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The place of SoTL in Higher Education, with Jane Pritchard
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Jane Pritchard, an expert in scholarship teaching and learning, discusses her background and interest in the field. She emphasizes the importance of evidence-based educational enhancement and the responsibility of individuals and institutions to engage in scholarship. Pritchard explains that scholarship teaching and learning has evolved from individual practitioners conducting research to a more systemic and institutional approach. She highlights the value of interdisciplinary collaboration and the need to broaden the conversation beyond subject-specific topics. Pritchard also mentions current trends in teaching and learning, including the impact of the pandemic on online and blended learning, as well as the importance of addressing hidden barriers to student participation in higher education. When asked about notable studies in scholarship teaching and learning, Pritchard emphasizes the complexity of the field and the lack of definitive answers. She suggests the need for more critical Welcome to the Scholarship Teaching and Learning Podcast. I'm Phil Martin. Hi, I'm Lucy Turner-Bates, and we're joined today by Jane Pritchard. Jane, thank you very much for coming on. Thank you very much, Phil. We're going to take your expertise on quite a range of topics today. But please feel free. I didn't actually prep in terms of getting through all your areas of expertise. So please feel free to say I don't know any of these things. Excellent. Can we start just a bit by giving what's your background? What's your interest in scholarship teaching and learning? And just to define our acronyms here, we usually talk to this as SOTL. So anyone new coming to this, SOTL is a scholarship of teaching and learning. So can you tell us a bit about how you're interested and involved in this and what your definition is of the scholarship of teaching and learning? Okay, thanks. My background is actually I'm a material scientist and engineer. So that was my 20th century role. And in the 21st century, I sort of moved into educational development, supporting people in teaching and learning. So I guess my interest in SOTL came from a role I had at the University of Glasgow supporting colleagues who are on teaching and scholarship contracts to really think about what scholarship meant in their context to help the institution articulate it for promotion criteria. But personally, for me, because I think it's actually a responsibility of individuals and institutions to have evidence-based, evidence-informed educational enhancement. So I actually think it's absolutely right at research intensives, particularly that we think about scholarly information developed for enhancing our practice. Brilliant. So where are we at the moment with scholarly teaching? What do we know about good teaching practice? And how has it developed over, I guess, the last 20, 30 years of a small timeframe? Yeah, well, I think we've seen previous episodes, we've sort of landmarked early 90s as being a key point in the development of scholarship teaching and learning. So I'm not sure whether that chimes with your... Well, Jane was mentioning Boyer earlier, weren't you, and the relationship between people in UK and Carnegie Foundation and that being a sort of starting point of places? It was, I mean, the Ernest Boyer kind of scholarship reconsidered in 1990, 1991, I can't quite remember the date, really kind of the start of the conversation about what is it that academics do, and at different points in their kind of careers or roles or interests. And I think the UK kind of started to pick up on it in the late 90s, early 2000s. And we have taken a slightly different approach to it in the UK, where we're slightly perhaps a broader definition. And I often try to stay away from definitions of scholarship teaching and learning per se. But I think that's, you know, that's where it kind of stems from. And I think, you know, for me, it's really about helping people to articulate what it is their intention is in developing teaching and learning. So for me, it's quite an intentional activity. Perspicable is often a phrase I use to talk about subtle. It certainly has evolved. And I think it's evolved away from being individual practitioners in their classroom doing some actual research and before and after into more systemic, more institutional kind of strategic work. I think that's a good development. It kind of, we were talking earlier, it's about that sort of community of practice. And also that it's not owned by one individual or one particular institutional place. But if we're going to make it meaningful, it's got to be broader than that, hasn't it? So do you feel like those networks have, or the networks that came, I guess, in that sort of late 90s, early 2000s have laid good ground on that? Does it feel like a different landscape in the UK? And I think, I don't know, different. I think there's, if you go to things like the International Society, the ISOTL conference is a great conference to go to, if you get the opportunity. But I think it's really, it's a really rich place to hear from people outside your subject. And that's the one thing I think that ISOTL is in danger of doing is becoming too subject based. And so it's finding place for peers and subjects to talk with each other, so chemists to talk to other chemistry educators, but making sure chemists are talking to historians who are talking to classicists. And what comes from those? Sorry, I interrupted you. But why is it that feels so important? Because I think most teaching and learning things are shared. Yeah, shared issues, shared questions, shared answers. And we sometimes think everything is very subject specific. Yeah. Okay, so it's a shared, it's a shared thing. And we don't want to restrict ourselves, basically. I think there's probably more we can learn across equally, I think there's more, I think it's equally as valid to be talking with colleagues across the subjects as well as within a subject. I have to say, coming from a disciplinary background to ISOTL, that openness we talked earlier about porousness of ISOTL is really important and really generative, because otherwise you do get stuck. And you kind of tend to feel like, I don't know, you're missing that wider picture. And we might touch on it again, and don't want to go too big scale. But a university is a place where disciplines work in a shared space, don't they? And that's part of a higher education that that's different to, I don't know, a think tank, or something quite small scale and disciplinary specific, there's a benefit there. And also learners are in that bigger environment. So we should use that wider lens, maybe. I think so. Absolutely. I think it is, you know, learning is socially