the installation, Guggenheim, Bilbao
This post pulls together ideas about the value of ambiguity and space in art and education by drawing upon my diverse experiences as educator, artist, and musician. It wanders! In some ways, it is about creating room to wander. I hope you it connects with your own wanderings.
As well as being an educationalist, I am a photographer. Indeed I identify as a creative in general. I am a printmaker, musician, and painter. I don’t usually list these separately – these things connect and make me who I am.
This expression of identity reflects the concept of learning ecologies that helps to explain how unique each of us are. Knowing how our own qualities intersect and combine helps us to understand our students as complex beings with diverse knowledge and motivations.
It also helps to explain the value of collaborative learning – even though we might be denominated as having ‘student’ or ‘teacher’ identities, our differences help to make us interesting and useful to each other.
In this post I reflect on something that has been preoccupying me in one of my alter egos – being a photographer. In this post I consider how my photographer mindset can help me to understand teaching and learning. Specifically, I explore the role of leaving space to create ambiguity thereby allowing for real ‘truths’ to be found by the participant-‘viewer’.
Street photography
Last year I went on a street photography course. Street photography is often gritty and graphic, capturing the human condition as it is played out ‘on the street’.
Photographers such as Henri Cartier Bresson exemplify this rich tradition in photography around life-on-the-edge and the quirks which are observed in street life that reveal universal truths and humanity. At its best, street photography can capture the essence of being human. It can demonstrate empathy, endeavour, resilience, humour, and so forth. Cartier-Bresson and other great photographers have enraptured us with ideas like the decisive moment and the essential joy that epitomises humankind, even in adversity.
However, the best is rare.
I have a huge critique of the trend for street photography. Popular engagement with this trend is usually overly romantic, superficial, cliched, dehumanising, and at its worst, aggressive and exploitative.
A search of the hashtag #streetphotography on Instagram or other social media platforms turns up a plethora of technical excellence and trickery. It also reveals a shallow sense of faux empathy and conviction. It milks human life, lacks real compassion, and generally maintains a distance that pretends to objectivity, but which is often simply unethical reportage and exploitation.
I am intrigued by the trend. I find myself liking striking images on Instagram and I have many books on street photography! I am pulled into it, despite my criticism of it. The use of sensationalism in art, music, printmaking and photography may grab the attention of the viewer or listener (so important in the age of social media), but it also compromises the integrity of the medium and its potential to engage the audience sincerely and profoundly.
The impossible art of being literal
When I was young I remember coming across the concern amongst anthropologists that the Papua New Guinean people they were studying believed that the cameras used by the researchers would steal a person’s soul. To me, then, that was ridiculous and quaint. But I understand now that this is fundamentally a matter of ethics. Street photographers must engage and negotiate with their subjects respectfully. They should not attempt to convey the subject’s essence on their behalf, nor misrepresent them intentionally or unwittingly. Superficial representation is not just and it is potentially harmful. The sensational normalisation of destitute or eccentric people is prolific in street photography: the street, it seems, is fair game for exploitation in the name of picture-making. Venture into public at your peril lest you get snapped up because of your remarkable shadow!
Sensational photography is not new.
On reflection, it was this concern that caused me to leave my first career – in press photography in Belfast at the height of ‘The Troubles’ (1979-83). I worked for an international press agency. I knew the same pictures were being spun differently in every paper in which they appeared. I came to conclude that the pictures I was responsible for added to a noise that amplified and normalised the voices of terrorists and politicians – editorial presentations of extremes that did not represent my understanding of the people who I knew and who lived inside this dangerous media echo chamber – a journalistic simplification which sensationalised, amplified and compounded a false representation of a truly terrible situation. Everyone, including those who lived and died with the Troubles, was treated as media fodder. The question “What side are you on?” plagued me as an adolescent growing up there (I am English and my accent was pronounced) and I came to realise that proliferating images of The Troubles was unethical. So I put the camera down, left the job and joined a rock’n’roll band :-)…
People desire truth and certainty, but I wonder if truth is only really found in uncertainties and complexity. Don’t get seduced by the literal and sensational…
The elusive meaning in Art
As an art student, I was inspired and driven by artists and researchers who made works about the city and working life. At the time, painters like Ken Currie and Peter Howson were beginning to make a name for themselves in Glasgow. Their depiction of city life and trouble seemed to be full of social realistic intent but it left little room for the viewer to contemplate and analyse what was being presented. It was an attractive polemic. I was delighted to find artists who had something they wanted to shout at the world – it was punk. But the shouting spoke of a faux solidarity that did little to stimulate debate. Preaching to the converted, I eventually realised, is largely pointless. Art and education serve us better when they cause us to contemplate incomplete and open-ended situations.
