If you visit a National Trust property here in the UK, you will often see signs saying things like ׳Keep off the Grass’, ‘Don’t Touch This’, ‘Don’t Touch That’, ‘Keep to the Path’. It’s all in the negative and proscriptive. But, in a few places, as an experiment they kept the signs but changed the language. Now it’s Dos instead of Don’ts accompanied by some encouraging words. Rules are there for a reason, but rather than focus only on what people can’t do, try to point them in the direction of what they can do. If you need to impose a restriction zone, for example around a fragile object, then simply explain why and direct visitors to where they can take a closer look at the detail (for example, online). People tend to be more relaxed and understanding when they feel informed and can make a choice.
There was a recent short exchange on Twitter with an HE colleague looking for better word or words than ‘Delivery’ in regard to teaching and learning. I distinctly remembered the late Ken Robinson wondering in regard to the obsession with ‘delivery’: “When did education become a branch of FedEx?”
In my own research into creativity in higher education, when I asked colleagues from across a whole range of disciplines, for the words and phrases they used to describe creativity or being creative in regard to learning and teaching, the top twenty words and phrases contained words that never appear in programme or module specifications or any Teaching, Learning and Assessment strategies.
Words like joy, play, fun, passion, excitement, adventure and let’s admit they sit alongside words like anxiety, stress, disorientation, which are also part of learning.
Learning and studying should involve all of those…..and so should assessment.
So, instead of hitting students as soon as they start with dire warnings about plagiarism and cheating, let’s talk about integrity, trust, responsibility, partnership, collaboration, and so on.
I’d also like to suggest that we stop using the word failure. It’s such a loaded word. Much better, in my own mind and practice, to be able to say to a student: “OK, that didn’t work, and here’s why, but what have you learned from the experience? And design an approach to assessment that rewards the learning instead of penalising the so- called failure.
So, returning to the idea of ‘Keep on the Grass’ and extending the metaphor, perhaps it would be much better for everyone if we start seeing and talking about higher education as less like a machine for learning and more like a garden and words like growth, flourishing, blossoming, ecology and transformation.
“A picture is worth a thousand words” is an old, careworn cliché but it still holds true….to an extent.
What is undoubtedly true is that the human brain processes visual images thousands of times faster than text. A well-chosen, striking image placed in the appropriate context can be very powerful, thought-provoking and, importantly, memorable, linking the image with the content.
Image by Michael Heiss via Openverse
What is also true is that, while PowerPoint rules in higher education, its use is often limited to that of a glorified OHP i.e. the projection of (sometimes lots of) words on a screen. ‘Death by PowerPoint’ is a very real phenomena.
Image by Beate via Openverse
Searching for help
If you search online for a subject such as “How to improve your PowerPoint presentations” you will find dozens, if not hundreds, of ‘How to’ guides. The various recommendations tend to coalesce around a few key recommendations.
Image by gruntzooki via Openverse
These recommendations include:
Don’t simply read out or repeat what is on the screen
Make diagrams and charts interesting but not self-explanatory
Strike a good balance between the verbal, the written and the visual
Keep the number of words or bullet points (or images) on screen to a minimum
Good visuals alongside a clear explanation can help to communicate complex ideas
Turn bullet points into visuals 👇
Eyes image by Alec Couros via Openverse, adapted by Paul Kleiman
Keep It Simple
Somewhere around the middle of the last century someone in the US military coined the phrase “Keep It Simple, Stupid” or KISS for short. The idea behind it is that most things work best if they’re kept simple. Unnecessary complexity gets in the way of purpose and should be avoided. It’s probably no accident that the term has a military provenance as, in that environment, it’s incredibly important to send and process often complex information quickly and without ambiguity.
The KISS principle (or Keep It Short and Simple or Keep it Simple and Straightforward for those who don’t like the ‘stupid’ part) has since been adopted by anyone who needs to relay information – no matter how complex – effectively, efficiently and, above all, memorably.
Image by iNKMan_ via Openverse
Students are visually discerning and visually sophisticated. So it’s important to bear in mind that anything projected onto a screen becomes a visual medium, and the principles of good visual design apply as much to a PowerPoint presentation as to anything else one sees on screen.
These two slides – good design is aesthetic and good design is minimal – from my presentation on the Ten Principles of Good Design are examples, I hope, of keeping it simple as well as conveying some key points which are enhanced by the verbal explication that accompanies the slides.
Slides (c) Paul Kleiman
Where to look
So where can we find images that are guaranteed free-to-use?
There are, thankfully, a number of websites that provide access to millions of images that are free to use, also known as CC0 (Creative Commons Zero). These include: Creative Commons, finda.photo, Freerange, Gratisography, Images of Empowerment, Pexels, Pikwizard, Pixabay, Stocksnap, Unsplash.
Image by ZEISS Microscopy via Openverse
Particularly useful is the image search engine Openverse https://search.openverse.engineering/ It enables you to search through over 600 million free-to-use images most of which simply request that you credit the creator. It also offer you links to other search engines if you still can’t find the right image.
Screen grab image by Paul Kleiman
Time
“I haven’t got the time to search for and insert nice images or to edit my presentations to make them visually interesting”
Everyone is under often immense pressure, and the reluctance to engage in yet another time-consuming activity such as searching for good images to use in presentations is entirely understandable. But if it means that the important and valuable information you want to communicate really ‘sticks’, then it is probably time well spent….and the more you do it, the easier and quicker it gets.
Image by James via Openverse
I would suggest gradually building up your own ‘library’ of images which is located in a folder on your desktop or tablet. You know your subject, so when you come across an image that you think might be useful, stick it in the folder. BUT….(here speaks the voice of experience!) remember to make a note of where/how you found it, who created it and how they want to be credited. That will save you a great deal of time and frustration when you actually use the image.
Image DIY
You can, of course, create your own images! Our homes and surroundings provide an infinite number of photographic possibilities and most mobile phones have excellent cameras and there are many free photo editing apps. The main advice for presentation images tends to focus on close-ups and dramatic or striking images.
This photo was taken on a cycle ride that took me under a pylon. I happened to stop and look straight up and was immediately struck by what I saw. Using simple editing tools I changed it to high contrast black and white.
Image (c) Paul Kleiman
Good visual design and inclusivity
Image by cogdogblog via Openverse
Is creating a visually striking, memorable presentation compatible with the diverse requirement for inclusivity? The answer is a definite ‘Yes’!
A number of those requirements e.g. number of bullet points, font size etc. are about keeping it simple. The technology also provides the ability to read slide captions and descriptions (if you put them in), notes pages can be printed and published beforehand, audio can be recorded over the slides, QR codes can be used to link to the presentation and other material.
Good design takes time and effort. Making good design inclusive should be part of that time and effort.
Arresting images
One of the concerns in regard to using images is about infringing copyright, and it is worth bearing in mind that most images that you come across on the internet (or in books) are copyright protected. None of us and, particularly, our institutions, want to break the law by using copyrighted material we aren’t allowed to reproduce.
Image by deBurca via Openverse
There are, however, the ‘Fair Use’ provisions* that allow copyright works to be used for educational purposes. These include:
Showing copyright works in an educational establishment for educational purposes. However, it only applies if the audience is limited to teachers, students and others directly connected with the activities of the establishment. So, a lecture to students in a lecture theatre is covered by fair use, but a conference presentation in a conference venue isn’t. Whether uploading the presentation to a secure VLE is permittted is a moot point. Uploading to a publicly accessible website is not permitted.
The copying of works in any medium as long as the use is solely to illustrate a point, it is not done for commercial purposes, it is accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgement, and the use is fair dealing. This means minor uses, such as displaying a few lines of poetry on an interactive whiteboard, are permitted, but uses which would undermine sales of teaching materials are not allowed.
While you may use copyrighted images in a perfectly legal way under the ‘Fair Use’ provisions, difficulties can arise if, for example, a student videos or takes photos of your presentation and those copyrighted images and then posts them on social media or in a blog. So it’s far better to play it safe and, wherever possible, use images that you cab be sure are genuinely free-to-use.
So, is a picture worth a thousand words? Here’s a test: if you’ve got as far as here, close your eyes and think about the content of this blog and the various sections. Do the images help you to recall the content?
This is the full transcript (with slides) of my end-of-conference keynote address at the International Assessment in Higher Education (AHE) Conference held in Manchester, UK in June 2023. The keynote video is available here: https://youtu.be/nZbxDv3qqlA3 .
Thank you, for that kind introduction and thank you to the conference for the invitation to speak today. Given the many tremendous presentations and sessions over the past couple of days, there are a lot of very hard acts to follow!
Thinking about this presentation and trying to present something coherent has been like trying to build a house during earthquake. The tectonic plates on which higher education is built are moving dramatically, and is there any safe ground? So, what follows is, I realise, a rather non-linear, almost stream-of-consciousness set of thoughts and ideas about learning, teaching and, particularly assessment.
When I used to Chair an institution’s Exam Board, responsible for progression and awards, I regularly used to experience a sort of cognitive dissonance. Faced with page after page of student ID numbers, names, and a seemingly infinite array of rows and columns filled with numbers, I felt a deep sense of disconnect between what I was looking at and my day-to-day experience of working closely with those same students, discussing their work and their hopes and fears, their successes and disappointments.
Nowadays, when I explore assessment with colleagues I often start a session with finding out how they feel and where they are in regard to assessment, and I ask them to illustrate that by drawing or making marks on paper and then give them no more than 30 seconds to explain what they have drawn. The task not only energises the room at the start of an intense few hours but is also very revealing about attitudes towards and feelings about assessment. It also, puts paid to the “oh, I can’t draw” response. No matter which disciplines are represented by the participants, there is always an interesting, revealing and creative response.
These are just a couple that really stick in my mind and which, in a way, relate to my title and theme.
The individual who drew this said: “This is where I’m at regarding assessment. At its best, the work of my students is expansive! Multi-dimensional and multi-coloured. Dynamic and non-linear. This is how I sometimes feel when I come to quantify (assess) a student’s work – like I’m funnelling a wild and wonderful rainbow into a grid better suited to a game of noughts and crosses.”
And the individual who drew this said:
“This is my big black hole of confusion. It sits at the bottom of all my feelings of assessment. The deepest darkest part is numbers grades. I can write feedback articulating my views, but putting a number to it, seems almost impossible. Objectively, the better students should get a better grade. But what about learning journeys?”
So to begin….If a week is a long time in politics, then a year in higher education is an eternity. When I was invited, shortly after last year‘s conference, to give this keynote address or provocation we were sort of returning to what we might call the post-Covid ‘new normal’ in higher education. The idea that I presented to the conference committee was about how assessment had changed during Covid as we realised that assessment processes, protocols and procedures that had been assumed to be graven in stone, were, in fact, mutable “oh, we can do that!”.