constructed, socially situated. Why do we try and resolve learning and teaching problems in pockets? It seems an anomaly to me. Yeah. So I asked you a bit of an unfair question earlier about like, summarising the last 30 years of ISOTL. So yeah, I mean, I was I'm interested to know what what's happening at the moment within the field of teaching learning, generally, what's kind of trending? What are people doing? What's what's interesting research that that's quite current? Some of this might be post pandemic. And this is going to be a later question, which, you know, feel free to park or, or jump in on. But is there anything that's happened since this, the experience of movie online and things? Have we learned anything? And is, is this an area that's, that's really influenced what's happening at the moment in terms of what research is being carried out in ISOTL? Um, yeah, you're certainly seeing flavours of that, aren't you? If you read around, you're seeing a lot of people talking about how institutions are deciding whether to kind of stay more online and hybrid blended and all that kind of conversation is happening, how we support students to learn in different ways, how we support teachers to teach in different ways, assessing different ways, I think it's opened up conversations. Certainly in some institutions, we would never be able to have without the immediacy or the need to respond. But I think there's a lot of potential to ask some different questions. I think there's a danger slightly in the research to see some things we're doing as because of the pandemic, but they were already things that were already there around supporting students developing academic skills. There were, there were hidden barriers to students be able to participate fully in higher education, which have been exposed more by the pandemic. And I want to make sure that we're not using the pandemic as the kind of fall guy, if you like. So the reasons we should be doing it, we should have perhaps always been asking tricky questions about have we actually got a fair access to students engaging in higher education? So you were both talking about just before we started recording, you were talking about the importance of evidence base of our interest in teaching that we should, few would argue with I think. So is there, have we got, where is the research at in terms of these kinds of things that we're talking about? Have we got any like notable studies that have come out of scholarship teaching generally that have sort of shaped our thinking in terms of what works and what doesn't in, in learning? That's interesting questions to frame it, because actually, I've been sort of staying away from the what works and what doesn't work. Yeah, because I think that's in some ways, in helping people understand learning and teaching and the role that scholarship teaching and learning can play, is that there is no definitive paper that's going to pick up and put down and say, that's why you should use educational recordings to support students learning. We tend to build a picture of lots of bits of the puzzle. So I think it's, you know, it's, it's quite tricky to, to sell that to people who are looking for an answer. When it's complex, I think I'm not, I haven't seen things recently, which I would say were earth shattering, there's lots of good work going on. I see a lot on Twitter, the papers, there's a lot going on around AI. And I think I'd perhaps a scope there to be more criticality. I think it's we were taking a position and a lot of institutions for AI is a good thing. How can we live with it? How can we embrace it? But let's just check in about that and see how it does support students learning and what it stops. There's interesting, my colleague, Maeve was talking about she's quite techie. And she was, she looked at a study, which was about use of Google Maps, and kind of how great and useful that is also how it's getting rid of functions that might be quite helpful for people about orienting using different signs or engaging with your environment in different ways. So it's just a sort of, it's what we were talking about earlier as well, isn't it? It's the pause around assumptions, as well as this is an interesting topic, there's a new innovation, we want to look at this, but we kind of need to look at our frame for that first, don't we? And maybe ask about, yeah, sort of deeper questions about educational assumptions, I guess. It's assumed good, isn't it? Yeah, I think so. It's new, it's shiny. And what are the benefits? And it's great to start from that sort of very appreciative inquiry approach, what are the benefits, but it's also just slightly pausing and saying, there may be some loss here, let's just check in, you know, about this, you know, are we absolutely sure that if students don't handwrite anymore, is something lost? You know, and, you know, there's, you know, people talk about in academic literacy, the physicality of writing can help a thinking process. So how are we supporting students to see writing as a process, not a product? And then we're rewarding his product. Oh, that's interesting. Was there something about there's a particular study in there that talks about the importance of handwriting, is there some handwriting to say, but we were not talking about it. But we all know that when we write things down, and if you've been through school in, or certainly the last century, you did it when you and writing caused you to slow down and think, and there's a process, have we lost something by going straight to type? Someone's asking that question. So I think, and we've talked about this quite a lot already today about asking those questions, which may be a more difficult questions. And I suppose my question to you about the host, and how would we, I'm really interested in stuff like that. But how would I then build a study to look at that? And what would be my starting points on not necessarily that specifically, but I suppose, is it read around that first? Or is it start with observation? Or a bit of both? I don't think it's that there's a place to start apart from make sure you do both things. Yeah, you know, what do you kind of hypothesis or working kind of idea is, you know, does handwriting help students to develop ideas equally as well as typing? Or is there something else happening? Read around, find it, find out if there's a, this has been solved before somebody else has looked at it, have they looked at it in your disciplinary subject context? Yeah. You know, is there something physical about writing out chemical equations? Is there something physical about writing out maths? You can't imagine people who didn't handwrite long handwrite. Then they'll say, it's the process of thinking. If that went all online, are we missing something? And I think mathematicians would argue, you need to do it long hat. So that's, yeah, that's interesting. And