Welcome to the first installment of Enlightening Dialogues.
My name is Gabriel Cavalli and I'm director of LITE, the Leeds Institute for Teaching
Excellence. And in a world increasingly fast-pacing and with 30-second videos and soundbites and
everyone on the screen, the idea of Enlightening Dialogues is to provide some deeper insights
and reflections emerging from just having a chat and let the magic emerge.
Enlightening Dialogues, I like a pun, and what a first installment I'm delighted to have here
are outstanding guests. So I will ask them to introduce themselves and briefly tell us
what you may think are properties about yourselves for today. So Margaret, who are you?
What a confronting first question. Who am I? My name is Margaret Bearman. I'm a research
professor at the Centre for Research and Assessment in Digital Learning, CRADLE, at Deakin University
in Melbourne, Australia. And I guess I research what it says on the tin, assessment and digital
learning. I have particular interests in feedback, generative AI, and I think we're going to be
discussing about what sustains changes in educational practice. Brilliant. And we also have Jeff.
Jeff, who are you? So did I hear you say that we have to be enlightening and the conversation
is supposed to generate magic? Could we set a bar a little bit lower? No pressure. No pressure
whatsoever. So I'm Jeff Grabill. I'm the Deputy Vice Chancellor for Student Education at the
University of Leeds and spent most of my career in US higher education, 20 years in particular,
at Michigan State University, where I was a researcher of rhetoric and digital communication,
which I think comes and will come back to in terms of design arts and also in the provost office
developed and led an educational innovation function within the institution to try to
to move that institution around some some difficult corners with regard to what education
might need to look like in the early to mid 21st century. So a little bit about who I am,
nothing magical in that particular introduction, but hopefully useful. And last but not least,
Robert, who are you? So my name is Robert Averies. I'm a research and impact officer at the Leeds
Institute for Teaching Excellence, where I support development and impact of wide range of pedagogic
research projects. I have a teaching and educational leadership background in international
adult education. And this is where I saw my assumptions about teaching and learning and its
wider purpose continually challenged. And that taught me the value of applying a reflective lens,
whether that's in an academic sense or more in my day to day work. And as Maxine Green put it,
asking yourself, what are we as educators trying to bring into being? And I hope that kind of
perspective will lend itself out to this discussion and I can provide some useful reflective insights
for our listeners. So Robert is one of the multiple deep thinkers at light, and he's here
to bring a feature of enlightening dialogues that we call Tell Me What You See, or in this case,
Tell Me What You Hear. A bit like tearing down the fourth wall and bring every so often for the sake
of our audience, a different perspective. And it's not about agreeing or disagreeing with the
dialogue itself between here, Margaret and Jeff, but to remind us what does what we hear sound like?
Is there some other reading, interpretation or connection to anything else that our audience may
find inspiration from? And it doesn't even have to be within the subject of the conversation. It can
simply be, it reminds me of a book or a film by whomever. We already got a Maxine Green reference,
which is absolutely phenomenal. Yeah, no, you've earned your keep already. So are we ready? Sure.
Okay, so let me start with Margaret. What really caught LITE's attention in your work, Margaret,
which is impressive and in the depth and breadth of it, but particularly was your work in sustainability
of teaching and learning innovations in higher education. So what attracted you to this topic?
I've had a very long standing interest in what makes things stick. I mean, we spend a lot of time
in education and I think probably everyone in this room and maybe everyone listening, given it's magic
and all that kind of gear, has been involved in a very beloved educational piece of work
that you put your heart and soul into and then you blinked and it was gone. It dissipated and all
this love and care and in fact you might even say the impact that it was having just evaporated.
To give a very simple example, the very first project I was involved in when I was in my very
early 20s, and this dates me so strongly, I was hired as my first RA role to do a multimedia package
on HIV AIDS and this was at a time before a cyclone. So it was actually a package about
really managing social conditions, stigma, what could not be done in a very terrible time and by
the time I'd finished the package I was very proud of it. It was a wonderful piece of work,
the drug regime had happened and of course that was fabulous, nothing better. And if you want to
see your work go up in a piece of smoke that is the best way to do it because it really shifted
everything but it was really the first thing I ever did was a striking reminder of how innovation
has time and place and moment and what is it, where should we invest, how do we sustain things
forward and when is it time sometimes to let things go and say they've done their job.
That's fantastic way of setting us off. Jeff, in your case you have a keen interest and expertise
in designing student experiences, how did you end up in that area?
