Exquisite Education Podcast

In this four-part series, the Academic Leads for Employability responsible for developing and implementing the Anglia Ruskin Graduate Capitals framework reflect on the experience and how the framework continues to be important. In this final conversation, Beatriz Acevedo talks with Andrew Middleton about how the ARGCs framework proves to be versatile for developing sustainability in the curriculum.

In this four-part series, the Academic Leads for Employability responsible for developing and implementing the Anglia Ruskin Graduate Capitals framework reflect on the experience and how the framework continues to be important .In the third conversation, Marina Boz joins Andrew Middleton and Beatriz Acevedo.

In this four-part series, the Academic Leads for Employability responsible for developing and implementing the Anglia Ruskin Graduate Capitals framework reflect on the experience and how the framework continues to be important. In the second conversation, Adrian Scruton joins Andrew Middleton and Beatriz Acevedo.

In this four-part series, the Academic Leads for Employability responsible for developing and implementing the Anglia Ruskin Graduate Capitals framework reflect on the experience and how the framework continues to be important. In this first conversation, Jo Outteridge joins Andrew Middleton and Beatriz Acevedo.

Beatriz and Andrew discuss whether 'mattering' is a more useful term than 'belonging' when thinking about student engagement at university. From this, ideas about hospitality emerge.

We discuss the identities we have as academics and how we manage them when they come into conflict with each other. Subversive, autonomous, innovative and creative identities are in tension with the conforming identities we have to ensure our courses are clear, coherent and consistent, for example. Examining our 'leader identities', our legacy, and our desire to be collegial can help us to defend our academic practice and meet our student needs.

We start to explore the breadth of what is meant by creativity and why it is important to academics and their students. References* (note: I made explicit reference to 'possibility thinking', a term coined by Craft)Craft, A. (1999) Creative development in the early years: some implications of policy for practice. The Curriculum Journal, 10(1): 135-150.
Craft, A. (2001) Little c Creativity. In A. Craft, B. Jeffrey and M. Leibling Creativity in Education, London: Continuum.

In this episode Andrew creates a head for our exquisite corpse by reflecting on a presentation from Professpr Katy Shaw (University of Northumbria) who talked about the opportunity that storytelling give teachers and learners. She expplained how stories are systems for change, ways of making meaning, seeing and doing. Creating narrative is a process of meaning making, and the story can be understood as self-authored or collectively authored frameworks for understanding. The capacity to use stories is empowering for us as learners and critical thinking professionals - it gives us a mechanism for personalised learning through reflection. Stories matter - they bring us together or tear us apart.

Beatriz Acevedo and Andrew Middleton reflect on the threats, opportunities and necessities of AI and ChatGPT that educators need to consider. This three dimensional view identifies academic integrity, academic innovation, and the development of employability as important contexts for educators.

Top tip: Why not to attend the Global Festival on Active Learning, it is very inspiring, it does not take chunks of your time and it will give you some ideas on how to use this new technology for learning and teaching. https://activelearningnetwork.com/active-learning-events/

We discuss the value of anger and how we can use our emotions to help us reflect on what really matters to us. We discuss how Beatriz has used this as a catalyst to engage students in personalised learning.

We discussed strategies for engaging disruptive students in class with our guest Biba Hassiba. In our discussion we considered the importance of empathy and trust and ways of fostering this through co-developed ground rules and introducing and facilitating small group activities.

Biba has been part of the Raw Tag project and is committed to creativity and active learning and module leader for Supply Chain Management. Biba asked us to discuss how we gain the attention of students who appear disinterested and difficult to approach

We consider how Sian Shaw's model of the Digital Nurse can help us understand digital fluency.
'A caring nurse is digital nurse' . There are those who would argue that you can be both caring and have an eye on digital. There seems to be a belief that the digital agenda will somehow interfere with the ability of nurses to care. Quite the opposite if nurses are not digital they will actually harm patients by not using technology to empower patients to use technology to manage their own health and well being, be able to use digital databases to audit/evaluate the quality of care, of facility the reach and impact of the NHS through using technology to enhance the powers of nurses to free up time to care.

Sian is Associate Professor in Digital Learning in Nursing at ARU. As we look for ways to clearly explain what digital fluency means, Andrew was inspired by what Sian wrote for the Philip Ives survey about the Digital Nurse. Sian joined us to discuss this framing and how we might apply it to other disciplines, e.g. the Digital Engineer, the Digital Criminologist, the Digital Historian, etc. The model asks us to imagine our our graduates as leaders in a digitally rich profession.

A massive topic about the challenges facing teachers and the whole class now that we are back on campus. We discuss the importance of managing our own authority and how our attention must look after the interests of all students in the room - and not the attention seeker primarily.
Palmer's book on the Courage to Teach is used, but Tait et al's discussion of teaching as a performance is also useful here.

Palmer, P. J. (2017). The courage to teach: exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Tait, G., Lampert, J., Bahr, N., & Bennett, P. (2015). Laughing with the lecturer: the use of humour in shaping university teaching. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 12(3). https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol12/iss3/7

Today we have a very special guest: Rebekka Puderbaugh, teaching fellow at University of Edinburgh. She teaches and research on acoustic phonetics, phonetic description of understudied languages, glottalic speech, and phonation.   In this podcast she shares how she uses the exquisite corpse games to create “monsters” that have certain body parts, but which will vary in form from one to the next. This provides an accessible “body” that can be “cut” into parts and allow for a discussion of how those parts are identified, given their potentially very different presentations. She shares a number of activities that  serve as a metaphor for tasks that we need to learn in order to do acoustic analysis of speech – we first need to cut it up into parts, and to do that, we need to decide what information will reveal those parts and their edges to us.

Beatriz and Andrew discuss how to be success in gaining recognition for your excellent teaching. The episode focuses on National Teaching Fellowship and its three criteria, but the advice is intended to inspire academics at all stages of their professional journey.

In higher education, do we pay enough attention to the non-formal learning spaces that we pass through between formal classess? Do we talk to students enough about the value of hanging out and loitering on campus? How does the idea of 'decompression spaces' help us to envisage self-directed and social learning spaces? And does the idea of the hashtag help us to think about good learning habits?

References

Eraut, M. (2000). Non-formal learning and tacit knowledge in professional work. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 70, 113 - 136.

Ito, M., Gutierŕez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., Schor, J., Sefton-Green, J., & Watkins, S.C. (2013). Connected learning: an agenda for research and design. Online at: http://dmlhub.net/sites/
default/files/Connected_Learning_report.pdf

Shortt, H. (2014). Liminality, space and the importance of ‘transitory dwelling places’ at work. Human Relations, 6, 1-26. DOI: 10.1177/0018726714536938

Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. New York: Basic Books.

Warning: One of our hosts will be singing.

How do we as educators create space for students to develop politically so they are able to challenge and contribute to society at large and to defend their disciplines and their professions through life? How do we address 'post truth' and ignorance as educators? Isn't this an important role for higher education? Can and should active learning be more activist!?
Are you interested in joining us to discuss engagement in civic education? Please do contact us.

We discuss the importance of creating space within teaching to develop our students' expectations for their engagement.