A Handbook for Authentic Learning in Higher Education

Transformational Learning Through Real World Experiences

Andy Pitchford, David Owen, Ed Stevens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367197247
• eBook ISBN: 9780429516009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

An accessible resource to develop authentic learning and teaching in higher education, this book challenges conventional teaching practice and presents meaningful and impactful alternatives across disciplines that are research informed, student-centred and achievable.

Bringing together a wide range of contemporary examples, this essential text shows how academics from an increasing range of disciplines and fields have shifted their attention away from the restrictions of campus-based education. Using engaging case study material, underpinned by cutting edge research, the text shares innovations from over 50 different institutions, offers practical advice on how to facilitate authentic learning in real world contexts and examines the range of alternative assessment techniques available to the contemporary teacher.

A Handbook for Authentic Learning in Higher Education is ideal reading for early career academics exploring approaches to learning, established academics searching for practical guides to emergent pedagogies and all those responsible for leading teaching and learning practices within their department or institution.

Chapter 1

Arguing for authentic learning

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to help those who wish to develop new approaches to teaching, particularly those who can see an opportunity to bring authenticity into their curriculum in the ways that we’ve characterised. We recognise that the process of change is challenging and complex and that institutional life is full of unexpected events, hurdles and barriers. Universities are wonderfully enabling environments, but they often contain structures that inhibit and constrain, intentionally or not. They also house individuals who, for all kinds of reasons, will ask difficult questions about the changes we wish to bring. Some of these questions are designed to help us refine our ideas and propositions; some of them are designed to block our progress. Our success, and our sanity, will be enhanced if we’re able to spot the difference.

This chapter is therefore an introduction to some of the narratives and debates that surround attempts to innovate in higher education curricula. By fostering an understanding of these accounts, we hope to enable you to determine the following things:

1. 1 How to generate support for teaching and learning proposals in the context of your institution.
2. 2 The extent to which barriers or challenges are ‘real’ – we might even say authentic – or whether they’re a mask for other objections, fears or insecurities.
3. 3 Ways in which to protect and defend innovations at key stages of development.
4. 4 How best to learn from all those involved in the process of teaching and learning design – those with experience, and those without.

This isn’t a conventional ‘theory’ chapter. Although we’re now pretty exhausted having written it, the chapter isn’t remotely exhaustive in terms of the literature. We make reference to key texts and documents, but this is so that you have the chance to pursue arguments and debates in more detail. We substantiate our own positions where necessary, but our overall aim is to present debates and discussions with which we – and the many colleagues responsible for the success of our case studies – are intimately familiar. We know that you’re likely to face these challenges at some stage of your journey towards innovation, so we offer some guidance through these occasionally choppy waters.

The chapter is organised around debates under five broad sections:

1. 1 The virtues of the ivory tower
2. 2 How to learn and where to learn
3. 3 Vocationalism and dumbing down
4. 4 Students and consumerism
5. 5 Valuing diversity in higher education

In the sections that follow, we aim to characterise the kinds of questions that will be raised by friendly, or unfriendly, colleagues when the possibility for change arises. We also hope to pinpoint responses or contributions that will allow you to pick your way through these challenges and to keep faith with ideas that might otherwise be derailed or undermined.

The virtues of the ivory tower

There’s a set of ideas about university teaching and learning that can be found in the corridors and offices of all universities. These ideas are not universally held, but in some places, depending on the discipline, the institution and the ages and demography of the individuals involved, they may dominate. Sometimes, this domination will be at the expense of other conceptions, and sometimes it will be an unspoken ‘common-sense’ communicated subtly by the raising of an eyebrow, a skyward look or a stifled laugh.