Things changed and changed fast out of necessity. There was a veritable explosion of innovation and creativity in regard to assessment. Digital transformation occurred right across the sector during the pandemic. We learned important lessons about equity, about learning design and about interoperability. We saw success stories and consistently high levels of student attainment. Thankfully we moved away from traditional unseen exams to other forms of assessment that saw many students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, perform better.
The danger was always going to be, now that we were back in the “new normal“ was that we and our institutions would simply snap back to the old ways of doing things.
Paul Trowler writes about all institutions and organisations having ‘engrooved practices’. Those deeply embedded, social and cultural practices and norms that are so familiar and, to some extent, comfortable , that no one really challenges them. Occasionally, some new exciting innovation that looks like it may well enhance learning, teaching and assessment comes along, and enough people say let’s give a go’ and they give it a go.
The thing about engrooved practices is that they really are deeply embedded, not just in the social and cultural norms of the institution or faculty or department but often also in the minds and psyches of many people within the institution. It’s like they are part of the DNA of the institution, and we know how hard it is to change DNA. So something new, exciting, innovative comes along and some people get really excited about it. “This is the best pedagogic thing since sliced bread.” But unless this new exciting innovative thing becomes not only accepted but embedded within the systems and processes of institution, it remains ephemeral no matter how successful, and it can easily disappear as people snapback to the familiar and comfortable ways of doing things. Or the individual or individuals involved in it move on either within the institution or to another institution.
We have heard about and seen some wonderful, creative, innovative approaches to assessment these past two days….and I’m sure we’ll all leave here full of inspiration and good intentions….but…and it’s a very big BUT ….what happens when we return to our institutions and those pesky engrooved practices and attitudes?
So, that was essentially my starting point for what I was planning to say a year ago, and which I had titled “I am not a number!“; reassessing assessment“.
A year on, I have to say that while the reassessing assessment bit still holds, if I had been asked now to provide a title, it would have been something along the lines of “I am a not a stochastic parrot: reassessing assessment”.
I am, of course referring to last November and the appearance of ChatGPT (or, as an Australian colleague refers to it, ChattieG) and the academic and moral panic that ensued on its public release.
A glance at some headlines gives a flavour of the mood at the time:
ChatGPT is making universities rethink plagiarism!
Chat GPT: a tool for teaching or cheating?
Universities fear cheating epidemic
Chat GPT has universities in emergency mode to shield academic integrity.
EXCLUSIVE: ‘Half of school and college students are already using ChatGPT to cheat’: Experts warn AI tech should strike fear in all academics
I was half expecting to come across a headline that went something like CHATGPT DRIVES A STAKE THROUGH THE HEART OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITY
And we have seen universities reacting in very different ways. Like any crime prevention strategy, the pendulum has been swinging wildly between, at one end, a punitive hang ‘em and flog ‘em type of approach to cheating, at the other end, let’s understand it, let’s acknowledge it, let’s use it genuinely to enhance teaching, learning and assessment.
And if you’re wondering about the ‘Stochastic Parrot’ bit, it comes from the title of an influential and controversial 2021 paper by Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell,
A stochastic parrot is an entity “for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms … according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning.” The paper covered the risks of very large language models, regarding their environmental and financial costs, their inscrutability leading to unknown dangerous biases, the inability of the models to understand the concepts underlying what they learn, and the potential for using them to deceive people. The paper, controversially, resulted in Gebru and Mitchell losing their jobs at Google….but that’s a story for another day. Though the parrot may appear later.
As an aside, a couple of descriptions of ChatGPT or ChattieG, I’ve come across.
This by Prof. Inger Mewburn in her definitely worth reading blog The Thesis Whisperer:
Generally, the best way to use ChattieG is to imagine it as a talented, but easily misled, intern/research assistant who has a sad tendency to be sexist, racist and other kinds of ‘isms’.
And this, by a Senior Lecturer colleague I interviewed recently:
It’s by far the best thing since the internet! The benefits to me and my students are incalculable….and it really levels the playing field for disadvantaged students.
And if you think that generative AI is all about the written word, think again! As we’ve seen, images, artworks, music, posters, powerpoint presentations can all now be produced by Artificial Intelligence…..though I have heard calls for it be called Augmented Intelligence or Assisted Intelligence.
Going back to my original theme, Covid demonstrated conclusively that we can adapt and change our approaches to assessment. The extent to which those changes have been adopted across the board and embedded within institutional systems and protocols is a moot point.
One thing that changed quite dramatically, as we shifted to permanent online, was the relationship with students. There were some very interesting papers and ideas around what was termed “the intimacy of Zoom…or Teams”.
Larry DeBrock and colleagues wrote;
“ that student, who is sitting far enough away in the lecture hall that you can’t quite read her expression amid the proverbial, sea of faces? When you call on her in a live zoom session, she pops up right in front of you, one on one, looking you straight in the eye. There is no backseat in online education. Every student is in the front row.“
There’s a funny thing about front rows. If there’s a choice, no one likes to sit in the front row. Whether it’s a classroom, a lecture theatre or a conference presentation.
When I worked in touring theatre, doing performances in all sorts of venues like community centres and village halls, we used to put out a false front row of seats, knowing that nobody would sit in them. Just as everyone was seated and the show was about to begin the stage crew would remove the front row of chairs – much to people’s shock and amusement -to ensure that we did actually have people sitting in the front row.
But I digress…well, a bit.
The point is, and you may well object to the comparison, the one thing that a performance to an audience in a village hall has in common with teaching, learning and assessment is that it is about relationships, establishing a rapport with others, the very human act of engaging with and communicating with another person or persons.
Those of you familiar with my work will know that I have banged on for years about the word assessment deriving from the Latin ‘Ad Sedere’ – to sit together. Involving students actively in assessment, not just viewing them as objects of assessment, but as agents of and in their ownassessment.
And I’ll be coming back to this later.
But we still hold on to that idea of sitting together at PhD level but have lost it at undergraduate level, due to the massification of higher education and the quasi-industrial/ commercial/ marketised model that has developed as a consequence in which students are regarded as fee-paying customers and given a customer number, (we’re back to “I am not a number!”) but actually are treated more like units to be acquired, processed and produced, with rigorous quality mass testing at every stage of production.
The way we assess and how we assess is all part and parcel of the capitalized, marketized version of higher education that is now so dominant that it’s hard to imagine that there might be an alternative. It is an engrooved model.
It’s a model in which students are both units of production and objects of assessment, replete with individual ID numbers and batch numbers for their particular year group, and it should come as no surprise that students understand – either explicitly or, more likely, implicitly – their role and function inside that model: which is to succeed. And it really should come as no surprise that within a model of higher education predicated on a sort of ‘winner takes all’ version of success that students will be tempted to do whatever it takes to ensure that success. So we enter this eternal game of, on the one side, ever more sophisticated ways of cheating and, on the other side, ever more sophisticated and expensive ways of preventing or spotting the cheats.
Covid severely disrupted that model, but didn’t fundamentally change it. Students could no longer be regarded as a class (pun intended) or units or a set of ID numbers. No longer could we require students to gather together en masse outside and inside examination halls. One of the ironic consequences of lockdown was that it forced us to regard and deal with students as individuals – all sitting in the front row – all with their individual needs, hopes and fears but, at the same time, in regard to assessment trying to meet the requirements of validity, reliability, inclusivity and equity etc.
Then, just as we’re settling back into normal educational service is resumed, we hit another massive interference: this time it’s Generative AI in the shape of ChattieG and its fellow travellers. And now assessment is really in trouble!
I suppose the big question is…is the HE model that currently reigns supreme sustainable?
The famous lines from W.B. Yeats comes to mind:
Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold (from ‘The Second Coming’)
There is also this quote from Antonio Gramsci:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear (from ‘Prison Notebooks’ – Notebook 3)
I trained and worked as a designer before stumbling into teaching, and one of the things one learns as a designer – often very painfully – is that there comes a point where it is futile trying to further change, adapt, tinker with an existing design. You’ve got to have to courage to scrap it and start again or, at the very least, undertake a fundamental re-design. Of course, for very understandable reasons, we are really bad at doing either of those things in higher education. Even if we had the will, we rarely, if ever, have the time or resources to engage in such an undertaking.
If, like me, you happen to own a boat – in my case it’s an old narrowboat – that’s it in the photo – you will know that even the best designed vessel, after weeks and months in the water, gathers barnacles and other things around its hull.
Eventually what originally cut through the water and was a pleasure to sail or steer becomes heavy in the water, difficult to steer, a makes slow progress. The same applies to what we do. Even the best designed learning, teaching and assessment strategy gathers ‘barnacles’ over time: a new module here, new content there, new assessment changes everywhere, etc. It gets heavy in the pedagogic waters. Sally Everett, yesterday, talked about wading through treacle.
In the case of a boat , the answer is to take it out of the water, put it into dry dock, scrape off the barnacles, undertake a complete overhaul and, if necessary, refit.
But we can’t do that with our curricula and our learning, teaching and assessment strategies. We don’t have the time or resources between one cohort leaving and the next cohort starting. So often what we do – through programme review – is tinker…..with the result that often we end up not only moving the barnacles around instead of removing them but actually adding more!
So what MIGHT we usefully and positively do in the face very real, clear and present dangers?
I use the word MIGHT deliberately instead of what WILL we do?
A great teacher and mentor I had the privilege of meeting and observing used to say that the most powerful word in education is ‘Might’. If you ask “What is the answer to this problem?” or “What will you do about that?” that implies there is only one correct answer or one possible course of action and a host of incorrect ones. But if you ask “What might be the answer?” or “What might you do?” it opens up the curiosity, the creativity, the possibilities instead of certainties.
We need, somehow, to shift out of our familiar, engrooved discourses and practices and ask how and why students are assessed in the first place. We could also usefully ask why are students motivated to cheat or cut corners?
We actually know why…
High stakes assessment
Assessment overload
The feeling that it’s just another hoop to jump through
Lack of time and space
Lack of intrinsic motivation
Lack of creativity
Lack of inspiration
Lack of meaningfulness – a snapshot in time seemingly unrelated to anything else.
Lack of engagement
Lack of a sense of belonging
Lack of learning!!
You could probably add more.
When I go into institutions to help them solve or resolve a particular issue, I often ask the senior management: “Do you want evolution or revolution?”.
The answer, of course, is usually Evolution, but occasionally, actually very rarely, they bite the bullet and say something along the lines of: ‘We prefer Evolution but if it takes Revolution then we’ll support it’.