Yeah that's a good question, I sometimes don't know how I ended up in that area.
Maybe just a brief little kind of academic history, I mean Margaret used a rhetorical term in terms of
talking about time and place, that's the rhetorical concept of Kairos which is a very powerful concept
that I'm happy to go on and on about but won't but that's my disciplinary background which is
a field of study and practice largely North American I think in its current form.
It's a design art and rhetoric is I think usefully understood in a colloquial way as
the art of changing the world through language and to do that you have to design rhetorical
interventions, communications, engagements with people around who they are, where they are and
what they need. So it's a design art and so I've pulled that through my career. I don't think
anybody in a school of design would own me or maybe might own rhetoric as a discipline that
belongs in a school of design but we own ourselves in that space and my field certainly in terms of
its 20th century representation in the U.S. has been braided with educational work. So
literacy crises in particular tend to drive educational change and innovation at the school
level and at the university level and that's the case with my particular world which was focused
on writing in particular. So the crisis of bringing people to universities who didn't
belong in universities previously so the successive waves in U.S. higher education of
being more accessible to beginning with the GI Bill and soldiers returning from the Second World
War and having access to higher education these are the great unwashed and so I use that term with
great irony but it did drive changes in general education and the way in which we think about
writing and maths in particular as something that is required of every university person.
That particular kind of teaching problem, how do you help people learn how to write
who may not see themselves as writers who might have much writing experience.
You combine those two things, my discipline, my field, my world and me as an individual.
My entire career has been marked by working at the level of design and also thinking very carefully
about teaching a broad spectrum of university students and so that gets me to a place where
a university president or a provost looks at people like me and in my case people me and saying we
need to do some innovative work around education and you're one of the people at this particular
institution your colleagues more broadly are the people who tend to think about educational
innovation in a broad and accessible and thoughtful way. Will you be willing to do some work? So I get
to that space not really by choice but by doing the work if you will for a long period of time
and being identified by a senior leader who says I have a job for you will you do the job and
I'm just too stupid to stay to say no to those opportunities. Can I ask a question? Absolutely.
What do you enjoy about it? What do I enjoy about the job? Yeah so joy is the right word. I find the
work that that I've done at Leeds which has been exceptionally difficult and the work that I did
particularly the last five six years at Michigan State which is also very difficult I found I
I derived a great deal of joy in that work in this and then because we were doing something
that mattered we were we the work was consequential which is why it was difficult and I got very
interested over the last 10 years of my career in in doing good things at scale and the problems
we have problems of sustainability we have problems at scale and they do intersect in particular
sorts of ways and I knew I knew what I could do with a classroom of 20 students and I knew what
my program could do with a cohort of 150 but at 50,000 scale or planetary scale if we really want
to be crazy about how we think about educational innovation. Magical. Magical right the problems
of scale are scale introduces new problems and so I've got I find those kinds of intellectual
challenges and I have found my leadership roles intellectual work not management work. I sort of
coil at being called a senior manager in the UK. I'm an intellectual I think and I try to bring that
that to my work and to the work that my colleague we're trying to we're trying to untie some really
meaningful intellectual knots and that's fun and when you're trying to do it with an explicit
interest in working with people and with the idea that you're gonna if we untie this knot their lives
will be better that's joyful. What a lovely answer. Oh thank you. So I suppose that actually looking at those
perspectives I mean the obvious is trying to intersect them and and and as opposed to challenge
particularly from a perspective of what light is working towards it really takes me nicely to
can we in this space design for sustainability and if so you know what does that mean and
how do we go about it? Well you so I'm gonna kick it to Margaret because I read your paper on this
and and and I'm let's yeah we have the expert. Oh no expert is strong interested we have the
interested. I think that one of my and and and I think it's interesting to hear you talk about
the sorts of interventions you can make because I am I I do a lot of naturalistic on the ground
work I do it in health care I do it in higher education and one of the things that's really
striking about it is how difficult sustained change is and for a whole host of reasons we often
a lot of the innovation work and I'm doing what do you call them here? Air quotes. Air quotes I'd say
bunny ears but that sounds very childish. The innovation work is often tied to technology you
know chat GPT is a great example there's a new technology an iphone it comes and a lot of the
work on innovation change is this idea that you plonk the innovation in front of you
often a piece of technology and it will naturally stay it will stick because it's a thing but in
education what we're actually talking about is the way people do things and there's some work
Neil Selwyn is probably the best known person who talks about this that that says that often when we
bring in a new device or a new thing our practices don't change so we really just start channeling