Artists and educators, therefore, invite their audience to be agentic when they leave space and incorporate ambiguity. Doing so creates inviting affordances – invitations for participants and bystanders to be critical interrogators and co-constructors of the work. The artwork or idea becomes a space for participant interrogation. For the educator, ideas and questions accommodate the learner as investigator and interrogator.
The value of ambiguity
Latterly, my response as a photographer has been to create unpopulated photographs and to focus on the urban landscape, just as I earlier painted and made prints of urban landscapes and landmarks rather than the actual people in the city. I wanted the viewer to recall or construct their own urban narratives. At the same time, I turned to printmaking because it was ambiguous by nature and hard to get beyond structure, colour and texture – the meaning had to found by each viewer, in the their time, and drawing upon their individual and unique points of reference.
Including people in artworks can lead one down a narrow literal road that closes out options for the viewer’s interpretation or self-superimposition. It can fall into presenting satisfying narratives that have a simple single truth or moral point. Literal representation excludes the viewer or listener. The work becomes a window for observing a given world rather than a portal for entering it.
The dilemma, then, for the artist and the educator alike is to decide how much should be conveyed and provided as ‘generative constraints’ (Cope & Kalantzis, 2017) and what should be left to the agentic and curious viewer/listener/participant.
Romantic paradox
I am a romantic by nature and this fills me with self-doubt as a creative and educator. Whether as a songwriter, printmaker, photographer, or teacher, my selection of subject, content, method and structure has to satisfy me aesthetically. It is in my nature to look for the good and represent an ideal world or depict a bad world in contrast. I seek to create and offer explanations. I seek to represent a recognisable and desirable truth.
Instead, I know that it is better to leave room for the participant-viewer to delve into dissonances, nuances and complexities so their sense-making instinct can be stimulated and allowed to reveal more about their truth than I could imagine or deliver.
In education, our doubt is that the student understands their role in this and, if they can be persuaded, whether they will know how to do this. Hence, our tendency is to begin filling in the gaps and setting out the detail… The mantra, ‘if in doubt, tell them’ is stubbornly resilient. The art of teaching is not to be didactic, however.
Ambiguity, allegory and absence
A photograph without a human subject leaves a contemplation gap for the viewer or maker. Great stories work when the reader or listener is engaged in anticipating or constructing their own resolution.
So, I have been coming to terms with my diffidence about street photography, its simplified use of dark spaces and shadows, and its tendency to oversimplify representations by preferring black and white over chaotic colour. When the abstract painter Franz Kline painted large white canvases with bold strokes and splashes of black, he was finding his sweet spot for engaging the viewer and our innate desire to construct our own meaning. When the sculptor Ricard Serra created sheet metal mazes, he created ambiguous playgrounds in which the human attempts to respond and understand their situation.
Educators – find your own Franz Kline and Richard Serra within you! How can we create ambiguous spaces that stir our students’ curiosity?
I am happy when there is no central or dominant person in the picture – no explanation or given narrative. Along with this recommitment to unpopulated work is a recommitment to black and white photography – leaving the colour out is working for me too. More attention is given to shape, structure, and only the significant detail. Noise and distractions are reduced. Until… I find rich and vibrant ambiguity in the works of Saul Leiter!
