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Feb – May 2011

Journal

This edition of the Teaching Fellows Journal has been restored from an archived online edition, hence the simplified form.

Edinburgh Napier University is a registered Scottish charity. Reg. No. SC018373

ISSN 2050-9995 (Online)

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EditorialInto the future

Angela Benzies, Senior Teaching Fellow and Teaching Fellow Scheme coordinator, updates us on Teaching Fellow work and looks towards the future

As I write this we are in the final stages of the university’s restructuring work, with new professional services units and revised faculty structures taking effect from April. This has affected us all in one way or another and, sadly, has meant that we are losing some Teaching Fellows. Another colleague who is leaving is my fellow tfj editor, Margaret Nairn, who has opted for early retirement – I don’t quite know how we will produce the tfj and our other publications without her! We will miss all these colleagues hugely and thank them very much for the fantastic work they have done over the last several years, and the big contributions they have made to the Teaching Fellow community. On behalf of us all, I’d like to wish them well in whatever they chose to do in the future.

For those of us who remain it is important to know that the work of the Teaching Fellows continues, albeit it with some operational changes. Most of the Academic Practice team is moving to the Office of the Vice Principal (Academic) and the Scheme will continue to be run in its current form from there, where I will remain as coordinator and Ruth Lough will continue as administrator. The strategic importance of the Teaching Fellow Scheme is evidenced in the ongoing ELIR visits and the contribution from individual Fellows and the community will continue to contribute to university policy and operations, as well as benefitting our colleagues, our students and ourselves as HE practitioners.

It has been particularly encouraging to see Teaching Fellow funded work drawing in non-TF colleagues from academic and other units, and to see increased direct involvement of students in our work. For example, the ‘Rough and Rich Feedback’ project has featured work from students on the Creative Advertising programme within the School of Arts and Creative Industries. (See separate article in this edition for more details.) In the same School students have also been contributing to our thinking on how best to hear the student voice in their programmes of study.

For some time we have been thinking about how we can best utilise the diverse interests and expertise of our Teaching Fellows and provide support for

Contents2 Editorial

3 Eureka!

4 Reports

6 Review corner

8 Web spotlight

Edition Editors

Angela BenziesSenior Teaching Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Academic Practice

Coordinator of the Teaching Fellowship Scheme

Margaret Nairntfj Web Editor and Publications Officer

At time of publication:Academic Development, Bevan Villa,Craighouse Campus, Edinburgh

Current enquiries to:Office of the Vice Principal (Academic)Sighthill Campus, Sighthill Court,Edinburgh EH11 4BN

Email: tfj@napier.ac.uk

http://www.url.napier.ac.uk/tf

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Some of you will be aware that we have been talking to our Teaching Fellow Scheme external assessor, Professor Diana Eastcott, about development of a mentoring award that would be accredited by the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA). Although we are focusing on support for Teaching Fellowship and FHEA applicant mentoring, we would welcome all Fellows and others involved in academic mentoring of colleagues to an event currently pencilled in for 14 April, with a view to possibly starting an award programme in October 2011; more details to follow soon. Depending on how we get on with mentoring, we may also look at a leadership award, if the interest is there. It’s worth noting that our professional development programme already carries SEDA accreditation.

We anticipate having Teaching Development funding again next session but cannot as yet confirm the budget. The plan is to try to pull forward as far as possible the application process to enable teaching cover etc. to be arranged in good time but this is somewhat dependent on budgetary decisions at the top level of the university so we will need to accommodate those timescales; more information to follow after Easter.

We would really appreciate your views on SIGs, SEDA awards, project work and generally on how we operate in our new organisational framework so, please feel free to email or contribute to the discussions on the Education Exchange. And thank you for all you have contributed as Teaching Fellows. Without you there is no community! •

development work. Although grant-aided projects have been a very effective mechanism with a number of success stories around cross-school/faculty/service initiatives, we decided to create Special Interest Groups (SIGs) in order to create communities of specialist practice that may also provide a vehicle for themed work and development. The SIGs are intended to be a ‘community within a community’, not a committee with all the associated baggage of convenors, minutes etc. which tends to be time-consuming and off-putting, but something that easily and naturally facilitates growth and feels like a pleasure rather than a burden.