the things we've already done through the new devices that we have so what does bring sustained
change? It's unclear I'm going to be really brutally honest we know there's some things that matter
we know that what I'm just going to call roughly going with the grain matters so you need to be
in alignment with what everyone's thinking and this is based on research and also on other
people's research also a bit of my own work that you know that going with the flow of people is
really important if you have a particular way of thinking and doing to come head strong against it
you're not going to be salmon swimming upstream you're going to be carp swimming upstream it's
not going to happen you're going to come back down. We know that leadership matters intellectual
leadership even if we say and that whole idea of governance supporting we know that
strange things like money help but not as much as you might think time seems to be more important
than money there's some weird equation between the two and it's not it's not one-to-one
we know that people matter in in higher ed we know that educators matter the collegiate teams matter
collaboration matters and we know that students matter so to go back to that very early which I
hope stays in this podcast introduction about magic there does seem to be a piece of magic
where you can run two things that look pretty similar side by side and one of them will stick
and one of them won't and we have some clues as to why that happens but I don't know if you can say
what actually causes that magic and I can say for a lot of times that it's not evidence we know a
lot about what best best practice good practice what we ought to be doing is I mean think of all
the things you ought to be doing are you doing well maybe not so much how's that your membership
going that kind of thing we know so knowing what something should be or what you aspire to is not
the same as doing it so there's a whole lot of conditions and then finally to add on to all of
that there's a really well established pattern of human behaviour to return to what is familiar
and what is known and we we revert to it it's a very human thing to do and that drives a lot of
things so even though people can start off with really good intention and really good desire
you can end up doing what you've already done and um yeah referring back to that your membership
again you can see how that how that works in in human behaviour all the time I don't know if those
things are a problem I mean if it was all simple then where would be the intellectual challenge
where would be the fun we'd be turning out a bunch of very effective clones yeah I mean I think that
that's a brilliant description to be honest with you of of not just your work and the insights from
your work but but at least my understanding of what the literature more broadly looks like and
what I what I hear you describing really exceptionally well is is a system that in which
the sum is very much greater than its its its parts right so all of those elements you can change
any one of them and get one of them right or three of them right but they interact with the other
elements of the system I think in my experience that you talked about the grain and I think you
get change that's conceived that's possibly sustainable when you change the grain and to
play with that metaphor changing the grain of anything is really hard and I think that that
does explain substantially why change initial change is exceptionally challenging in education
and sustained change is even even more challenging I wonder though so I don't know can I ask Mark so
I don't expect you have a definitive answer but I wonder what you think about this kind of a question
is the initial change harder or easier than sustaining the change easier you think so
definitely yeah I don't know because it's it's it's the one that's off we know a lot about it
we know how to do it and we can force change we can force it right and that's the change it
doesn't stick yeah I mean that's why I think it's easier okay before I bring in Robert actually I
have tell me what I hear because this reminds me of last year at the LEED student education
conference we had Paul Ashwin from Lancaster and he was actually talking about that
there's a it's a different practice to research for innovation and then to be the one who
receives it and applies it and that it's I think it he posed as a part of the problem that actually
people are in different businesses when you're actually you know creating initial change to
when this is actually passed on Robert are you ready to come in I suppose I've been thinking
about your discussion in relation to my role and the people I work with and like I like fellows
and colleagues especially the work we're trying to do now which is provide a better platform for
light fellows to evidence examples of impact everyone comes into I'd like to think a light
fellowship because they want to make a change they want the experience they want to develop
and that's the kind of change but they also want to change an aspect of student education that
maybe they've noticed needs changing and that's a that's messy that's complicated and it's contested
there's no one right or wrong answer and that's not a reason as you said not to do something in
fact that's exciting and also having read your paper around the concept of sustainable innovation
it's a kind of oxymoron you know there's change but also there's stability and it's given me a
whole load of questions not necessarily answers but questions around how we can support that and how
we can provide that platform in the long term with people that we work with and yeah thank you
Margaret just one thing as I was actually bringing in this idea that people might be in different
practices were you frowning were you were clearly being very reflective is there's something that
you want to bring it bring it on that is my thinking face oh that's brilliant it gets me
into trouble all the time I once had a had a had a colleague who turned around snapped around to me
in the corridor and said Margaret is something wrong it's like you look so angry oh no it's my
thinking face on again I can't even remember what I was thinking I do that's all right very pensive