definitely direction. I think it's worth talking about here, because there might be the main question I have is thinking of people who want to start their own scholarship teaching learning project, and they're involved in teaching, but they don't quite know where to start. And I guess Lucy probably deal with this a lot with you've got your software module and people looking for research projects, what's what's a valid thing questions to be answered, asking a moment. And I guess these kinds of things are going to be coming up a lot with this pace at which learning technology moves. And it seems to be picking up pace every year, there's just a new way of either presenting information, interacting in lectures, the mix of how hybrid learning is presented the new tools that we've got on each point, you need to stop and ask, is there a trade off here? There's something this is something cool that we can do before, but are we losing something? So this the sheer volume of opportunity right now might be a bit overwhelming for people. Just, you know, is the word what advice we take it anymore, though, I mean, sorry, but it's just, I think we have this feeling, you know, you know, pace of change is faster than all of them. But I've been in this job all this century. And I've had that every year. So it's kind of like a it's like a self fulfilling prophecy, isn't it? It's the pace of change is where one thing you're certain of change is your constant. And I think we're, we use it as a slightly potentially a defence mechanism about why we shouldn't do things rather than change. Great. Let's embrace it. And we want, you know, how do we do this? And seeing as an opportunity to ask good questions, seeing as an opportunity to ask new questions. And I've kind of Yeah, I've kind of come around a bit thinking differently about change. But yeah, coming back to the getting started a bit and not being overwhelmed and actually managing to get something that has traction to kind of build an inquiry on. The thing that struck me about what you said about the sort of handwriting thing or the the conversations we were having earlier is that it does come from people's practice, or at least in in my thinking, scholarship should come in part from your experience as a teacher and a learner. That's something learning about teaching, basically. And you talked a bit about sort of transforming something from the heart or the initial sort of sense impressions to then an inquiry. I think that's quite important, actually, because, to me, that feels like quite a distinguishing characteristic of scholarship of teaching and learning, but it starts with an experience, maybe, or how does that figure in the inquiry? It does it because it's mostly when people kind of say, I don't know what to like, where do I start? How do I start? What do I investigate? They normally had an experience, perhaps they taught something last year, which went particularly well, or didn't go particularly well. And I often use group work, people say, I tried that group work thing, my students didn't like it, and I'm not doing it again. But no researcher in their good mind would kind of walk away from that without thinking, why didn't it work? I'm not sure you're the first person who's done group work, how can I make it better? You know, what would have come sticky points, you'd go away and inquire into it. You try and make sure you're not falling down the same potholes everyone else has fallen down. So you do some reading around, get some good practice, but be sure it's actually group work is what you want your students to do. And making sure your intention is there. So sometimes it's a good and a bad experience that drives the kind of inquiry. And the difference between what I call scholarly teaching and kind of good practice, what everyone should be doing is, you know, making sure they've got a bit of context, what their practice and subtle for me is the purposeful transition of an experience, or an interest in a topic into a deliberate inquiry. You know, you're setting out and you're thinking about ethics, you're thinking about power dynamics to renew and your learners, you're thinking about creating a robust, rigorous, trustworthy investigation. But also you're thinking about something that's manageable in your time. I think and you might think, I think most people start off with PhDs worth of questions. Yeah. And they've got 10 weeks to do something. Yeah. How scholarly is teaching in higher education? Sorry, there's another massively sweep of questions. So feel free to jump in there. And one of the things that I was, as you're talking, I meant to ask earlier, one of my first questions was, it's just the importance of perhaps before you embark on your own software project, the the importance of becoming a scholarly teacher yourself first and kind of utilizing a lot of the research and evidence based practice into your own teaching. And do you we've got things like the PG cap here and various teaching courses, which are presumably we're trying to make teaching as scholarly as possible. Do you do you think we're in a good place, generally in higher education that is teaching generally, as scholarly as it should be? And I'm kind of connected to that, I think, would you would you agree that it's kind of a good place to start before you get into your own subtle project? Just thinking people who might be coming from, again, their own discipline, their own research background, and perhaps haven't absorbed as much of the literature or scholarship for teaching and learning as as, like dedicated teachers, perhaps? Um, it's a massive question, you're right. Um, isn't that back to read again, before you kind of slide off? Yeah, I guess. I don't really care. I mean, it's, you know, I mean, it's just like, you need to have some experience to talk about or think about whether or not you've read a lot of literature about teaching and learning might not be I don't think you always have to do it before you embark on your teaching or scholarly teaching. But I think you certainly should be starting to think about whether or not this is the right thing to do. I don't see teaching as a craft. I know some people do. I see it as something that people can learn to do and learn to do better. And I think that reading has its place to play. But why do you say you don't see it as a craft? That's interesting. Because it's just some people can do it. Some people can't. Okay, I would see it as a different analogy. But yeah, I think you would do your apprenticeship again, with, you know, I'm not going to say master crafts person, but it's, but I guess sometimes in crafts, it's a sense that sometimes your mentor might be, or your master might be shaping you in their image, right? Yeah, in the craft that way. And I think that the important bit is to enable people to sometimes challenge some of the practices, because their tradition, tradition isn't always good practice. Yeah. And it's like you're kind of breaking that up. