Looking back, it appears that it’s been 6 months since my last confession – um, post.
A few things have happened since then, less tangible progress than I would’ve liked but at the same time I feel that I’ve unraveled a few knots that had been troubling me and I’ve set the stage to get things done in 2021. (Sure, why not tempt fate, what could possibly go wrong with that)
It’s basically impossible at this point to not talk about COVID-19, as much as I’m sick of the sound of that term. It’s had a handful of notable impacts on my research, in that one of my underlying assumptions that people don’t know much about edvisors and what we do has shifted as more academics than ever have been forced to engage with us in the rapid shift to online teaching and learning. This still doesn’t necessarily mean that they have the full or correct understanding of this but overall awareness at least has changed. At the same time, the shift has also had an impact on the way edvisors work with academics at scale, so my ideas about (collaborative) working relationships need to be reframed and reconsidered.
The loss of the international students that underpinned university finances has also had a significant impact on budgets and staffing levels. People in edvisor roles have perhaps been safer than some but I have still a number of friends and colleagues that have borne the brunt of cuts and restructures and there remains a nervous instability in many institutions. Speaking more selfishly, I think this will mean that institutions will likely be less willing to share information about edvisors numbers, roles and unit structures than they might previously have been.
On a more positive note, I was fortunate to add an additional supervisor to my team, Dr Jess Frawley, who also works in an edvisor role and has been invaluable in providing some new insights into this work. One big breakthrough discussion I have had with the whole supervision team has led to me rescoping this project from my initial “boil the ocean” idea of getting insights from edvisors, academics and institutional leaders to the somewhat more manageable and realistic focus just on edvisors. (I can save the latter two for post doc work maybe – but one step at a time).
I also learnt a lot about going through the ethics process last year – doing so another two times for minor changes to my methodology. I suspect that the less detail about the nuts and bolts that is included the better. In my case, I’d initially said that I’d put out a call for survey participants and they would need to contact me before I’d give them a link to the survey. On reflection, I felt sure that this would have significantly reduced engagement so I needed to submit a modification to fix this. Live and learn.
I’m now reading a bunch of highly relevant theses that all seemed to hit Google Scholar within a few days of each other and trying to fight off the urge to radically upend all my plans for something completely new. Stay tuned for a post or two about what I’ve taken from these soon.
I finally also got around to engaging more with my PhD peers in the lab at my school. COVID-19 has probably been a blessing in that regard as it has meant that there has been much more web based activity to support this group that I’ve been able to participate in. This can be a very lonely endeavour and I really do value the conversations I have both with my TELedvisors friends and study peers.
I took a little time off – as it appears many of my fellow candidates are – due to the plague and the impact it is having on, well, everything. Work in the online education space has been frantic and it seemed like a good time not to try to do too much.
One thing that I’m very conscious of now is the fact that the role and value (at least hopefully perceptions of value) of edvisors has changed now. I know this will impact what I’m looking at but it’s not really clear yet how. Academics are absolutely far more aware that we exist and largely seem to be appreciative of this fact. What does this mean for my main research question?
What strategies are used in HE to promote understanding of the roles and demonstrate the value of edvisors among academic staff and more broadly within the institution?
To be honest, I’ve been thinking for a while now that this isn’t the right question anyway. It doesn’t explain why I’m doing this research (the problem) and it moves straight into looking for a narrow set of solutions for an assumed problem. This problem being that academics and management don’t know what edvisors do or what they contribute. It also assumes that edvisors and edvisor units have the time, energy, skill or political capital to develop and implement formal strategies to address this.
The heart of the issue is really, to put it plainly, why don’t people respect our skills, experience and knowledge and take our advice seriously? Which seems possibly a bit pointed or needy as a research question but that’s not hard to tweak. So this is something that I’m thinking seriously about at the moment.
Something else is the fact that I’ve never been entirely happy with my methodology. Unfortunately, as someone who hasn’t done a lot of research before – at least at this scale – I’m dealing with a lot of unknown unknowns. How much data do you need for a good thesis? People have said to me recently that the best PhD is a done one, so maybe the question is just how much data do you need for a thesis – but I feel like if I’m putting in the time, it needs to be good.
Generally my approach when faced with a big project is to gather up everything that seems to have some value and throw it at the wall to see what sticks. Then it is just a gradual process of filtering and refining. The problem is that the scope of “everything” has expanded to cover edvisors across three roles, academics and leaders in potentially 40+ universities around Australia, as well as policy documents, job ads and position descriptions, organisational structures and whatever else crops up along the way. Given my ties to the TELedvisors community, I’d hope that this group will also play a substantial part of what I’m doing.
But maybe this can be done more cleverly.
Could there be enough material just in the edvisor community? Even in the TELedvisor community? (486 members and counting). I’d long felt that case studies were an interesting way to tell a story but lack something authoritative. But I’ve been reading Five misunderstandings about case study research by Flyvbjerg (2006) and I’m starting to see the possibilities. (I think I’ll do a separate post about this)
If the world’s going to change, I might as well join in.