The ideas relate to the virtues of a university as an ivory tower, of a protected realm, unsullied by everyday concerns, in which truth can be pursued without fear of contradiction by external interests. Those who inhabit the tower do so with great legitimacy, given their intelligence, academic achievement and the respect that emanates from their peers. They’re necessarily disconnected and separated from the practicalities of life as it’s experienced by the majority of the population, in order that they’ll be able to benefit from leisure, peace and calm rather than being constantly distracted by more worldly temptations. With these protections, knowledge can be pursued ‘for its own sake’, not in order to fulfil a contract or to satisfy some vested interest. Academics should, in this view, be free to pursue the knowledge and truths that they deem necessary to ensure the furtherance of their discipline or the insight for which they have responsibility. None of this should be subordinated to everyday concerns or to demands to engage more directly in the humdrum troubles of the locality. Academic freedom therefore protects the sanctity of scientific enquiry but can also be used as a defence against calls for the application of research or for wider collaboration (Martin, 2012).

To be a student in this version of a university is to acknowledge the wisdom of those who lay claim to valuable knowledge by virtue of their reading, searching or experimentation. These people have knowledge to profess, to declare publicly, and a student attends in order to share in this declaration. The implication is that those who are closest to the knowledge, who have the most nuanced and intimate understanding, are those best placed to explain it. Lectures, the traditional signifier of a distinctively higher education, make sense in this setting. Hear from the horse’s mouth, learn from the experts, discover the knowledge at the cutting edge. The benefits of this approach have been evidenced throughout the centuries, from the original tiered lecture spaces at Padua and Bologna to the U-shaped adaptations at Harvard and other more contemporary institutions. Technology-rich lecture theatres now enhance the experience, which can be recorded and shared more widely and at a speed to ensure that all glean the required information. Seminars, tutorials and laboratories afford students the opportunity to test and clarify this knowledge, sharing understanding with peers, refining assumptions, receiving feedback.

Students typically join a university that comprises departments, schools, faculties or colleges that in turn reflect disciplines and fields of study. All of these organisations confer status and prestige and make these rewards clear to all by public pronouncements and through rituals, ceremonies, clothing and other awards and signs. Status is also communicated through titles and qualifications, many of which hark back to the ecclesiastical roots of many institutions. The result is a complicated web of hierarchies, expectations and relationships that’s continually reproduced and which constantly attracts new members, keen to enjoy the benefits that they have seen from a distance as a student. People work very hard to enter these communities and harder still to succeed in them. The communities are prized because they have produced knowledge of unquestionable value and offer their members largely rewarding and respected lives that reflect long-held expectations. These are structures that have evolved over several centuries and imply wisdom, merit and achievement (see Barnett, 2014; Lea and Street, 2006).

We paint this picture because those of us who suggest new ways of working in this realm will often encounter hostility and recalcitrance, most frequently from those who represent this, the ‘classical’ interpretation of university life (see Martin, op cit). This is sometimes because more experienced colleagues will wish to critique new ideas in the hope that they’ll become more refined and more likely to enjoy success. It is also, however, because new ways of working imply a threat to the status quo and to the structures that support the status of those who have been successful on the basis of this established understanding or whose expectations of university life are grounded only in these conventional ideas. It’s of course true that this view of university life has some value, and few of us are likely to suggest that scientific enquiry should be curtailed in some way or universities made more subject to the demands of the state or the market. However, the traditional view of university life also conflates several rather questionable notions and tends to lament a ‘golden age’ of university life and enquiry, when the good work of a university went unquestioned, when academic freedom was protected and respected by all and when academics could enjoy an unencumbered view from the ivory tower to pursue their work without hindrance.