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the motivation behind the question really, because I think teaching based on my own observations, I've seen a lot of people who are very tradition based in their teaching, and they have cherished beliefs, like that might not be borne out in, in the literature, for example, and I take your point, the readings, not everything, but how, how much of a problem is kind of entrenched personal ways of teaching in higher education? Or how many times have you seen it? And do you ever like, do you ever get to the, did you ever just like, watch people teaching? And you just think, you know, there, there are things that you could concepts that you could become familiar with that would help you just looks like they haven't updated their teaching in a long time. Sorry, I'm playing a very cynical picture here. But do you know what I mean? Yeah, I think it's going back to something Lucy was saying. It's, it's, um, I think that the role of software for me is to connect heart and head is that we, no one goes in to deliberately give a bad lecture or bad seminar or design a poor assessment. No one has the intention of doing that. But there's a lot of feelings and belief around what good looks like in teaching. And I think if we left it there, we'd be doing a disservice to ourselves as, um, as professionals, and we'll be doing a disservice to our students. And I think for me, the subtle bit is connecting the head back into that. So what makes you feel that students don't like engaging or asking questions of each other? What makes you feel that students do that? And they are feelings and a good bit of software is to start actually sometimes what feelings do you have about learning and teach what makes good learning and teaching in your subject? It's important to me that students do 50 titrations in order to learn by taste, titration and chemistry. Is that true? Do I really need to do 50? Or do I need to do 10? And I think for me, there's a lot of heart and I don't think sometimes it's moved on. But I think there's opportunities through things like recognition schemes, through kind of PG caps for the early career, but I think the more established and take the moment stop take about what they do, and how it supports learning to provide a framing of why they their feelings about learning, teaching or good and then to hang the scholarship off that. It's the intentional bit again, as well and sort of and discipline actually disciplined analysis of that feeling and the assumptions behind it and then thinking about how are you going to ask that question and what will be the sort of method that will enable you to kind of get to the end of that inquiry. So this is the feeling of two different things as well. And you talked about beliefs. People have a belief that it's really important that teachers, you know, we have a belief that, you know, if it's anonymously marked, we'll be more robust. But actually, we should be have some professionalism that we should still be able to look at who the candidate is, we've got good assessment criteria and protocols. And we can give some personalized feedback to that student. So we've got these contradictions. So we know that this stuff can happen. But we have this kind of belief that anonymity creates a more rigorous system. Hmm, I don't think that's true. You know, PhD vibe was the least anonymous experience out. But no one questions the validity of that. No, I think that's really interesting. And it's something we were talking about again, earlier is particularly around PhD education. And that's an area of scholarship, I'd really like to see more of, it feels to me like it's a bit, it's been a bit the second coming the stuff on postgraduate or PhD. There's good stuff in Australia. I mean, long time. I mean, when I started that, I think I suppose my first if you like, technically formal social project was around PhD supervision. Okay. And, and what happens in the meeting between the supervisor and supervisee, and that sort of negotiated space, which kind of there was a load of really interesting stuff about research supervision concepts, concepts, conceptions of supervision, trading, bartering, crafts, master, apprentice kind of models. But PhD supervision is the last place we go to talk about developing practice, you're right, we're quite happy to talk about developing a lecture, or seminar, or a lab, but we don't talk about supervision, because that's, that's research, and that's not teaching. And there's loads of great stuff out there. Okay. Get up and make some lists of it later. We were we had some prepared questions, I think, Lucy, have we made any inroads into these? Yes, I have answered your questions. Yeah, it was, that's, it's been, I think, my, my questions were mainly around, as somebody who is quite interested in how minds work, and how we absorb information. And looking at a bit of like debunking of popular, because I agree, I like your example about the anonymity and marking, it is one of those things that you just think, why, why are we doing it this way? And I think universities are, because of their size, this, this happens a lot in universities, you get entrenched practice, and they are in many ways quite conservative institutions, it's very difficult to instigate change. And I tend to see a lot of things, which to my eye, I should be reviewing those, I end up asking, what, why are we doing things like this? And you often get the question, well, we just do, don't we? And, and it's about kind of inquiring that and pushing out, but some days hard in universities, because we, we were looking for scholarly informed teaching, we should be open to saying, we're doing things like this, but I can't see any evidence that this is an effective method. And things should, things should be open to change. But it sometimes feels harder than that harder than it should be sometimes. But do you think it's sometimes there's a lot of myth busting? So yeah, in educational development, we often I think we're often doing a lot of myth busting, you know, the institution won't allow us to like, is that true? But also, I think we encourage, we talk about innovation, a lot sometimes in teaching and learning, which suggests it's shiny new. Sometimes we forget to go back. And I think as you say, to ask a really kind of fundamental questions about our propositional offer, have we got some of the the building blocks right in the first place? Yeah, we challenge that we're looking at the latest use of VR or AI. And they're great and valid questions, but we we kind of skirt over what I'd call foundational aspects of the teaching and learning experience. So I think we need to keep revisiting them to check in that they're right. But now at this stage in 2023, is it right we still have