In my teaching, can I address my tendency to fill in too much detail? To leave explanations for my co-participants? It feels that not to do this is disrespectful to the learner.
(And here’s another paradox – the first principle of good teaching is clarity! So be clear about what needs to be clear – and what doesn’t).
Intentional space
I have mantras as an educator committed to active learning – “engagement first, learning will follow”. Recently, as I focus on learning as an outcome of reflection in, on, and through learning, I find myself saying “create space for reflection”, but perhaps I should add, “create space for (self-)discovery.” I think this is good advice for the artist and the educator. In part ‘less is more’, but also allow for dissonance, nuance, and complexity and a person’s innate desire to create resolution.
Reference
Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M., eds (2017). E-learning ecologies: pinciples for new learning and assessment. New York and London: Routledge.
In this post I explore the pedagogy of humour in the context of higher education teaching and learning and begin to realise there’s more to humour in the classroom than having a bit of fun!
Laughter (photo by Jackaylor Toni on Unsplash.com)
This was my starting point, realising that I like to quickly gain the trust of an audience, especially where I may be a new face to them. Humour is risky though and can easily backfire. I am careful enough (or lucky? Or insensitive? Oblivious?…) because I don’t think I have overstepped the mark, but have seen others crash, with the best of intentions, resulting in a deathly silence at best. Self-awareness, then, is important in thinking about the academic performance and the ethical responsibilities that need to be managed in the classroom while lightening the mood.
There’s a lot to go at here and I realise this post is likely to be the first of several as I consider humour and,
engagement, approachability, trust, and release of tension
wit, intellectual fluency, intelligence, and self-evaluation
in-jokes, jesting and banter
inclusivity, empathy, emotional intelligence
taking risks – self-deprecation, irony, and ridicule
performance, the role of surprise, and revelation
active learning roles, play, personalities and persona
And much more, I am sure. Having said that, it is an under-researched area in higher education.
Humour for engagement
In Henri Bergson’s essay Laughter (1900), he describes how laughter can release tension,
“Freud suggests that humor is generated by the pleasure in stimulating others, and/or by the desire to release emotions.”
I have also seen self-mockery as a form of whit. Indeed, I am partial to this. However, this is potentially self-defeating because it can puzzle those who expect and need you to be serious and reliable. I think this strategy is best when an audience knows you and your foibles well. It implies something about the audience – not just you: “I’m prepared to talk about my weaknesses because I know you have weaknesses too and that’s OK.” It may be better to just say that and avoid being hoisted by your own petard. Selecting when to use humour, how much, and how extreme it is, is where we need to focus as performers – it’s all about timing. Well, not quite, but that management of interludes of relief as part of an engagement mix is useful to think about.
Performance and persona and the need to ‘edutain’ and instil some drama into today’s lecture theatre or classroom is in the mind of most academics when they deploy humour to gain the necessary attention to teach (Tait et al., 2015).
To be humorous and light-hearted requires practised stand up comedic skills or, as is likely to be the case with educators, a fluency and understanding of the situation and a wit.
How many teachers does it take to change a lightbulb?
I couldn’t continue without asking, “how many teachers does it take to change a lightbulb?” But why? And should I have asked the question?
It feels like a good thing to do because my audience will recognise the standard format. But who is ‘my’ audience? Am I unwittingly excluding people who have not encountered this before? There is no malice intended in the posing of the question but, for the uninitiated, they don’t know this. So there becomes a tendency to explain jokes (never a good thing). By the way, I have included some answers to the question at the end of this piece.
Humour comes with a cultural bias – especially ‘in-jokes’ which can be extreme, implying expectation for complicity. However, like jargon, in-jokes can signal unity and ‘being in the know’ and, therefore, can be powerful indicators of a functioning community. Pedagogically, designing a humorous process (one with obvious faults to the insider for example) takes us towards some interesting possibilities – slapstick pedagogy! But it all feels dangerous and brings the possibility of adding to the tension.