There’s a lot about the PhD experience that I find quite daunting – I don’t think I’m alone in this – but the administration side seems particularly nerve-wracking. Getting accepted, getting my thesis proposal accepted, getting ethics clearance: they all speak directly to imposter syndrome. Most of the time this just burbles away happily in a small dark corner in the back of my mind, tempered largely by knowing that this is just part of scholarly culture and it is pretty much universal. Hearing the many many stories of others in my position through online communities and blogs like The Thesis Whisperer has been hugely helpful in understanding that this is just part of the process.
All the same, having to pass these institutional hurdles for the first time still brings it to the fore. This is when the faint nagging doubting comes into the light because there will be proof, one way or the other, that I belong or I don’t.
Happily, I do. (At least for now)
HREC came back to me on Thursday to say that they are happy with the extra information that I provided in response to their questions and it is time to move forward.
Given the current flurry of activity in universities in responding to the challenges of the COVID19 Coronavirus, I have a feeling that this may not be the optimal time for me to be asking for the time of people in roles like mine. It’s a fascinating time to be supporting learning and teaching in Higher Education in Australia, particularly given how many of our students now come from (and are still stuck in) China. Being on-the ground in institutions that are sometimes seen as slow movers when it comes to learning and teaching change and seeing how they take rapid and decisive action at scale in seriously embracing TEL is pretty exciting. There will be a lot to say and learn when the dust finally settles – whenever that might be.
Suffice to say, I’m mentally factoring in longer than normal response times for surveys and interviews. (Not that I know what the norms are anyway, but you know). At least hopefully contact uni HR teams for more generic data about numbers and titles should be less dramatic.
I can’t remember what I’ve mentioned before about my methodology but in this first phase I’ll be seeking to survey and interview edvisors about a range things relating to professional identity and perceptions of their place and value in institutions. I know essentially nothing about what to do in terms of wrangling this data and turning it into a story – I know there will be coding and Nvivo involved for the qualitative responses – but I’m looking forward to learning it.
It also occurred to me the other day that there is a great deal to be learned about what people think edvisors are and do from successful and failed job applications. The ethics around accessing the latter in particular seems like a massive swamp but it’s something I’ll think about for later.
The cool thing about not blogging for a little while is that I get to do one of those cool narrative jumps that you get in your better TV shows* where a bunch of stuff happens between now and then but we just focus on the now.
I’m close to putting my ethics application in, I think I’ve got a fairly decent set of survey and interview questions and I have a reasonable idea of what data I want to capture in the first phase of investigation. The plan is still to work with around a dozen local Key Informants (KIs) in universities around Australia, edvisors who will help me sense check the questions and also help source information about numbers of edvisors in their institution, where they are located and how this is arranged (i.e. faculty vs centralised units, do learning technologists work side by side with learning designers etc).
I’m kind of concerned both about the ethics process – mostly because I haven’t been through it before, not because what I think I’m doing is unethical. This comes back to a lifelong wariness of authority I suspect. Recruiting KIs is a bigger worry, I think I do my best work when I don’t have to rely on other people and I don’t think I’m particularly good at asking other people to do things – specially things that will involve a bit of effort. I mean, I do it and I’ve done it but I don’t think I do that bit very well, the getting people excited and bringing them along for the ride bit. I raised the idea of paying the KIs some kind of honorarium when I spoke to Peter (supervisor) the other day but he was against it. (Ethics mostly I think).
One great thing that has happened in the last year has been the way that the TELedvisors network (and I) seem to have become a touch point for people doing research in this area. I should say, for professional staff and PhD students doing research in this area. I think I’ve been contacted personally by maybe 7 or 8 people wanting a chat and/or to use TELedvisors to help recruit participants to various studies. These all centre around Learning Designers, interestingly enough. I guess Academic Developers, coming moreso from the ranks of academics still tend to steer clear of professional staff and nobody really gives a damn about learning technologists, except me. (That’s not true, there’s a fair body of research about technologists out there but it’s a far small slice of the pie).
I’ve also reached out to a few people doing research in this space, and some taking it off in interesting new directions. I don’t feel at all insecure about saying that I feel like many of these people are smarter than I am, so it’s nice to be able to extend myself through the complexities of their ideas. Sarah Thorneycroft, someone I’ve been fortunate to know in the sector for a few years now has started her PhD on learning design, but for organisations. I think what I admire most about practitioner driven research is that it has a tight focus on meaningful outcomes rather than feeling like some kind of loose thought exercise.
