3-Minute Thesis

Yesterday I participated in the University of Edinburgh's college-level three-minute thesis competition for the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. This is an initiative to challenge PhD students to condense their vast work into one PowerPoint slide (no transitions, props, etc.) and a three-minute speech. Today's competition really showed the great breadth of PhD research across our College, and it was great to meet other researchers from across the University.

I found this experience to be extremely beneficial, especially whilst in the midst of wading through what seems like almost endless quantities of data that I have collected and trying to analyse it and write up my results. It was helpful to condense my work into such a short piece, explaining what I have researched, my findings, and why they are important. I would recommend this as an exercise to any PhD student!

So what did I write? I'm happy to share my very condensed version of my work below to help others learn about my work, and potentially help those thinking about how to structure such a short summary talk about their work. Many thanks go to Mason Robbins for his insights and support in sharing this structure with me.

INTRODUCTION:

What’s the point of higher education? Transforming students from ducklings to competitive foxes or curious cats? Or helping them defy the odds to fly like mythical creatures?

A high-quality undergraduate curriculum that is engaging and relevant to learners’ interests and the needs of today’s society is vitally important, so why do academics often create curricula in isolation?  Why don’t they involve students in curriculum design?

LITERATURE REVIEW:

Co-creation of the curriculum is one form of student engagement where students and staff work in partnership to design aspects of higher education curricula.

There are different grassroots models of co-creation including staff working with past, current, or future students who are selected or democratically involved as a whole class.

But all models are based on respect, reciprocity, and shared responsibility.

THESIS:

In my research, I look at how students and staff advance their aims of higher education through co-creation of the curriculum.

METHODOLOGY:

I identified rare instances of co-creation and interviewed students and staff across 10 subject areas at five Scottish universities.

These co-creators had developed educational resources, grading criteria, or exam questions together and student consultants supported staff to improve their courses.

I also used arts-based methods (including images such as these) in four focus group discussions with students and staff who were not familiar with co-creation.

FINDINGS:

I have found that co-creation of the curriculum brings together students’ and staff members’ different forms of knowledge, expertise, and skills. Sharing ownership over the curriculum increases empathy and respect while also promoting student and staff engagement, creativity, and enjoyment of learning.

Beyond advancing the personal and professional development of students, co-creation also helps staff improve their teaching practices. By modelling democratic engagement in the classroom, students and staff are gaining skills together to deal with uncertainty and tackle the world's most complex problems.

CONTRIBUTION / CONCLUSION

Co-creation of the curriculum helps challenge consumerist hierarchies and humanise the education experience through inclusive partnerships between students and staff.

It’s not without its challenges and risks but, for those who do engage, there are many benefits that make higher education more meaningful and relevant to their aims.

It helps support duckling students to be creative, curious, and competitive job applicants while also helping them fly beyond what they think is possible.

Student perceptions of teaching excellence: an analysis of student-led teaching award nomination data

I am thrilled that my co-authored paper on student perceptions of teaching excellence was published in the journal Teaching in Higher Education. This research article culminates several years' work of supporting student-led teaching awards at Edinburgh University Students' Association, sharing the research previously via presentations and an internally produced report (see my previous blog post), and now engaging in this article with scholarly literature and theories of teaching excellence.

I'm able to provide access for the first 50 individuals to receive free online copies of the article via this link, and see the abstract below:

This research explores student voice and student perceptions of teaching excellence in higher education, and authors suggest implications for student engagement and student/staff partnerships in teaching and learning. Edinburgh University Students’ Association facilitates the longest-running student-led teaching awards in the UK, receiving 2000–3000 open-ended student nominations annually which raise the profile of teaching and reward strong teachers. These extensive qualitative data were analysed using aspects of a grounded theory approach to investigate student perceptions of teaching excellence. This research identified four key themes of teaching excellence: (1) concerted, visible effort; (2) commitment to engaging students; (3) breaking down student-teacher barriers; (4) stability of support. This paper explores these themes with respect to theoretical work on teaching excellence and suggests that students’ perceptions of excellence in teaching and student support advance notions of ‘critical excellence’ and ‘moral excellence’.

Read the full article.

Teaching Outside the Box

Last week I participated in a workshop led by the Institute for Academic Development on ‘teaching outside the box’. I really enjoyed the first half of the session when we worked collaboratively in groups to define ‘creativity’ and then to define ‘teaching’ separately, followed by the development and critique of our own definitions of ‘creative teaching’.

