On the core unit of our PGCert in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education at MMU we have been thinking about the pedagogical theories that we use with out students with the aim of getting broader representation.  With this in mind, I have been reading a paper by Dr Paora Stucki (A Māori Pedagogy: Weaving The Strands Together) which is a combination of literature review with first hand interviews of some Māori teachers.  The paper considers pedagogy along 5 strands as “fundamentally grounded within its parent culture”, a result of the ever changing socio-political and cultural context (strand 1).  He explains this using the metaphor the forest of Tane (the Māori god of forests and birds) where “learning theories (strand 2) are the ground of the forest and the other four aspects of pedagogy are trees within it.”, these four aspects being: teaching and learning methods (strand 3); curriculum content (strand 4); teacher behaviours and characteristics (strand 5); and the context and organisation of teaching (strand 6). 

Strand 1: socio-political and cultural context

Stucki identifies well developed characteristics of Māori society and culture as of importance in what and how things should be taught.  This includes concepts such as truth (pono), power (mana) love and compassion (aroha) and inherited constraints (tapu) and means by which constraints can be released.  Tribal history and artifacts are also important, as are extended family bonds and lineages (whānau and whakapapa), and land (whenau).  This rich tapestry of concepts come together to form a way of thinking about the world that is “continuous, dynamic and evolving (Roberts & Wills, 1998)”, including the impact of colonisation with institutions that seek to redress the negative outcomes through promoting agency to overcome barriers having a significant impact on pedagogy.  A final interesting point made is that “The truthfulness of a statement is ascertained using the criteria of reasonableness, precedent, experience (Roberts & Wills 1998)”.

Strand 2: learning theories

Not surprisingly, this strand identifies the importance of caring relationships between teachers and learners.  Clear connections can be seen between this approach and one of Relational Pedagogy that “takes seriously questions of trust, recognition and respect which lie at the heart of the student’s experience” (Murphy and Brown, 2012, p 633).  However, Stucki takes this further making the assertion that this goes beyond teaching and is related to the fundamentals of who we are “socially, politically, spiritually and culturally”.

Strand 3: teaching and learning methods

Building on the point above, methods that take account of the importance of relationships: teachers-learners and learner-learner are central to teaching designs based on the metaphor of family (whanau).  This implies mixed age and ability classes, collaboration & cooperation, active hands-on learning, and co-constructing as the basis of lessons, and above all a learner centred, personalised approach.  Similar pointers are often drawn from Community of Practice (Lave and Wenger 1999) learning theory when applied to formal learning settings where at times everyone is at times a teacher and everyone learns.  There are parallels her with Vygotsky’s Social Constructivism and his key concepts of the more knowledgeable other (MKO) and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).  However, an additional layer is the spiritual where wider aspects of well-being need to be considered.  In addition, concepts of reflection feature heavily as they do I many teaching and learning contexts.

Strand 4: curriculum content

Stucki identifies the importance of having culturally representative curricula, as opposed to an imposed curriculum and the impact that can have on society at large as one world view is privileged over others.  For him the key question is not what curriculum but who is in control of what to include and what to leave out.  Although not touched upon by Stucki, the Internet, with concepts like ‘fake news’ and the ability of anyone to share ‘knowledge’ has further complicated the notion of control over curriculum in the broader sense.

Strand 5: teacher behaviours and characteristics

Tiakiwai & Richardson (2003) outlined 6 dimensions of the effective teacher:

1. Manaakitanga: They care for the students as culturally-located human beings above all else.
2. Mana motuhake: They care for the performance of their students.
3. Ngā tūranga [sic] takitahi me ngā mana whakahaere: They are able to create a secure, well-managed learning environment.
4. Wānanga: They are able to engage in effective teaching interactions with Māori students as Māori.
5. Ako: They can use strategies that promote effective teaching interactions and relationships with their learners.
6. Kotahitanga: They promote, monitor and reflect on outcomes that in turn lead to improvements in educational achievement for Māori students (Bishop et al., 2003, p. 108).