One idea that I’ve been wrestling with has been about the difference between Learning Technologists (LTs) and Educational Technologists (ETs). Part of this was sparked by my gut reaction to ALT’s definition of LTs. ALT is the UK based Association for Learning Technology. In the TEL sector, they are a pretty big deal and their annual conference is one of the events of the year, from what I understand. They run CMALT, an accreditation scheme for learning technologists and also have learning technologist of the year awards. The 2017 winner of this award posted a reflection blog saying that she works as and probably sees herself more as an academic developer. In the post she does discuss “proper” learning technologists, people with this as a blog title but neither her or ALT saw not being a learning technologist as a barrier to being the best one of 2017. Which brings us back to ALT’s definition.
We define Learning Technology as the broad range of communication, information and related technologies that can be used to support learning, teaching and assessment. Our community is made up of people who are actively involved in understanding, managing, researching, supporting or enabling learning with the use of Learning Technology.
We believe that you don’t need to be called ‘Learning Technologist’ to be one.
As a professional staff member in a Higher Education institution and someone who has worked as an actual Learning/Education Technologist for a number of years, I struggle with this for a few reasons. The biggest relates to the academic/professional divide. My immediate, visceral reaction is that academic hobbyists are barging into a domain and claiming ownership like some European coloniser here to save the poor, ignorant local natives from themselves. Clearly that is a gross overreaction. It comes from an array of experiences (shared with my peers) of being disrespected and marginalised by (some, not all) academics as a professional staff member. Research is the key word at issue, as in most institutions, professional staff are excluded from this activity.
There is a second divide, lesser spoken of than the first, the pedagogical/technological divide. While I don’t have literature to back this up, I’d suggest that there is a hierarchy of knowledge in HE that goes 1) domain/discipline, 2) pedagogical and at a distant 3) technological. Given the purpose of HE, I don’t necessary disagree with this, although it does depend on what weighting we give research over teaching as a university purpose as to the gap between 1&2 and I also question the need for the size of the gap between 2&3. Both of these factors mean that, as a “proper” learning technologist, I can sometimes be sensitive to a sense of othering not just from academics but even from some edvisors in more pedagogically oriented roles and so this sense that ‘anyone can be a technologist’ probably grates more than it should.
But, I need to recognise that my feelings aren’t the only show in town and none of this has been consciously factored in to the ALT definition. Looking at it from another angle, it is about fostering an inclusive community of inquiry and practice, which is obviously a good thing. If there is one thing my research has made clear over the last 3.5 years, it’s that language in this space is hazy and fluid and just because I believe (for some good reasons) that the term learning technologist should represent a dedicated profession, it doesn’t mean that others have to. Stamping my feet about it is certainly not going to get me anywhere, anyway.
All of which led me back to the perennial question of what does a learning technologist do. Most of the ALT definition actually does capture it, though I think we need to go deeper. Managing, supporting and enabling learning are a big part of my work, with some understanding and some researching. (I consider myself fortunate to now be working somewhere that actively supports professional staff participation in research – oh yeah, one of the things that happened in the 10 months was that I got a new job). Managing, arguably is where the main dividing line between academic and professional and pedagogical and technological can be found. (Probably supporting too but let’s stick to managing for now).
Thinking about managing educational technology led me to the realisation that we should have educational technologists (ET) and learning technologists. Both need to have a strong understanding understanding of both technology and pedagogy – a fact that many people seem to miss. The difference between ET/LTs and IT staff is that our focus is ultimately always on the best application of technology to enhance learning. Without the learning, there is no need for the tech. If it doesn’t enhance the learning, there is no need for the tech. This isn’t to say that IT staff don’t have ideas about how tech can enhance learning but this is not their primary function. (I raise this – and will come back to it in a future post – because one of the biggest misconceptions about LT/ETs is that we are primarily IT staff).
So what’s the difference between a learning technologist and an educational technologist then? Great question, thanks for asking. I would suggest that an LT is principally focused on the connections between learning, teaching and technology. They tend to work more closely with teachers and will more commonly be found in faculty/college based units than in central ones. An ET, on the other hand, does this as well but has a lot more to do with how the education technology works in and serves the needs of the wider institutional education ecosystem. They are more commonly found in central teams and will work more closely with the institutional IT teams to manage and implement systems and platforms.
These central teams are often the business owners of the tech, and In addition to the impact tech has on learning and teaching, they need to be across the practicalities of how it is supported, what happens when it breaks, how it integrates with other institutional systems (e.g. student management), how its use aligns with university policies (e.g. academic integrity), legal requirements (privacy, security, intellectual property), how the implementation works with the available staff resources to actually get the work done (amidst competing priorities) and financial considerations. These are some of the less interesting aspects intellectually of using technology in education but nonetheless, they are essential for facilitating the big picture operation of the institution beyond learning and teaching.
Now, as I’ve mentioned once or forty times before, the semantic landscape when it comes to describing edvisors is more of a jungle than a garden, but in terms of making sense of the different responsibilities of types of technologists, using educational vs learning seems helpful. Whether this might also be applied to learning designers or academic developers is something for further consideration.
It feels good to get that all out of my head.
