Some recent and not so recent posts, mainly about education, creativity and assessment, with a few more personal pieces thrown in for good measure.
Grief crept up on me, unexpectedly: a story of Christmas Eve.
As a Jewish family, we don’t really do Christmas. Yes, we’ll gather together, have a big meal, play board games, and watch far too much television. But that’s because it’s a holiday, everything is closed, and there’s not much else to do. Coming up to Christmas that year we’d just had some building work done,…
Lessons from the Garden
There’s a corner of our garden where I keep a number of pots and containers that have nothing in them except some earth or compost and the occasional weed. It’s a sort of limbo for plants that once bloomed but have now have departed this horticultural coil. Some have been there since we moved into…
Separate grading from learning!
One of our engrooved or deep-seated beliefs in higher education 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…
‘See me. Feel me. Touch me.’
From virtual to visceral learning After I wrote a piece on inspiring learning through objects and artefacts, I began to think a bit more about what makes that form of learning so powerful. I was walking the dog (I use it as a form of idea-generation therapy) wondering what might be the opposite or complementary…
Revealing assessment through drawing
When leading workshops on assessment I often start with a ’warm-up’ exercise in which the participants, supplied with sheets of paper and plenty of coloured pens, are asked to draw/make marks on paper about how they feel in relation to assessment: as assessors or being assessed or both. They then share their work with the…
A brush, with silence and solitude
I really enjoy painting. Not the sort of thing one might frame and hang on a wall, but the actual walls one might hang them on. The larger the better. And I’m trying to work out why I like it so much. The rather dark and now somewhat battered walls of our hallway, stairs and…
Thinking, Making, Doing, Solving, Dreaming: reflections on completing a PhD thesis on creativity in higher education
Recently, I undertook a PhD viva as external examiner at the university department where I did my own PhD. The viva took place in a room the shelves of which contain copies of every completed PhD. And there it was! I finally completed it in 2007 at the end of a long four years during…
F-AI-L: forget about assessment?
You can’t move these days in Higher Education without reading about how AI has completely compromised most, if not all, the approaches to assessment that require a student to produce an artefact e.g. an essay, a poster, a portfolio, etc. It would appear that the only way to ensure ‘assessment security’ is to, first, thoroughly body…
Adventures in HE: time for a Skunk Works?
A few years ago, a UK university established a new initiative with funding from central government. The initiative was one of about 70 such initiatives across the HE sector which were established in the hope that, within the five years of the funding, the universities involved would have taken risks and pioneered innovative learning approaches…
Assessment: paradigm shift required?
There has been a slew of recent journal articles, blogs, podcasts etc. on the challenges posed by Generative AI in higher education and, particularly, the threat GenAI poses to assessment integrity and security along with possible approaches to mitigate the threat. The picture that emerges is one in which none (perhaps bar one: the viva?) of the…
Design for Learning: a case for detangling education?
Academics, eh? We may be great teachers. We may be great researchers. We may even be great managers and administrators. But that does not make us great educational designers….and I write this as someone who trained and worked as a designer before I stumbled into teaching design and some other subjects in higher education. Once…
Notes from the edge: piano lessons
I aim to play the piano most days, if I am near one. I work from home a great deal of the time, and I do a lot of writing. The work often involves some complex problems – large and small – that need to be addressed. When I am stuck, simply fed-up and frustrated or just need a break, I’ll go to the room with the piano and play for…
”It’s cheating Jim, but not as we know it”: the problematic arts of plagiarism
Recently, while the academic world attempts to negotiate its path through the minefield posed by Generative AI, I was looking at some university policies about academic integrity and stumbled across these two statements: There are few intellectual offences more serious than plagiarism in academic and professional contexts. To submit a paper or comparable assignment that…
Telling Tales
I was once helping to run a ‘New to Teaching’ workshop for new/early career lecturers in languages and linguistics. I was one of several presenters during the day, and I was chatting with one of them – a Head of (a very large) Department – over the rather basic and disappointing sandwich lunch which the host…
‘Taking a Line for a Walk’: reflections on interviewing academics about creativity
“You just get this one idea, which might, at first, seem a bit daft. But something just holds you back from thinking it is completely daft. It was the artist Paul Klee who talked about painting being about taking a line for a walk. And that was the thing about it. What it was like….it…
When something(s) need to change…
When a higher education provider calls in a consultant, it’s usually because they want and need some thing or things to change. Usually, at least some people in the institution know precisely what the problem is and what needs to change. But bringing in a consultant can provide validation and confirmation of what needs to…
Beyond the Debatable Hills: is it curtains for the arts in education?
