![\"Self-Reflection\"](\"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/files\/2016\/05\/Self-Reflect-762x360-300x142.jpg\")
<\/p>\nHi all! As we approach the end of what has been a massively busy term, we will be uploading a couple of reflective pieces about what we’ve been up to as a group. This is the first of them, written by the Programme Leader of BSc Business Management\u00a0at the Business School, Dr Mark Gatenby. Hope you enjoy reading and learning more about our trips to various conferences!<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s been a busy couple of months for the project and co-design group. We\u2019ve attended three conferences and made connections with researchers across the UK and around the world. Five undergraduate members from our group have attended academic conferences for the first time and we have co-presented our work to audiences including students, academics, staff-student initiatives, technologists, professional support staff, managers and policymakers. I was lucky to attend all three.
\nI\u2019ve learnt about many new perspectives on higher education from a diverse range of disciplines and institutions. I particularly enjoyed the workshops at MIIETL which were expertly facilitated by a group from the University of Queensland, Australia. My views have been challenged and transformed in conversations with students, and I have been energised with questions and ideas about the future of education. It was a refreshing time to see new things and make new friends; even poutine, a signature dish of Canada, added something to the experience!
\nI come back more confident that bringing students and staff together to openly share ideas in a conference format is a really good idea \u2013 it definitely \u2018works\u2019. We need to find time to get away from the campus and visit unfamiliar places, triggering new conversations and new ways of working together. The challenge is reproducing these roles and relationships when we get back. Here are a few reflections and questions I have from our recent travels:<\/p>\n
How can we work with the language of education?<\/span> Who has the power to change higher education?<\/span> Is partnership for everyone?<\/span> Hi all! As we approach the end of what has been a massively busy term, we will be uploading a couple of reflective pieces about what we’ve been up to as a group. This is the first of them, written by the Programme Leader of BSc Business Management\u00a0at the Business School, Dr Mark Gatenby. Hope you enjoy reading and learning …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75786,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1030549,1030531],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-sacaca-project","column","threecol"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/75786"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":389,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions\/389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThere is a growing movement towards changing our definition of the roles and relationships of key participants in higher education, namely \u2018students\u2019 and \u2018staff\u2019 (also \u2018teachers\u2019 and \u2018academics\u2019). For example, at Southampton we have our Business School \u2018co-design\u2019 group. \u2018Partnership\u2019 and co- everything was the clear fashion at ALDinHE. At MIIETL we spend several days debating the definition of many keywords, only to fall back so easily on the students-staff dichotomy. We have a long way to go in constructing a meaningful new dialect, linked to local practice, which signifies how the diversity and plurality of people in education can relate to each other. Whenever we use language in a social context we make assumptions about the \u2018we\u2019 and the \u2018them\u2019.
\nMany terms are in reaction and resistance to students becoming \u2018consumers\u2019, a term the UK government seems comfortable with using in education policy. I think the biggest challenge will be somehow dealing with the multiplicity of roles and identities we all carry with us in higher education. We need to resist the temptation to brand our anti-consumerist terms and conceptual models or we fall into a self-defeating game. This year in the new undergraduate modules at Southampton Business School, Stefan and I (\u2018co-leaders\u2019 of the module) played with many different identities to refer to ourselves and others. I think collaboratively destabilising old terms and definitions is probably the best we can do for now. There is also the international language dimension to think about!<\/p>\n
\nThis leads into a key theme of all the conferences: power. Terms like \u2018partnership\u2019 often speak to questions of governance and can be compared with other organising mechanisms such as \u2018hierarchy\u2019 and \u2018bureaucracy\u2019. Partnership is often understood by its informality and lack of strict rules. At MIIETL the answers offered to questions about power were predominantly about the important of \u2018trust\u2019, \u2018transparency\u2019, and regular \u2018communication\u2019 between all participants. But what does partnership of this kind really mean for the notion of \u2018teaching\u2019 and \u2018research\u2019 in universities? Who produces and owns knowledge? Who can make judgements about the quality of learning? What does this mean for the credentials of a university degree? This week I have been looking again at the idea of Community of Practice and seeing what this says about power within the context of learning. I think much of it goes back to a more reflective understanding of the social positions we find ourselves working with, how we practice our ongoing roles, and how willing we are to move between different positions and roles.
\nThere are many players, or \u2018stakeholders\u2019, in higher education \u2013 the dominant groups being government, academics and students (perhaps also parents?). Many academics I know and read are increasingly fatalistic about the future of \u2018UK Universities plc\u2019: the corporate, marketised, managerial model. In this world, academics have become subordinated service workers. But students are also confused and anxious about the value of their degree, their role in the process, and the financial implications for their lives. The danger is that academics are distracted by the dark abstract forces of \u2018Tory policy\u2019 and students are distracted by an abstract notion of what the \u2018university\u2019 or \u2018degree\u2019 should do for them. Everyone should contribute to the democratic process and debate about education policy but both staff and students can do something much more important in their local context: turn to each other and work out how to make education worthwhile.
\nTalking about power is almost as complex as talking about love. We know when it is working well and we know when things have gone wrong in the relationship. The major warning sign in any relationship is when the partners have stopped talking to each other with care and consideration.<\/p>\n
\nThis leads to another question I have been thinking about since arriving back from Canada: is educational partnership really for everyone? Characteristic of any sweeping fashion, the overriding assumption among participants in the conferences was that staff-student partnership should become the new norm for educational design and delivery. At a liquid caf\u00e9 in MIIETL we were asked to discuss questions such as \u2018how can we scale-up student partner initiatives to engage a greater number of students and faculty\/staff and administrators?\u2019, \u2018how can we ensure students as partners is an ethos that informs all aspects of the student experience[?]\u2019, and \u2018how can we ensure that our approaches to students as partners are inclusive and engage diverse students?\u2019 Such questions make big assumptions again about the \u2018we\u2019. The danger here is that partnership moves from being a useful set of ideas and an emerging paradigm to inform theory and practice, and instead moves into becoming more of an academic religion with dogmatic assumptions and imperial ambitions. This was recognised in conversations at MIIETL about spreading practices to parts of the world outside of Europe and North America.
\nOne thing we know for sure is that people are wonderfully diverse. There are many different ways of thinking and acting, and not all will fit well with particular environments of partnership working. Some personalities thrive on carefully controlled and rule-bound learning environments. Others feel more alive and capable when they can work alone in their internal world. Both of these perspectives may find the informality of partnerships extremely difficult. Or perhaps this means that new forms of partnership will be created, such as virtual forms. Understanding the \u2018other\u2019 is a life-long journey and it takes patience and generosity to find new ways of working together. We are all social beings in one way or another. So perhaps I am suggesting we need to move slowly and considerately, and restrain ourselves from rushing too much in building education partnerships. But saying this makes me feel intensely impatient about the possibilities of alternatives ways of organising our education! We certainly need to be cautious about the language of \u2018student engagement\u2019 that we (academics and university leaders on this occasion) are not forcing students or anyone else into marriages they do not wish to be part of. And on this point, one of the words I would like to add to the conversation on educational partnerships is making decisions through \u2018consensus\u2019 \u2013 a space we can explore and work towards, even if this is a destination we can never fully reach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"