In terms of what’s next, I have a long list of things that I’m trying to cut back to something manageable and less overwhelming. A big thing overall would seem to be to do more writing, so returning to this blog feels like a positive step in that direction. The advice I read about doing a PhD is not to wait until you’ve collected your data to start writing it – because there are going to be many many drafts before it is ready. Setting up Scrivener to support this seems to be a good next thing to do. I’ve been flipping between whether I want to set up individual Scrivener projects for each chapter or just put everything in the one. A single one feels like it might be unmanageably large but maybe there would be problems if I want to quickly access content/ideas/etc between chapters if I do it the other way. Compartmentalising by chapter feels like it might better support a sense of progress and achievement. I’ll probably do that.
Time to crack on then.
*Apropos of nothing much, one of the best shows I have watched recently, to the point where I felt the need to ration it out, has been a series called Patriot. This low key spy comedy is like nothing I have seen on TV before. It has the sensibilities of a great indie film, deep rich characters, imaginative production, a profound love of language and just superb story telling. It takes it own time and I could never tell where it was going, which makes the comic moments leap out. Stephen Conrad, the writer/director has gone on to make Perpetual Grace Inc. which is equally amazing. These are true auteur shows. (Below is a nice example of the fun they have with language – I’d share a series trailer but there are too many joke spoilers, just watch it)
(Caution – this is very rambly and introspective and I think I largely used this to tease out some ideas that seem quite obvious in hindsight. You can pretty safely skip this post, even if you sometimes find my other ones interesting)
A couple more months have passed since I went through my confirmation and while I’ve been letting ideas percolate and I’ve been developing plans, it feels like there hasn’t been enough pixels put to e-paper
I caught up with Peter, who continues to assure me that I’m not aiming too high, and he said a few times that more than anything else, I need to be taking notes about everything. That was one thing that I was using this blog for and it is the thing that I am returning to.
I actually like writing and I don’t feel like I get to do enough of it in my day-to-day – or at least I should say, I don’t get to do enough satisfying writing. Emails written and instruction/process writing has skyrocketed as I slowly get my head around the challenges of a shared management role in a Higher Education institution. In those cases (other than instructions and processes), a lot of what I’m writing still feels like it is wrong because the landscape is changing so quickly that it is incredibly difficult to have the context and rationale of many of the things I’m responding to. I am quickly – though not quickly enough – learning that I’m not in a position to raise questions about decisions made at an executive level and I need to get on with just implementing them. Which is ironic I guess because I feel as though many of the calls that I have been making are similarly questioned by my team members and I know how frustrating that is. (Because I have the full context perhaps and they don’t? Who knows – that does at least seem to be one thing I can try to do better anyway)
The apparent binary between rational factors and emotional factors in decision making and activities at all levels is definitely something I had never given enough thought to before. Both types of factors are valid and need to be addressed, working with the emotional is a lot harder though. I feel as though I have touched on this a little in the Lit Review as far as teachers/academics goes but have greatly underestimated its impact across the educational ecosystem. I do suspect that this ecosystem is relatively unique in terms of workplaces and that people accustomed to working in “normal” work environments frequently don’t make allowances for it when they try to apply typical change management strategies and tools. It feels as though I have already seen it bewilder and crush the spirits of more than a few sensible and good people. It is probably both a strength and a weakness of Higher Education and I guess I need to find some way to explore and explain it in my research. I keep coming back to the Brew, Boud, Lucas & Crawford article from 2017 about “Responding to university policies and initiatives: the role of reflexivity in the mid-career academic” as something that both shocks and enlightens me about aspects of university culture. This culture seeps through all areas of the institution.
Coming back to methodology, one of my big concerns as I work out how to do the first round of interviews with Key Informants (approx 12 across edvisor and manager roles – maybe some teacher??) has been how to find a reflective sample of Australia’s Higher Ed landscape. In broad brushstrokes, we have city and regional/rural universities, “elite” research institutions (the Group of Eight), technology oriented universities, younger research focussed ones and a large set of ‘others’ that are often considered by learners as having more of a career-gaining purpose (though quality research is also done in these ones). Some institutions are financially well-off and others struggle for survival – which could both make them more open to innovation and teaching and learning support offered by edvisors as well as less able to pay for it. Culturally, the ‘elite’ universities – and particularly the academics within (to apply a ridiculously broad brush) might have much more restrictive internal hierarchies and cultures that downplay teaching support from ‘non-academics’ – or even teaching over all.
So how to allow for all of these factors (and so many more) in choosing which institutions to focus on in a logistically feasible study. Peter’s feeling – which surprised me but kind of makes sense – was that these distinctions fade away somewhat if I ultimately aim to gather rich data from all the Australian universities. All 40-43 of them (depending on the inclusion of private and international unis with Australian campuses).