First, it was striking that for our group and for the others, the words we associate with creativity (such as ‘play’, ‘originality’, ‘engaging’, ‘exciting’, ‘dynamic’, and ‘fun’) tend to be much more positive than the words associated with teaching (‘lecture’, ‘content’, ‘learning community’, ‘collaboration’, ‘boring’, ‘contained’, and ‘should be fun’). This was a bit depressing, especially when thinking about recapturing the excitement of lectures to be, as Cathy Bovill suggests, as exciting as an adventure in Legoland® or reflecting on how creative teaching such as co-creation the curriculum benefits both students and staff by developing increased engagement with and enjoyment of learning.

It was challenging to create a concise yet all-encompassing definition of ‘creative teaching’. Our group came up with: a flexible and fun process that actively engages students and teachers in a challenging, collaborative learning experience. We wanted to emphasise that creative teaching can and should be messy and challenging, but it can also be extremely rewarding, meaningful, and beneficial for both students as staff when they overcome challenges together (for example, see my previous post about my research article). I enjoyed seeing the other groups’ definitions of creative teaching, for example the one that emphasised the tools, concepts, actions, and aspects of reflection that are embedded in creative teaching. By using stickers, it was also helpful to see which concepts resonated most with the group.

This exercise and subsequent collaborative review and critique of various definitions of creativity were extremely interesting and also beneficial for my forthcoming article on creativity in co-creation of the curriculum, which draws on some of my recent research and a presentation on creativity in learner engagement. It was helpful to have the space to step back from day-to-day activities and reflect on these concepts through having meaningful conversations with colleagues.

The second half of the workshop consisted of unstructured exploration of five different types of creative teaching methods, but unfortunately the lack of structure or case studies of how these activities were used in the classroom made the activities fall a bit flat. For me, this emphasised how creativity and fun can be important aspects of teaching excellence, but they can’t be implemented superficially just for the sake of it and need to be incorporated alongside clear learning expectations to add to and enhance engagement with academic subject content. See my previous work on teaching excellence and my article addressing challenges of co-creation for more on this, and stay tuned for my research article on creativity.

Learner Engagement, Co-Creation, and Creativity Across Educational Contexts

Last week, I was delighted to facilitate the event ‘Learner Engagement… In Conversation with Peter Felten and Meredith Piatt’ which I coordinated with Juliet Hancock and Cathy Bovill. This event was the first time in my new job as Partnerships and Professional Learning Coordinator at Moray House School of Education where I was truly able to combine my work in the professional learning office with my PhD focusing on student engagement and co-creation of the curriculum. 

It was a fantastic synergy of ideas and colleagues coming together across education sectors and there’s so much to learn from those in the primary and secondary education sectors and how they are dealing with some of the same challenges and issues that we are in higher education. Furthermore, this event was especially meaningful since Cathy Bovill, Peter Felten, and Alison Cook-Sather’s book Engaging Students as Partners in Learning in Teaching is partly what inspired me to pursue my PhD, and I was excited to have both Cathy and Peter at the event as well as many other inspiring individuals who have contributed to my PhD research.

Excitement, Belonging, Community, and Resilience in Learner Engagement

During the first part of the event, I led a discussion in front of the audience with Peter Felten and his inspiring final-year undergraduate student Meredith Piatt on learner engagement. I really enjoyed this experience since it pulled together my experience in facilitation and interviewing as well as my knowledge of the subject, and I had the opportunity to delve into some fantastic topics of conversation with them both.

In particular, I was struck by what Meredith said about learner engagement as being a feeling of excitement for her while she makes connections between her learning and everyday life, and what Peter said about how learner engagement is about staff connecting to what students find meaningful in their studies. They also highlighted how it was important for staff to have high expectations of students, which often create the spaces for students to take responsibility to take up opportunities and meet or exceed these high expectations. This is a theme that has also emerged in my PhD research which I am looking forward to exploring more in the future.

Peter highlighted how staff are teaching not just ‘heads’ but also ‘hearts’ and ‘bodies’, and this led to a really interesting discussion about the different emotions we feel in learning and teaching. Whilst many times we want these emotions to be positive and we want students to enjoy the fun of learning, it was also important that Peter pointed out that learning is not always fun. Learning is also about the challenging experiences that we have, which can sometimes be the most formative when we develop resilience through overcoming obstacles. However, there is a strong role that relationships and belonging play in student engagement to create spaces where these deep learning opportunities can occur in a constructive manner.

