Tag: education

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 inside academia I was immediately struck by the fact that a great number of things just didn’t seem to work very well. I was surrounded by talented, skilful, intelligent, committed and passionate colleagues who appeared to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy just getting things to work for them and their students.

It didn’t take me long to work out that one of the primary causes of all this inefficiency and waste and the bang-head-on-desk frustration that resulted, was frequently and simply a tangle of poor design. The plethora of complex systems, labyrinthine processes and perplexing protocols that extend to every corner of our educational endeavours all too often have been created by individuals and groups who – with the best will in the world – are not well acquainted, if at all, with the basic principles of good design.

An awareness and appreciation of concepts such as ‘good design enhances the users’ experience’, or ‘good design is logical e.g. form follows function’, or ‘good design is minimal design e.g. as little as possible and only as much as absolutely necessary’, or ‘good design is consistent right down to the fine details’ was and is often entirely lacking.

There is also an aesthetic quality to good design, but I’ve yet to hear or read that word, or anything similar, when it comes to discussing the crucially important task of designing the educational experiences of students.

If we are to be architects of educational experiences, then we must accept that not only do we need to embrace the principles and practices of good design, but – crucially – we either need to become skilled educational architects and designers ourselves or ensure that at least some of us have or develop those skills so that we can help our colleagues and institutions not only detangle the knots that bind us but also, and more importantly, to create and support the wonderful educational experiences that our students truly deserve.

Paul Kleiman Design for Learning

About me:

I am an independent higher education consultant and co-founder of the educational consultancy Ciel Associates specialising in organisational and transformational change and enhancing learning, teaching and assessment. I have over thirty years experience in a wide range of higher education providers both as a consultant and, before that, in a number of management, leadership and strategic roles. My work is informed by my belief in the transformational power of education and a commitment to enabling institutions to create meaningful and sustainable change. Contact me at Ciel Associates .

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 10, 20, maybe 30 minutes. When I sit at the piano, I might choose to run through one or two of the classical pieces I’ve learned to play reasonably well over the years. Or I might choose a jazz or popular standard that I’ve picked up by ear, which involves a bit of improvisation in that sense of working relatively loosely within a recognised framework. I never play the same tune in exactly same way: but then, who does?

Usually I just place my hands on or over the keys, and I wait to see what happens. I have no idea of what is going to happen before it takes place. Something stirs. Something starts. A note or a chord is played. And off I go. Or off ‘it’ goes, because I feel I’m not in conscious control of my fingers. I am, of course, but it doesn’t feel that way.

David Sudnow, in his now classic work Ways of the Hand (1978) which is a remarkable insider’s account of learning to improvise jazz piano that was based mostly on his own introspection, describes having the most vivid impression of his hands making music by themselves. Sometimes, for me, it feels a bit awkward, as I travel down some musical cul-de-sac or find myself in a particular and sometimes too-familiar groove. Other times it just flows, I’m ‘in the zone’, and I know, especially when it really flows, that it clears and refreshes not only my mind but also my spirit.

In relation to ‘flow’ and Czikszentmihalyi’s influential work on that topic, we know that performances that combine flow states with a degree of risk taking might hold the key to achieving optimal levels of musical communication in improvisation. Being in the flow or ‘groove’ sometimes enables experienced improvisers to move beyond or extend their previous cognitive limits.

Sudnow uncovered many principles about learning, and particularly, what we might call embodied learning. His analysis and observations resonate powerfully with the work and research around creativity in learning and teaching, and what might be referred to as learning or teaching at the ‘edge of chaos’.

Photo by Paul Kleiman

‘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 was like taking an idea for a walk. You know, the more you just did it….it might just work.” (Interview)

It had been a long day. I had spent it interviewing several academics – from new lecturers to emeritus professors, across a range of disciplines – about their conceptions and experiences of creativity in relation to learning and teaching. Even though I was recording it all, it was still hard work maintaining focus and enthusiasm for each of the 45 minute sessions, and ensuring – as one is obliged to do in phenomenographic research – that I had obtained deep and rich responses to my questions.

I always started with the same question: Could you tell me about an occasion that was a creative experience for you in terms of learning and teaching higher education?

All too often that question would be greeted by silence, and what I came to call the ‘rabbit in the headlight’ look: as if why on earth would I think that there might possibly be a connection between creativity and teaching?

But I’d learned, from my training and work in drama, not to be afraid of silence and to avoid the temptation to ‘jump in’ in order to avoid embarrassment. As a drama therapist once told me: “silence IS golden: it usually means they’re thinking”; and sure enough, after a short while, a story would emerge, and I would gently probe the whats, hows and whys of that particular experience.