when I think I think you're supposed to it wouldn't be better though to look a little bit more
I mean you know open and reflective rather than grumpy but the one thing that actually and and
somehow you alluded to this already but um because in your scoping review Margaret you talk about
sustainability of teaching innovations defined in terms of social practices associated with education
which actually you know sounds like a very messy definition of change in terms of like how do you
define it and in concrete terms um so and therefore is that an implication for is there an implication
for design when when when when what you aspire to reach might be less well defined I'm going to try
I'm going to try and link social practice to design because I think they're really tightly coupled
I think design is part of social practice we do it all the time I mean I'm talking to a design
expert but let me please indulge my my musings on design that are not as well informed um I think
it's part of a social practice I think we do it all the time I think we do a lot of design work
all the time and I think we um don't think I believe that it's beneficial to think about what
we do in education almost all the time as a form of design because that's what's open to us as
teachers it's to um you know drawing from Peter Goodyear's work it's to set up the spaces the
social interaction um if you like the the the epistemic idea the ideas the content and bring
them together and then we don't do the learning we have done the teaching the design and the
students inhabit what we have what we have set up for them and sometimes they and mostly they do
their thing that is quite different from what we necessarily intend and he calls that um learn time
and design time so in that world social practices the social practice of being a teacher is about
design there isn't really a separation what I think is interesting though is that how what drives
that design what drives people designing instinct and their social practices what's available to
them I mean we think of ourselves as being intellectuals but at the same time we're kind
of there's that craft element of design you know like we're like potters working with clay you have
a you have the familiar um equipment models modes um you know your clay you know your students
and um again there are a whole range of practices built up about it so for me the reason I like to
focus on it and I don't think it's in any way contradictory to design is it's not um although
there are material elements it is not the materiality in and of itself it's like the
innovation isn't some kind of product that descends like my long-lost HIVS package that
actually was a product but mostly the innovation is something in in higher education that's ongoing
that we keep doing it's not the one-off does that answer the question I'm not sure if answers
the same question but actually I think is really productive so yeah no thanks very much
I know it's really insightful I liked it I mean can I complicate the picture I'm looking at uh
at uh uh Jeff both from the point of view of um the role that you inhabit right now
uh at the University of Leeds but also your background and uh we've had some prior discussions
on uh Derek Bokken higher expectations and uh uh writing from the U.S. in terms of um essentially
educational reforms of change and sustainability are at the heart of that and and there's a lot
there about different types of the institution and I think that maybe the conversation has
made a bit of an assumption that there's an average teacher an average institution you know
what what what happens and and when we complicate the picture and actually there's different
different motivations different values and and different constraints as well and yeah I want to
I want to I'll probably come back to design because I thought your I thought your answer was excellent
actually because I think design is a kind of social practice but it also is embedded in lots of social
practices and and it and I think I thought you had a an appropriately democratic and participatory
notion of who designers are we all design and anytime we're moving from uh trying to move
ourselves or others uh from the current state to a new state that's a classic design setup isn't it
but I'll respond to the to the to the Derek Bokk work I mean we're talking about this on the walk
over I mean he's a particular kind of I don't want to be more broad than this so I'll let me
let me Americanize he's a particular kind of American higher educational intellectual
who thinks a little bit about higher education as a thing and but what he's a Harvard he talked so
his sense of the world and what higher education is like is a little bit more particular than maybe
he lets on um and so higher education as a system is is is very diverse in different kinds of
academics different kinds of students different kinds of institutional positioning so his insights
about about a higher education and why we don't provide an educational experience which aligns
with what we know to be the best way to do it is I still think they're useful insights and and more
broadly I mean in the book that we were talking about he identifies three impediments and you know
one of them is what he calls the low quality of of educational research in higher education which
we can argue about um whether that's whether whether we the quality of the education is good
and the quality of the evidence is good I think we have a lot of evidence I mean the problem in
higher education or in education more broadly isn't that we don't know what to do the the the
sticky bit is why we don't do it in a more systemic way so I think I think we we know what works and
so I think we have plenty of evidence for it where and you mentioned this a little bit earlier
where in my personal experience and this is tells us a lot about higher education where where people
sometimes get hung up is they'll say well you know that may have worked in physics but it doesn't
work in psychology and most of that is nonsense so can you show me some evidence of how this works
in psychology sometimes that's just a delaying tactic to get to it so quality of the work quality
of the evidence but I think and we can argue about whether those are real impediments to to