A westernised characteristaion of this would be student centred learning, linked to the ideas of Carl Rogers core conditions for education.

Strand 6: context and organisation of teaching

There was little specific in strand 6 that would be other than what would be expected by way of a learning environment conducive to learning.  Important aspects were that it reflected Māori in terms of artifacts but also that it was a safe environment.

Conclusions

The paper is summarised by Stucki’s diagram below.  As he states, it isn’t key concepts unique to Māori pedagogy that are significant, but what is important is the interconnected nature of the concepts and ideas and how they work together to support and nourish Māori culture and society.

For me, this ‘systems’ view of learning and teaching is the key message and in reading this paper I have had time to take a step back and think again over some of the ideas, concepts, theories that form part of my own pedagogy in practice.

Orlagh McCabe and myself presented some early findings of our work at MMU at the UCL APT2021 conference. In a nutshell, we used Soft Systems Methodology Problem Structuring techniques to try and better understand one of our key work challenges over the past 18 months captured in this SSM root definition, how as academic developers do we:

This challenge will have been common to many across HEI around the world. So what did we find out?

For me, the experience I had designing and developing fully online degree programmes back in 2003-2008 (Personalized learning and the Ultraversity experience, 2008) means that I am confident that a ‘visceral’ sense of community can be developed successfully with wholly online study, in this case with formal teaching primarily using asynchronous tools. This time, the challenge was similar but different, in that students had chosen face-to-face study and were now being told that a significant part of this would be online. I learned:

• we now have very effective synchronous conference platforms like Teams and ZOOM (much of a muchness between them), but mostly they can be tricky to get significant widespread student engagement though addition of apps to help with participation (Vevox, Cahoot, Padlet, etc.) helped
• Other functionality of Teams is inferior to platforms like FirstClass (20 + years ago) that had the channel like functionality but also usefully integrated email in one app – this functionality was little used – structured asynchronous learning was not a preferred mode of teaching or learning
• Although these students didn’t choose to study online, a sense of community did for many develop – a pretty good result given the challenging starting point for learners and teacher alike who were largely wedded to same-time same-place models of teaching and learning
• Some activities, like personal tutoring meetings, worked very well online being more efficient and easily accessible for tutees and tutors alike – we need to keep the good bits like this and, where teaching teams insist, large lectures that can be accessed live or later as recordings
• We have seen a significant shift in terms of staff thinking in terms of teaching design, that is thinking about how activities (a process approach) is important, moving us a little bit further away from the focus on content transmission.
• Possibly best of all, who needs traditional time-tabled exams – various formats of take-home exam when constructed well can actually asses the things we want to rather than memory under pressure.

For two years with my colleague Alicia Prowse at Manchester Metropolitan University we have been running a Office for Students (formerly Hefce) funded project to develop a cross institutional Personal Tutoring Framework.

We used Soft Systems Methodology as our theory of change and at the heart of the approach was a university wide conversation to find out about and agree the purpose of personal tutoring (PT) for students and staff.

Through finding out about personal tutoring, we discovered that our students were very adept at spotting an insincere offer – if it can not be resourced as personal, don’t pretend that it is!

When conceptualising PT, our framework suggest splitting it into designing the system of PT and the activity of PT across three domains of activity, the three C’s, course, community and career. 

The debate around measuring learning gain is gathering momentum internationally, and in the UK context is connected to the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework that is applied to higher education institutions to identify them as either bronze, silver or gold providers.  In this special issue of Higher Education Pedagogies, we  argue (Gossman, Powell and Neame) that before we start to apply complicated measurements of learning gain,  we first need to identify the educational purpose of a particular institution as it is this that should determine the nature of the learning to be measured.

Pain, gain – mission.