In a separate writing practice I like to write ridiculously unfilmable science fiction and horror scripts. I used to write like a producer, only including the things that I thought were actually doable (not that I have the experience to know what that is any more). After a while though, I realised that this seriously stunted the enjoyment that I got from telling crazy stories and I decided that the first drafts needed to have everything and I could leave the problems of actually realising them as someone else’s problem. This feels a little bit like that in some ways and maybe it’s a terrible analogy as none of the scripts have ever been made but at the same time, it seems increasingly like the only way I am going to really learn what it is to be a researcher is to aim too high and then let reality whittle that down into something achievable.
So I guess I’m aiming to explore the relationships between edvisors, academics and management in all Australian Higher Ed institutions, in some way.
The key informant interviews are still as much about working out how to do this substantive piece of research and the different avenues that I might need to follow in order to get access to institutional data. Given that every institution is different, I guess I can only hope to get indicative insights into how this might be done rather than definitive information.
Any way I cut it, I need to actually be doing it to learn about this rather than trying to work out the perfect fully-formed solution in my head before I go and do it. Which will be a challenge but one not unlike my current new work role.
This has been my TED talk, thanks for listening. (It was really just about committing to some ideas I now realise and there is no better way to do this than have to commit them to screen.)
I mean, I guess I am anyway. After a great deal of panic and uncertainty about my methodology (particularly), I flew through my thesis proposal review/confirmation thing a few weeks ago and it was signed off by the panel with no changes, there and then.
All that remains now is to actually do the research, analyse it, make sense of it and write it up. (Oh and get ethics approval and maintain a healthy work/life/study balance and…)
While I was feeling pretty good about my review of the current literature and ideas about what I’d like to achieve in this space, my lack of research training and experience and my incredibly scatter-shot approach to what I actually plan to capture as data (and how) had me deeply concerned that I was going to be sent away to do major revisions before resubmitting my thesis proposal. (Also the fact that it weighed in at 15,000 words – a lazy 5,000 over the recommended word count).
I’ll save the full description of my methodology for another post – suffice to say that I’ve counted 17 different sources of data that I want to collect and a good 4 or 5 of them I find I’m completely unable to link them to my research questions. (Also I think my research questions are not quite what I want to do but I was damned if I was going to mention that. I mean, they’re close but the wording isn’t quite right.)
Getting this thesis proposal accepted has been my only real goal for the last 2.5 years, with everything else largely sent to the carpark to deal with later.
But I guess later is now. On with it, I suppose.
I would like to thank the friends and colleagues who have helped me to get this far and been generous with their time, support and advice – Peter, Lina, Kerrie, Mischa, Carol, David, Kate, Chie, Kym, Pam and anyone I’ve missed.
I got some rich, detailed feedback on my thesis proposal from Peter. Given that this was firmly entrenched in my mind as a first draft, I was prepared for the worst – I think – so I was fairly happy that some of the key issues were things that had already been concerning me.
I need to go over the comments again in more depth but the biggest areas for improvement so far seem to be the fact that I got a little repetitive in the latter section (and I know this is true) and I focused too heavily on building and supporting my argument in the literature review rather than just describing the current state of scholarship in the field. That I had been less aware of (or perhaps didn’t quite understand at the time), I think maybe because I’ve been concerned about snooty examiner academics looking at my idea and saying – so what? I probably also liked the flow that this – making a case – gave me in that it made it easier to look at the connections between a range of ideas but I’m sure there’ll be other ways to do that that will be less, I don’t know, needy?
One thing that was interesting was the fact that I had been concerned that I was trying to cover too many things and needed to reel it back in a little to come to an achievable project. On the contrary, Peter suggested a couple more avenues that might be interesting to explore and noted the virtual absence of students. I think it’s more about teaching than learning but I also had a great discussion with a friend last week along the lines of ‘you can learn without a teacher but you can’t teach without a learner’, so there’s some room to move there when we look at the practice of teaching (If that’s what I’m going to do)
One thing that I was perhaps a little wrong about was my sense that older literature might carry more weight or have more gravitas or something. I’ve read a lot and must confess that some of the more recent work has been particularly valuable in some ways (probably that whole standing on the shoulders of giants thing) but I guess I was concerned that overemphasising this might make it look as though I’d only taken a shallow step into the pool. Just picked up a handful of recent journals and gone ‘this’ll do’. I do still think that the older literature has value in demonstrating that these issues aren’t new and that, in spite of much discussion of them, little seems to have changed. Room for both I guess.
There were also a few minor things – formatting and heading size, indenting quotes etc – which I’m always fine with because these are the easiest to fix and the more of this there is, the less there is to improve in the actual writing and arguments and ideas. I also need to be a little more mindful of my broad declarations that a thing is a certain way and claiming knowledge of things I couldn’t possibly know. That’s fair too. Sometimes you just get caught up in an idea and go too far.
So there’s still a fair bit to be done but there doesn’t seem to be anything majorly wrong with my key ideas, so I’m happy.