change or not I think that they are brought up as impediments to change the the issue here I
identify is which is interesting to me is the unwillingness of leadership in higher education
to devote the time and energy and resources to educational transformation so and I think that
that's real I think in my personal experience of higher education executive leadership
around educational innovation and change has been poor it's not where now I've spent my entire
career at research universities so different types of experiences different kinds of institutions
different investment patterns a different story about about what that looks like so those are
those are the impediments that that Bach talks about and and one of the things that certainly
in the work at Michigan State that that we took we took to be true in our experience was that it
there wasn't a question about what to do pedagogically or curricularly we had lots of ideas about what to do
we we had a pretty good understanding and we thought that the people we worked with had a pretty
good understanding of what to do educationally and why I think most people were aligned about
you know who's going to argue against a better student experience or better learning outcomes or
or closing opportunity gaps or minoritized so nobody's going to argue explicitly against that
nobody's going to argue explicitly against that in public and so those are though we could get
people aligned on the why as well how was hard how do we how do we change how do we structure
change processes which are inclusive and participatory have enough pace and agility to
them that we can start to see some benefits sooner rather than later that don't get us into three
year planning cycles and three year pilots after which everybody's exhausted and the first time
you do something it may not work particularly well but you've spent three years on this and
you've spent a lot of money and you're exhausted and so you're not going to do it again and one
of the things that we discovered is if we could get people to do something twice that usually was
enough activation energy for them to continue with the work towards a sustainability pathway so I'm
trying to pull back towards sustainability doing something twice was our little magical it wasn't
always true but it was our little magical shorthand for so I'm just trying to pull together
that those impediments to change with why design became an important mechanism for thinking very
carefully about how as a I think how is a hard problem and bridging a little bit in terms of
of how we tried to build sustainability into our into the work we did at Michigan State and we're
doing trying to do the same thing here at Leeds in terms of leveraging design to move a little bit
more iteratively and a little bit more quickly through change cycles so that we could make our
mistakes more quickly at a lower cost and get people to do something twice on on that pathway
towards sustainable changes in their own practice there's a lot going on there I don't know whether
so Margaret maybe neither neither you nor I are responding responding particularly well
to give those questions but no but that's particularly the magic is emerging oh
is that's absolutely we have magic emerging um so I'd like to take up that notion of time
because it was something I didn't mention with sustainability but it is one of the big questions
we don't talk enough about time my boss Dave Bowda and this is another thing I've worked
with North Americans and they they don't like the term boss it sends shivers down their spine but
it's it's okay in Australia it's affectionate um um Dave says that um you know you never evaluate
something on the first run because it's never never at its at at its go and in fact even the
second run can be a bit bodgy I like that there is something about um letting things bed down
letting them take the time that they need um in terms of sustaining and also in terms of I think
you mentioned effort something I really notice is when you bring in change in higher ed and you know
just this is not particularly research this is just me having been around the block people really
kill themselves in that first iteration they they split blood and tears and they really
because people really do care in this industry they really put themselves into it and then they
are exhausted and we often don't let people reap the benefit of their exhaustion of that work with
something oh no you've got to do something else and something new rather than just holding back
letting them um live with the the successes or sometimes the failures that have happened
without constantly asking them for more um and there's something else about rhythm there
rhythm I use the word rhythm all the time and it's unusual um people accuse me of moving too fast
and that I'm really interested in pace but I'm mostly interested in rhythm yeah rhythm matters
absolutely and if you yeah so I won't go I could but I won't go on so keep going sorry no no no
I want you to go now now you're talking about rhythm I mean particularly with the change work
that we did at leads we we did move fast we did start very fast and and part of that was overcoming
inertia particularly at the scale at which we were working and so I did start fast um but it's but
after that I was really trying to get people into a rhythm and that was even that was challenging
too because there was no history here and I think this place is not unusual of educational change
or innovation work having a kind of rhythm over time I think you're on to some time really does
matter and kairos the the magical concept is a time concept right um it's just not a chrono
there's there's there's chronos right which is chronological time and there's kairos which is
episodic time right and both time both time concepts really matter absolutely but but I told
you I could go on but but but really quickly we're trying to get and we're still we're still
struggling with that to be honest with you a couple of years into the program of keeping people in a
rhythm of work which if we get it right doesn't overwhelm them they can do other things in their
lives um but they also can't put their educational innovation work on the shelf for eight months
