Curriculum Design With James Wisdom (11th April 2019)
Lucy Panesar, UAL Education Developer (Diversity and Inclusion), gave a very insightful talk about diversity and inclusion. As a middle-class white male I am exactly the type of person her talk would have been aimed at. Unconscious bias is a powerful thing and it is very easy to miss the bigger picture and forget that not everyone will share your view point.
She asked us to review the UAL Staff Development on Diversity and Inclusion webpage which was not only difficult to locate but universally seen as both uninspiring and lacking in detail. Link: https://canvas.arts.ac.uk/sites/working-at-ual/SitePage/46039/staff-development-on-diversity-and-inclusion . During the group activity (Inclusivity when designing the curriculum) I noted:
- Adapt materials to reflect the make-up of the class
- Perhaps have a workshop at the beginning of the course which highlights the topics of inclusion and diversity
- Make reference to relevant key people from diverse backgrounds and/or their sexual orientation where appropriate.
- Embed these topics into general classroom teaching.
During one of the classroom discussions with James we spoke about cultural behaviour in terms of the way different cultures learn and participate. We have a Hong Kong cohort (MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise) and these students are very reserved when it comes to participation. James recommended the John Briggs book – Teaching for quality learning in Higher Education, written while working as a tutor in Hong Kong.
We looked at student engagement in terms of who designs the curriculum and James mentioned the students studying at the School of Independent Study at UEL who designed their own learning (which needed to be agreed by there tutor). What was found was that this gave students a much greater sense of ownership. We considered terms including ‘co-creators not consumers’ and ‘engaged with, not presented with learning’.
Perhaps the most interesting insight for me was around a discussion connected with the process of learning. This was where a group of students sort to distill information that they had had to grapple with and went on to produce a simplified version that they felt was clearer and easier to digest. What they have failed to grasp was that it was the process itself of discussing and searching for clarity what was the learning and that just referring to the outcome would be of far less value to would be students of this topic. This has parallels with a project I worked on called Students as Producers. The idea was that students who had grasped key threshold concepts would create learning resources that would help other students learn. At the end I felt that the key benefits were for the participating students and that the resources themselves were not always beneficial for others.
Link: http://www.learningdevelopment.qmul.ac.uk/student-producers