I have a fond memory of presenting a proposal for a new, radical approach to the assessment of creative practices to an institution’s senior management team where we proposed moving away from learning outcomes, and the Director of Academic Studies raising his arms in the air and shouting “Hallelujah! Finally!”.
And that’s what we did, and I am pleased, and relieved, to say it works. We have the data and the feedback. But that’s another story. But I wrote a case study which I wanted to title ‘We Don’t Need No Learning Outcomes’ in homage to the famous Pink Floyd song, but the publisher insisted it was changed to ‘We Don’t Need Those Learning Outcomes’ as the original was deemed grammatically incorrect.
What this is all leading to, as you’ve probably guessed, is that I am sure I am not alone in this room in thinking that we are now the stage – in regard to assessment – where REVOLUTION is required. “The centre cannot hold”! We’ve moved beyond adapting, amending, adjusting.
So, in a spirit of revolution, what might we usefully do.
If you look at the various lists of ‘Skills for the 21st century’ you find the same dozen or so attributes appearing in various combinations. These are the skills that students and graduates need to keep up with the lightning-pace of today’s world. Each skill is unique in how it helps students, but they all have one quality in common. They’re essential certainly for today and probably tomorrow.
Here’s one version of them:
Now, let’s for a moment imagine those skills are assessment criteria, and what if we were to assess our own assessments, the things that we require students to do, what if we were to assess them against those criteria? I suspect we’d manage to tick perhaps one or two – including critical thinking. But as for the rest?.
So, here are some thoughts on what we might do:
Create Space. Stop Filling the Void.
Like many, I am fascinated by Japan and Japanese culture. (I did say this was somewhat non-linear!) That fascination, in my case, goes back a long way. I recently watched James Fox’s series of documentaries about Japanese art and culture and also Monty Don’s programmes about Japanese gardens and garden design. Both presenters commented on the importance of the Japanese idea of ’Ma’ – often translated as ‘negative or empty space’ but it is much more than that. One way of understanding ‘ma’ is as the space between tangible things that gives those things meaning. It is not so much empty or negative space, but rather it is a space full of energy, potential and promise. The character for “Ma” (間) combines the character for “gate” 門 with the character for “sun” 日 – an image of light beaming through the empty space of a doorway.
In the western tradition and culture we have nothing like the idea of ‘Ma’. Instead, we dislike a void, and tend to fill it. There’s actually a Latin t erm for it “horror vacui”. One of the few things I remember from my student art history days are the large, ancient storage jars called Attic Vases. They are often covered head to toe in decoration. The reason for that, so we were informed, was the belief that the Evil Eye enters through empty space. Perhaps that notion is still hidden deep within our Western psyche?
What is that proverb? The devil makes work for idle hands.
When I started working in higher education I was immediately struck by the fact of just how busy our curricula, our timetables, our workloads, our assessments are…and it’s got much worse. It’s as if we are afraid of leaving ‘empty space’. Why? In case students and staff get up to ‘mischief’?
Rather than filling the curriculum, timetable and workload voids, what if we designed them incorporating the idea (and actualité) of ‘Ma’. Designing in those spaces that help to make sense of the whole, providing the time and space that allows us and our students to step back, to think, to reflect, to make, to create, to experiment….and perhaps to have those conversations that enable us and our students to get a good and genuine sense of how they are doing, what they might need to do, what they might want to do?
Create a Skunkworks.
Every HE institution, and possibly every faculty, needs a Skunk Works.
How many people here are familiar with the term?
A Skunkworks is essentially a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, with the task of working on advanced, experimental projects.
The term goes back to World War Two, Lockheed and America’s need for a new fighter jet as soon as possible, and the group ‘the original Skunkworks’ who managed to get it from drawing board to runway in record time.
So if you’re interested in moving to some of the creative, innovative approaches we’ve heard about these past two days: unessays, collaborative annotation, using ‘ungrading’ approaches to assessment, or designing and implementing genuine authentic assessment, then having an equivalent of an officially sanctioned Skunkworks within your institution or faculty may provide some significant gains and rewards for both students and staff.
Change the Language Around Teaching, Learning and Assessment.
If you visited a National Trust property here in the UK, you would often see signs saying things like Keep off the Grass, Don’t Touch the Plants, Keep to the Path. It was all in the negative and proscriptive. But, as an experiment, they kept the signs but changed the language. Now it’s Dos instead of Don’ts accompanied by some encouraging words. Rules are there for a reason, but rather than focus only on what people can’t do, try to point them in the direction of what they can do. If you need to impose a restriction zone, for example around a fragile object, then simply explain why and direct visitors to where they can take a closer look at the detail (for example, online). People tend to be more relaxed and understanding when they feel informed and can make a choice.
There was a recent short exchange on Twitter with an HE colleague looking for better word or words than ‘Delivery’ in regard to teaching and learning. And I distinctly remember the late Ken Robinson wondering in regard to the obsession with ‘delivery’: “When did education become a branch of FedEx?”
In my own research into creativity in higher education, when I asked colleagues from across a whole range of disciplines, for the words and phrases they used to describe creativity or being creative in regard to learning and teaching, the top twenty words and phrases contained words that never appear in programme or module specifications or Teaching, Learning and Assessment strategies.
Words like joy, play, fun, passion, excitement, adventure and let’s admit they sit alongside anxiety, stress, disorientation which are also part of learning.
Learning and studying should involve all of those…..and so should assessment.
And instead of hitting students as soon as they start with dire warnings about plagiarism and cheating, let’s talk about integrity, trust, responsibility, partnership, collaboration, and so on.
I’d also like to suggest that we stop using the word failure. It’s such a loaded word. Much better, in my own mind and practice, to be able to say to a student: “OK, that didn’t work, and here’s why, but what have you learned from the experience? And design an approach to assessment that rewards the learning instead of penalising the so- called failure.
One of our engrooved or deep-seated beliefs is that grades are important because they motivate students to do the work. Take them away, and students won’t do anything.
But oddly, for a discipline that says it relies on evidence-based research, there is little to no evidence or research that demonstrates that grades make students learn more or work harder. In fact, there is ample evidence that grades actually do the opposite: They hurt academic motivation and inhibit learning.
We’ve known for a long time, well before Covid, that the way we do assessment is damaged and creaking at the seams. Perhaps Covid and now GenerativeAI can finally provide the impetus we need to let go of outdated, obsolete practices that are well past their sell-by date, and embrace those that are fit for purpose to meet the challenges we and our students face
What we do know is that students – and we are all students, lifelong learners – work harder, learn more and are much more likely to thrive and achieve when we are intrinsically motivated. When we have some real autonomy, real choices. When we feel we are in control of our learning. It means being given meaningful choices and engaging, authentic tasks to choose from. It means feeling empowered to choose, as students, where to invest our time and energy. It also means feeling encouraged and supported even if that means, receiving feedback that is uncomfortable but honest and that comes from a good place.
Autonomy also means that our own autonomy, our own academic identity has to shift, from the keepers and transmitters of knowledge to facilitators of learning
Also, as students we like to feel we’re continually growing, improving, developing new skills and understandings. Our own students are no different, so the question for us as teachers and assessors is how best can we focus both our and our students skills, time and energy on helping them build the skills they are motivated to learn?
A sense of relatedness, a sense of genuine belonging is also critical. Somehow we need to find ways of enabling our students to understand they are not just a number, not just cogs in a vast machine but valued as individuals and as part of a larger community… that they matter more than their grades. And they will respond and realise they don’t need the carrot and stick of grades to care about their learning.
So…let’s leave grading to recede in the rear-view mirror, and focus on the road ahead and where that might lead.
For example, there’s a growing body of evidence that pass/fail, scaffolded by clear and coherent explanations, expectations, exemplars etc. shifts the student focus away from grades towards a focus on learning.
For example, move to some of the approaches that have flowed out of the ‘Ungrading’ movement, eliminating or at least greatly minimizing the use grades, focusing instead on providing frequent and detailed feedback to students on their work, in relation to the course learning goals.
For example, move away from atomised learning outcomes and the atomised, tick-box assessment practices that often accompany them towards a much more holistic approach and setting high expectations.
As Chickering and Gamson wrote back in the 1980s,
“Expect more and you will get more. High expectations are important for everyone – for the poorly prepared, for those unwilling to exert themselves, and for the bright and well motivated. Expecting students to perform well becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when teachers and institutions hold high expectations of themselves and make extra efforts.“
It’s beginning to look like the only way to guarantee -and I use that word very advisedly – some sort of academic integrity involving an encounter with what a student genuinely understands, what they know, what they think and what they can do is, to meet them face-to-face and to interrogate them – in a rigorous but empathetic way.
Many ago, when I was doing some research around assessment, I came across an article in the Harvard Education Review. The article was called “Assessment at a Crossroads: Conversations” (Plus ca change!) and it was a verbatim record of a panel discussion between some of the editors of the Review. It was a really interesting piece, but one comment particularly struck a chord and stuck in my mind. And it’s been a sort of touchstone for me ever since. It was a remark by Walt Haney, who was at that time Professor of Education at the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy in Boston. He said this:
“You’ve got to involve students actively, not just view them as objects of assessment, but as agents of assessment. This can be done in many ways. One is that you ask students systematically what they have learned. It’s a simple idea; it’s rarely done…..You find that students say some remarkable things.”
And students DO say some remarkable things, and not only is it a journey of exploration and discovery for them, it is also a journey of exploration and discovery for us. It’s a dialogic process.
And I imagine some of you sitting there thinking, that’s all very well with cohorts of 20 or 25 students. But what if you’ve got ten times that number. It’s impossible!
It isn’t, as Erik Driessen demonstrated 20 years ago in his work on portfolio-based assessment in Medical Education. That involved 247 students meetings regularly with a mentor, discussing their work, what they’ve learned, what should go in the portfolio and why. Of course, portfolios are not unproblematic, but those very real, person-to-person interactions, transactions and conversations cannot be faked.
So, to wind up….
My partner and I both have theatre backgrounds, and over dinner a couple of nights ago she asked how this keynote was going. I said, as you do, that it was going ok and that, but I needed a really, positive ending before the curtain comes down on the conference. Then, across the lemon ricotta pasta and spinach, she said: “Why don’t you ask Chat GPT?”.
I said “Really?” and I got that ‘I dare you’ look that’s hard to resist.
So I did, and asked Chattie G to provide an inspirational end-of-conference speech for an international conference on assessment in higher education. Full disclosure: what follows is entirely generated by the Stochastic Parrot, unexpurgated.