because once you do that you know you're fundamentally restarting the project um does that
make sense absolutely in this um okay so it's just going I just I'm just thinking as you're talking
about one I think Deakin runs in trimesters not in semesters we have three equally spaced teaching
terms and it's a bit I mean they're good reasons to do that and they're student reasons to do that
but it's very punishing on staff it's super punishing and you start to realise how much you
know you talked about kairos how much the heartbeat of the universities around those semester times
you know it's assessment time it's you know it's um first day of term it's now we're midway through
and we run on that on that um known rhythm and you know for we just had the glory of
particularly in Australia which works over summer you know the glory of the break
where nothing happens you know the one time a year and we we do feed off these in terms of
going with the grain a grain that perhaps we I don't know if we can change it but it's so
embedded in what we do and yet I think we don't think about it enough we don't think about it in
terms of funding we don't think about it in terms of cycles of work when you do educational research
I mean it's really difficult it's got to be collected within that term time pattern data if
you're collecting data from students yet you know so many things conspire against it so I'm just
sort of thinking more about what drives the rhythm of a university well nothing particularly thoughtful
now I think I think I've thought about this a lot because it is the rhythm of the academic term
right and it is I mean leads leads as academic rhythms are even stranger um that we have both
terms and semesters at the same time it's incoherent and and we we it's not optimal for
learning because we find ourselves in these these moments in which like right now students have come
back to take assessments after a long break so they've had a bunch of teaching they've taken
a long break and now we're going to come back and assess them well there's all sorts of cognitive
reasons why this is a terrible idea um particularly depending on what they did during that time they
might they might have consolidated during that time right it might have been a brilliant break
but I don't think there's a whole lot of consolidation going on nothing about that that term is driven
by habits and history and academic conferences and you know research it's not driven by it it's it's
it's these institutions have have muscle memory and and what we also don't do a really good job
of is pulling academics out of those normal rhythms and saying you know for a period of time we can
afford for you to spend your time thinking and doing we do research sabbaticals we do this on
the research side easily educationally we don't do it easily at all in fact we have real hard time
doing that so I think we lack creativity and generosity with regard to thinking about academic
time and educational work both on the student side and on the on the academic side it would
be interesting to start over yeah design it we could design it you know and to be the naysay
I once did a project on um assessment design and we went off and and as we were interviewing folk
about the units that why they were doing assessment and how the assessment was changing I started to
realize that there were units that people were coordinating that were older than anyone on the
team so and those units had just gone on and accreted like like barnacles mollusks and so
that assessment had become so stuck to them that it didn't matter what the teacher came in and did
in fact that unit just had a life of its own it would it would continue onwards I don't know if
I have a particular solution for that but I do know that what it sometimes means is the older the
university the more traditional the university the more difficulty it has with that sort of change
and those very young very it's like when you set up a new unit you can do anything you want with
the you can be as free as a bird but there's something about tradition which I don't think
we should break I think again it's very human we want to have those things but at the same time it
does hold us back yeah makes us high bound no I think it's true I think in the UK the the the
younger universities have a reputation for being much more dynamic uh and and malleable in a in a
positive way less high bound and less tradition bound and more student-centric Robert tell me what
you hear okay I have um maybe a micro level um idea the listeners might want to implement in their
day-to-day work whether that's the university or elsewhere um which is I don't know if anyone my
colleagues at LITE will have heard of this concept because it's something that I'm always banging
on about um some of you may have and it's the Japanese concept of ikigai and you're nodding
I'm nodding that's her pensive face that's my face saying I've nodded and now you're going to
ask me to say what ikigai is my colleagues are thinking I was banging on about it yet again and
it's it's just um it's a framework that helps you to do things that you find meaningful and purposeful
and I think it's something that you can look at on a micro level i.e. yourself but also maybe
embedded into design and student education in my opinion and that's combining something you love
something you're good at something the world needs and the last one which is feels more
instrumental but it's something you can be paid for which is why I say at last and maybe you know
in relation to this conversation around design thinking about how some of these kind of principles
can be you know thread that binds together aspects of design whether that's in a project
you're involved in and a piece of work you're doing um a course or leading or a life a lifestyle
a way of seeing life and a way of seeing work learning so maybe it wasn't so micro after all
I had never I don't know this guy this is I have learned something this is a revelation to me this
is I'm so glad I'm here yeah no I sorry I don't mean to go on that was great keep going okay um
so it's something that I learned about during lockdown I think a lot of people were evaluating
you know those sorts of wider questions and kind of when you talk about life the meaning of life