Learner Engagement at Scale

Following the discussion with Peter and Meredith, I enjoyed attending Mark Huxham’s discussion group on student engagement at scale. This was particularly interesting since working with large numbers of students is often seen as a barrier to both student engagement and co-creation of the curriculum. We had a very constructive discussion, ultimately focusing on how we need to find ways of ‘belonging at scale’ to help humanise learning and teaching in both large lectures and online distance learning. Others suggested examples of small-group break-out discussions within lectures or meetings outside of class with students then sitting with their group to create a sense of belonging. In the context of online distance learning, we discussed the importance of online discussions or other activities such as sharing photos of workspaces to build a sense of belonging amongst students whilst helping staff to learn about their students, and also how staff could record video introductions to sessions or develop audio feedback to ‘humanise’ online learning and, particularly, the experience of receiving constructive feedback.

Creative Engagement

In the last discussion group session, I led the group discussing creativity in student engagement. Each member of the group introduced him/herself by describing what creativity means to them. Examples included drawing connections across subject areas or contexts, lateral thinking, problem-solving, collective working and achievement that brings together individuals’ perspectives, thinking outside of the box, imagination, fun, and challenging the status quo. (I enjoyed hearing this last aspect of creativity since I saw a great connection with my previous blog post and research article on co-creation of the curriculum challenging the status quo!)

Participants’ statements are strikingly similar to definitions of creativity in the literature that suggest that creative pedagogy can encompass and further promote curiosity, imagination, play, exploration, ownership, innovation, and connection-making for both learners and teachers (Craft, Cremin, Hay, & Clack, 2014; Grainger, Barnes, & Scoffham, 2004; Jeffrey & Woods, 2009).

I then presented some of my initial findings in my research that benefits of co-creation of the curriculum include various aspects of creativity including:

•         creativity through learning from diverse individuals in the learning community
•          ownership and intrinsic motivation leading to creativity
•         trying new things despite risk of ‘failure’
•         values and empathy that promote creativity
•         fun and play in learning

In particular, we discussed how teaching and learning is a social practice, and often creativity can be seen through dialogue when we bring together diverse students and teachers in the classroom. We explored how it can be great to give students freedom and ownership, although this can pose risks. As one participant stated, ‘It’s okay to be stuck, but it’s important to know why you’re stuck and use that as a building block to become unstuck’.

This led us into a great discussion on how many participants felt that it is important to see learning as a process, rather than a product. We also returned to the idea from the initial session with Peter and Meredith that challenge is important, and by incorporating creativity into learning and teaching we help students to take ownership and challenge themselves, whilst they also develop important transferable skills and reflect on their work.

We concluded the discussion group by discussing some of the challenges to creativity, including the risks for both students and staff to experiment with new ideas and ways of teaching and learning. However, we left hoping that there are good education managers, policies, and processes in place that can allow us both as staff and learners to experiment and incorporate more creative practices into our learning and teaching.

Here, I will conclude by leaving you with some of the questions I posed to the discussion group, as well as some of our unanswered questions that may be helpful to reflect on:

•          What does creativity mean to you in your educational context, and how does it make you feel when you are creative?
•          In what ways do you give students ownership over their own learning, and do you have any examples of when you have been pleasantly surprised by students’ work?
•          Do creative practices help learners try new things and even fail within safe learning environments?
•          Do learners need to reach a certain level of understanding before they can play with ideas and concepts more creatively?
•          Within the context of high workloads and demands on both teachers and learners, do you feel there is there enough room for you to be creative in your context? How can we further facilitate creativity in our work?

Watch this space - I'm currently working on a research article exploring more of these themes of creativity in co-creation of the curriculum for a special issue on creativity in the Student Engagement in Higher Education Journal which should come out later this year.

Challenging the Status Quo to Embed Partnership

This year I have been analysing my PhD research data and have been delighted to have opportunities to share, discuss, and receive feedback on my initial findings. In particular, I began 2017 by leading the workshop 'Exploring Power: Democratisation of Knowledge through Co-production' a conference on co-production at the University of Glasgow and I presented 'Co-creation of the Curriculum: The Juicy Challenges and Clear Benefits' at the TSEP conference in London (see my Publications and Presentations page for further details).

