1. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
Context of Higher Education : no consensus
Innovation: pedagogy and politics
Independent Study
Teaching Space
Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate
Research
Teaching in Public
2. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
No consensus about the ‘idea’ or the ‘uses’ of the university (Newman,
1873; Kerr, 1963)
‘realised and reshaped’ (Barnett, 2000; 2005)
‘rethought’ ( Rowland, 2007)
‘redefined’ (Scott, 1998)
‘neo-liberal’ (Callinicos, 2007)
‘ruination’ (Readings, 1996)
‘death’ of the university (Evans, 2004).
3. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
Independent Study
Intellectual history: Pedagogy and Politics
Humboldt’s Berlin University, 1813
Benjamin’s, Author as Producer, 1930s
Debord’s, Paris, France, 1968
North East London Polytechnic 1977
Barr and Tagg’s ‘productive learning’ 1995
Boyer’s ‘Scholarship of Engagement, 1990s
4. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
The Polytechnic Experiment 1965 -1992
North East London Polytechnic
a course to embody ‘left-wing’ ideals
Independent study Module 1974 – 1991: ‘a completely
different approach to Higher Education’ - to meet the
needs of the new type of student (Pratt, 1997: 138)
Robbins, D. (1988) The Rise of Independent Study: the
politics and philosophy of an educational innovation, 1970-
1987
5. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
Humboldt’s Berlin University, 1813
“It is furthermore a peculiarity of the institutions of higher
learning that they treat higher learning always in terms of not
yet completely solved problems, remaining at all times in a
research mode [i.e. being engaged in an unceasing process of
inquiry].
Schools, in contrast, treat only closed and settled bodies of
knowledge. The relationship between teacher and learner
is, therefore, completely different in higher learning from what
it is in schools.
At the higher level, the teacher is not there for the sake of the
student, both have their justification in the service of
scholarship.”
6. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
Benjamin, W. ( 1930) Author as Producer
„What matters is the exemplary character of
production, which is able, first, to induce other producers
to produce, and, second, to put an improved apparatus
at their disposal. And this apparatus is better, the more
consumers it is able to turn into producers – that
is, readers or spectators, into collaborators‟ (777)
7. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
1968
„We work, but we produce nothing‟ (p.41)
Cohn-Bendit, D. (1968) Obsolete Communism: the Left
Wing Alternative
Debord, G. (1970) The Society of the Spectacle
8. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
‘When people are thrust into history and forced to participate in the work
and struggles that constitute history, they find themselves obliged to view
their relationships in a clear and disabused manner.
This history has no object distinct from what it creates from out of
itself, although the final unconscious metaphysical vision of the historical
era considered the productive progression through which history had
unfolded as itself the object of history.
As for the subject of history, it can be nothing other than the self-production
of the living — living people becoming masters and possessors of their own
historical world and of their own fully conscious adventures’
(Debord, Society of the Spectacle)
9. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
‘The most important obligation now confronting colleges and
universities is to break out of the tired old teaching versus research
debate and define in more creative ways what it means to be a
scholar’ (Boyer, 1990: xii)
The scholarship of discovery – research
The scholarship of integration – interdisciplinary connections
The scholarship of application/engagement – knowledge applied in
wider community
The scholarship of teaching – research and evaluation of your own
teaching
Brew – the core characteristics of academic professionalism
Boyer, E. (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities for the Professoriate, University of
Princeton
10. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
Productive learning
From teaching to learning: a new paradigm for undergraduate
education, R Barr and J Tagg 1995
http://critical.tamucc.edu/~blalock/readings/tch2learn.htm
From instructional paradigm to learning paradigm for
productive learning
11. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
Warwick and Brookes:
Sociology/Built Environment
Research-based learning
Academic
Fellowships, £10,000
Student Research £1,500
Redesign spaces in which
student learn
12. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
Research–led:
subject content of teacher
Students as Producers
Reinvent the Research–based:
relationship students doing research
between teaching
and research by
bringing students Research-orientated:
more closely into how knowledge is produced
department
research cultures
Research-informed:
researching teaching and
learning
13. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
Undergraduate Research Scholarship
Scheme ( URSS) [ 8-20-58]
Research placement for student ( 2nd yr) with academic
extra curricula
£1,500
10 weeks in summer vacation
14. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
Student Projects
Universities Plc – learning enterprise in HE (documentary)
Sort’d – community education with young offenders
Water schemes in rural Africa
Gender and US sports
Twentieth Century oral history
Legacy of Solidarity
Womens microcredit in Africa
Democracy in Venezuela
Tanzania literacy schemes
Broadcast student writing
15.
16. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
Centre for Human Rights in Practice
„The key issue is that students feel as if they own the projects and the
research and to use it as they see fit. The problem with most teaching on
modules is that students to the work for assessment and write it up in the
way in which they feel the marker wants it to be done. But with this work
they are released from that constraint and take ownership of the whole
process so that it is not just research but a whole learning experience…it‟s
life changing stuff…Leading to the development of community projects in
their own way and by making their own connections‟.
„At the department level it is beginning to have a real impact, colleagues
can see …there is a sense of real exposure to real things that are happening
and that they are already teaching about…it‟s a natural fusion of their own
research and what students can get into…‟
Short-listed for the National Law Teacher Award, 2007
17. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
History: Galleons
The point is that there is the space for the students to
adapt the module in ways that they are interested in. The
students who are doing this approach the subject in a
different way, because they know that their research is
being taken seriously, and that it is making a serious
contribution to the course as a whole, and in that sense the
module is very much doing what I want it to.
This means that their approach is more critical and engaged
and that they have a real sense of ownership with the
ability to change the module, and not simply passively
listening to what we tell them.
18. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
Students
I think it’s a really good idea, with freedom to develop
ideas and to get involved. In normal lectures and
seminars there is no real input from the student, its
more like school, where you are told what to do and
what to write, but this is more like proper
research, encouraging new ideas and not depended
on secondary material.
It makes everything more diverse and the module is
very much student led, everyone has real input and
can make lots of different suggestions in a more
relaxed and productive environment. The world has
changed and it is important that methods of teaching
reflect that change.
19. The Reinvention Centre
at Westwood
Complexity not Flexibility
Democratic
Grounded
Technologically enabled
Acoustics
Light/Colour
Collaboration
20.
21. External Partners
HEA Subject
Centres
Ruskin College
UWE
Aston
City, U., HK
Anglia Ruskin
Sydney
UCE
Queens, Belfast
22. Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum
Teaching in Public
Students as ‘first public’
Public Sociology (Burawoy, 2004)
Teaching as Public Space
Academics as Public Intellectuals
HE as ‘public good’: reinvent
university