The last interview of the day was with a vastly experienced educational developer, with a PhD in linguistics, who had taught in China. After the usual hesitant start, he began to tell me how he had developed a successful student-centred, experiential and problem-based learning experience which was the antithesis of the teacher-centred, conformist, ‘micro-teaching’ that was the normal and expected practice. It was he who described the experience with the Paul Klee ‘taking a line for a walk’ quote above.

Thinking back to those interviews, a number of ‘moments’ stand out:

The eminent, soon-to-retire historian bemoaning the conformity and lack of risk-taking in his younger colleagues, and finally – as his last ‘hurrah’ – running a ‘visual history’ course on 18th century England as seen through a number of key objects that he had always wanted to run but never had the nerve… until now when he was leaving. (This was way before Neil McGregor’s renowned BBC series on the objects of the British Museum).

The management school professor in a 5* research rated department who, much to the annoyance of his colleagues, had won a prestigious national prize for his innovative teaching methods. Apparently they couldn’t understand why he was wasting his time on enhancing his learning and teaching expertise when he ought to be enhancing his (and the department’s) research reputation and ranking.

There was the young, early career lecturer, genuinely committed to teaching, tears rolling down her face as she recounted the frustrations of having her creative ideas about teaching rudely quashed by her senior male colleagues: “I feel restricted, I feel frightened….the constant ‘don’t bother about the teaching, just focus on your research’….it makes me so angry, but I don’t dare say anything”.

And there was the language lecturer whose creative ‘Damascene’ moment occurred serendipitously as a result of being very late for a class she was meant to be teaching in parallel with other identical classes. When she finally turned up at the end of the session she found that the group, who normally “sat like puddings” while she presented the set material in the set textbooks, were still there and that “the atmosphere in the room was buzzing…they were talking to each other, they had a problem to solve. So we spent the last couple of minutes talking about how we were going to keep that going now”.

There were many such moments in all the interviews, and after personally transcribing all the interviews (extraordinarily tiring, but so valuable in being able to get ‘inside the source material’), I began to search for patterns of thoughts and behaviour. Slowly but surely, after a long and rigorous iterative process, the many and varied experiences of creativity in higher education began to coalesce around five main conceptual categories. I attempted to capture them in the following map:

Creativity: a conceptual map. (©️ Paul Kleiman)

1. Creativity can be a CONSTRAINT-focused experience, where the constraints and specific limitations tend to encourage rather than discourage it. Creativity occurs despite and/or because of the constraints;

2. Creativity can be a PROCESS-focused experience; that may lead to an explicit or tangible outcome…or may not;

3. Creativity can be a PRODUCT-focused experience where the whole point is to produce something;

4. Creativity can be a TRANSFORMATION-focused experience where the experience frequently transforms those involved in it;

5. Creativity can be a FULFILMENT-focused experience where there is a strong element of personal fulfilment derived from the process/production of a creative work.

As well as the development and identification of these five categories (later to be reduced to three – but that’s another story), a number of significant outcomes and observations sprang from the research. It was clear that university teachers experienced creativity in learning and teaching in complex and rich ways, and certainly the ones I interviewed – once they got going – exhibited great enthusiasm for, and an interest in, creativity.

I was struck, particularly, in response to my exploring the reasons why an individual pursued a particular creative course, by the number of times someone said ‘I stumbled across something’ or something similar. The example of the very late lecturer (above) is a typical example. The frequency and consistency with which the opportunity to exploit the consequences of ‘stumbling upon something’ played a critical part in the various self-narratives of creativity in learning and teaching is clearly important, and it has obvious significance for those interested and engaged in learning and teaching. Firstly it is important to realise that there are several distinct but linked elements in this. One is the ‘stumbling’, and another is the ability or opportunity to exploit it. However, as one of the university teachers interviewed said, people stumble across things all the time but rarely act: “So it’s not just stumbling upon it, it’s finding that the thing has a use”.

Then, beyond finding that whatever it is might have some use, one needs the confidence to be able to engage in an action that exploits – in the best sense of the word – that situation. The notion of confidence constitutes a significant and expanding thematic element through all the five categories. In many of the interviews – and it is one reason why actual face-to-face interviews are so important – as the individual began to explain and explore their own creativity (some said it was really the first time they’d ever really thought about it) – I both heard and observed the growing sense of confidence both vocally and physically: they became animated, they smiled and they laughed.

Confidence clearly plays a critical role in enabling university teaches to engage creatively in their pedagogic practice. However, in the research into conceptions of learning and teaching, little attention seems to be paid to the subject of confidence and other affective aspects of the teacher’s role and identity. A number of researchers comment on this apparent gap in the research literature, and explain it by saying that dealing with the emotional and attitudinal aspects of learning and teaching is rather antithetical to the prevailing analytic/ critical academic discourse.