Before moving on from making use of common frames of reference, I was chairing our Course Leaders Conference last Friday. Due to multiple unforeseen circumstances I found myself having to reorder the whole programme on the hoof. When the programme slide came up, to release the tension (my tension!) I said, unplanned, “All this is happening, but not necessarily in the right order!” A reference to the Eric Morecambe/Andre Previn sketch from the 1970s. It made me smile, but I have no idea if, for example, our many Asian staff or younger staff will have understood the reference. Well, it made me feel better and I hope my smile helped to put people at their ease. Sometimes it is worth the risk and, even though explanations can be self-defeating, humour exists within a greater context in which trust-building happens.
Playing with knowledge
More positively I’d like to shift the focus from teaching to learning and think about humour as a pedagogy and what students bring to class.
Teachers know how different our students are. They all bring themselves in glorious Technicolor and this can be a joy, or it can be tiresome and trying. But students need opportunities to express and discover themselves. For example, on a Computing course where I was teaching a module on Innovation, I was having real problems with the ‘classroom clown’ – you grit your teeth and mutter to yourself, “They’ve got a bit of growing up to do.” A comedian takes pride in how they deal with hecklers, but usually this is a matter of mutual put downs being exchanged. That’s not appropriate in class obviously. Eventually, if you are lucky, you realise that, by spending time with the individual, they have strengths that can be mined. I have found that these students are usually outgoing if nothing else and you can work up a healthy good fun relationship with them winning them friends in class, providing a laugh and a sense of joy, and generally bringing the class into a positive frame. This was the case in the Computing class. We built a strong rapport and, from week to week, we enjoyed a good-humoured exchange.
Turning to pedagogic methods, focusing on fun and humour can lead to entertaining activities. Here are a few brief examples:
using humorous distractors or answers in in-class multiple choice polls
Setting a limerick as a feedback method for a group breakout session rather than a standard “tell me what you discussed”
Assigning behaviour-types in a role play activity, e.g. be sad, angry, flamboyant, etc
Using absurd problems or scenarios to explore concepts rather than highly authentic ones
using 10 second ‘wrong-handed’ ugly drawing activities to encourage the ‘non-artists’ to capture the essence of a group activity – then asking members of other groups to explain what it is meant to be communicating (it’s fun and, surprisingly, interrogations lead to deep inter-group sharing)
Anything that involves making collages, pipe cleaners, glitter (etc)!
Once you stop to think about bringing humour into your pedagogy you realise there is so much you can do. Of course there has to be some serious learning in all that fun but this can come out of the playing. Using a game of snap where each card includes a set of symbols that have real meaning or rolling a dice to decide who must answer a question or using a modified dice to change a variable in a learning scenario all shift the tone of the activity and help to promote interactivity.
Longer playful learning activities can be devised too. Modifications of TV programmes like ‘Would I Lie to You?’ (2 true answers, 1 false proposed by a student with a poker face) or a Sherlock Holmes deduction activity in which a set of clues in various media are presented along with a set of questions – the group has to resolve the mystery. The humour and enjoyment comes from the social intrigue rather that the ‘telling of jokes’ in these cases.
Breaking down barriers
The use of humour and fun in class is all about breaking down barriers and making learning more accessible. This must work for everyone, but it is a good lesson in itself – students need to know learning is fun and enjoyable and that being with others working on problems, in class and in later life, should feel good, not only challenging.
Lightbulbs and teachers
The following answers come from Barrypopik.com – please add yours to the comments:
‘None, that’s what students are for.’
‘None, but they can make dim ones brighter.’
‘I’m not going to just tell you, you need to work it out for yourself.’
‘None, there’s no budget for lightbulbs.’
References
Bergson, H. (1900). Laughter: an essay on the meaning of the comic.
Bruner, R. (2002). Transforming thought: the role of humor in teaching. Present Value: An Informal Column on Teaching
Tait, G., Lampert, J., Bahr, N., & Bennett, P. (2015). Laughing with the lecturer: the use of humour in shaping university teaching. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 12(3). https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol12/iss3/7
In this post I explore what is meant by ritual in relation to the teaching and learning experience and, as we reset our post-pandemic classrooms, why we should care.