“As I stand before you today, inspired by the collective brilliance and unwavering dedication of this esteemed gathering, I call upon each of you to embrace an audacious vision for the future of assessment. We find ourselves at a critical juncture, where the very essence of assessment is under siege from numerous threats, both internal and external. But let us not succumb to fear or despair. Instead, let us rise as fearless champions of change and architects of a new era in assessment.
The threats we face are formidable, but they are not insurmountable. The first threat lies within ourselves—the shackles of complacency and conformity that confine us to the stagnant realms of the past. We must break free from these chains and embrace innovation with unyielding determination. Let us dare to dream of an assessment landscape that defies convention, where imagination knows no bounds and boundaries are mere stepping stones to greatness.
But we must also confront the external threats that loom over us. The threat of exclusion, where assessment becomes a gatekeeper, perpetuating inequity and stifling the voices of the marginalized. We must dismantle this fortress of exclusivity and construct a new paradigm that celebrates diversity and inclusivity. Let our assessments be instruments of empowerment, enabling every individual, regardless of their background or circumstances, to unleash their true potential.
Another menacing threat we face is the commodification of assessment—a perilous path where education becomes reduced to a mere transaction, and students are reduced to data points and metrics. We must resist this dehumanizing force and reclaim the true essence of assessment. Let us infuse it with purpose and meaning, recognizing the inherent worth of every learner and valuing their holistic growth and well-being above all else.
Lastly, the encroachment of technological advancements poses both promise and peril. As we navigate this digital frontier, we must wield technology as a powerful ally, not as an all-knowing, all-seeing entity. Let us ensure that technology serves as an enabler, enhancing our capacity to assess with accuracy, efficiency, and integrity. But let us never forget that behind every data point, there lies a human story—a story that must be honored and cherished.
So, my fellow trailblazers of assessment, let us unite in a resounding call to action. Let us challenge the status quo, disrupt the norms, and shape a future where assessment transcends the boundaries of tradition and rises to its full transformative potential. Together, we can forge a future where assessment becomes a catalyst for growth, a beacon of equity, and a testament to the power of human potential.
As we embark on this audacious journey, let us remember that the future is not something that happens to us; it is something we create. It is in our hands to mold and shape, to inspire and empower. So, let our legacy be one of courage, innovation, and unwavering commitment to the cause of assessment.
With hearts afire and minds alight, let us go forth and pioneer a future where assessment becomes the cornerstone of a just and enlightened society. May our resolve be unyielding, our endeavors boundless, and our impact everlasting.
Thank you, and together, let us transcend the boundaries of what assessment can be!”
And now, in my own words: we have a lot to do, colleagues…tremendous challenges….but as these past two days have demonstrated, we have incredible knowledge, skills, understanding, creativity, motivation, commitment to achieve what needs to be done. Thank you.
References
‘Assessment at a Crossroads: Conversations’ (1996). Transcript of panel discussion. Harvard Educational Review, Fall 1996.
Bender, E., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Mitchell, M. (2021) “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccT ’21, March 3–10, 2021, Virtual Event, Canada https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 (accessed July 2023)
Chickering, A. and Gamson, Z. (1987 ‘Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education’. AAHE Bulletin p.3-7.
DeBrock, L., Scagnoli, N., Taghaboni-Dutta, F. (2020) ‘The Human Element in Online Learning’. Inside Higher Education, 17 March 2020.
Gramsci, A. (1930) in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 276.
Trowler, P. (2020) Accomplishing Change in Teaching and Learning Regimes: Higher Education and the Practice Sensibility. Oxford University Press
(This is a full transcript of the talk given by Prof. Paul Kleiman at the University of the Arts London’s ‘Reward and Recognition Celebration’ event in the Banqueting Hall at Chelsea College of Art, celebrating the achievements of UAL staff. December 6th 2022)
The event is introduced by Dr. Sérgio Fava, Acting Head of Academic Practice
Good evening everyone.
I’d like to thank UAL for inviting me to speak to you today. It is an honour and a privilege. First of all I’d like to start by congratulating all of you for achieving your various successes whether it’s the PGCert, the Masters degree or Fellowship.
When I was invited to give this address I was asked if I might focus on creativity and assessment as those two topics are not only ‘hot topics’ in higher education but they have been central to my own work and research…and I’ll do my best.
I’ve called this address ‘Stumbling with Confidence: close encounters of the creative kind’. The phrase ‘Stumbling with confidence’ comes from my research into how academics from across a wide range of disciplines across the arts and humanities, social sciences and sciences – how those academics conceptualised creativity in their pedagogic practice.
The research was based on a series of in-depth interviews and I’d start each interview by asking if they could tell me about an experience in regard to teaching their subject that they might regard as a creative experience.
That request was often greeted by what I’d call a sort of rabbit in the headlights stare. You could feel their brain going “Teaching?” “ Creativity?”, frequently accompanied by a long silence.
Now I know silence can be awkward, and there is always a temptation to jump in, to fill the void. There is a Latin term for that: Horor Vacui – fear of empty space. It’s one of the few things I remember from my art history lectures in my student days. We were shown these huge ancient storage jars and vases that were covered head to foot in decoration. One reason for that, so we were told, is the belief that the evil eye enters through empty space. So we fill the void. And when I look at our curricula, our timetables, our workloads that’s what we still do…we fill the void, leaving very little or no space. What are we afraid of?
The Japanese have the concept of ’Ma’ – often translated as ‘negative space’ but it is much more than that. One way of understanding ‘ma’ is as the space between tangible things that gives those things meaning. It is not so much empty or negative space, but rather it a space full of energy, potential and promise.
The great graphic designer, Alan Fletcher, refers to Ma in his book ‘The Art of Looking Sideways’.
“Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by “taking the fat off space”. Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses… Isaac Stern described music as “that little bit between each note – silences which give the form”… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission.”
Rather than filling the curriculum, timetables and, indeed, our own working week, what if we incorporated ‘Ma’.? Designing in the ‘empty/negative’ spaces that help to make sense of the whole, providing the time and space to step back, to think, to reflect, to create….
But I digress….
Back to silence and the research interviews.…
Many years ago a colleague, who was very interested in Buddhism, taught me that when a question is greeted with silence it usually means people are thinking. Let the silence breathe, embrace it…and an answer will come.
Just as my friend advised, in my interviews, I would wait, let the silence breathe and, sure enough, eventually an answer would come and an often fascinating narrative would emerge.
I would then ask “What made you follow this particular path?” and more often than not the interviewee would say something along the lines of “I stumbled across something and I thought I’d try it”.
What became clear is that though we stumble across stuff constantly the key element is also confidence. Having the confidence to pursue it further, to go ahead, to have a go, to try it out…often in the face of resistance or constraints.
Some of you may be familiar with the now famous Ken Robinson TED-talk (the most watched TED-talk ever!) on the theme of ‘Schools Kill Creativity’. You may agree or disagree with Robinson’s thesis, but there is no doubt in my mind that, certainly, in my own disciplines of the performing and visual arts, many students have managed to keep their creative flame burning despite not because of their school experiences, and many colleagues manage to keep their own creative flame burning despite not because of the systems and environment they work within.
When I was Head of Performance Design at LIPA (the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts) I often used to refer to the first year as the ‘de-schooling year’. We would set projects and assignments that were designed specifically to encourage creative thinking and to get rid of the expectations and habits acquired through school in order to provide, if nothing else, the confidence to ‘have a go’, ‘to be prepared for things not to work’ (I have an intense dislike for the word ‘failure’). And I designed and implemented an approach to assessment that focussed not on the so-called ‘failure’ but on the learning from that so-called failure. Let’s reward the learning and not penalise the failure.
At LIPA and, I’m sure, here at UAL as well, we attracted some wonderful, highly creative students. Now, if you look at the research into the qualities and attributes of highly creative individuals you find among them:
– High curiosity – High risk taker – Collector of theUnusual – Intellectual playfulness – Lateral thinking and responses – Uninhibited – Radical – Tenacious – Determination to succeed – Intellectual playfulness – Highly self-aware and open to the irrational within themselves – Non-conforming, accepting of chaos, not interested in details – Described as ‘individualistic’ but not afraid of being classified as ‘different’ – Unwilling to accept authoritarian pronouncements
Now, arts-based institutions will have a significant number of students (and staff) who meet some if not all those criteria. We certainly had them at LIPA, and one, in particular, sticks in my mind.
We were in Germany interviewing applicants for the performance design degree course. Amongst those interviewed was a young woman, Eva, and when we saw her portfolio of work and spoke with her she immediately struck me and my co-interviewers as a real ‘creative spark’. It was one of those ‘tingle factor’ moments. It was obvious that she exhibited many of the characteristics that I just listed. We also recognised that if she were to accept the offer of the place that we made, her relationship with the course, the institution and the system would not be unproblematic.
Our assumptions proved entirely correct as Eva challenged, often in a very creative way, the course work and assignments that were set. For example, I would set an assignment based on what I believed to be the best pedagogic principles. Inevitably there would be a knock on my office door.
“Ah, Eva, come in. What can I do for you?”
And Eva would stand there and say something along the lines of:
“This assignment that you have given us…”
Me: “Yes?”
“It is…..(I won’t use the word in polite company but it begins with ‘s’and ends in ‘t’,) I have a better idea.”
And often it was.
And I and my colleagues would be sitting there going “Why didn’t we think of that?”
We were caught in a dilemma. We had in Eva someone who was generally regarded across the institution, which prided itself on its fostering of creativity, innovation, taking risks etc., as one of the most creative students in the building. Yet her refusal to comply with and conform to the regulations and procedures of the university put her at severe risk of failure…of being kicked out.
There was a consensus amongst the course team that we would do all we could to keep Eva on the course, even if it meant bending as far as possible (but not actually breaking) the regulations.
Our reasoning went as follows:
The institution and its courses were designed to attract the most talented and creative students. We taught a subject that placed a high priority on creativity and creative solutions within an institution that declared the same priorities.
As it happens, Ken Robinson was at that time our chief external examiner at LIPA, and in relation to this particular case I remember Ken saying to me that, given our values, if we could not keep someone like Eva on the course, then we had to seriously question ‘what are we doing?’ and ‘why are we doing it?’.
In the end there was a compromise. Eva reluctantly agreed to undertake those parts of the course that were absolutely essential to her staying, and we would endeavour – with the encouragement of Ken Robinson – to ensure that we could fit her work into the assessment system of the validating university.
Eva graduated from LIPA and she is now a very successful artist/designer/performer/creative entrepreneur based in Germany.
We actually had a number of highly creative students that came from Germany and I used to ask them why they came to the UK and to LIPA, and the answer was usually that they could not get what they wanted and needed creatively in Germany.