During the course of those interviews there was a strong sense of people transformed. It is also clear that the centrality of creativity-as-transformation in relation to learning and teaching, and the importance of creativity in relation to personal and/or professional fulfilment, poses a series of challenges. There is much more to the experience of creativity in learning and teaching than simply ‘being creative’. Furthermore, a focus on academics’ experience of creativity separated from their larger experience of being a teacher may encourage over simplification of the phenomenon of creativity, particularly in relation to their underlying intentions when engaged in creative activity.

The transformational power of creativity poses a clear challenge to organisational systems and institutional frameworks that rely, often necessarily, on compliance and constraint, and it also poses a challenge to approaches to learning, teaching and assessment that promote or pander to strategic or surface approaches to learning. Academics need to be perceived and involved as agents in their own and their students’ creativity, rather than as objects of or, more pertinently, deliverers of a particular ‘creativity agenda’.. For higher education institutions (and the government) creativity is seen as the means to an essentially more productive and profitable future. But for university teachers, creativity is essentially about the transformation of their students…and themselves.

Graphic if the weird creativity surrounded by curving black lines

(‘Creativity’ image created by Paul Kleiman with the assistance of AI)

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 done by digging deep into the problems, asking some awkward questions, and providing the hard evidence to support the change event.

Change, of course, can be challenging, awkward and divisive, and there’s the old cliche about people liking the idea of change as long as they don’t have to change themselves. But change isn’t just about people. For genuine, effective, sustainable change to happen, three things need to be addressed simultaneously: People, Systems and Environment. Changing one or even two of those will lead to whatever change is envisaged either not working as well it could or not at all.

An example:

A university’s STEM departments were scattered around the campus. The university commissioned a prize-winning architect to design a new ‘stand out’ building that would house all the various departments. There would be a beautiful atrium in the centre of the building with a café and colleagues from different departments would gather there and all sorts of wonderful ideas (and possible patents) would emerge from the exchange of ideas.

What actually happened was that while the university clearly changed the environment, nothing was done to address the people and systems involved. Within a very short time the building was re-compartmentalised into separate departments who kept their own coffee machines. The atrium remained a beautiful, empty, silent space.

The PSE framework informs much of our consultancy work. It enables us to explore the potential and practicalities of change through those three ‘lenses’, always asking and seeking ‘What will make this better?’

About me:

I am an independent higher education consultant and co-founder of the educational consultancy Ciel Associates specialising in organisational and transformational change and enhancing learning, teaching and assessment.. My work is informed by my belief in the transformational power of education and a commitment to helping institutions achieve meaningful and sustainable change. Contact me at Ciel Associates .

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 wrote an associated journal article ‘Predictive Texts’ that took a look into the future of the arts in the UK in 2026 based on the then current trends. I described a cultural landscape in which the arts had largely been stripped out of the educational experience of children and young people. I described the consequences of that policy on the live performing arts sector which was now being by-passed by a generation of students who had not received consistent, or in many cases any, arts education through primary and secondary education where the focus was on STEM education. I reflected on how that educational neglect had led to a kind of cultural blindspot or illiteracy which, in turn, had led to a severe decline in arts attendance as that generation of millenials now sought other avenues for their entertainment and spending.

There have been many dozens of articles written in the last few years voicing concern about state and future of the arts in the UK, particularly in education. Tory policy towards the arts threatened the existence of the entire creative sector, particularly those parts of the sector in which live performance is an integral part of their raison d’etre: live theatre, dance and music. Today, despite the change in government, almost daily there is news of another university cutting its creative and performing arts courses.

The decision to cut arts funding in higher education by the last Tory government signalled not only a drastic diminutions of the arts in education but also, as a consequence of this and other policies, an acceptance that whole sections of the creative sector could be allowed ‘go to the wall’ despite the fact that the sector as whole contributes massively to the GDP. The contrast with the then government’s support of the fishing industry, which played such a huge role in Brexit, is stark. At present fishing contributes around £1.4 billion to the economy (Gross Value Added data from the Office for National Statistics). The creative industries contribute around £124 billion to the economy (2022 figures)

While the election of the Labour Government and the accompanying positive statements about supporting the arts and creativity in education provide some indication of a change for the better (we’ll wait and see on that one), in the meantime a bleak future for the arts beckons. The creative industries are fed via a pipepline of skills and talent that are nurtured in our education system. By reducing or stopping the flow of creative talent along that pipeline ensures that the creative industries, and certainly those parts of the sector that are seen to be less ‘valuable’ in economic terms, wither on the vine. It also ensure that access to the arts and arts training increasingly becomes the preserve of the wealthy and privileged and those who have social, cultural and economic capital.