Given that there is little obligation to care, beyond a notion of professional value and common decency to others, Chy Sprauve reminds us (‘How ritual can inspire connection in the classroom’, Visible Pedagogy blog, 12 November 2020) that an effective classroom is one in which students feel secure. She suggests academics build a ‘ritual toolkit’. I propose understanding affinity spaces may help us do that.
Does rituality help educators to address the problem of alienation?
I am struck by the eagerness of students to return to campus and salvage something of the experience they had known or expected. I can’t tell whether this desire reflects their interests in or out of the classroom. In many ways it does not matter. We can say that a campus-based education is about experiencing the world together at a highly formative point in our lives.
If we were concerned about our students being isolated and alienated during lockdown, as I was, this was because that safe space of being amongst peers had been disrupted. For myself and my colleagues, our question was how can we now foster belonging and create a sense of safe interdependence amongst students and staff while making opportunities for friendship amongst peers. In other words, we gave serious thought to developing a surrogate online connected experience. To help us we referred to the hard-to-define affordances of affinity spaces (Gee, 2005).
As we return to campus it is time to do that same thinking exercise to remind ourselves of the value of being and learning together.
Affinity spaces
Affinity spaces accommodate social affiliation by being places where learning can happen and where acts of learning are acts of being productive together. Being productive together can be called collaboration, but the features of affinity spaces emphasise the value of the ‘being’. They can be categorised using the following features which allow the academic to check their learning environment design:
Common endeavour – students connect through common interests, endeavours, goals or practices
Common space – that does not discriminate on experience or reputation with each finding different value in the space according to their their own choices, purposes and identitiese
Strongs portals – learning activities allow students to engage so that they can make a useful contribution to the space
Dynamic and variable environment (Gee calls this ‘Internal grammar [practices]’ -) – the core focus, purpose, or activity is transformed by the actions and interactions of participants
Encourages intensive and extensive knowledge – participants gain and disseminate knowledge and are able to develop indepth specialised knowledge
Encourages individual and distributed knowledge – encourages and enables people to gain both individual knowledge and to learn to use and contribute to distributed knowledge (knowledge that exists in other people, material, places, or mediating devices)
Encourages dispersed knowledge – the use and application of knowledge that is associated with other domains has value
Uses and honors tacit knowledge – knowledge built up from experience but which may be difficult to explicate fully in words
Many different forms and routes to participation – there is not a set way of participating
Lots of different routes to status – people demonstrate and are known for their different strengths
Leadership is porous and leaders are resources – leadership takes many forms according to the different demands and opportunities afforded by the space
Ritualising learning
Ritual is usually described in formal ways of being, rites, and ceremonies. It often has religious connotations. It describes a sense of acquiescence or willingness to silently consent to a system or to show respect for the procedures that define us. I note Wikipedia’s definition, which I find more useful in thinking about constructing our own ritual toolkit:
A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community
Its interest for educators, I think, is in knowing the value of acquiescence and agency as being complementary and without contradiction. You could say that acquiescence and agency are co-dependent features of an effective space; a space that frames expectations and provides a common sense of certainty.
Ritual may be a powerful thing, not only in uncertain times, but more generally in what is essentially an uncertain and formative phase in our lives. Committing to being a student is about making a commitment to an unknown culture and an immersion in an inherently alien, liminal and dynamic experience. For some of us our parents made this commitment before us, or our siblings, or others we know well. We may have learnt from them about the value of acquiring a tradition, becoming an ‘insider’ with ‘emic and being able to assume the identity and status that comes with that.
For many students these days, making this commitment is less well founded. Many students enter education on trust and with their own expectations which may be ill-conceived, for example being based on what they may have experienced in education previously. I try to keep this in mind as an educator. Making values, traditions, and ways of being explicit is the beginning of creating a ritual toolkit. Doing so can be an act of co-creation. Working together on creating a set of ground rules, for example, is something I advocate. Talking about learning in a constructive way clarifies expectations and debunks unhelpful myths.