A couple of years after Eva graduated and I had left LIPA, I was at a conference in Belgium the theme of which was something like ‘the Future of Arts Higher Education in Europe”, and I found myself in the long queue for coffee and pastries standing next to the then German Federal Minister of Education who had just given the keynote address – in English! I thanked him for his keynote and he asked me where I was from.
“I’m from the UK” I said cheerfully.
There was a long pause….and this was several years before Brexit…. “Ah, the UK….an interesting country”.
As we shuffled towards the refreshments he went on to say: “I know I could say a lot about the UK, but I have a serious question to ask about your education system. For several decades your economy has not been in the best shape, and yet as a country you have led the world in many of the creative arts: art and design, music, theatre, dance, architecture, etc.
Over the same period we in Germany have had a very successful economy and yet, with a few notable exceptions, we have had nothing like your creative success. So, what are you doing, or perhaps not doing in your education system that allows that creativity to thrive?”
We were close to the coffee and rapidly disappearing pastries at this point, and I said that I didn’t have an oven-ready, well-researched, evidence-based answer to give him but I did say two things….actually three….but, on reflection, I should have held back from the third one.
First, that we have a long and noble tradition of non-conformity in this country, of sticking two-fingers up to authority and second, sort of related to that, we have a high tolerance of mavericks and eccentrics. I then made the fatal error of going on to say, thirdly, that I thought neither of those were in the German education tradition.
We’d now finally reached the coffee and the few remaining pastrie and he simply said “Ah, that’s very interesting and turned to talk to someone else”.
I often think back to my experiences with Eva, to that conversation with the German Minister and to that series of interviews with colleagues about creativity in teaching when looking at higher education now. And I do wonder whether creativity and creative success often thrives despite not because of the way higher education works. Certainly, in my own research, the notion of creativity in the face of resistance and constraints was a major theme.
In the course of my work with universities I’ve come across numerous wonderful, creative, innovative approaches to teaching and learning. All too often, however, they tend to exist in isolation driven by a particular individual who, in the nicest possible way, has decided not to do what is required or expected of them in the cause of ensuring their students have the best possible learning experiences.
When I first joined Lancaster University I went along to one of its annual internal learning and teaching festival – I think they called it. A lecturer in the department of religious studies talked about having been asked to create a new course on an aspect of Early Christianity that he wasn’t that familiar with. As an excellent academic and committed teacher, he spent the summer researching, writing and preparing his ten lectures and seminars that the course documents required.
Now, there were a number of mature students on the course and after his second or third lecture he was in a local pub and one of those mature students was working behind the bar. As he ordered his drink he asked her, as you would, “How’s it going?” And she said something like “oh it’s fine, though we know you’re just keeping ahead of us”.
He went home totally deflated, and it crossed his mind to throw the masses of research and all his lecture notes in the bin. But he didn’t. Instead he copied a lot of the research and put it into three folders and went back into the next session and divided the students into three groups and gave each group a folder containing masses of research material.
He told them to get their heads around the source material and to produce something in response….and that was completely open. He said that during class time he would be in his office and available to talk about and discuss any aspect of the work.
In the end, one group produced a short play, another group a video, and the third group produced a mini exhibition with posters and artefacts. The lecturer was absolutely delighted at the three responses but was also extremely worried, as the one thing that hadn’t changed and that couldn’t be avoided was the traditional three hour sit down exam the students were required to sit.
As it turned out, he needn’t have worried. Not only did they all pass with flying colours, but the knowledge and understanding they had acquired really stuck. Genuinely deep learning.
What he had done, following his pedagogic instincts, was to engage in what could be terms variously as Problem Based Learning, The Flipped Classroom, Student-centred learning.
He also realised, when it came to assessment, that the sit-down exam, although they all passed, was an inappropriate assessment tool to assess the creative practices and work the students had produced, and he changed it the following year to a viva…which leads me on to assessment.
The word Assessment can be traced back to the Latin ad sedere which means to sit together, to sit beside each other. For a number of reasons, students numbers being amongst them, we’ve lost – particularly at undergraduate level – that sense of assessment being a sitting together, sitting beside each other a dialogic exchange.
When I first started researching and developing innovative approaches to assessment, particularly around the assessment of creative practices. I came across a quote in an article in the Harvard Educational Review. The article in question was a verbatim account of a discussion between several leading academics, all of whom were on the editorial board of the review. The article was called Assessment at the Crossroads: a conversation…and amongst a great deal of fascinating and useful comments, one stood out for me, and it has been a touchstone for much of my work ever since. It was a comment by Walt Haney, then Professor of Education at the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy in Boston. He said:
“You’ve got to involve students actively, not just view them as objects of assessment but as agents of and in their own assessment. This can be done in many ways. One is that you ask students systematically what they have learnt. It’s a simple idea, rarely done. You find that students say some remarkable things”.
Those notions of ‘sitting down together’ and ensuring students are not just objects of our assessment but agent in their own assessment informed the development of a negotiated approach to assessment that I developed and implemented at LIPA and which has been adopted and adapted in several institutions. I understand it played a small part in the development of the approach to assessment that you now use here at UAL.
The work on assessment I have been engaged with has involved, perhaps controversially, a move away from the often fuzzy, threshold statements of learning outcomes and towards setting very clear and concise high expectations.
It also involved creating five or six assessment lenses or assessment fields through which all work….and I mean ALL work….is assessed. And an essential feature is that those fields or lenses could be weighted and negotiated depending on the nature of the assignment and what was expected…or perhaps unexpected, at the end.
I haven’t got time to go into details but if you’re interested, and at the risk of immodesty of you Google my name and either negotiated assessment or a case study called We Don’t Need Those Learning Outcomes there’s more there. Those familiar with the Pink Floyd reference will appreciate that the powers that be wouldn’t let me submit a paper titled: We Don’t Need No Learning Outcomes on the basis that it was ungrammatical!
So, to try and tie all these various strands together.
Even before the pandemic struck I used to talk about the fact that the tectonic plates that underpin higher education are moving dramatically, and the whole system is being shaken down its foundations. The pandemic served to accelerate many of the trends that were already happening, particularly in regard to learning, teaching and assessment. Amidst the panic and the often extreme pressures we saw a veritable explosion of creativity and innovation. Things changed, and changed fast because there was no alternative. Systems, procedures and processes that were seemingly graven in stone suddenly became flexible and malleable. “Oh, we CAN do that!”
Colleagues across the country (and internationally) were thinking seriously about and implementing authentic assessment with the work of individuals like Sally Brown and Kay Sambell inspiring a lot of colleagues. There was, and still is a growing conversation around the idea of ungrading and the work, among others, of Jesse Stommel in the US and Martin Compton here in the UK. If you haven’t come across ungrading before do look it up.
The technological and digital tools that were available were gathered in a creative embrace by staff and students. In my own little patch as an external examiner I saw some truly wonderful and inspiring work not only done by students, but also done by colleagues on behalf of students.
Yes, it was often difficult, painful, exhausting, stressful ….but creativity is often like that. It often thrives in difficult circumstances.
We now have least six different ways students may engage in learning. My colleague Sue Beckingham usefully describes them as in-person, fully distant, hybrid (some classes in-person, some online), hyflex (students choose the mode), blended (in-person with a blend of activities) + self-directed.
The danger is, now we are in the ‘new normality’, that our institutions and we ourselves, simply snap back to what was familiar. It took a pandemic to show us what was actually possible, that change was actually possible.
But this is not change just for change’s sake. And it’s not about novelty or doing something different. It’s about harnessing our creativity to make something better.
The great designer Jony Ive at Apple, talking about design, said “Making something new or different is relatively easy. To make something that is genuinely better is really hard”.
I’d add to that, in regards to higher education, that we are often our own worst enemies when it comes to making creative interventions to enhance learning and teaching. It’s all too easy to falter or just stop in the face of actual or perceived constraints.
But it needn’t be that way.
I was involved, as a consultant, in the development of an MA in interdisciplinary arts at a Russell Group university. It was an exciting, novel and I suppose risky venture for that particular institution. But they had been given lots of money to do it. interestingly, they appointed a creative practitioner as programme director, and I and some others, with experience of higher education, were there to advise and support.
The director had some wonderful creative ideas and vision for the programme which we had to ensure got through the university’s rigorous validation process. The program director and I had some heated exchanges about things like what call module titles. I would be saying things like “I absolutely agree with your vision, ideas and thinking but if you want to get this passed by the validation board you need to call it this and not that.
Anyway, a few months later the program director rang me to say that the program had got through validation.
I, of course, congratulated her, but then asked, after all our discussions: “what did you call the first module? “
She said that she had decided to stick to her guns and the first module was called ‘Adventures in Interdisciplinary Arts’.
I said that was fantastic and then asked what did you call the second module?
She said “‘Further Adventures’, of course”.
And I said “you’ve got that through validation at that university? amazing?”
She said “ yes. All those fuddy-duddy professors sitting round the table seem to love it I was saying things like they would love to do a course like this”
The program was indeed a series of adventures. The students were mature students with jobs and families and care responsibilities. So they would meet on a Friday afternoon, and work intensively right through the weekend with artists musicians filmmakers writers choreographers etc. and produce something on Sunday evening or they might work on the same adventure over a couple of weekends.
Getting that program of adventures through validation was a lightbulb moment for me. I realised that I’d been in the high education game for too long and was too easily, too readily self-censoring myself. I’d become institutionalised!
And I suppose that’s the message I’d like to leave you with.
Not being institutionalised (!) but being prepared take the risk, to have a go, to try something you believe will make things genuinely better.
Actually it’s not a message….that relatively easy. It’s a question.
And on the matter of asking questions, the great drama educationalist Dorothy Heathcote used to say that the most powerful word in education is the word ‘might’. If you ask ‘What is the answer to this question?’ or ‘What will you do?’, it suggests that there is one correct answer or a definite course of action. But if you ask “What might be the answer to this question?” or “What might you do?”… You open up the space, the possibilities, the curiosity, the creativity
So I’ll frame my question in those terms:
Not ‘how will you’ but ‘how might you’ harness your undoubted creativity, confidence and passion for learning and teaching to make things better?
And that might, indeed, involve a great deal of Stumbling with Confidence.
This book chapter was first published in P. Jones et al. (2010) Sustainability Education: policies, perspectives and practices. London: Earthscan
Universities bear profound responsibilities to increase the awareness, knowledge, technologies, and tools to create an environmentally sustain- able future.
ULSF, 1990
What we use on stage is a way to demonstrate that we are accountable to our relationship with the planet.