As yet another UK university announces major course closures and redundancies – mainly affecting arts and humanities – it’s worth being reminded that entries for A level arts subjects: dance, design & technology, drama, music among others, have reached the lowest since at least 2011. Back in 2016 I presented at an arts conference and…
Plus ça change: a taxonomy of pressures and hard times in higher education
12 years ago I came across and wrote a blog piece about Terran Lane, a tenured associate professor in the US, recently moved from academia to industry. His move caused consternation amongst his friends and colleagues: “voluntarily giving up tenure is roughly akin to voluntarily giving up a lung”. On his blog – which…
We’d never get away with it now!
6 problems and developing creative confidence in students LIPA (Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts) welcomed its first students in 1996. In those early days, as a very rare brand new higher education institution, LIPA had many of the typical characteristics of a ‘start-up’: exciting, risk-taking, a bit of a roller-coaster. Looking back at that time,…
2 Jews, 3 Arabs and 5 cups of tea
More years ago than I care to remember, five men sat around a hissing stove in a campsite outside Sofia in Bulgaria. It was 1969 and Robert and I were two Jewish lads from North London driving from London to Israel via Turkey. We were discussing life, the universe and the future of the Middle…
Performing assessment: are you an assessment Cavalier or Roundhead (or Innocent)?
There I am, sitting in my favourite balcony seat in the institute’s auditorium, pen in hand, notebook discreetly balanced on my knee, preparing to watch and assess a performance by final-year performing arts students. Not only am I audience and critic, but examiner too: I have to assess and assign individual grades to each of…
The plagiarism (and plagiarised) iceberg
I once attended a conference on academic integrity. Full of academics and university managers all concerned about the rising tide of plagiarism, cheating and the exponential growth of services and products aimed at providing their users the means with which to ‘game’ the system. As is customary at such gatherings, there was a keynote presentation…
Higher Education, Creativity and the German Minister (+Coffee & Pastries)
Some years ago, before Brexit, I happened to be standing and chatting to the then German Federal Minister for Education. We were in the (long) coffee queue during a break at an ELIA (European League of Institutes of Art) conference, the theme of which was the future of arts higher education in Europe in the…
A lesson from a flower
The morning after the announcement of Trump’s victory, I, like many though by no means all, sat rather despondently at my kitchen table listening to the endless post-mortems. I glanced out of the window and something caught my eye. There, in the grey morning light and among the plants that had long ago bloomed and…
On Creativity: is ‘might’ the answer…as well as the question?
The eminent, and now sadly departed, educationalist Dorothy Heathcote used to say that the most powerful word in education is the word ‘might’. Asking a student ‘what MIGHT be the answer?’ rather than ‘what IS the answer?’ opens up the possibilities, the questioning, the pondering, the wondering….the creativity.’ Our handbooks say things like (and I know, because…
Zen and the Art of Curriculum Maintenance
Like many, I am fascinated by Japan and Japanese culture. That fascination, in my case, goes back a long way. My father used to do business in Japan and often visited with my mother. We had Japanese art and artefacts in our house and we often hosted Japanese students who came to study here in…
Armed for a multitude of jobs
This blogpost is adapted from an article that first appeared in a special learning skills supplement of the Times Higher Education. Employers frequently bemoan graduates’ lack of skills, but the performing arts demonstrate that they can provide students with the variety of ‘soft’ skills coveted by CEOs. “If I want someone to design and build…
The Story of a Life
How well do we really know the life stories of our parents? Obviously most of us will know some details of their lives before they were our parents: place of birth, schooling, career etc., and as children – and we will always be their children – we will, of course, know much of the middle…
Reflection: schooldays, sitting quietly and making marks on paper
My first attempt at life drawing c. 1968 During a conversation about education with a colleague who is an eminent and well-respected professor of education, he said vehemently ‘I hated school’. Now he and I are probably of a similar generation, but my school experience in the 1960s was rather more positive. I went to…
Beyond excellence…..towards wonder
In higher education (and in education generally) we obsess about excellence. So what does excellence mean? Going by the result of the debate on excellence at an academic conference, there is a clear majority who feel that the term has lost credibility and value. When all institutions are either ‘excellent’ or, at the very least,…
‘Keep on the Grass’: changing the language of education
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…
👁
“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…
“I am not a number!”: reassessing assessment
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…
Stumbling with Confidence 