Presenting at these conferences helped me reflect more about some of the initial research findings relating to the challenges and benefits of co-creation of the curriculum in higher education. This informed my work on a research article for the Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change with the theme of Embedding the Culture of Engagement.

I'm thrilled that my work on the research article 'Co-Creation of the Curriculum: Challenging the Status Quo to Embed Partnership' for this special issue has now been published. The abstract is below, and I hope you enjoy reading it. I look forward to any continued discussions about it via Twitter or email!

Many individuals in the higher education sector claim that co-creation of the curriculum is an innovative process of student engagement in which students and staff members become partners in curriculum development. This research analyses rare instances of co-creation of the curriculum in the Scottish higher education sector to understand individuals’ different conceptualisations of this collaborative teaching and learning practice. The researcher interviewed ten academic members of staff and ten students who participated in co-creation of the curriculum in Scotland to analyse their perspectives of the benefits as well as the challenges of this form of active student engagement. Staff and students participating in co-creation of the curriculum encounter such challenges as staff and students taking on different responsibilities, increased time and effort involved and institutional inertia as they challenge the status quo. This paper will explore how individuals have overcome these challenges to embed partnership and achieve strong benefits of co-creation of the curriculum, including shared ownership and the engagement of both students and staff in the learning community and their increased satisfaction and professional development resulting from working in partnership.

Read the full article.

Educational and International Thematic Connections

With my new role at Edinburgh University, I've been enjoying hosting a study visit of twenty Chinese headteachers. We began the visit on Monday with sessions at Moray House to show them the long history of teacher education there, followed by a Scottish welcome dinner hosted at the City Chambers to celebrate strong partnerships between Scotland and China.

After great sessions yesterday at Moray House on the Scottish policy context and teacher professionalism and standards, theory was really brought into practice today during a fantastic visit to Dunbar Grammar School today. It was also my first visit to a Scottish high school, so I was quite interested in the visit and any thematic connections with my higher education research. The Headteacher gave an overview of his growing school community, the curriculum, and their School improvement plan. He highlighted student choice in the curriculum (which is much greater at this high school compared to elsewhere) and the breadth of subjects including health and wellbeing, computing, business, and home economics. Furthermore, the Headteacher emphasised the importance of not only teachers' and parents' voices but also pupils' voices contributing to the revised curriculum and the school improvement plan. It was great to hear the Headteacher speaking about the importance of student voice and student engagement.

The Chinese Headteachers really enjoyed the tour of the school, bringing it to life as they saw cooking classes, science, art, and PE. They even were able to see a social studies  class where students were being taught to think for themselves and articulate what they would do if they were President Trump with regards to building a wall with Mexico. The Headteacher emphasised of course that students were not being influenced in what to think (and could lose their job for this) and instead were learning how to think critically and substantiate their arguments with research they could do on their mobile phones in class.

We were all impressed to see the fantastic inclusive education support provided by the Pupil Support Workers both inside and outside the school including mindfulnesss sessions, trips to the beach, hiking, gardening, working on a farm, outdoor cooking, and building relations with local elderly residents (for which they won a national award for partnership).

The Chinese Headteachers were also very interested to hear about the support provided to newly qualified teachers by both the school and the local authority. They saw how new teachers needed to meet General Teaching Council Standards for Registration, and keep up their standards through continuing professional learning. They were particularly interested in performance management of staff who did not meet the standards, which is an important issue that can arise across all education contexts internationally. In looking at the similarities and differences between secondary and higher education, I was reflecting on how universities offer the PG Certificate in Academic Practice to new lecturers and opportunities for academic staff to earn Higher Education Academy Fellowship, but they do not tend to have strong performance management processes for staff who do not excel in teaching.

Last but not least, we enjoyed learning about and seeing the various technology used in the high school. This included EdBuzz Google resources, email for submission of homework, collaborative areas where teachers could share resources, the Pupil Record System, students' digital portfolios of their progression records to document their learning, Kahoot online quizzes which  students could complete using smartphones, and ShowMyHomework to document homework for students and their parents. They also were able to learn about student voice including the prefect system, student council, and surveys. They saw student feedback forms (including questions on enjoyment of learning, academic challenge, and the quality of feedback provided by teachers) and learn how they are used as one way to monitor and support teacher performance.