May, 2008
Introduction
While for some disciplines the sustainability agenda is regarded as ‘natural territory’, the relationship of the performing arts (dance, drama and music) and the act of performance with that agenda is somewhat indirect and problematic. As a consequence, there are a wide and diverse set of understandings, discourses and practices around the notion of sustainability. These range from basic issues such as the use and recycling of the materials used in performances and productions through to more complex issues such as of the role of the arts as a tangible means of articulating and disseminating ideas about sustainability by, for example, exploring narratives of consumption and investigating our relationship with landscape and the environment. There is also the important issue of personal and professional sustainability in the face of an uncertain future. This chapter will explore and illustrate the manner in which some of these discourses and practices around sustainability appear in performing arts HE.
Working with sustainability
In 2008, a job advert appeared for a professorship in performance design and technical theatre at the University of Colorado. Alongside the usual outline of the responsibilities of such a position, the advert asked for: ‘an understanding of sustainability issues and willingness to articulate environmentally sensitive designs’ (Inside Higher Ed, 2008). Such a requirement probably would not have appeared until relatively recently, and its inclusion might be perceived as an indication of the extent to which the sustainability agenda has impacted on the performing arts in HE.Yet in their report Sustainable Development in Higher Education, Dawe et al investigated ‘how different subject disciplines taught within the higher education system are contributing to creating sustainability literate graduates’ and reported that the arts and humanities subject areas generally – and the performing arts in particular – identified the largest number of barriers to embedding sustainability in the curriculum. Those barriers ranged from an ‘awkward fit with the subject area to lack of staff expertise, irrelevance, financial restrictions and limited institutional commitment’ (Dawe et al, 2005, p4).
When I started out to research material for this chapter, I sent an email in September 2008 with the subject line ‘Do we do sustainability in higher education performing arts?’ to the online discussion lists of the three main subject associations in HE in the UK: the National Association of Music in Higher Education (NAMHE), the Standing Conference of Dance in Higher Education (SCODHE), and the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments (SCUDD). The email asked colleagues to comment on and, if possible, provide examples of how sustainability is understood and how it manifests itself in these subject areas. I received a number of interesting and detailed replies, many of which have informed what follows. But one in particular struck me as exemplifying both the possibilities and problems of addressing the notion of sustainability in the performing arts. The response in question was from a colleague in music, and he provided several examples of where he thought music is addressing, or could address, sustainability. The first was through the use of open, sustainable technologies to generate and disseminate music as a way of countering the ‘throwaway culture of mobile phones, mp3 players etc.’ This included teaching ‘as much programming as we can afford to so that students can make their own solutions’.
The second was through encouraging and enabling students to be active listeners, who have ‘the respect for sound which comes from recording it, shaping it and listening to it in an active and engaging way.’ It is through this ‘active listening’ that one can build ‘a sustainable aural understanding and thus a greater relationship with the changing sonic planet. The [use of] mp3 in-ear headphones is isolationist and should be strongly discouraged.’
The third was a recommendation to read Eric Clarke’s book, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (2005). This is an explication and application to the field of music of James Gibson’s influential ecological perceptual theory – which assumes that structure is inherent in the environment, not a construction of the mind, and that perception and action are tightly interlocked and mutually constraining (Spiegelberg, 2006; Zhang and Patel, 2006).
For the fourth he suggested ‘the study (and performance) of Beethoven. While I might think it’s time we listened to composers of the 21st century, Beethoven did die in 1827 – how sustained do they want it? (this is yet another reading of sustained, sorry)’.
Finally, he wrote that the biggest challenge for music in the academy is ‘the perceived need to adapt to uncharted changes in a mass-media dominated bums- on-seats driven climate’.
Although all the examples provided interesting and potentially valuable avenues to explore further, perhaps the most memorable and relevant of his comments was the final sentence of his message: ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand the term sustainability at all. My apologies.’ The apparent confusion is, perhaps, unsurprising. While it is very noticeable – and the more one looks, the more noticeable it becomes – how the words ‘sustainable’, ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainability’ have become part of the strategic, operational and everyday discourses and practices of both HE and the arts, one of the consequences of their ubiquity has been a multiplicity of definitions, understandings and misunderstandings of what the terms actually mean. The influences and impact of these various and varied currents and streams of discourse around the notion of sustainability manifest themselves in a plethora of ways in HE dance, drama, music and performance.
Sustainability and performance
Performance is increasingly regarded not only as a creative practice and mode of representation but also as a vital means of embodied enquiry and as analytical trope (Arts and Humanities Research Council [AHRC], 2009).
If one looks beyond and behind the word ‘sustainability’, and understands it – at least in part – as an active concern with the relationship between humans and their environment, and the impact and consequences of the activities of the former on the latter, then it becomes obvious that there is a sustained and rich tradition of that concern manifested in the performing arts. The arts, generally, have long been a powerful source of awareness, understanding and appreciation of our environment, whether it is the ‘natural’ world or the urban and industrial landscapes that the majority of the world’s population now inhabit. There are numerous works of art, literature and music in which natural, urban or industrial environments play a major role, and many of these – for example the art and literature of the Romantic movement – have left powerful and indelible marks on our individual and collective psyches. As Wasserloos reminds us: ‘The deep embedding of natural experience has remained a characteristic of Northern literature, painting and music as a mirror of nature since the 19th century to the present day’ (Wasserloos, 2007, pp1–2).
If one looks beyond and behind the word ‘sustainability’, and understands it – at least in part – as an active concern with the relationship between humans and their environment, and the impact and consequences of the activities of the former on the latter, then it becomes obvious that there is a sustained and rich tradition of that concern manifested in the performing arts. The arts, generally, have long been a powerful source of awareness, understanding and appreciation of our environment, whether it is the ‘natural’ world or the urban and industrial landscapes that the majority of the world’s population now inhabit. There are numerous works of art, literature and music in which natural, urban or industrial environments play a major role, and many of these – for example the art and literature of the Romantic movement – have left powerful and indelible marks on our individual and collective psyches. As Wasserloos reminds us: ‘The deep embedding of natural experience has remained a characteristic of Northern literature, painting and music as a mirror of nature since the 19th century to the present day’ (Wasserloos, 2007, pp1–2). Similarly, there are numerous works of art and performance that tell of humankind’s often baleful impact on these environments and the communities that inhabit them.
Performance is not only an action and an art form. In the discourses and practices of performing arts higher education, it is also a field of study and a method of inquiry (or a way of knowing):
Arts-informed research … may trump conventional forms of research when it comes to generating questions or raising awareness of complex subtleties that matter.The deep strength of using arts in research may be closer to the act of problematizing traditional conclusions than it is to providing answers in containers that are watertight. In this sense, the products of this research are closer in function to deep conversation and insightful dialogue than they are to error-free conclusions (Eisner, 2008, p7).
The arts can be seen as ways of doing, knowing and being that often involve multiple paradoxes and the holding-in-mind of many interpretations and positions (Danver, 2007). The philosopher Alva Noë, who has worked closely with dancers and choreographers, states that ‘experience, consciousness, is always necessarily embodied. It is always, necessarily, environmentally situated’. He goes on to say that performance – particularly dance – ‘is an enactment or modelling of the fundamental fact of our relationship to the world around us’ (Noë, 2008), and that dancers perceive of their dancing not simply as a form of doing or action but primarily as a research tool, a way to explore the world and to generate knowledge and understanding.
There can be no doubt that a concern with sustainability and, particularly, an interest in the relationship between performance and the environment has become an established strand in those discourses and practices. In 2005. the AHRC established its £5.5 million Landscape & Environment transdisciplinary research programme.The aim of this four-year programme is to develop ‘arts and humanities understandings of landscape and environment in distinctive, innovative and engaging ways’ (AHRC, 2005). Following the announcement of the programme, a symposium of academics from a range of disciplines including anthropology, archaeology, architecture, dance, drama and theatre, geography, literature, music and the visual arts, met under the title Enchantment and Haunting: Creating Landscape Through Performance to explore how the AHRC’s programme might be used to investigate, in particular the relationship between performance, landscape and environment.
The AHRC’s initiative was welcomed at the symposium ‘not least for how it might demonstrate distinctive arts and humanities contributions to our understanding of the bio-physical world, human relations to it, and their current constellation around both various environmentalisms and politics of place’ (Clang, 2005, p2). Among the many responses and ideas that the symposium produced, the emergent interest in ecologies of performance was highlighted ‘for its concern with relating epistemologies of performance and ecology, and for mobilising notions such as sustainability and recycling in performance studies’ (Clang, 2005, p4). There was also an interest in ‘investigating site-based or site-inspired “eco-theatre”, various environmental and land arts, and the role of performance in environmental education and environmentalism more generally’ (Clang, 2005, p4).
The importance of considering performance in relation to sustainability is that it is both a conceptual and practical terrain that has the potential to generate and provoke genuine shifts in attitude and behaviour by engaging the emotions and senses as well as the intellect, its ability to disturb accepted attitudes and behaviours and its facility to make the ordinary extraordinary.
Sustainability and drama
Theatre reaches audiences in a very personal and compelling way, touching both the heart and the mind. Because theatre can also impart technical information and encourage action, it addresses one of the most notorious challenges of the sustainability project: moving people from the status quo to sustainability action.
(Clark, 2008, p5)
In 1882 Henrik Ibsen wrote the play Enemy of the People, which is set in a small town that has invested heavily in tourism by developing a spa.The local doctor discovers and points out that pollution from the town’s tannery is causing serious illness amongst the tourists visiting the spa.The doctor is denounced by the local authorities, businessmen and press for threatening to ruin the town’s reputation and prosperity. Ultimately he is cast out of the town and branded ‘an enemy of the people’. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Director Siân Ede, in an interview for The Ashden Directory (a website dedicated to ‘bringing together environmentalism and performing arts’) says of the play:
[It is] the most interesting play in the field of environmental issues, and it’s one which I draw on all the time … It is a brilliant piece of writing that shows the political dilemmas surrounding environmental issues. It is the most fantastic example of somebody standing up for freedom and not looking at the commercial aspects of it.You see how unpopular the hero has to make himself and the effects on his family as a result of that. It ought to be done over and over again.You can hardly better that play (Ede, 2004).
While productions of Enemy of the People are relatively rare nowadays, there is a more recent history of education engaging directly with environmental issues and the performing arts.TheTheatre in Education (TIE) movement that thrived in the UK, particularly from the mid-1960s to the 1980s, focused its work in schools. Working and engaging with (rather than simply performing to) young people and teachers, TIE companies developed, produced and performed drama-based programmes ‘around a topic of relevance both to the school curriculum and to the children’s own lives’ (Jackson, 1993, p4). TIE was an ‘issue-based’ movement, and many of the companies pursued an agenda that enabled them to combine theatre, politics and education in a unique, potent and sometimes controversial mix.