anonymous marking? Is it right that we still? I don't know, I just I think it's an assumed, it's an assumed rigor. You know, I think, you know, we know, there's bias in marking and people know, but I think that we say feedback is more is better when it's more personal. These two things can't, you know, they don't work together, pieces of data, aren't they? Yeah. But it's very testable. You know, you can see, but people don't want to ask because that's done and dusted. There's a feeling of done and dusted. Yeah. You know, I think we should be going back and asking some questions, really ask the question about really what is the purpose of a timed exam assessment in most subjects? You know, and if the answer is because it's prevents cheating, they can't use AI. And I think we're doing a disservice to our learners and a disservice to our academics in designing great assessment tasks that are more realistic for their subject. You know, I think we're still not questioning some real fundamental practices around timed exams. You talked earlier about an example of a kind of more shiny word coming up, innovative assessment, where my learners, instead of doing that, were producing a podcast or something else, a radio script for two different audiences. And that was really interesting to me, because it highlighted, I suppose, a meaningful sense of assessment and a kind of a sense of what is it for being not about performance, but about getting them to think about something differently. And I suppose, I don't know where I'm going with this, but that was just it was what the purpose of higher education is. But yeah, so it's and it's like a contract, isn't it? So when we're asking kind of inquiry questions, you could say, we're designing assessment tasks that help the student to tell us what we've told them. And that feels like a real shortcoming of higher education, we should be thinking about how we're supporting students through our teaching and assessments to really tackle really conceptually difficult things. And you should want actually sometimes the feedback from your students to be that was really hard, I had to really think. Not that thank you very much, I feel very supported. It's you know, they want some real kind of conceptually difficult topics and trickiness, but also that the demonstration of the learning isn't just a private practice to the lecturers. It's got some sense of, can you take this learning and translate it into different audiences? If you really want your students to write for different audiences and communicate as part of your graduate attributes, your transferable outcomes, don't get them just to write you essays in a closed book exam, get them to do those kinds of tasks. So I'm really pleased you said all those things, because it's making me, it's leading me to this idea of York at the moment, very self consciously promoting itself as a university for public good. And maybe we can talk a bit about where and how scholarship of learning and teaching could kind of fit into that. Because it must be about that sharing, in a sense, sharing sort of our thinking with learners, but also building assessments, which enable learners to take that impact back out. I mean, do you see what scope, how can we use this public good sort of byline to really argue for the place of scholarship in an institution like ours? No, no pressure, Jane. No, it's only a university mandate, isn't it? And we haven't thought it ourselves yet as an institution. So ask the question, then I'll get everyone else to answer it. Coming up with a definition, I would say, I'd almost stay away from a definition. It's like, what does it mean to talk about public good in chemistry? So yeah, you know, you see a lot of things around citizen science. Yeah, those students are out there, like a colleague in Bristol used to get students to work with the council to do monitoring. So they learn about doing very real projects with very real data that inform the council about air quality. Yeah. I mean, that's good. So it's kind of a live lived experience, isn't it? But getting students to write about something highly theoretical to prove to Phil and Lucy that I know something about air quality testing in chemistry. Maybe they both got their place, but it certainly shouldn't just be the latter. Yeah. So something about it's not only the what, but the what next. Yeah. And you do need that. We need learners to come out with those knowledge attributes, don't we? I hate the way you speak in this language, but it does it after a while. But we also need to know what they're going to do with it. And is it meaningful for them? And it might always be kind of like pragmatic or practical. I think that's one of the things is if people say, well, you know, like the maths at school arguments, why do students need to learn some of the maths they learn at school? It's because it teaches logic and thinking. And we've we need to be careful not to lose that as well. There's a reason to kind of grapple some theory because, you know, we start to think about different other things differently. So everything has to be sort of transactional and useful. But there is an element where probably more of our assessments should show some externality. So really well said, I think. Yeah. So it's not an either or, but it's an and. Do you think higher education is slightly too assessment focused? I don't think it's assessment focused enough. Controversial. Yeah. Controversial. Go on. I guess. Why do you say that? Because it feels like we are this ever present concern of are we doing enough to prepare students for assessments? And listening to conversations recently kind of triggered by the artificial intelligence context about assessments needing to be realistic representations of things that students will do in the future. And we just seem to be very, the conversation is kind of plugging around assessment a lot rather than what we're actually teaching them. So the content of the course, and I know everything should be aligned, but it's it just seems recent conversation seems to always lead back to assessment. Is that something you've noticed or would you? Yeah, I guess it's, it's become a bit adversarial there for me. It's like teaching versus assessment, like content versus that thing we need to do. And assessments become, it's starting to feel to me like this sort of necessary evil institutions talk about it, or when we have to assess them in order to give the degree. It's, I think we should be seeing assessment as the kind of, it's a driver. It's a driver. Yeah. I mean, it does drive learning. There's lots of research that says it does do that. But if you're finding your assessment is driving bizarre or perverse behaviours in learners, then change it. Yeah, it's changed. I think embrace it. I think it's, if you see assessment as just telling students telling you how much they remember, if you're