It was a fantastic visit and it was especially interesting to focus on themes of student voice in the Scottish education system, student curricular choice, technology in the classroom, and inclusion. There are such interesting connections between these themes in secondary education which carry on into higher education. It was also fascinating to explore sometimes tricky issues such as smartphone use in the classroom, dealing with student behaviour issues, and processes for teacher performance management which are not often spoken about in higher education.

Connecting with Other Junior Researchers - JURE

This week I have enjoyed the fantastic opportunity to participate in the JURE conference for Junior Researchers of EARLI (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction) in Tampere, Finland! It was a great experience to meet, network with, and learn from PhD colleagues in education from all across the world whilst also being the only student at the conference representing the University of Edinburgh.

JURE provided a great programme of academic and social activities to help early career researchers get to know each other and exchange ideas. On Saturday, I enjoyed taking part in the JURE walking tour of Tampere, starting at the City Hall, progressing through the historic market, and passing local Schools. It was really interesting to hear about the Finnish outdoor nurseries where children stay outdoors all day long, as well as the early language-learning at primary schools. The tour then headed up the nearby hill through a beautiful forest to the highest part of the city where you can see views over the two lakes (on either side of the city) and also enjoy the quaint café which is known for the best doughnuts in the city. They were indeed delicious! We finished the day at a local restaurant later in the evening where it was great to meet others who had been arriving throughout the day ahead of the conference.

After many months of preparations for JURE from submitting my abstract last autumn, my article last winter, and my peer review last spring, it was fantastic to present my paper during a higher education strand of sessions. I introduced models of student/staff partnerships and my emerging model of the variables of co-creation of the curriculum, as well as my initial findings of staff and students’ perceptions of the benefits of participating in co-creation of the curriculum projects at Scottish universities. The paper was well received, with interesting questions to delve more into the nature of the co-creation projects, selection of student participants, how ‘success’ was measured, the nature of student/staff dialogue, and any correlations with student achievement. Presenting also led to great conversations with a PhD student from Spain who researches co-creation of grading rubrics in universities and with a student from Canada who wants to start similar research on co-creation of the curriculum.

Throughout the conference, I really enjoyed participating in a variety of sessions. The roundtable discussions were a particularly interesting format, with PhD students presenting only a five-minute overview of their project plans and leading a discussion to receive feedback from others and brainstorm solutions to any issues they were wrestling with. I really liked this more interactive format that promoted collaboration amongst early career researchers. I feel that other conferences and also University departments could benefit from offering such sessions to promote more discussion and shared problem-solving amongst new researchers to help them with planning their research design or wrestling with difficult questions during the analysis.

The other presentations which most interested me focused on student motivation, agency, critical thinking skills, and academic achievement. A particularly interesting presentation was testing various flipped classroom models to promote students’ systematic creativity, inventive thinking, and satisfaction with a Finnish engineering course. The researcher found that the transition to blended learning can be difficult for both students and staff members, since the increased or different workload model can negatively affect attitudes and participation. Another very interesting presentation was on different online learning designs and how they affect different levels of student engagement, satisfaction, and pass rates; unfortunately, there were no conclusive results from the analysis of the fifty-five different learning designs. It seemed that the majority of participants were conducting quantitative, positivist studies into the psychology of education, and I was surprised how few other participants used qualitative methods or other research methodologies. Since the UK model of PhD study focuses on conducting research and writing one, cumulative thesis, I was also surprised that the majority of other participants (mostly PhD students from continental European or Scandinavian countries) were participating in a PhD by publication model.

Learning how much other PhD colleagues were publishing, I was especially motivated to participate in the Writing for International Scholarly Journals workshop at the conference which was led by an editor in chief and a representative from a large publisher. It was extremely beneficial that they provided so many tangible tips for writing strong journal articles that will be accepted into good journals, and they were also extremely accessible by answering many questions about the process. I also participated in an introduction to meta-analysis workshop on how to conduct statistical analysis of a large collection of results from individual studies – I was not familiar with this and it was a good opportunity to push myself to learn about this new area at JURE whilst there was the opportunity.

I was thrilled to participate in the JURE conference, meet other junior researchers from around the world, present my research, and learn more about the Finnish culture and education system which is world-renounced. It was beneficial to learn from the various presentations, workshops, and discussions over the past few days to help me reflect more on my PhD student journey, and it was wonderful to be supported by the Principal’s Go Abroad Fund from the University of Edinburgh to support me in this great opportunity. It was an educational trip but also fun to explore Tampere and Helsinki, as well as the Finnish food!