Abstract “We present a short conceptual framework as an opinion piece for considering learning gain based on Biesta’s three domains of educational purpose: qualification, socialisation and subjectification. We invite readers to reflect on the perspectives given in relation to different institutions mission statements around teaching and learning, and consider if the focus on developing methods for measuring learning gain is premature, given the lack of consensus regarding the nature of the learning to be measured.”

For a workshop at a recent SEDA conference, Peter Gossman, Charles Neame and myself ran a workshop exploring the concept of Learning Gain, a concept that is currently being promoted by Hefce with the aim of ‘developing and testing new ways of capturing educational outcomes and analysing how students benefit from higher education.’.  In a UK context, this is closely bound into the new Teaching Excellence Framework that will rank UK Universities on measures of the Student Experience – the Teaching part being something of a misnomer.

Our starting point for the workshop was that before we get to thinking about measures of Learning Gain (as being explored by the Hefce projects), we first need to understand something of the purpose or mission of an institution – a cursory consideration reveals that they will be very different for different institutions.

For the purpose of stimulating conversation, we invited participants to reflect on their own institutions using the thinking of Gert Biesta and his writing around the purpose of education (Good Education In An Age of Measurement: On The Need To Reconnect With The Question Of Purpose In Education – 2009) and the three functions he identifies as:

• qualification “It lies in providing them with the knowledge, skills and understanding and often also with the dispositions and forms of judgement that allow them to „do something‟ – a “doing‟ which can range  from the very specific (such as in the case of training for a particular job or profession, or training for a particular skill or technique)”
• socialisation “the many ways in which, through education, we become members of and part of particular social, cultural and political “orders‟…Through its socialising function education inserts individuals into existing ways of doing and being
• subjectification “might perhaps best be understood as the opposite of the socialization function. It is precisely not about the insertion of “newcomers‟ into existing orders, but about ways of being that hint at independence from such orders”

To help participants think about these ideas we provided them with the triangular graph (Geographers will recognise it as soil texture triangle).  The approach allows for a plot of three variables adding up to 100% (sand silt & clay for soils), in our case the three purposes proposed by Biesta. Colleagues plotted their own institution and engaged in dialogue around the positioning and what kind of measure might best be used to capture learning gain.

As a tool for structuring discussions we think it worked well as it forced choices to be made that traded off one purpose against another – less ‘fence sitting’.

For me, one of the most interesting ideas to emerge is how I can use the technique to stimulate dialogue and reflection for academics about their teaching.  For example, where would we position ourselves as a teacher using the three constructs of student centred, teacher centred and discipline knowledge?

Many institutions are pushing ahead with learning analytics and in so doing are identifying different use cases. In this example, the development of a Personal Academic Tutoring dashboard that uses the digital footprint of students across the university systems as a proxy for engagement. From a technical perspective, once data is accessible (held in a data warehouse for example) it becomes a relatively straightforward proposition to produce different presentations or visualisations for whatever purpose is identified.

In this Viable Systems Model (VSM, Stafford Beer) inspired diagram I have tried to capture the high level relationships between the key processes, organisational structures and their relationship to the external environment (pink).

Central to the VSM is the concept of variety management as achieved through amplification and attenuation between the manger and the managed. I think that the part of the system within the dotted line is relatively healthy in this respect, however elsewhere the flow of information and instructions are unidirectional which does not provide for a balanced and thus healthy system.

The relationship between students and their tutors is by far and away the most important contributor to an engaged student, and great carer needs taking to ensure that it is cultivated in a thoughtful way, and not transformed into a ‘policing’ activity. As institutions come under increasing external pressures (financial and reputational), their priorities around progression rates and destinations of students become sharpened. However, pushing targets down from the top without adequate feedback loops risks incurring unexpected consequences.

The ‘father’ of Pattern Languages is the architect Christopher Alexander. In the 1970’s he became concerned about the way in which the design process of living spaces had changed from one whereby those who live and use the buildings, streets, parks, etc. were primarily responsible for their design to one dominated by architects, town planners, and other professionals. He developed the idea of a structured template where:

Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice. (Alexander et al., 1977)

For Alexander, the process of writing patterns democratises decision making about buildings and spaces as it also communicates ideas clearly to non professionals about a design thereby allowing wider society to input int the decision making process.