really engaging lecture, then it's, there's no point to that. If you see assessment as being challenged by AI, because, you know, you put the question into the AI, and it gives a really good answer, then stop asking that question, because the student can do that. That's not higher education. Higher education is knowing whether the answers are useful, insightful, what they can do with it. You know, I think I like to see a return to thinking more about assessment as, you know, being something to be positive about, you know, and the teaching is to provide students the conditions to think, really think and assessments to require students to really think. And not just be remembering lots of information and preferencing certain types of learners. You know, we don't create a condition where actually students are sorry, I will put the camera here. But there is a sense that I think we, we, we sometimes have really innovative teaching. And we can do PPL, problem-based learning, and we can do voting and colouring in and all these kind of exciting teaching. And then we come back to really traditional assessment. And I think higher education's missed a trick in creating students who can demonstrate their knowledge, their skills, their attributes, holistically in a variety of ways. And actually, all students should be able to do that, not just some students. So actually challenging them to be able to communicate, to write, write for different audiences to visually represent their information. Yeah, sounds great. You've talked about that in your practices, Phil, and I both share a kind of bit of academic skills and writing support background. And you've talked about using different genres of writing with learners haven't you before? Yeah, didn't you do some scholarship? Are you really nervous enough? I think everything you're saying is totally valid about looking at different ways of expression, you know, with it, I think there is a just observationally, again, there seems to be a shift away from just relying on essays that regurgitate what students were taught in lectures. I'm not sure that that's I don't see that a lot. I think I think most of when I look at module specs and program specs, I mean, you look at the learning outcomes, they tend to be fairly, you know, based around deep learning, I don't see too many that, you know, over rely on, you know, wrote memorization of knowledge chunks. And so I think you sort of see that in assessments, and I see some interesting assessments coming out like you know, video blogs, and using different media to as ways of expression, different genres of writing. I think that's all I think it's happening. And it whether it answers the questions of whether they're, you know, preparing students sufficiently for what they're going to be doing in the future, I think is, is open to question. But I suppose no one, no one sets out to in their outcomes to say they're looking for knowledge and remembering. So I think that's the slightly disconnect for me is no one, no one states that. But at the end of the day, it's very hard for a timed condition assessment not to be actually looking for that quality in a student. So the intention will be that this is deep learning, we're asking these tricky questions. But the reality is the students who can recall seeing similar types of answers before will do better. So there's very little I've got called new thinking in situ happening in those conditions. But the stated outcomes look deep, and the assessment looks like it's that but the behaviour required by the student is probably more of a strategic approach. We should be looking for some sort of transferability. Is that fair to say? I mean, yes, you might have, we need you to demonstrate that you have learned particular things for sure. But it's doing that in a way that's not purely rote. And there should be some element of problem solving going on in assessments. Thinking, I think it's, I think it's proper thinking. It's not, in some sense, it's not playing a game. I think a lot of assessments can feel like game playing. Yeah, and it's, you know, I kind of like it in terms of like, you two might have had a lot played a lot of Monopoly and board games at school, and you come to university and you find out the game is Cluedo. You don't know the rules, but you've got an idea of the feeling of that. So you kind of Okay, I know I've got to roll the dice, I've got to get around. And for some students, they've never played any board games. And no one's helping them to unpack that kind of tacit understanding about what is required in assessments. And they've only ever played cards. And somehow these students are kind of disadvantaged by the system, but they, and they don't know they are. And, you know, and there's a, there's a sense of whether you're not the right type of student or, you know, you should know what it means to be at university, you should know that Cluedo's like Monopoly, it's just, you've got to get a lead piping in the library kind of thing. So it's, so taking that as an example, which is sort of the rules of the game and you like, is as either educators or educators of educators or developers of educators, is that a sort of interesting topic area, the kind of it's a, I'm trying to form a question around, I think, inclusivity and opening up the black box of higher education, do we need to do more work there? Or is it that we need to change the assessment? Or is it a bit of both? Isn't it? I think, I think inclusivity is I mean, everyone's you asked earlier about, you know, what's kind of like, we're talking about inclusivity all the time. It's been around for a number of years, the Office for Students and the access participation plans of foregrounding and institutional minds. And it's a great lever for talking about creating the enabling conditions around teaching and learning for all and making a tacit explicit and all that. And I think it's, it is a really important part, but it's no one naturally is going to say they're an exclusive teacher. No. So how do you tackle the question about who you're teaching and learning is for without, because no one's going to put a hand up saying that my teaching and learning isn't for these people. So it's quite clunky to go in, I think, sometimes with it, how inclusive is my assessment? So ask questions, which are more like, you know, what kind of behaviours, what kind of support to students need to be successful in this assessment? What are the kind of environment you need to support with the students in the lecture in the office hours, whatever it is, for the students to do the type of thinking, rather than measuring inclusive, you know, you've come over seven out of 10, your assessments inclusive, we can't have a hard number to creating a culture and environment. But we don't ask those questions. I think we ask, we come in at the other end for me, I think that might