One of the most influential of the many environmentally focused plays and projects produced by the TIE movement was Drink the Mercury by David Holman, who has written a number of plays directly tackling environmental issues. First produced in 1972 by the Belgrade TIE in Coventry, the play is still performed regularly around the world – an example, perhaps, of creating sustainable theatre? The play dramatizes, in an extraordinarily powerful way, the medical and social impact of 36 years of industrial effluent poisoning on the once-prosperous Japanese fishing community of Minamata and tells the story of the struggle of the surviving victims and their families for justice and reparation. (The famous ‘Minamata’ series of photographs by W. Eugene Smith (1996) is an eloquent and terrible testimony of that particular tragedy.)
An important feature of both the plays mentioned above (see note at end of this section) is the quality of the work – not only in the original writing but in their production. One of the challenges of the sustainability agenda in regard to the arts and arts education is that, perhaps inevitably, the discourses and practices of sustainability are often framed and influenced by the rationalism of the scientist and the pragmatism of the bureaucrat rather than the passion of the artist. Each, of course, is important in its own way, but when the artistic agenda is set by the scientists and/or the bureaucrats, the art tends to lose out. Siân Ede provides a typical example of this tension:
All our [arts] grants are for early research and development activities. I’m now half-wondering whether to do an arts and environment strand. But I think I probably won’t call it that. I’ll probably say we’re continuing to do R&D but this will include environmental issues. My fear is that very poor applications will come forward. My joke is always – and this is absolutely true – when I was on the Science on Stage and Screen Committee at theWellcomeTrust[2] and we asked for things addressing science we got I can’t remember how many plays with the title Hello, hello, hello, Dolly, Dolly, Dolly.They were all really dreadful plays about cloning. Nothing had broken boundaries. Quality is the key issue. When people write to me with an application and say ‘We’re writing a play to change the world and these are the issues,’ I say,‘Well, who’s going to disagree with that? But are you any good?’ (Ede, 2004).
That ‘But are you any good?’ describes one of the tensions inherent in tackling sustainability in the performing arts curriculum. As Ede points out, very few if any would disagree with the sustainability agenda, so the ‘what’ is not in question. It is the how best to do it in a way that works which exercises those with responsibility for designing and delivering meaningful learning experiences in HE performing arts.
Such developments in HE performing arts are a response to some of the ‘hard questions’ identified by Kershaw about the theatre’s relationship with and response to the environment and environmental issues, and ‘the ambivalence of theatre in the face of a calamity for humanity’ (Kershaw, 2007, p10).
One of the hard questions Kershaw asks is ‘In what ways has the theatre been unavoidably embroiled in the ecological mess that is climate change?’ (Kershaw, 2007, p10), and anyone who has been involved in theatre-making and production will know that the theatre has a complex and difficult relationship with the notion of sustainability. On the one hand, the theatre is intensely frugal in the acquisition and use of resources, and simultaneously wildly profligate in relation to their disposal. In the face of the general lack of financial resources in the arts and the resulting, often severe, limitations on production budgets, designers have to be particularly innovative in their design solutions, and very resourceful in acquiring the materials to realize their designs. The constraints also mean that, when purchasing items, frequently only the cheapest options are or, up until recently, were pursued. Inevitably, questions such as where and how items such as timber were sourced were rarely if ever, considered.
More troubling, perhaps, from a sustainability perspective was the matter of disposal once a production had finished. The traditional theatre flat of painted canvas stretched over wooden frames was eminently recyclable. It is now rarely if ever seen, and many companies and theatres utilize the latest (affordable) developments in materials and technology.
Building-based theatre companies had scenic stores, props rooms and wardrobes where scenery, properties and costumes could be kept to be used or adapted in other productions. But in many cases, at the end of the last performance, the crew would dismantle everything on stage and much of it would go into a skip to be taken away to some landfill site.
Those practices were frequently replicated in the conservatoires, universities and colleges where the performing arts were studied and performed. With the increasing focus on sustainability and the environment, while the skip may still stand outside at the end of a production period, it now often remains partially filled or even empty, as policies – both explicit and implicit – on the acquisition, use and re-use of materials are taken on board and implemented.
Some HEIs are actively developing and promoting the sustainability agenda as it relates to the performing arts. In 2008, the Centre for Excellence for Theatre Training at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London took part in the Mayor of London’s Climate Change Action Plan for London Theatre, with a series of focused discussions and open access forums. The conference, Theatre Materials/Material Theatres (Central School of Speech and Drama, 2008), included discussions on ‘sustainable theatre architecture’ and ‘sustainable theatre production’. Central is also involved with the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL on a project to rethink the design, fabrication and purpose of performance spaces and to explore ‘issues of sustainability and spatial innovation’.
As an example of the importance of demonstrating an institution’s sustainability credentials, a new music and performance centre was recently heralded by West Chester University in the USA for winning a prestigious rating for ‘features including use of products made from recycled materials, locally manufactured or harvested wood products from a sustainably managed forest, materials with low or no volatile organic compounds, and energy-efficient mechanical and electrical systems’ (Arnold Creek Productions, 2009). While this is, of course, admirable and welcome, in the light of Ede’s question ‘But is it any good?’ there is no clue as to whether the building works as a performance space.
Theatre companies, too, are now proclaiming their sustainability credentials. The 2009 tour of the musical Cloudcuckooland, produced by the Onassis Programme at Oxford University, which supports new writing based on classical Greek drama, claimed that it was perhaps ‘the first ever environmentally sustainable touring musical’ (Eastman, 2009). This claim, perhaps inevitably, set off a series of questioning and sceptical exchanges when it appeared on the SCUDD list, the discussion list of university drama departments (SCUDD, 2009).
As the notion of sustainability has risen up the agenda for HE, its integration into institutional practices has occurred not only at the macro level of strategy and policy, but also at the micro level of course content. Increasingly, performing arts students encounter course curricula and content that requires them to consider and demonstrate an awareness and understanding of sustainability issues in relation to their subjects of study and related activities.
In a typical example, students on a new technical/production degree course at Rose Bruford College (RBC), a specialist higher education performing arts institution in Kent in the UK, have to ‘demonstrate an awareness of the environmental issues associated with the live performance industry’ (RBC, 2008). This learning outcome is developed at all three levels of the degree course, but is only assessed at level three in a module that has the assessment task outlined below. RBC is now planning to introduce a sustainability element into all its courses (Email correspondence with author, 2008).
Project specification for RBC level three assessment
Students will develop a specification for a real-world live performance event with EITHER a) Full costings, technical specifications, creative overview, profit/loss breakdowns and environmental impact assessment for taking the performance to two commercial venues. OR b) Full costings, technical specifications, creative overview, environmental impact assessment and completed grant application (Arts Council, Lottery or others) for taking the performance to two venues. (RBC, 2008)
At another UK HEI, the University of Chichester, although sustainability per se is not addressed formally on the curriculum there is, as in other institutions, a significant amount of concern among students and staff about environmental issues. A senior lecturer reports that a considerable proportion of final year devised productions devote an element of their considerations ‘to the narratives of consumption and sustainability’ (Email correspondence with author, 2008):
In the past three years we have had a number of ecological disaster zones (exploded suns, waste-filled landscapes, spaces where the ‘natural’ reclaims a redundant ‘technological’ space etc.) Following more recent work and collaboration with an architect who designed ‘rain water capacitors’ blending glass architecture with gardening, I have engaged with two undergraduate devising processes that have engaged with ‘sustainability’. United States Of Austerity (2006) drew on the imagining of an unsustainable city and worked from Paul Auster’s novel Country Of Last Things and Donald Barthelme’s They Called For More Structure (Email correspondence with author, 2008).
At Edith Cowan University in Australia, one of the project units on its Contemporary Performance course was based entirely on sustainability and the environment. Students created four original performances that were presented as part of the university’s annual theatre festival.The festival was staged entirely at an inner city site that, 14 years previously, had been a heavily degraded and polluted industrial area, and which, by the time the Peppercorn Festival took place in 1997, had become a rehabilitated wasteland developed according to permaculture principles. The titles and descriptions of the productions, which were produced to coincide with World Environment Day, demonstrate very different takes on the project theme (Edith Cowan University, 2007).
The examples above demonstrate that there are clearly a number of opportunities and a variety of ways in which sustainability issues can be and are being addressed in performing arts curricula. The first example, namely ensuring that students have properly to consider the environmental impact of their plans and activities, is a more formal approach that is more in line with the legal and regulatory framework that has developed around sustainability. While it is clearly essential that students who are planning careers in the performing arts – particularly in the areas of design, management, and technical production – are made aware and have some experience of sustainability considerations in relation to their work, it does not necessarily follow that they themselves are interested in or committed to sustainability. Rather like health and safety regulations, there is a danger that sustainability issues can be perceived merely as something that has to be taken into consideration along with everything else.
In the other examples, students are creating work that has a sustainability theme. This approach may not have the force majeure of legal obligation, but it does provide the opportunity, through the process of research, devising, performance and reflection, for students to develop, individually and collectively, an intellectual, emotional and even a political commitment to the idea of sustainability. Students are increasingly creating work, and being increasingly encouraged to create work, that is ecologically themed because it is clear that it is important to society and its survival. This work is then communicated through various arts and performance practices to the wider culture, where it contributes to the ‘warming effect’ around sustainability. One of the academics who responded to the question ‘Do we do sustainability in the performing arts?’ described this process as follows:
While it may be considered that the performing arts subject areas do not share the immediacy of subjects such as architecture or engineering sciences, they are valued by colleagues in these areas who welcome the opportunity to either use the performing arts as a means of communicating ecological sustainability issues and practices, or draw on the knowledges (e.g. of space, narrative and decision-making processes) of the subject area. (Email correspondence with author, 2008)
One curriculum area in drama/theatre that does lend itself to the integration and promotion of sustainability is that of applied drama or applied theatre (Nicholson, 2005). Both terms are used to describe an expanding set of practices and accompanying discourses in which theatre and drama skills and a range of other skills are applied in specific contexts such as communities, prisons, schools or hospitals. The teaching of applied theatre and drama necessarily involves equipping students with the pedagogic experiences and tools that enable them to conceptualize and develop into their roles as emerging applied theatre practitioners who will, as graduates, go out into the community and find work in such roles, thus continuing and expanding the field and themselves.