At present we have four SIGs at various stages of development. These are: SIG-M, our Mentors Group; SIG-Int: Internationalisation; SIG-Inc: Inclusiveness in LTA ; SIG-TEL: Technology Enhanced Learning. Although these SIGs are led by Teaching Fellows or Senior Teaching Fellows, the idea is to draw in members from across the university. In this way we can all learn from each other, create and/or contribute to development work, and ensure that outcomes are fully disseminated for maximum benefit. Outline remits for the SIGs and are being refined with lead Fellows/Senior Fellows and we are working on updating the TF database to reflect membership. This is taking time but we hope to have this fully in place by the summer. A presence for each SIG has been set up on the Edinburgh Napier Education Exchange (ENEE), a relatively new social networking site created by colleagues within Professional Development that facilitates collaboration on all sorts of academic development activity. So use this link to register interest in one or more SIGs and share your thoughts by starting or contributing to a discussion.

Eureka!Instead of our usual eureka! discoveries, here’s a suggestion for getting to grips with work/life balance in the form of a book by Rob Parsons The Heart of Success; Making it in business without losing in life. As the university goes through restructuring and we are all experiencing stresses and strains in various ways this book, used as part of Academic Induction for new staff, may be helpful also to more seasoned members of staff. The chapters are divided into seven ‘laws’, for

example ‘Put your family before your career’, Play to your strengths’. It’s available from Amazon in print and on Kindle at www.amazon.co.uk/Heart-Success-Rob-Parsons/dp/034078623X

Parsons, R., (2002). The Heart of Success; Making it in business without losing in life. London: Hodder & Stoughton ISBN 978-0340786239, paperback, 240 pages •

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Reports Christine Penman, Lecturer, School of Marketing, Tourism & Languages, reports on Travelling Languages: Culture, Communication and Translation in a Mobile World

Fiona Campbell, Head of Professional Development, Academic Development, reports on the Staff Conference

Christine Penman reports on Travelling Languages: Culture, Communication and Translation in a Mobile World

The conference ‘Travelling Languages: Culture, Communication and Translation in a Mobile World’ was held 3–5 December 2010 in Leeds. This was an event jointly organised by the International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC), of which I am a member, and the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change (CTCC) at Leeds Metropolitan University. The overarching theme of the conference was that of ‘cross-cultural capability’ and intercultural competence in global contexts and it covered a number of theoretical, pedagogical and ethical issues while adopting an interdisciplinary perspective. The extreme weather conditions at the beginning of December meant that I could not reach Leeds on the first day. However, once there I had a large number of presentations to select from. For this report I have selected a few that provided a fresh angle from a teaching and learning perspective.

I was particularly interested in talks on the acquisition of intercultural competence for students, either in their home university setting or abroad under the Erasmus exchange programme. Research has established that a period of residence abroad may not be enough to inoculate against prejudices and in some cases even crystallises stereotypical views on another culture. German academic Doris Fetscher introduced the use of an e-portfolio to foster and document the intercultural processes developed by students during their year abroad. The e-portfolio was developed on the basis that meta-reflection on intercultural isssues was poor despite training prior to departure using a number of critical incidents for reflection and discussion. The e-portfolio was developed from feedback provided by students and aimed at developing the students’ awareness of their coping strategies, of knowledge transfer, and of the way they passed judgement on the hosting culture. Very well documented and illustrated examples of

such portfolios were presented and I was interested in finding out that one of the incentives for the students to engage in this fairly substantial reflective document was that the portfolio was allocated 6 ECTS and the students were also given the opportunity to use it as the basis of their dissertation at a later date. I feel that the ideas and discussion fostered by this presentation will provide a good platform for discussion here at Edinburgh Napier.

Melinda Dooly, an academic from Barcelona, displayed a dazzling array of technology used for the development of intercultural competence of teacher trainers. Apart from the interesting discussion on the ways the different technological platforms provided affordances for interactions with other ways of seeing and doing, and the interesting question raised at the end as to whether Web 2.0 environments such as Second Life® created a third cultural space to negotiate identities, the presentation gave me novel ideas for the use of technology in a classroom setting (in particular I am keen to explore the potential of ’voicethread’, a multimedia collaborative tool which allows several people to comment on images, for example).