I am reminded of a sentence from the 2015 book by the eminent producer and impresario Michael Kaiser titled ‘Curtains? The Future of the Performing Arts in America’. Examining the trends, Kaiser describes a ‘doomsday scenario’ in which, across America, many theatres, arts centres and other performance venues, hit by the decline in audiences and/or funding, “sit vacant, reminders of a different era, not unlike the Colosseum in Rome and the Parthenon in Athens”. Kaiser was projecting some years into the future, but in the UK the Covid crisis massively accelerated the onset of that doomsday scenario.

Thinking about all this I was reminded of a book I read years ago, which remains one of my favourite books (it’s also on Neil Gaiman’s list of all-time favourites, so I’m in good company). The book is called Lud-in-the-Mist, written in 1926 by Hope Mirrlees. Mirrlees was a classicist, and much of her work dealt with the contested boundaries of Art and Life.

In Lud-in-the-Mist there are two countries. There is the land of Dorimare, a nation of stolid burghers, merchants and artisans. A rather prim and very proper place, where everyone knows their place, where the motto is essentially ‘it’s the economy, stupid’, and where the arts are relegated to activities such as needlework and country dancing: pursuits for the refinement of gentlewomen and gentlemen.

On the border of Dorimare, however, on the other side of the Debatable Hills, lies the land of Faerie, a strange, dark land full of mysteries and wonders…not all of them pleasant. The upright citizens of Dorimare so fear the land that lies beyond those dread hills, that the word ‘Faerie’ is never to be uttered.

Dorimare’s main city of Lud-in-the-Mist lies at the confluence of two rivers: the Dapple and the Dawl. The Dawl is like any other commercial river, but the Dapple happens to flow out of the land of Faerie, and brings with it fairy fruit, that is smuggled into Dorimare.  Eating fairy fruit has a terrible effect on the upright citizens of Lud-in-the-Mist: it causes people to start singing strange songs, to spout poetry, to dance with abandon. In other words, it turns them mad.

The plot revolves around the disappearance of a group of young ladies and the Mayor’s son who have been kidnapped and taken to the land of Faerie, and the attempt of the Mayor, a bumbling, self-important, rather fatuous man to rescue them. (Any resemblance to a real persons is entirely coincidental).  As a consequence of that quest, fundamental changes are wrought – to the Mayor and to Dorimare itself.

In Lud-in-the-Mist, Mirrlees is dealing with the division of the world into Apollonian and Dionysian aspects: the homely and the wild. There is also the long battle between Classicism and Romanticism, and Freud’s theories of the conscious and unconscious mind, and the relationship between terror and beauty.

The actor Mark Rylance, in an interview, said that the arts are essentially ‘mysterious’ which is why they frighten  politicians and policy-makers, because they can’t control them, they can’t measure them.

I imagine the educational curriculum in Dorimare’s schools is very much what like the one demanded by Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times;

“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the mind of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.“

And if you think that’s rather extreme, consider this – handed to parents at a primary school in London:

‘The new programme of study in English is knowledge-based, this means its focus is on knowing facts rather than developing skills and understanding. It is also characterised by an increased emphasis on the technical aspects of language and less on the creative aspects.”

So, alongside schools dropping all ‘non-core’ subjects i.e. arts subjects and a few others from the school curriculum in order to enable students to catch-up on everything they missed due to Covid, we also had catastrophic cuts to arts subjects in higher education in line with the Tory government’s insistence that all higher education programmes must align with  “economic and societal needs” – which the government believed will only be met by STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) programmes and some others such medicine and agriculture. One can only look with envy at the financial support some other countries are putting into supporting their creative and cultural sectors as they recognise the importance and value of those sectors to the well-being of society as a whole.

I was thinking about Lud-in-the-Mist because it seems to me we are increasingly living in a country which is becoming more Dorimare-like by the day, where the arts are increasingly banished to the equivalent of the land of Faerie, where creativity is associated with the creation of goods and wealth, where any hint of an artistic or genuinely creative spirit is dismissed as bad influence, and to be actively discouraged and eliminated.

Across our education system, from primary through to tertiary, there is now a very real danger, evidenced by the course and departmental closures and the significant drop in the take-up of arts subjects, of subjects like art, dance, drama and music disappearing entirely from the curriculum. The clear and present danger for the wider creative arts sector will be the cutting off the pipeline of interest, skills and talent on which the sector relies. We are facing the prospect, in many areas of the country, of the spectre of a cultural wasteland, not unlike Kaiser’s ‘doomsday’ scenario.

A hundred years ago, in Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrless asked how might we truly embrace the arts in all their wondrous, dangerous, life-affirming glory along with the eccentrics and mavericks?  Or are we fated to banish them, their works and deeds, to that strange, wonderful, forbidden land beyond the Debatable Hills?

The final, celebratory chapter of Lud-in-the-Mist, as the citizens of Dorimare throw open the gates of the city to allow those mysterious, dangerous, life-affirming Faeries to enter, provides the answer.