have been an aspect of my question about when I said, are we over rely on assessment? I, I think at the back of my mind, there was something about are we over rely on the quantitative aspect of assessment and this need to assign a numerical value to everyone's learning. I mean, it seems to be the default mode for most of us have most assessments or grade, you mean a number, a grade, or albeit, you know, we have a huge drive for quality feedback, we know the importance of feedback on learning and guided feedback, everything else, but ultimately, the number is always there. And I think there has been, you guys probably talk about this more than I would know, but there has been a fair amount of research to say that the grade can be counterproductive. In some, in some situations. Yeah, there is, there is stuff, isn't there about, you know, saying, you know, give feedback without marks, you're just going to change the feedback. I think it's only reality, isn't it, though, assigning a some kind of outcome, whether it's numerical or word. I think that's, that's the bit where you have to be a bit practical about what the purpose of each is. It does have we are accountable, we are accountable to every taxpayer in the country. Yeah. And that's not a bad thing, actually, having accountability in higher education, you know. So for me, that's not a bad thing. But numerical grading, percentage grading, I think it's the most unhelpful thing we've done. Yeah, I think we sent we set up a sense of linearity between the 68% what two more things do I need to do? Yeah, but we'll say you'll probably say it's qualitatively different. Getting a two one to getting a first, but we don't set it up like that. We set it up as what two things, you know, okay, so it's about that heuristic judgment versus numbers on them. Yeah. And we spend a lot of time stuff spent a lot of time making agonizing over 68 and 66. We're quite frankly, that's not a produce of anyone's time. Yeah, and the impact on on the learner, the person receiving the feedback can be completely out of proportion to the intention. Yeah. So as a marker, perhaps we have to land on a particular grade or sometimes a particular side of a great boundary. And we might do so casually. So 68, but the impact on the learner might be huge, because it's culturally contextualized. Yeah, if you work in North American institutions, um, so when I worked in in Queen's University in Canada, and I first did some marking, they they told me just to add 15 on to my British marking. And I arrived at the same outcomes. And it shows how, how it's not a really an objective, no matter what, how clear your criteria, there's, there's a social construction around what good looks like in marking. So I, you know, me, a fail mark in the North American system was 50%. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And here it's 40 or 50. Yeah. Masters. Yeah. But also, then you get things like habits, which should be challenged more through social about we never give over 70. Yeah, we don't use the full grade bundle. Well, then if you don't cover 70, you make 70 or 100. Yeah. You know, it's this kind of ludicrous, really. You know, so, yeah, there's a lot of things around our, you know, in terms of sort of isn't always about inquiring into students learning, it's about inquiring into teaching practices and behaviours. I think we should be doing far more work. And I think the recent marking and assessment boycott has challenged some institutions think about different ways to think about marking. And I think that the question about what are the good questions to be asked is, there's an assumption made that some marking practices are better than others. And we're constantly being asked to defend and say, Why? Tell me how this assessment is as good as this one. How is this as good as a, you know, a lecture, we have these kind of mythical gold standards of higher education, the closed book exam, the lecture, these are how is anything else you do in teaching and assessment as good as this? This is this is important, I think, because it's actually also coming back to another point that we talked about earlier, I really want to touch on a bit, which is around challenging those sort of assumptions. And how can we as subtle practitioners or burgeoning subtle practitioners find courage to do that? And, and, again, the big question is, you can just solve that for us. Okay, that is easy. Yeah, let's see. 10. Yeah, what can what can sustain us in doing that? And where? What? How practically can we, we can have two networks is your network, you have to be have to be sharing the stuff. And I think, yeah, you know, there's got to be space, I tried this, and it didn't work. And I think it's, it's embracing, almost embracing failure, you want your students to take risk, you want your students to say, we learn when we fall over, we learn when you fall over in teaching as well. And being more honest, more quickly with peers about something that's sticky, not working, not quite that good. I mean, yeah, so I think it's creating those kind of groups around you and networks, but honesty and transparency. There's far too many conferences where everything worked. And it's not a clear picture, is it? And that's really problematic. And if you come from practice, and you want to enter into this community, and it feels like the community is saying, or there's bits of it that it's all right, when you're thinking in your own practice, it's not went like a lead balloon. And expect your first couple of kind of more formal teaching inquiries to not go well. Yeah. And you want to apprentice learning a new skill set and new methodologies. You're going to ask the wrong questions in your surveys, you're going to analyze your data incorrectly. Of course, you are. So is that a point where I know we're we're running up against the clock now. So I'll try and know this won't be a concise question. What am I talking about? Right. So before you were I wanted to pick up on a couple of things that you were both saying, before we turn the mics on, which was talking about the importance of the peer review process and publication. Is that what you it sounded like a conversation that we're chatting about for? So is there an argument that one of the shortcomings of doing that without, you know, the auxiliary conversational aspects and the social learning, because just now you're highlighting the importance of the social aspects of, you know, sharing your practices, which I totally agree with. But if you if you're just dependent on the on the publication, as your means of communication, do you miss that level of scrutiny, which people asking you questions kind of like what we're doing now, where you're having a spontaneous discussion, and you kind of have to justify a belief that sometimes the conversation, the speed of the conversation makes you realize, Oh, actually, I