These ideas have inspired the development of Pedagogical Patterns, although in this context there is little evidence of the aims of those capturing patterns to have learners as a part of the conversation.

The pattern below is a response to demand to develop an online module that can be mapped against the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF) for Higher education.

a. Archetypal example of the pattern: an inquiry based approach to improving personal work practices and organisational performance.

b. Pattern context: this pattern fits within a larger collection of patterns around supporting online learning and in particular work focussed learning using inquiry based methods.

c. Essence of the problem: how to support academics in partner institutions around the world achieve Recognised Tutor Status which equates to Associate Fellow of the HEA.

d. Body of the problem: in order to assure the quality of teaching on franchised and accredited programmes, the host Higher Education Institution needs to have confidence that the teaching and resulting learner experience is comparable to that experienced by students on home delivered programmes. This applies to multiple different contexts and needs of academics, and is essentially about delivering sustainable CPD opportunities.

e. The solution: use inquiry based approaches where students find out about their own work context, identify opportunities and issues and devise individual plans to bring about improvements. To absorb the high variety of students and their work contexts, use portfolio assessment and learning outcomes & assessment criteria that are capability focussed rather than subject or discipline. As much as possible, design activities where students interact with and support each other sharing their ideas and approaches reducing the demand on the tutor. This approach is theoretical underpinned by the concept of variety as explain in the Viable Systems Model (Stafford Beer, 1985).

f. Diagram solution: the solution below is supported through a VLE with a specific learning design.

For a long time we have been thinking about why our curriculum innovations in higher education institutions (HEI) take off or not, and this is our attempt at an explanation; ‘Handling Disruptive Innovations in HE : Lessons from Two Contrasting Case Studies‘.

We examined our experiences in two different HEI of implementing the same curriculum innovation of the work-focussed model of learning, one successfully and the other, more recent, far less so. In brief, the work-focussed model is: an undergraduate degree; has curriculum focus determined by the student’s inquiry focus; uses action research as teaching/learning approach; is support through online communities of inquiry; and has academic tutors in the role of facilitators.

Clayton Christensen theory of disruptive innovation was used as an analytical framework, and we conclude that there was strong evidence for the proposition that institutions “have strong inbuilt filters that weed out any innovation proposals that do not directly enhance the current products or services they offer to their existing markets.”  In our first successful incarnation of the work-focussed model, we operated from a semi-autonomous sub-unit and has such had a high degree of flexibility and control over our business processes and functions (marketing, technology used, teaching practices, etc.), whilst in the second case these were far more geared towards institutional norms and we found that these severely hampered the development of the new provision as the existing products win the resource battle and seek to maintain established ways of working.

The take away lesson is that for curriculum innovations to be successful, institutions need to “put in place the appropriate structural and governance arrangements that will enable them to flourish rather than get killed off.”

My choice from the 4 images offered and my thoughts around the question “What do your eyes and/or mind see? How do you connect with one of these pictures?”
I heard on the radio this morning that this weekend will be the busiest for channel ports of the year.  When I look at this picture I see nothing profound, but I do feel a strong sense of wanting to be on that warm beach in the warm sun doing nothing but messing around in the sea and the sand with my family.  With some imagination I can see the red chord and parasol as a flying stunt kite, something that we love to do when there is a strong enough breeze blowing. This is a quiet sea, but of course that can change quickly and there is nothing like dancing in the waves of a rough sea when they are smashing onto the beach – even the North Sea off the coast of Scarborough is fine with a 4mm wetsuit! I have a friend who swears by the value of the Learning on the Beach unconference.  I haven’t been to an unconference, but the next time I hear about one on a beach like this I think I might try it out!