Discussing rituals, habits, practices can help us to create a safe space without unduly constraining and determining a student’s experience. Talking about tools, folklore, respect, and so forth, is a healthy way to immerse our students in our practices and scholarship and developing a strong sense of our ways of doing, seeing, being, and feeling.
Being part of the tribe
Studios can be defined by their customs – rules that have to be learnt but are full of mystery and tradition; rules which may even be unspoken; rules that are learnt in the doing. This can sound elitist, cliquey, and alienating, but being an insider ‘in the know’ or an “emic” performer to an onlooker can also create a communal sense of pride in ‘being one of us’.
Calling yourself an artist, an engineer, or a scientist is arguably the first step to acquiring identity and expertise. Sennet (2009), reflecting on military and religious uses of ritual, discusses it in terms of ‘codes of honour’. As such it provides a society or tribe with a way of evaluating itself – what ‘good’ looks and feels like – and this can help us as educators to find alternative ways of assessing good learning. Dannels (2005) considers academic ritual in the studio in terms of ‘tribes’; a term also used by Becher and Trowler (2001) to help differentiate disciplinary cultures, norms and territories. Knowing who you are, why you are, what you do, how you do it, who you do it with, and how you are different to others, are all part of ‘being’ and knowing.
“In such [affinity] spaces, people who may share little, and even differ dramatically on other issues, affiliate around their common cause and the practices associated with espousing it via affinity spaces that have most or all of the previously described eleven features.”
Gee, 2005, p. 229
Routine
“Ritual-work is an intentional practice of something one builds into their routine to bring them feelings of joy, safety or calm. We probably all have rituals we practice as instructors and students, and in the space of the classroom I invite us all to bring those things more to the surface… [It] can help us to feel grounded in a very groundless time.”
Indeed Sprauve suggests that we reconceptualise the classroom as a workshop. In effect, she says elicit the value of ritual by adopting an active learning strategy in which the ‘complex web of meanings’ (Dannels, 2005) can take shape as we observe knowledge flow and habit, identity, culture emerge.
Conclusion
The features of an affinity space provide a way-in for any academic designer beginning to think about enculturation in the classroom.
Equally, rituality and custom can provide a lens for interrogating what is already done, what mustn’t be lost, or what could be introduced from professional practice. Ironically, they can be invisible and hard-to-spot for the initiated who ‘have always done it this way’ but clear as day to the uninitiated – those from other tribes.
This suggests that making a list of ‘10 things that define us’ and comparing this with lists made by people from other academic tribes could be an interesting and useful exercise in recognising the value of difference.
Sprauve develops the idea of toolkits and provides some examples of how they can be developed with students.
References
Becher, T. & Trowler, P. (2001). Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines, 2nd edition. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Dannels, D. P. (2005). Performing tribal rituals: a genre analysis of “crits” in design studios, Communication Education, 54:2, 136-160, DOI: 10.1080/03634520500213165
Gee, J. P. (2005). ‘Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces’. In: David Barton & Karin Tusting, eds, “Beyond Communities of Practice: Language Power and Social Context”. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sennett, R. (2009). The craftsman. Yale University Press.
In this post I explore creativity and critical thinking and how they connect with the fostering of curiosity.
This post continues my exploration of curiosity as a state of learning in which learner motivation and agency are central. Following on from the earlier post on curiosity, the need to maintain the learner’s motivation (more than just interest) leads the academic designer to look at creating situations which ensure learning is situated and open-ended.
Problems and possibilities
Creativity and criticality relate to each other through patterns of divergent and convergent thinking.
If creativity is about possibility thinking and asking “What if?” through engagement with problems (Burnard, Craft & Cremin, 2006), critical thinking is about evaluating or weighing up possible options and answers. Learning is a process of making judgements – asking about the strengths or weaknesses of an argument, looking for alternative perspectives or answers, deciding what is or isn’t significant, or what is useful to know.