Identifying the specific period that’s characterised by the ‘golden age’ can prove challenging. Thody (2012) shows how the growth of British universities in the past 200 years has been marked by considerable diversity, not simple reproduction of an existing or dominant form. There has been no great period of stability, and no unifying view of the purpose of universities in this time. As we’ll see, many institutions developed in architectural isolation from their locales, but no institution has, to our knowledge, ever succeeded in building an actual ivory tower. Shapin (2012) demonstrates that this Biblical figure of speech only became associated with universities in the 1930s. It has been used in both a positive and a disparaging sense to describe the disengagement of artists, scientists and intellectuals from everyday life, but it doesn’t accurately describe any buildings, past or present, at Oxford or Cambridge or other British universities. Conflating ideas around Oxbridge colleges and ivory towers helps to enforce conventional views about the nature of university life but masks the complex histories of those institutions, which have at various times worked intimately with external organisations and communities in order to develop knowledge and educate students. There have never been any physical ivory towers, and the metaphorical ones have only been inhabited occasionally, by particular disciplines and fields of study at particular stages of development.

Understanding the contested and constructed nature of university life can help us to recognise that while particular conceptions of study and learning may dominate, many others are possible. While some colleagues seek to valorise a traditional or conventional view of how we ought to act as academics, other possibilities are evident in the histories of universities and in the logical extension of their missions or core values.

How to learn and where to learn

When considering what it is that makes a university experience distinctive from, say, a school or the workplace, the ideas of the lecture and the campus continue to dominate. The lecture is still seen as the characteristic mode of learning in higher education, and the campus marks the boundary of this community, a physical space designed for particular forms of learning, controlled and surveyed in order to guarantee the quality of the education. Unpacking the history of both of these notions can help us to challenge conventional wisdom while still appreciating the insight of those who have contributed to the development of these forms in the first place.

The lecture is a form of one-to-many verbal communication. Its history is intertwined with other related practices in religious and political settings, including the sermon and the speech. It’s centred on the sharing of knowledge by an individual who holds a monopoly position, either to the ownership of the knowledge in question or to its analysis. Given that lecturing emerged as a practice in advance of the advent of the printing press, it’s also possible to associate it with the art of town crying. Curiously, of all of these practices, only lecturing appears to be in what we might describe a growth position, all of the others having been undermined by the arrival of new technologies. The resilience of lecturing as a practice could be explained, in principle, due to the need for academics to preserve an activity that affords them status and makes clear who holds authority – in all senses. It could also be explained by its unique effectiveness and by the ways in which the lecture has been refined over time in order to maximise student learning.

In order for the latter point to hold, we would need to find evidence of significant advances in practice over time. This is not easy to do, as beyond the application of presentation packages and more recently the use of recording and distribution software, the practice of lecturing is essentially the same as it’s always been, in that a single person, who is uniquely skilled or informed, shares their knowledge in a verbal format. There is, on the contrary, much evidence to suggest that as an educative form, the lecture is deeply problematic (Freeman et al., 2014; Bligh, 2000; Gibbs, 1981). We don’t want to suggest that a lecture can’t be inspirational, because we have all borne witness to great oratory or been engaged effectively by a well-organised class, but we do want to argue that it’s simply one form amongst many and that its apparent domination may be due to historical factors rather than any great advances over time or evidence that proves its worth. Other forms of teaching and learning may be more effective and should not be discouraged.

The notion of the campus is, meanwhile, tied to ideas about residential education and intentional communities. In the United Kingdom, we assume that the ideal higher education is necessarily residential, that it makes sense to travel to a new setting for the benefits and rites of passage that accrue. We know, however, that this approach isn’t shared in many other countries, and indeed historically in the United Kingdom, the principle hasn’t been consistently applied. While monastic life and ecclesiastical education have relied on the development of communities separated from everyday life, this distancing wasn’t a feature of the ancient incarnations of universities in Europe. Rather, Klinenberg (2018) argues, the enclosed quadrangles of Oxford were a gradual response to tensions between Town and Gown, and while the students required protection, the architecture also afforded the college authorities greater surveillance of their charges and greater control over their behaviour.