Also, hooray, 50 research updates. I have no idea if anyone reads these, I seem to get maybe 10-15 hits on these posts on average but I have no idea how much people read. If you’re still here, I hope you get something from this. It’s a weird form of public personal writing really, blogging, when you think about it.
The nature of my research topic, with a focus on the status of professional staff in an academic world, feels risky at times. While I know that academic staff occupy edvisor roles as well, I have a feeling that I’ll be digging into sensitive areas around the academic/professional divide that often seem to be swept under the carpet because they raise uncomfortable questions about privilege and class in the academy and some entrenched beliefs about what makes academics special. It would be incredibly presumptuous for me to think that my ideas are all necessarily right and the point of research is to put them to the test and see where they take me but there’s a fair chance that some of what I’m going to have to say won’t always be well received by some of the people that I work with and who pay me. The other big issue is whether if my findings demonstrate a blind spot to professional staff in academics, those same academics responsible for assessing my research will see the value in my work.
Fortunately at this stage I don’t have my heart set on a career as an academic – I really do like doing what I do – but it seems imprudent to prematurely cut one’s options. I am conscious that I need to be more researcherly or scholarly in the language that I use in this space. I sent out a slightly provocative tweet yesterday, prompted by a separate (joke) tweet that I saw which said that the fastest way to assemble a bibliography was to publicly bemoan the lack of research in topic x.
Academic inside baseball: I think we kinda figured out how to do a great lit review on any topic. 1-Pop on twitter and say "why aren't academics working on this?" 2-Build scraper to collect handles from angry replies, send suggested titles to Zotero. 3-… 4-Profit.
Why do no academics research the contribution/value of professional staff in the teaching and learning third space? Classism? Cultural Capital? Lack of awareness? #TELedvisors
After 36 hours I’ve had no literature recommended but a university Pro Vice-Chancellor replied suggesting a collaboration on this area of mutual interest. Which surprised and flattered me greatly, considering that I was concerned that I’d come across as a little bolshie in my questions. Maybe it’s wrong of me to see academics as some kind of monolithic whole.
Maybe the trick is to just worry less and be honest. You can’t please everyone and if you can stand behind your work, maybe that’s enough.
I’m not sure. We seem to live in incredibly sensitive times.
In some ways this is a ‘thoughts on thoughts on’ as I’m writing about Tai Peseta’s summary reflection at the end of a special issue of the International Journal of Academic Development focusing on the politics of academic development. Specifically, it asked writers to respond to this theme:
amid the array of contested and politically difficult agendas, how do academic developers enact and imagine a future for themselves (and the profession) in ways that recognise and take seriously the business of their own political power, and in particular, their responsibility to speak truth to power (p.65)
I’ve been going to IJAD a lot in my reading because of those that I consider to be the three main edvisor roles – academic developer, education designer and learning technologist – it is academic developers that appear to dominate the research space. Which does make me wonder whether it is a role that is more dominated by people in academic (rather than professional) positions than the other two. Something I’ll be keeping an eye on.
The more time I spend looking at this particular role-type, the more I’m seeing the terms academic and educational developer used interchangeably, which doesn’t help my current line of thinking about education designers/developers primarily as people working with academics to design and built learning resources and online course sites. However it does fortunately still work with my other ideas that titles in the edvisor domain are all over the shop.
Anyway, much of this is by the by. Peseta elegantly ties together the core ideas of five papers about academic developer practice across Europe, Canada and Australia into a wider discussion about how much power or influence ADs can or should exert in their institutions. The broad tone is that this power is far more than I have personally seen but she does note that there can often be a tendency in these kinds of papers to be slightly celebratory and overstate things.
A second reading however is that while the collaboration portrayed in this account contains all the hallmarks of a cautious victory narrative, there remains an underlying question about the possible kinds of representation of academic development initiatives. In reflecting on our modes of justification, I find myself asking who is offering this story? How is the discursive field organised to enable this particular account of it?My goal is not to be cynical but rather to open up the spaces and meanings that illustrate the spectacle of academic development’s political power (p.67)
This mention of cynicism in particular brings me to what I found to be one of the most interesting parts of the author’s reflection. I must confess that in working in an environment where cynicism seemingly abounds, it is easy to travel down the same path. When mystifying decisions are handed down from on high with minimal or laughable consultation, information is fearfully hoarded by people that lack the capacity to use it well and there is a generally pervasive belief that most people don’t care about teaching and learning (vs research), it can seem like a natural progression to simply go with the cynical flow. Fortunately my job leads me more often than not to those people who do care about education and who are capable, so this at least tempers those inclinations.