Another interesting paper with pedagogical implications was that given by a teacher and researcher from Poland, Marek Krawiec, who reported on a project codenamed ‘Agent’, aimed at combining interdisciplinary activities with the use of English as a foreign language with high school pupils. This was designed to help learners discover historical and urban sites in their own country through the medium of a foreign language and gave a very literal meaning to the notion of active learning.

My own contribution, produced in collaboration with Maktoba Omar, Reader in Marketing, was placed in the ‘Learning the language of migration’ strand. Titled ‘Figuring Home: the role of goods in the transnational experience’ it reported on a study of the type of goods which international students brought with them and related the findings to cognate research on commodity culture and identity in a variety of fields ranging from consumer behaviour to sociology and human geography. The ensuing formal and informal discussions gave me further ideas for alleyways to explore and take this research forward, beyond writing up the paper for a peer-reviewed publication.

I found the conference stimulating for the human and intellectual encounters that it offered and am therefore thankful for the Teaching Fellow development grant which allowed me to present our paper at

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this conference, listen to some very stimulating presentations and liaise with international delegates.

Fiona Campbell reports on the Staff Conference Learning, Teaching and Assessment at Edinburgh Napier University: celebrating our practice

The staff conference, held on Friday 7 January 2011, explored the new Learning, Teaching and Assessment (LTA) Strategy and provided opportunities to showcase and celebrate the academic practice which underpins it. In introducing the conference, Vice Principal John Duffield welcomed the 110 participants (including delegates from Edinburgh’s Telford College) and highlighted the opportunities the day would provide for engaging with the Strategy in a meaningful way. He described the Strategy as innovative, iterative and inspirational and discussed how it would set institutional priorities and direction. The aims and inclusive gestation of the Strategy were discussed in more detail by its main architect, Rowena Pelik, who also focused on the dynamic structure of the Strategy:

• a top level which includes ten short, framing, key statements

• a second level consisting of a series of statements or responses by Schools and subjects, Professional Services and NSA which will be updated on a regular basis

• a third level which is the LTA Resource Bank consisting of a wide range of learning, teaching and assessment resources, case studies, and guidance.

The second level of the Strategy was illustrated with examples of local responses to the key statements from the School of Computing (Sally Smith), Student Affairs (Cathy Lambert) and NSA (Maxine Wood).

The conference launched the Strategy’s third level, the online LTA Resource Bank. This new resource brings together case studies, exemplars and guidance to help staff in developing aspects of their academic practice. Karen Strickland introduced and demonstrated the Resource Bank, illustrating example case studies and showing how the multi-search facility enables access through a number of routes.

Many of the examples from the Resource Bank were showcased during the day through interactive Learning from Experience sessions and Showcase of Good Practice posters providing opportunities to discuss how examples developed for one context could be adapted and adopted for use elsewhere.

In addition to the opportunity to interact provided through the sessions and posters, delegates were also able to participate in a number of ways including:

• a group discussion session in which participants were enabled to reflect on how the Strategy applies to themselves, their modules and their students through an engaging and innovative card-based activity designed by Elaine Mowat

• a plenary session How do we know what we are doing is effective? led by Karen Aitchison which provided an opportunity for participants to learn more about action research from a presentation by Julia Fotheringham, and examples of practice from three recent PgC TLHE graduates and from the University’s Visiting Professor, Mick Healey. Individuals were also able to share and to give and get advice on planned action research from a colleague with whom they were paired. This generated a very animated buzz of dialogue and resulted in many concrete ideas for future enquiry. Mick Healey also contributed to the final plenary by summarising the key messages from the day.

At the end of the conference, John Duffield presented the new Best Practice Awards that are designed to celebrate good practice in the University. To encourage and enable the sharing of practice, the awards are made for any form of practice entered into the Resource Bank. The following individuals received awards:

• Best Classroom Experience awarded to Mark Huxham, School of Life, Sport & Social Sciences for Tipping out the bootgrit

• Best use of Technology awarded to Christine Penman, School of Marketing, Tourism & Languages for Use of wikis for 1st Year students of French

• Best Workplace Learning Provision awarded to Barbara Neades and Mike Parkinson, School of Nursing, Midwifery & Social Care for Mentorcentre

• Most Innovative Practice awarded to Frank Greig, School of Computing for MarkItEasy.

The opportunity for gaining an award for an entry contributed to the Resource Bank had already generated much interest in it and the submission of a significant number of entries to it before the conference.