Courses in applied theatre have embedded in them many opportunities for students to engage with sustainability issues through placements and the development of applied theatre projects for and with a range of arts and non-arts organizations and communities. At the Central School of Speech and Drama and at Royal Holloway, University of London, part of this provision enables students to set up and run projects in developing countries. Providing these curriculum opportunities creates the first layers of potential sustainability, that is, the students develop links (and future jobs) while on their course, and through undertaking projects in the community develop their skills as practitioners.
NOTE: In a remarkable but potentially tragic example of life imitating art, on 21 February 2008 the New York Times reported a story under the headline ‘Mercury Taint Divides a Japanese Whaling Town’. The story combines elements of Enemy of the People and Drink the Mercury. Taiji, a seafaring town in Japan, is (in)famous for its annual dolphin drive, involving the slaughter of hundreds of dolphins. The NYT reported that high levels of mercury had been found in the mammals, and that a member of the town’s council, backed by scientific evidence, was fighting a lone battle against the authorities and the local fishing community who insisted that the danger was overblown.
Sustainability and music
Imagine if all sound-related disciplines added soundscape listening, analysis and topics of acoustic ecology to their course curriculum.
(Westerkamp, 2001, pp3-4)
The ethnomusicologist Jeff Titon describes music as ‘a human bio-cultural resource’, and writes about ‘worlds of music’ as ecological systems (Titon, 1984, p9). The subject area of music – which in HE includes related areas such as sound technology and sonic arts – offers a range of approaches and activities that provide opportunities for students to enhance their thinking and practice on the environment and sustainability.
The importance of, and threats to, the physical environment – both locally and globally – has been paralleled, but in a much smaller way, by a recognition of the importance of the acoustic environment. In this respect, the development of the discipline of acoustic ecology has been very significant.The underpinning philosophic principles of acoustic ecology were developed 30 years ago by R. Murray Schafer in his seminal book The Tuning of theWorld (Schafer, 1977). A sophisticated and complex discipline, it focuses on the relationship, mediated through sound, between living beings and their environment and it considers the acoustic environment as a ‘soundscape’ in much the same way one might consider the physical environment as a landscape. For example, there are ‘soundmarks’ that are analogous with landmarks, and which are sounds of particular significance (e.g. waterfalls, church bells, trains) in a particular community or environment (Wrightson, 2000).
Schafer’s terminology helps to express the idea that the sound of a particular locality (its keynotes, sound signals and soundmarks) can – like local architecture, customs and dress – express a community’s identity to the extent that settlements can be recognised and characterised by their soundscapes. Unfortunately, since the industrial revolution, an ever increasing number of unique soundscapes have disappeared completely or submerged into the cloud of homogenised, anonymous noise that is the contemporary city soundscape, with its ubiquitous keynote – traffic.
(Wrightson, 2000, p10)
The influence of Schafer’s ideas can be seen, for example, in a 2008 project for music students at Bristol University called Urban Soundscapes: Music in the English Town 1800–1900.The project entailed second- and third-year music students exploring the 19th century soundscape of a particular city. According to the course documentation, they had to do this in ‘as specific and unique detail as you can muster, relating it to whatever concept of overall coherence seems to you most fruitful … Give attention, where appropriate, to geography, architecture, institutions, communities and significant individuals’ (Banfield, 2008).
At Tufts University in Massachusetts, 100 students from across a range of disciplines worked with a composer to create a ‘cross-disciplinary audio exhibition’, using the university campus as a psycho-acoustic map. One of the aims of the project was to make people become far more aware of their audio environment, to think about and question the elements that go into making it. The instigators of the project also recognized that it had a political purpose in enabling people – through enhancing their understanding – to take or at least have some control over their acoustic environments.
Although neither of the projects above has nor makes explicit links to sustainability, they fall clearly into the category of work that raises an awareness of and concern for the environment that is one of the essential first steps in changing not only peoples’ attitudes but also their practices:
Soundscape and acoustic ecology approaches are important to us pedagogically … In these projects we explored a range of technologies that allow environments to be ‘brought inside’ the classroom, to be considered and reflected on and used as a source of musical expression. Whether this is a geographical or social environment, individual or collaborative reflections can lead to an increasing sense of environmental awareness.
(Savage and Challis, 2001, p38)
One of the problems that music has in relation to sustainability (or any other non-musical topic) is that music, for many, essentially concerns itself with composition, performance and analysis – that is, it is all about the music, musicianship and musicology. However, reporting on a cross-disciplinary initiative that involved academics reflecting on how sustainability might be made relevant to their subjects and demonstrating how environmental sustainability could be integrated into at least one course, Wachholz describes an approach to a music curriculum that explicitly links music to sustainability. It takes the form of asking music students to explore a number of sustainability-related topics and questions (Wachholz, 2007, pp5–6).These include:
• What might be the consequences of global warming on the music and music traditions of African peoples and communities who have to leave their homelands due to drought and famine?
• How might an unclean or polluted environment affect musicians? (Example: an increase in asthma and other respiratory conditions.)
• How might music have contributed to the problem? (Example: the glorification of the automobile in popular music.)
• Exploring sustainability in music instrument production. (Example: Investigating what and how many different types of wood and other materials are involved in making string instruments, pianos and so on.)
• Exploring sustainability in music consumption. (Example: What is required of the environment for the production or dissemination of music – the energy consumption in mounting a huge venue concert, the energy needed and waste produced in the glass mastering, electroplating, stamping, moulding, metallization, lacquering, printing, and packaging of CDs or DVDs, the necessity of battery disposal for iPods and other such gadgets, and so on)
(based on Wachholz, 2007, pp5-6).
If one accepts Titon’s description of music as a ‘bio-cultural resource’ (Titon, 1984, p9) then one could add to those questions and topics an exploration of what it is to be a musician in a rapidly changing cultural environment (Bennett, 2008, preface). It is perhaps no accident that Helen Stowasser, in her foreword to Bennett’s work, uses an environmental analogy:
It is widely recognised that the survival of all living things on this planet depends largely on their ability to adapt to environmental changes. It is also acknowledged that plants nurtured in a hothouse (also known as a conservatory!) do not always survive when transplanted into the open air. Classical musicians are no different, and if they are to avoid extinction they need to develop the diverse skills required to survive in our present day multicultural, economic rationalist and computer-dependent society
(Stowasser in Bennett, 2008, foreword).
Although music is not immediately a candidate for the integration of sustainability into its curriculum, the examples in this section demonstrate that it – as a discipline – provides a number of fascinating and excellent opportunities to explore sustainability: from the personal to the practical and political.
Sustainability and dance
Dance, as with drama and music, has had a long-standing relationship with the environment and, particularly, landscape. This relationship has become ever more explicit with the development of organizations and companies such as Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance (iLand) and Human Landscape Dance. iLand describes itself as ‘a dance research organization with a fundamental commitment to environmental sustainability as it relates to art and the urban context, cultivates cross-disciplinary research among artists, environmentalists, scientists, urban designers and other fields’ (iLand, 2009). Matthew Shute, the Artistic Director of Human Landscape Dance, writes:
By plying the counter-tension between person and space, this group reveals humanity’s interdependence with our world … The group treats the interconnectedness of man and nature through modern dance in public spaces.
(Shute, 2009)
The concerns about the environment, and questions about sustainability and sustainable practices, have become increasingly the concerns of the discipline, and because many dance practitioners are also dance teachers in HE, there is a constant flow of ideas, practices and people between the dance world and that of HE dance. It is important to remember that dance is not just an art form but also a form of enquiry and research (Noë, 2008; Eisner, 2008), and the HE dance curriculum reflects these concerns. Dance courses and dance institutions have begun to explore questions that range from ‘How we can better understand the environment through movement practice?’ to ‘What are sustainable dance practices?’ and ‘What constitutes a healthy dance ecology?’
Also as with drama and music, one of the recurring themes in dance is that of personal sustainability, that is developing the knowledge, the skills and, importantly, the attitudes that might enable an individual to sustain a career in what is a particularly demanding and difficult field of work (Bennett, 2008, p1). Professional dancers, in particular, tend to have relatively short careers as ’working dancers’, and teachers, researchers and practitioners in dance have grappled increasingly with the notion of sustainability, not only for what it means for individual dancers but also for what it means generally for dance.These and similar questions formed the agenda for a student-focused symposium on Sustainability, Ecology and the Moving Body (University of Northumbria, 2009) that explored ways that the discourses and practices surrounding sustainability might become core discourses and practices in the discipline of dance.
Endnote
Finally, it is worth mentioning an alternative approach to encouraging students to engage with sustainability. Some US HEIs, as part of their strategic and operational commitment to sustainability, have recently begun to require that all students, regardless of their main subject of study, undertake a sustainability- related course. At Goucher College in Baltimore, for example, all first-year students are ‘required to explore the ecological and/or policy dimensions of environmental sustainability’, and they are offered a choice of 17 courses that range from the scientific to the philosophical and ethical (Goucher, 2009). One of the courses, Consumerism, The Media, Popular Culture and the Environment, is one that might well attract dance, drama and music students. The course description is, perhaps, a useful way to end this chapter on sustainability and the performing arts curriculum because it encapsulates many of the themes that have been discussed, as well as some of its aspirations for a more sustainable world:
This course will examine the relationship between culture and environment.We will focus on how the mass media and popular culture create and perpetuate the mythology of the American Dream and the “good life”—with all its material abundance and consequent wastefulness. How does our culture talk about various forms of consumption? What is the relationship between the media, cultural and political elites, corporate entities, and the consumer? How do we, as an audience, receive, internalize, and operationalize these messages? And how can we escape the mantra of “more is better”? The course will include a strong experiential component meant to encourage students to live in more sustainable ways
(Goucher College, 2009, p93).
This chapter has demonstrated that while dance, drama and music in Higher Education may well appear to have an ‘awkward fit’ with the sustainability agenda (Dawe et al, 2005), appearances can be deceptive. It is perhaps the nature of that agenda and, particularly, assumptions about how best it should be implemented that provide the awkwardness. It is clear that the performing arts not only have a long and significant history of creative engagement with environmental issues, but also that they continue to play an important and influential role in the development and transmission of ideas, attitudes and calls to action in relation to sustainability.
* * * * * * *
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the following dance, drama and music colleagues across the UK and further afield for their invaluable help, advice and comments: Stephen Banfield, Janette Barrington, Gill Clarke, Dave Coslett, Nick Fells, Ashley Hanson, Nick Hunt, Adrian Moore, Misha Myers, Kate Newey, Mary Oliver, Claire Parfitt, Sheila Preston, Tina Ramnarine, Julie Robson (Australia), Matthew Sansom, Mark Seton (Australia), Trevor Wiggins and Andrew Wilford.
References
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Stumbling with Confidence 