It was revealing to see today in the results of the National Tertiary Education Union survey of 13500 university workers that only 27% expressed confidence in the people who run their various institutions. Sadly, clearly cynicism is the dominant culture. When we get to this state, I suspect that our ability to understand and empathise with the people that we work with and the cycle only worsens. Peseta discusses the Polish study in this issue where educational reform leaders described three institutional responses to change and characterised academics variously as:
…traditionalists, individualists, unaware, in pain, irrational, lazy, or inert. Each of these three logics permeates the policies of academic development in different ways with different reasons and leads to any number of reactions about the merits of institutional initiatives: pernicious, naive, neutral, welcome, celebratory and necessary. What is to be (or has been) our response to the contradictory reactions about our work as academic developers? What conceptual tools are at our disposal to understand the origins of these perceptions and to see arguments about them as a necessary part of an academic developer’s political repertoire. (p.67-68)
There are some big ideas to unpack in this. The educational reform leaders in this study may well be right in their summary of many of the academics that they have tried to work with but they may equally have misunderstood what has led to these behaviours. They may be grossly oversimplifying the nature of their academics, which is a human thing to do when we find ourselves in opposition to someone who doesn’t share our vision. Their rejection of this vision then calls our own abilities into question and so rather than interrogate those, it’s far more comforting to attribute resistance to lesser personal qualities. (Which isn’t to say that they can’t be present as well, just to complicate matters).
At the heart of these issues (for ADs) I would suggest is the triangular relationship between institutional management, academics and academic developers. ADs are routinely forced into a position where they are tasked with effectively driving compliance to institutional policies and initiatives by offering training in ‘doing things the new/right way’ or trying to advocate best practices to the powers that be. This, to me, seems to be the issue of where and whether ADs should assert their political power. When things take the former route
Too heavy an emphasis on compliance without critical engagement leads to dull, bureaucratic box-ticking , and effectively hollows out academic development of its intellectual contribution. Similarly, accepting and lamenting resistance without considered debate or challenges entrenches tradition unthinkingly. Although both positions are productive and necessary for academic development to flourish as a critical encounter, they each contain an uneasy energy characteristic of Di Napoli’s (2014) agonistic spaces. Yet is in in precisely these spaces tha academic developers realise and grasp the power they have to form and practise their judgement, developing a feel for the game and what it means to be in it. In these spaces, the question which usually lurks is ‘what do I do with the power and influence I have?’ (p.66)
This is also perhaps where Peseta and I diverge a little – and I’ll readily accept that my experience in Higher Ed is limited to one institution – but, as a professional staff member, I’ve never had a feeling of any political power. This may simply be a reflection of my particular context or my lack of experience in politicking and the fact that the author and most of the authors of the papers in the special issue do feel that they have some degree of power has to make me wonder if ‘it’s not you, it’s me’. So this in itself has been something of a breakthrough in some ways and is giving me a lot to consider.
The author and the authors of the papers in the special issue spell out a number of strategic approaches to developing and exercising their power that are worth exploring. Many of them seem highly valuable but a handful I’d question.
From them we learn something about how teaching and learning issues unfold into urgent institutional problems; we develop an insight into the different ways academic developers read the rhythms of their contexts, draw on research, assemble arguments, and galvanise people and resources to reformulate and address the challenges before them. Most importantly, we get a sense of how a particular course of action is justified and argued for over others (p.67)
This to me positions ADs as providers of frank and fearless advice that draws on scholarly practices that senior academics and institutional management (generally the same thing) are more likely to respond to. It puts advocacy front and centre (alongside research) as a key practice of ADs. This is something that I’ve rarely seen specifically listed in job advertisements and position descriptions for these kinds of roles, although maybe it sits under ‘advise’. This certainly lends weight to my feeling that Peseta and the other authors largely see AD roles as being occupied by academics. This is extended in the discussion of the Norwegian paper
… we are privy to the insights of a very experienced group of academic developers and this shows in several ways: in their description of the political context and their participation in it; in their deployment of expertise (institutional know-how and educational research); their sense of what to argue for and what to withdraw from; and more generally, in the way they understand the possibilities and limits of academic development (through their choice of a sense-making framework: discursive institutionalism. This piece really shines when the sense-making apparatus kicks in: levels of ideas (policy, programme and philosophy); types of discourses (coordinative and communicative); and types of ideas (cognitive and normative)… It seems to me that one of the compelling lessons from this paper is about inducting academic developers into the scholarship of the field as an opportunity to debate and defend a set of views about higher education (p.68) (emphasis mine)
This quote leaves me a little unclear as to whether Peseta is suggesting that ADs should be inducted into the scholarship of the discipline being taught or broader scholarship about teaching and learning. (That’ll teach me to only read a summary of a paper and not the paper itself. Fear not, it’s on the long list). One question or idea that has come up a number of times in discussions within the TELedvisor community is whether academics need to better understand what edvisors do but I can see a strong case for going the other way. (Even when we assume that we know). If it is about delving into disciplinary scholarship (e.g. microeconomics) I’m less convinced, as much for the sheer feasibility of it all. Maybe being to ask questions about approaches to teaching and learning that align better to disciplinary practices and scholarship is a practical middle-ground.