Overall the most valuable aspects of the conference were seen to be (quotes):

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• chance to meet colleagues – make contacts and hatch plans for future development

• insights into common ground and differences for partnership working

• good to have a chance to reflect on the new Strategy

• valuable to get a sense of the commitment of staff to LTA and the exciting and innovative approaches to making it more effective

• best staff conference yet!

The conference provided a valuable opportunity to encourage greater ownership of and engagement with the new LTA Strategy and to interact with the Resource Bank and the examples of practice within it. Further information about the day, including most of the presentations and a report by Jacqueline Brodie (Management & Law), is available on the conference website.

Ongoing activity following the conference will include:

• The inclusion of some of the Learning from Experience sessions – developed into longer workshops – within the Professional Development Programme and made available to staff university-wide or on a tailored basis to more specific staff groups

• The use of the card-based discussion activity at local level – two faculties have already requested this

• The provision of a selection of posters on school and service notice-boards and at specific events, eg during the ELIR visit

• Further promotion of the LTA Resource Bank to encourage submission and its use through podcasts developed with a selection of staff including the award winners. This is being enabled through the successful application by Karen Strickland for a Teaching Fellow grant. The resulting podcasts will be made available to staff and the audio files will be included in the Resource Bank to provide more of an intimate insight into the case study being discussed

• Ongoing promotional activity of the Resource Bank in tailored, school-based activities

• Encouragement of further entries to the Resource Bank with the provision of Best Practice Awards in relation to feedback to be presented at the Feedback for Learning joint Academic Development/Teaching Fellows conference to be held on 17 June. For consideration for these awards, the deadline for entries to the Resource Bank is 15 April. •

Review Corner

Keith Smyth, Senior Lecturer, Academic Development, reviews The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer by Mike Molesworth, Richard Scullion and Elizabeth Nixon (eds) (2011) Routledge: Abingdon ISBN 978-0-415-58447-0 250pp £24.99

The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer reviewed by Keith Smyth

The initial expansion of UK Higher Education resulting from the publication of the Robbins Report in 1963 has, in the last two decades, been followed by a further period of growth that has seen the number of UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) rise from around 60 in the mid-1980s to over 140 today. As is reiterated throughout The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer, the government policy

that has driven the expansion of UK HE, including the widening access agenda and the principle of fair access to HE, has to date resulted in a more educated workforce and increased equality of opportunities. However it has also led to heightened competition between HEIs and the increased adoption of market mechanisms as a means to manage expansion effectively.

This, and recognition of the potential impact of the latest government cuts that were incoming during the authoring of this text (in the lead-up to the Browne Report) provide the general context for a rich and in-depth exploration of challenges, concerns and implications by a range of leading educationalists.

This book is organised across three themed sections; the first, by Roger Brown, begins with an exploration of marketisation and the characteristics of higher education markets. The consideration offered around key factors including institutional autonomy,

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institutional competition, price and information is a pragmatic one. Brown clearly outlines the complexity inherent in the marketisation of higher education, and this complements well the following chapters by Nick Foskett and Ronald Barnett in orientating the reader towards the nature of the HE sector as a politicised ‘quasi market’ characterised by significant government influence and competition for resources between HEIs.

The chapters of Section 1, which include excellent contributions from Paul Gibbs and Lewis Elton, also raise important questions around what exactly students are paying for in a marketised HE sector (instruction and pedagogic guidance, a qualification, both?) and the dangers inherent for the sector, institution, tutor and student in adopting and promoting a ‘consumerist’ perspective. Lewis Elton extends the argument to considerations of scholarship, academic freedom, and ‘learning for the sake of learning’, leading effectively into the focus on issues around institutional values, external reputation, and the authenticity of the learning experience collectively addressed in Section 2, The Marketised Higher Education Institution.

In the chapters by Helen Sauntson and Liz Moorish, Stella Jones-Devitt and Catherine Samiei, and Chris Chapelo we can find, albeit to varying degrees of strength, a clear warning against the dangers of the ‘commodification’ of higher education and where this might lead us in terms of standardisation, the constraining of creativity in learning and teaching, and the implication, as described in Frank Ferudi’s excellent introduction to the book, that if the student as customer and consumer is always right then we had better ensure we give them what they want. As highlighted at several points elsewhere in the book, this view is in stark contrast to the outlook many academics hold around the need for education to be challenging, perspective-broadening, and ultimately about personal growth and development.