I think it's defined meaning and that is such an important aspect of education we were talking
about earlier Margaret and you're using some kind of I think concepts and terms of millennic
philosophy earlier so that thing of the the t loss the purpose what are we trying to achieve
why are we learning and stopping and constantly evaluating that I think these sorts of reflective
practices that engage with your more profound maybe aspects of why you're doing what you're
doing I think they're challenging but they're important I think I think we can embed them in
our work I was actually reflecting on that thanks Robert on on on the back of um
some of the work that light isn't barking right now in terms of supporting people to to feel
better aligned with the with them in their own inquiry in in in education better aligned with
the with the institution and therefore possibly have more impact in in the renovation and so
and there's an element and I think actually that that you know Japanese concept actually
is quite nice how it brings all the different aspects together but I suppose in a way this is
related to my question about are we assuming an average teaching practitioner and an average
institution what's the role of academic freedom in all of this and and should we redefine it or even
define it I mean I suppose it's part of actually this idea that we do a lot of things
without design and without that we've just inherited you know like the timetables and the
cycles and and the fact that we care about these things and maybe not others and and so how can we
actually bring it all together in a in a meaningful way by rethinking what is academic freedom and
how much to support people to while aligning themselves to what the world needs what the
institution needs still have their own their own the things that motivates them and and therefore
contribute better to to to student experiences at the end of the day okay I have a view I have views
about many things but this is not a terribly um I I'm sort of thinking that you know academic
freedom has a very particular meaning in Australia because it's kind of a protected right basically
if you're going to have a view that might be counter to I don't know counter to something
let's just call it that you have protected right I don't I don't I don't think that's what you mean
I think you mean something else and what I what I and I'll go back to the design issue again
what I sometimes think if you think about with Peter Goodyear and I was talking about setting
up a design space for education you have you you put things into place and and then the students
inhabit it and I think what you do when they inhabit it the best sorts of design give them
the freedom to bring themselves to it so they bring their own unique ways of of doing of saying
and they can see something of themselves in the space that you've built and I think that that's
the same thing for teachers when teachers teach they need to bring something of themselves to it
I don't think it's the same as academic freedom I do think that's essential and I think those two
things maybe what people want is to know that they count as teachers their views and their beliefs
and their ways of seeing a world really matter and I think that's something that can be given to
to people but everyone has to work within constraints it's like um it's not like there's
some unbridled outside of that sort of legally protected right for whatever reason I'm don't
use them really some unbridled sort of academic freedom that we can just run around and do whatever
it is we want we do work within a large body of constraints and I don't I think that I think that
just reframing it as bringing yourself as an educator would probably do it for me.
I think that makes sense I agree with you that particularly in higher education that concept of
academic freedom is a is a tricky one and and often gets used as an excuse not to do things or
an excuse to leave me alone and let me do whatever I want to do and that's that's not what academic
freedom actually means in in terms of of of what you're talking about Margaret but you know
constraints you know like the the sonnet like like the sonnet in in poetry it it forces some
creativity right so constraints are resources for creativity and we I agree with you we do operate
within within those constraints I think where we get into trouble is when we constrain and tighten
down those constraints on teachers so much that they can't bring themselves their full selves
their identities their creativity their intellectual passions that hurts them and it hurts education
it hurts students and so and there's lots of I mean this is an interesting thing there's there
are lots of education reform efforts and I'm thinking about the U.S. context now more specifically
that were driven by by the angels I mean they were these were good ideas in their inception
but the outcome of that was to tighten down the constraints on teachers so much that it it
it killed the intellectual work and the passion of teaching and didn't that will never produce the
kinds of outcomes that that we want so I'm a big believer in constraints actually as as a resource
for thinking and creativity but there has to be I think there has to be the space to to create and
to be fully human and there also has to be the obligation to do that right so the the responsibility
of of the teacher in that space is to be creative and fully human that's that's the job and so I
think I think that's an important part of the equation as well if if if we aren't willing to do
if if we aren't willing to do that as teachers we're not doing it we're not doing the work that
we need to do and we're not leveraging the gift that the constraint gives us and the opportunity
gives us to be to be to be ourselves and these are at the heart of design right I mean at least
from an engineering perspective what what else are user requirements if not constraints you know for
for operating in certain scenarios yeah now I'm in in the design work that we we do here and
certainly that we did at Michigan State we we were big on constraints we wanted them on the table
they were they are resources for thinking and to ignore them I mean I actually think that the bad
