The ‘Teacher Factor’ and the Process of Co-creative Learning – Exploring the In-between Space and the Process that Drives it

1. The ‘Teacher Factor’ and the
Process of Co-creative Learning –
Exploring the In-between Space and
the Process that Drives it
Ksenija Napan

2. Mihimihi
Ko Air New Zealand Boeing 777 te waka
Ko Medvednica te maunga
Ko Sava te awa
Ko Ngati Pakeha te iwi
Ko tangata Tarara te hapu
Ko Ksenija Napan toku ingoa
No reira, tena kotou tena kotou tena
katoa
Tena kotou katoa
Tihei Mauri ora
27/05/2014
K.Napan Inspiration for social practice
2013

3. The teacher factor

7. A challenge to every
academic
• Export service industry ?
• Corporations?
• The role of Vice-Chancellors and Deans?
• The gap?
• Rising class sizes
• Non replacement of academic staff members, but
increase in everybody’s workload.
• Contract staff
• ‘Degrees that bring revenue are privileged whereas
philosophy and critical thinking is perceived as non
productive although philosophy and reflective critical
thought was central idea of university (Connell, p.2).’
• Would rotating leadership be a better model?

8. Co-creating a better context
• Universities are meant to be
spaces for collaboration,
inquiry and discovery and
academics are meant to be
critics and consciousness of
society.
• If academia wants to retain its
integrity, it needs to be outside
of the neoliberal paradigm, or
knowledge development and
exploration will be possible
only within narrow confines of
performativity (Oladi, 2013).

9. • The role of the tertiary education is disseminating
but also creating knowledge
• Knowledge can be created through inquiry,
dialogue, participation and research

10. How are relations of production and consumption constituted
in an increasingly neoliberal institution that quells resistance
through exhaustion, attrition, evaluation, competition, and
distinction? (Haritaworn, 2011, p 27.)

11. • Can we utilise our strengths; keep publishing our concerns, get
together, dialogue, share knowledge, blog, do our best and find
ways to replenish our spirits?
• Can we retain our enthusiasm in spite of institutional efforts to
trim our wings or fix us?
• How can we overcome our fear of becoming another taxi driver
with more degrees than a thermometer?
• How can we retain our enthusiasm and find strength to transfer
it to our students and colleagues while another compliance
procedure is taking up a whole day you planned to finish that
long awaited article?

12. • Can we dare to stand up and confront when needed, can
we support each other and not buy into threats that there
is not enough while our students pay mega-fees ?
• Can we promote well-grounded excellence, which embeds
collaboration as opposed to competition?
• Can we confront manipulation and unethical practices?
• Can we assess our students’ work justly and not lightly,
even when our existence depends on retaining them?
• Can we give them a critical feedback when one wrongly
accentuated word can create a massive complaint that will
take up a lot of our time that could otherwise be spent on
creating better teaching/learning processes?

13. How can we become not only good teachers, but also
good allies to each other? (Haritaworn, 2011, p 27.)
• The term ‘university’ originally means a ‘community
of teachers and scholars’. Community implies allies,
communication, commonality, support. A community
is a place for growth and development of new ideas.
The notion of academic freedom defines tertiary
education as it allows scholars to explore and expand
ideas regardless of how strange or unusual they may
seem.

15. • With skyrocketing tuition fees turning the
idea of public education into a farce, what
alternative models of empowerment,
liberation, and education can we develop,
both within and outside the institution?
(Haritaworn, 2011, p 27.)

16. • It seems that if neoliberalism continues to drive us,
tertiary providers of the future will need to
‘outsource’ critical thinking to alternative places
where academics would be able to share and grow
ideas as opposed to merely reproducing them.

17. • Fully funded tertiary education is offered in a number of
countries.
• In New Zealand, tertiary education was free from the advent
of the welfare state until the early nineties. Since then, tuition
fees sky-rocketed coinciding with proliferation of neoliberal
ideas.
• As it is not likely that tertiary education will become free
anytime soon, what are alternative models of empowerment,
liberation and education that we can develop?

19. How important is reflexive sensitivity when it comes
to inquiry and co-creative teaching and learning?

20. Co-creative teaching – a
threat or opportunity?
• Questions are asked
• Courses are co-created and in a constant state of
transformation, based on student involvement
• The content and the process of courses are
continuously revisited and only purposeful
learning is encouraged
• It requires competent and reflexive teachers
capable of seeing beyond the mask of disinterest
sometimes present on student’s faces.

21. The in-between space

22. • When teachers become lifelong learners and develop the ability to
transfer that inquisitive attitude, students become unstoppable and
no neoliberal structure can prevent them from learning
• Classrooms become touchstone spaces when students come to
connect, re-group and reflect. Learning happens everywhere else, in
the bus, at home, on the beach, in the library, on-line, while they are
awake or while they dream
• The teacher becomes a main support person in the process of learning
and may retain a position of the source of knowledge, but this role is
expanded by being knowledgeable and skilful in development of
processes conducive to learning
• Learning processes become reflective of what each new generation of
students brings and all participants contribute to continuous
refreshment of learning practices

23. Teaching in the 21st century