As Sauntson and Moorish conclude at the end of their chapter, the emphasis universities place on marketing and prestige, on league tables and branding, and increasingly on business and notions of ‘product’, sees the sector in a position whereby ‘there are very few universities, it seems, that choose to portray themselves in harmony with the ethos of those academics who work within their walls’ (p. 84).

Sauntson and Moorish suggest this indicates that the dominant, but now tainted, neo-liberalist rhetoric is not without challenge in HE. This is certainly evident across several chapters offered in Section

3, Students, Consumers and Citizens. Here, amongst a series thought-provoking contributions, Johan Nordensvard argues strongly and convincingly for citizenship as an alternative metaphor for reconceptualising what it can and should mean to be a student in higher education, while Elizabeth Nixon and colleagues consider how curriculum models founded on well-intentioned principles of learner choice, autonomy and personalisation might, without opportunities for critical engagement in the self, be contributing as much to sustaining the ‘student as consumer’ metaphor as they are to effective learning.

Within the text as a whole, the challenge to the neo-liberalist perspective in HE is arguably at its strongest and most political in Mike Neary and Andy Haygard’s chapter on the ‘pedagogy of excess’. Central to this argument is that the transformative potential of HE requires a more radical addressing of research-teaching linkages than we are currently dealing with in the sector, and one that can ‘transcend the constraints of consumerism by overcoming the limits of what it is to be a student in higher education’ (p. 210). With an emphasis placed on ‘collaborative acts of intellectual enquiry’ and the lessons that can be learned from the 1968 student protests in France, including the then revolutionary concept that research was something students could and should do, Neary and Haygard offer an ultimately optimistic view of the possible, and of the intellectual power that that lies in academics connecting with undergraduates as intellectual partners in research and scholarship. However, as an aside to this review Neary and Haygard’s perspective does not merely put forward a rhetoric of the possible, and interested colleagues seeking to grasp how this might look in practice are directed towards the work and emerging impact of the Student as Producer project led by the authors at the University of Lincoln http://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk/partners/.

Within the current climate in UK Higher Education, and within the broader social and political climate in the UK generally, this book is both timely and relevant and the editing and contributing authors are to be commended on the breadth and depth of their collective discourse. The text has a richness and multi-dimensionality that is not easily captured in even a detailed review. It is also, in several places, a challenging read with a range of competing and occasionally contradictory views to negotiate.

This book does not offer a complete decrying of the marketisation of HE, and there is a careful consideration of the role this has to play alongside

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the more overtly radical arguments put forward. This is only to be expected in an edited volume of this nature. However the book is ultimately challenging in exactly the way that is currently needed in the sector right now, asking us difficult questions about what higher education is for, how we have come to this point, and where we might go in the future. Had this book been in preparation now, for publication in six months’ time, one can only wonder at how some of the

authors would have addressed the current situation particularly the one facing our fellow students and colleagues in England. At a time of unprecedented uncertainty within UK HE, when the actions and decisions of our institutions and educators count for everything, this book is recommended as crucial reading for HE leaders and educators in general, and as a key text for the PgC Learning and Teaching programmes undertaken by new lecturers. •

Web Spotlight The web spotlight falls on the new LTA Resource Bank, the ideal place for you to submit your Teaching Fellow project reports

Why not consider submitting examples of your Teaching Fellow grant-funded work to the third level of the LTA Resource Bank? Take a look at the case studies already posted from all round the university and disseminate your LTA good practice here.

The Resource Bank forms the third level of Edinburgh Napier’s LTA Strategy which is an active, flexible and dynamic strategy which is owned by its contributors, is ‘live’, transparent and highly visible. The strategy exists as a document but primarily as space on the intranet and has three levels of activity: the top

level provides strategic direction, the second level encourages detailed critical engagement, and the third level (Resource Bank) acts as a mechanism to promote and share good practice and to engender learning across the institution.

The Resource Bank is available externally, providing a showcase of LTA practice at Edinburgh Napier University. For this reason you will be asked to assign a Creative Commons Licence to your case study. Find out more about Creative Commons licensing from http://creativecommons.org. Creative commons allows you to share your work safe in the knowledge that others will acknowledge you where appropriate when using the resources you provide. It is a really simple, fast and free way to copyright your work! •