Most of these early universities grew in urban environments, and while they gradually created exclusive spaces for their students, these spaces were largely integrated into their host cities rather than being an entirely separate settlement. The idea of the campus was largely an American invention, owing much to the availability of cheap land on the outskirts of cities (Turner, 1987). The American conception of the campus incorporated residential life and made a virtue of interdisciplinarity and informal learning. In turn, this idea inspired the growth and design of new institutions in the United Kingdom and beyond in the C20th, with many modelling their provision on the out-of-town campus model. As a result, we can now see a range of approaches to place and space in British universities, with some institutions inhabiting and, in some cases, dominating their host towns and cities and with others set apart, on a green or brownfield site or on top of a windy hill with the city in the distance.

Although British universities have, over the centuries, become distinctive places, separated in various ways from their host communities, this process has long had its critics. While many have seen this distancing as a virtue, others have expressed concern about the superiority implied by separation and of the failure of institutions to prepare students for citizenship and with an awareness of the circumstances of those less fortunate than themselves. Universities have been responding to these criticisms for over two centuries, with the mission and settlement movements at Oxford and Cambridge in the C19th the most obvious demonstration of the desire to help students understand more about their social circumstances and to instil a desire to reach beyond the campus environment and to work with more deprived communities (see Brewis, 2014). Since then, universities have in various ways sought to break down the real or imagined walls that prevent greater understanding on both sides, through outreach, widening participation initiatives, public and community engagement and more recently a desire for universities to become anchor institutions for local economies or to understand more fully their roles as part of the civic infrastructure.

In recent years, opportunities associated with mass higher education and more liberal markets have led to many questioning the need for a campus as it’s conventionally understood. This notion can be tracked back to the founding of the Open University in 1969 but now extends to institutions which are almost entirely virtual (consider Arden University), are reliant on borrowed accommodation in cities across the world (for example, Minerva – www.minerva.kgi.edu), those who simply rent iconic buildings (for example, the University Campus of Football Business, UFBC, based at Wembley and Etihad Stadiums) or which are located in business settings on the basis of strategic partnerships. Increasingly, British universities are engaging more deeply with local authorities in order to secure planning consent for capital development or are developing partnerships with those organisations in order to create new spaces that have both civic and educational purposes (for example, The Hive library in Worcester, the Sport Dock at East London or Imperial’s White City Campus). All of these developments demonstrate fluidity, new ways to approach and understand educational spaces, new ways for universities to engage with place.

Vocationalism and dumbing down

The idealised vision of a university offers academics freedom from interference and the opportunity to discover and construct knowledge in a way that is unhindered by external influences. As a result, contract research always carries with it the threat of constraint or subordination. Status accrues from the ability to secure significant external funds for research or enterprise, but a shadow of doubt remains because another piper is calling the tune. Is this work in the pursuit of truth or the pursuit of profit? Scepticism also abounds when degree courses are associated with particular occupations or professions, as students will be occupied not in the quest for knowledge but in a quest for compliance and docility, with the ultimate aim of submitting their will and personality sufficiently so that they can become dutiful employees.

While this scepticism harks back to our mythical ‘golden age’, it also overlooks the fact that higher education has always been closely aligned to preparation for particular forms of work. To accuse a course or programme of being ‘vocational’ often implies a lack of intellectual challenge, unworthy of university enterprise or approval. But the reality is that from their very inception, universities have been training their students for work in the church, in education and in those professional areas deemed legitimate, or of sufficient status, at any point in time (Boud and Solomon, 2001). Medicine and law, disciplines that remain unquestioned when it comes to their ‘higher’ credentials, are explicitly vocational. They develop both knowledge and skills that are appropriate to their profession. We might even go one stage further and argue that the most established or traditional disciplines, mathematics and philosophy, for example, are organised in order to create a new generation of mathematicians and philosophers, trained in the rigours of those fields, ready to extend the legacy of those who worked so hard to establish the field in the first place (Becher and Trowler, 2001).

To a great extent, these implied criticisms of applied learning, and o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Arguing for authentic learning
• 2 Organising authentic learning
• 3 Working in partnership
• 4 Change and university cultures
• 5 Global perspectives
• 6 The case studies
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index