don't have a really strong justification for that. That's a good point. And you incrementally change your mind through the course of the conversation. So I think that's, that's why things like the more dialogical media of scholarship and teaching and learning are so helpful and so valuable. And that's not to preclude review article is that it's just a slower conversation, isn't it? But it's also the end of a process as well. So it's part of it. Yeah, I think I think what you're saying is that in so when I was, when you're when I was doing my materials, search, things you think about what people do you, you present ideas quite broadly at conference, you take a hit sometimes, or you get some feedback, you can say I tried this, it didn't work, you might do that in departmental kind of presentations with your peers. And the ideas tend to be raw. And I think we we don't present very raw ideas and teaching and learning. I think that's the bit that's really important to create that dialogue. But we shouldn't be afraid of going to that more public, more formal peer review process, and opening ourselves up and wanting to get that critical feedback. And not seeing it as a challenge. I think there's a danger slightly in subtle and calling everything software is that because it was it was so happy, people are interested in teaching, we want to call it scholarship, teaching and learning. I think software should put its walls up a bit more than saying, that's great. And I'm really pleased that you're interested in teaching. And I'm really pleased you read some stuff. But softly, deliberate, purposeful inquiry, and not to muddy the waters between Canada value in that as an idea diluted, it will lose its value. So yeah, and yeah, they scholars are talking about the dilution of software and it's become this broad church and everyone's in, you know, we'll have people doing it. Distinguish and want it something. Yeah. And I think that's really important here at York as well, where we, you know, the research article, the scholarship, or a published piece is a currency of academics, academic currency, the world over. And there's a reason for that. And the kind of set of standards that go with that. And that's okay. In fact, I really value that. I think it's important. And we, we if we do dilute that we lose something really, really important. And we we lose that for learners to you know, that's our culture as practitioners, isn't it for, for good reason, some of it, but it's not just doing that you go out and you give presentations, yeah, and give talks, you, you know, it's, it's recognized. So I think it's, it's recognized, but also getting people who are subject experts, and, you know, in disciplinary research, they're doing all this, but, and that's going into the pot of kind of informing the publication is one thing. And I think too quickly, subtle tried to say it's not about publication. I think it should be I think I want to put it back on the table. Yeah, definitely. And just my question is about should it be just publication? I don't think because I find it really about the writing process. If you're writing for, you know, something which you hope might get published, because it's just putting your work under a different kind of microscope. And it is really valuable, because a lot of times, I thought, Oh, I've got a great idea for an article. And you start writing. And you get into it, you realize, actually, I don't have anything that new or interesting to say, because, you know, forces you to explore certain reading avenues, and it forces you to, you know, think your ideas through a microscopic level, and put the put everything down into coherent sentences that all hang together. And it's at that point that you realize that actually you've had a maybe a bit of a cherished belief that doesn't quite bear scrutiny. So I totally I really find that process as well is you talked to earlier a little bit about difference in what was it being being something and doing something critical thinking and critical beings. Yeah, yes. So that process of being engaged in the constant sort of analysis and that it's not done, which is sometimes again, a bit overwhelming. But it's also why it's interesting, because you don't stop that process. Once you've published an article, you then or done a podcast or whatever it is kind of continual habits, isn't it? So before we all turn to pumpkins, because it is past 12 o'clock, Lucy, did you have any of your questions here that we are going to kick ourselves not asking, we could just do a quick fire. Jane, how to succeed? Well, there is one which we've touched on, but I'd really like to finish on it, which is about working collaboratively, I think, with scholarship, and we talked about conversations. And I suppose just closing on that, you know, what networks can we get involved in? How can we how can we how can we make sure our practice is collaborative? And what does that look like for us? That's a small question. Again, yeah, frankly, comes back to something I think we're talking about earlier as well is is you can be collaborative also by making sure you're talking to people across subject areas across institutions, finding those opportunities connecting to different social media. I mean, I think we're talking earlier, I find Twitter has been the most important thing in the last three or four years for me to stay connected quickly and rapidly to the latest thinking and asking questions. And we're talking about publications just now, they're great, but there's time lag. And you see a lot of early prints and early ideas. So doing that, and you also speak to people you wouldn't normally speak to. Not just looking and reading and speaking to people in your own subject, go and talk to the people across the corridor, go and talk to people across the university. I mean, universities is the ultimate place to kind of meet people out of your district, go and talk to other institutions. And, you know, make sure you're stepping out. And we talked a bit about kind of the politics of paying attention to the landscape of higher education in the UK. And I think people need to connect themselves into the kind of the debates around learning and teaching HE, freedom of speech conversation, it matters. But in the wider context, you know, what the Office of Students is saying about access and participation, tap yourself into that, love it or hate it, the teaching excellence framework. These are things that are happening in the UK. Yeah. So stay connected, talk, but be open to listening as well. Well, thank you very much. Thank you for taking the time to come and talk to us. It's been really great. I'm going to drag you around in unexpected directions, because it's been really educational. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Anything you thought about good luck.
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