design bad learning design is when you put people in a room and say there are no constraints you
have complete freedom in my experience people shut down that's hard to think without constraints
and so I do think constraints are really a powerful resources for creativity
no no disagreements from can I bring in another another you know analogy from from
maybe designing an engineer perspective you know I'm originally a chemist but I worked in a
in an engineering school and I had to at least be conversant with some of these concepts from
from an engineering perspective and in relation to design and and there's an element that actually
I hadn't you know noted as a scientist in terms of always looking for the answer or the optimization
of absolutely everything well engineers work with this concept of good enough and so you you were
talking earlier um Jeff about uh the role of executive leaders and leaders you know what
so what happened with this good enough in a world of of rankings you know and and and and and the
consequences of that kind of thing um for for designing great student experiences I don't want
to answer that question I'll answer it go ahead um so I think that they're just two different worlds
I mean we have to play for one of the better word the rankings game we are we exist in a society
where rankings matter where they count and you know we can write um papers that might say we
don't believe in rankings but yet they still they are if you like the constraints within the world
in which we live and so we have to work with them but that doesn't mean that and it's kind of it's
kind of like a world view difference so a ranking is a set amount it is a an answer that has a
solution and that has a singular solution and for me in design work and the is about you know
solutions there isn't um it's not just that it's good enough it's that it's good um that it's
particular that it's in this right time and place that it's all those things and that that is um
that that's just a different way of looking looking at the world and we have to play both
games at once I think and I think due respect to management my uh funny years to use that
childish term again coming into play I think that's the game that that that you're in some
ways you're charged with yeah yeah no that's all right I mean it's that's a good answer I mean it
it's a measure it gives us a measure and I don't have a problem with the measure uh as as but I
have a problem with it as the only measure um and particularly some of the things that we get
measured on educationally with regard to rankings don't have anything to do with education they have
to do with important things like experience in the case of the NSS which is something that I think
is really powerful a big believer in designing experiences um so we have to take those those
issues seriously but not too seriously and I think the real trick for good leadership at higher
education uh and I mean this at the board level as well as the executive level is to take them
seriously but not too seriously I do believe in accountability and those measures and those rankings
are one one of the ways to hold ourselves accountable for the outcomes of our work so
no issues with them whatsoever but need to be a little bit thoughtful about what we measure and
how we measure and how how much variation we we're willing to tolerate in the solution sets
because it it isn't there isn't one thing that you can do to measure to move some of those measures
it's we we live we live in a system and moving systems is exceptionally difficult to do it's
where we started right we started with a description of that system uh which plays into sustaining
change and some if you want to change them if you want to change a poor ranking measure you can have
to change um which means you're going to have to move a system at some way shape or form to sustain
it I suppose for me it's like you've got to be responsive but we shouldn't be reactive right and
and I'm mindful of the time I'm I think the magic emerged so thanks very much for for uh um uh your
contributions can I ask you to go around very briefly I mean one thing that all of you you know
got us from from the conversation uh although probably we know what Jeff is going to say but
for me is the the the the notion of of a narrative of of episodal time and and and presumably in
connection also with narratives and stories as well Margaret um I think really similar I think
really that sort of reattention to rhythm and and the role that it plays and yeah lots lots rattling
around too difficult to capture in a couple of words thank you so what's this Japanese concept
again say it for me again I can you spell it for me
I may not be pronouncing it correctly yeah no that's all right I'm gonna be that that I that
resonates with me and it's the it's the thing I'm gonna I'm gonna take it away and play with it
but I think it is is it is a design arc it's also really countercultural in so many so many ways I
mean I was having a conversation with a colleague about her wishes for her daughter um for her
university experience and it was that she wanted her daughter to be to be happy and to thrive and
and and I remember you know saying something very countercultural to my kids my kids said well no
other parent is talking about this I wanted them to be happy and to do something that they loved
and that had meaning to them that was my only expectation for their university education
and I think that that is hopefully delightfully countercultural but but I think the the Japanese
concept is gives a framework for how you get to an answer to what do I want out of my education or
what do I want out of my program so obviously I'm I'm rambling now Gabriel it's all right this is a
I learned something today that that I am going to continue to work with so thank you fantastic
and Robert one thing that you take home I think it's this has confirmed many things in a really
positive way that I've identified that are important and it's also given me energy to
tackle some really complex but important challenges that we're facing we're working with and that's
quite a broad answer but it's the best answer I've got brilliant thanks very much thanks everyone
thanks for having us thank you