Moving on to the study in the special issue by Debowski, Peseta notes a different strategic approach being taken by Australian ADs.
We find an Australian academic development scene keen on a model of partnership with its political allies: from external quality agencies to teaching and learning funding bodies. The politicisation is plausible enough but the distributed nature of the political game carries noteworthy and worrying epistemological effects. The first is that the job of academic development shifts to one of ‘translation’ and ‘implementation’, suggesting in part that the intellectual puzzles of learning and teaching in higher education have more or less been settled. Moreover the thorny and substantial issue of what (and whose) knowledge is being ‘translated’ and ‘implemented’ is left unattended. A second effect is tying oneself too closely to the external political game is that it can divert attention away from a commitment to the project of knowledge-making. (p.68)
Part of me has to wonder whether this different approach – between Norway and Australia – is reflective of national cultural characteristics or if it is simply a matter of the specific examples being examined. If my feeling that ADs don’t carry a lot of power in Australia is widely true, it would make more sense to lean on other authorities to help get things done.
Peseta draws her reflection to a close by reasonably asking
whether academic developers are eager to imagine themselves in the role of steward, where there is a job to be done in caring for the field – its history, ethics and politics – in ways that are future looking. It does seem to me that a condition of scholarship lies in academic developers’ disposition to scholarliness and scholarship, as well as a desire to know and immerse themselves in the peculiarities that comprise the field. If we are to better support academic developers in navigating the messy politics of the agency game, then we need more occasions to dispute, debate and deliberate on what it is that we offer learning and teaching in higher education. We need occasions to test our politics with others in and outside of the field. (p.69)
I would love to see this happening but having had a taste of institutional and academic culture where this absolutely does not happen, I can completely understand ADs wanting this but choosing to spare themselves from banging their heads against a brick wall. (And I thought I was going to be less cynical in this post). Maybe banging our heads against walls is a necessary part of a practice though.
I’ll wrap this post up with one more quote that I want to include but couldn’t find a way to fit into the discussion. I’ll certainly be reading more of this special issue as it clearly speaks directly to my research and hopefully I can also use it to spark wider discussion in the TELedvisor community.
What feels fresh and thrilling to me is that the lens of political ontology unlocks two important aspects of the work. First, it draws attention to the matter of justificatory politics, inviting us to interrupt the discourses that structure the accounts of our work as academic developers. While institutional capture provides academic development with much sought-after leverage and profile, it has the uncanny effect too of infantilising academic developers’ professional imagination such that our identities, values and actions can appear to outsiders as inseparable from what an institution requires. Second, the focus on ontology locates these interruptions as individual and collective acts of political agency, inciting us to lead more public conversations about our values at exactly the time when higher education’s purpose has multiplied. Without these conversations, there may be a temptation to position academic developers flexible and enterprising operators advocating on behalf of greedy institutions (Sullivan, 2003) regardless of their own professional and personal values. Many of us would baulk at this suggestion while reflecting on its distinct likelihood (p.66)
It’s been way too long since I’ve posted about my research and that’s not great. I seem to be finding a lot of legitimate seeming reasons to do other things – also getting sick – and things feel a little out of control.
There is an overall plan – I’ve booked in December to write the first draft of my research proposal, including most importantly the lit review and I think I’ll spend most of November getting ducks in a row for that. The SOCRMx MOOC is helping me to understand research concepts and language a little better and I feel like it will give me enough to get through.
One thing that I have been excited to find is what p means in statistical tables. As I’ve surely mentioned, I’ve not spent a lot of time studying research methodology and pretty well no time at all working on stats. I managed to work out that n is the number of participants in a study – however it was only this afternoon that I learnt that this is referred to as the frequency. But I’ve always been baffled by what the p column meant.
Turns out that it is the probability that the two associated variables in the table have no relationship – also known as the null hypothesis. So a p value of 0.623 means there is a 62.3% chance that the relationship between thing in the column and the thing in the row just happened by coincidence. I still have no idea how that score is calculated but little steps.
This I found through the SOCRMx MOOC, which is still kicking goals. I’m getting into some of the assessable work now. Given that I’m not formally taking the MOOC – as in not being accredited for it – I’m toing and froing about the next piece of work, reading a 17 page paper about food and culture and then taking a quiz about my understanding of the research methodologies but I’m here now so I guess I might as well.
Reading some of the other student work – several people here are doing this as part of their coursework – I’m highly conscious of the fact that I still really don’t write in an ‘academic’ style and I worry that this makes me look dumb. For the most part it’s a political or ideological decision – I read something by John Ralston Saul a long time ago about how language is used by technocrats to exclude people and it’s been important to me ever since to be accessible in my communication. I realise that there is a need to be mindful of one’s audience as well and I know that when I do formal academic writing, I will be more ‘proper’ but for the here and now, I really just prefer natural language.
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