Divergent and convergent patterns of pedagogic design are the basis of design thinking in which the learner fluctuates through phases of ideation, application, and synthesis. From possibility thinking the learner applies and evaluates what they know to form firmer conceptions of knowledge. Learning is equally active, cognitive and meta-cognitive.
Open-ended learning
Iterative patterns of divergence and convergence or problem finding and problem solving suggest learning is a matter of forming conclusions and finding definitive answers. In reality, and in the case of authentic learning theory (Rule, 2006), this is not the case.
The implication of this is that the learning designer needs to situate learning so that learning always has somewhere to go: new, emergent ideas and understanding need to be continuously applied, tested and reworked. Acts of learning should seed learner curiosity by design.
This conflicts with a teaching and learning culture in which summative assessment is positioned as an acceptable and dominant motivational force – it feels so cynical and lazy to accept surface learning as the defining force in learning design.
Designing for curiosity through feed forward
Personally, I think effective assessment should always be formative – the act of assessment is itself should be a significant act of learning. Summative assessment should sit within that frame when it is necessary to make academic judgements about the learner’s performance to date, however, if the formative flow is allowed to colour the assessment activity, it becomes clearer how designing for learning can help to carry the learner forward.
The trouble is the act of summative assessment is so often reified by both the teacher and the learner. This is well-known in the literature on feedback design.
Fostering a state of learner curiosity, arguably, is as necessary as feedback that that is designed to feed forward. Feed forward, perhaps, is the obvious opportunity to reinvigorate a learner’s curiosity. Rather than telling a student about what they got wrong, feedback can emphasise possibility thinking. For example, if the assessment problem specified variable ‘x’, feedback can ask or explore what would happen if variable ‘y’ had been specified. Or, as in good feed forward design, provide intrigue in terms of how the learner might apply the theory, skill or knowledge in a later module or activity.
Don’t leave me in the lurch – inspire me
If learning is always an unfinished symphony of possibilities, it follows that the academic designer is faced with leaving the learner ‘hanging’ and dissatisfied. On the other hand, they can leave them wanting more by assigning each learner a sense of their agency: an expectation that they can reflect further to make sense of their experience and draw out further meaning.
This takes us to meta-cognition and reflective learning. Beyond learning as an act of making sense (creating a general sense of understanding), Moon points us to the need to create expectation and space to go further. Only then can making meaning, and then working with meaning, lead to transformative learning.
Curiosity, then, seems to have a strong connection with the desire to apply learning with a strong sense of agency to make meaning.
References
Burnard, P. , Craft, A. & Cremin, T. (2006). Documenting ‘possibility thinking’: A journey of collaborative enquiry. International Journal of Early Years Education. 14.
Moon, J. (2003). Reflection in learning and professional development: theory and practice. Logan Page.
Rule, A. (2006). Editorial: the components of authentic learning. Journal of Authentic Learning, 3 (1), 1-10.
I keep returning to the phrase Community of Enhancement to describe my philosophy behind my staff development role. It is not astounding but, significantly for me, it is a better than Community of Practice.
It reflects and models the ethos of student-centred active learning which is so often the focus of my work when supporting staff development and curriculum innovation.
Here’s how I define Community of Enhancement
Community of Enhancement
A community of enhancement (CoE) connects principles such as joint enterprise, mutual benefit, and shared practices with ideas of networked development. At the heart of CoE is the expectation of participant empowerment through the collective exploration of existing knowledge of effective practices. It is a form of networked authorship.
Individuals in such a network develop through specific acts of co-creation in which the best of practices and philosophies surface and combine to create expressions of excellent innovative practice. While creating useful tools together (e.g. guidance, explanations, case studies, stories) participants learn as contributors. The collective act accommodates ‘experts’ and ‘novices’ equally through discourses of explanation, exemplification, application, evidence sharing, questioning, and reflection.
Tactile 