Risk for professional learning when the academic community is forced online? (original) (raw)

Changing academics’ ways of working: towards a distributed university campus

The Academic Research Community publication

Academics are a peculiar category of knowledge workers whose work, by nature, is characterized by undefined time and space and includes individual and collaborative activities. Over the past decades, academics have progressively evolved their typically university-centric way of working towards a hybrid, spatially distributed model that includes home and other spaces. The spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the redrawing of the geography of workspaces for academics and has opened up opportunities to enable creative, innovative and socially sustainable ways of working. Indeed, working from other spaces than the official workplace can not only have positive impacts on productivity, creativity, and collaboration of academics and staff, but also increase the attractiveness and inclusivity of university campuses by proposing a campus model that is spread across the territory according to the individual needs of its users. While there are already some cases where university ca...

Playing it real in a virtual context: developing sustainable connections to university

For teachers from within the early childhood education and care sector, working with children and families in the current societal context has become increasingly problematic . From one standpoint, research has indicated that much of the difficulty associated with working in this field is symptomatic of the uncertainty, discontinuity and insecurity characteristic of the post-modern condition (Dahlgren & ). As authors of this paper, whilst we agree with this particular standpoint, it can be argued that the aforementioned perspective can be seen as an over-simplification of the problems in the ECEC field. While the characteristics of the post-modern condition may be considered to be at the heart of some of these problems, the complexities of current policy reform, the demands of neo-liberal approaches to the provision of care and education , as well as a lack of understanding of current contexts for children and their families compound the present state of play across the sector . Thus, new demands are evident for teachers in the ECEC field in relation to both personal and professional skill development. Therefore preparation for understanding the impact these contexts have on their identity development is critical to evaluating pre-service educator"s university experiences in contract with the reality of the rural practice context.

Transforming spaces and identities: the contributions of professional staff to learning spaces in higher education

Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 2012

Staff are a university's key resource. Typically, research has concentrated on the contribution of academic staff, and has largely overlooked the crucial role of professional staff. However, recently there has been an increase in research by professional staff, about professional staff. In Australia, professional staff comprise more than half the higher education workforce, and a more rigorous understanding is needed of the contribution that professional staff make towards the strategic goals of their institutions. This paper explores the work of professional staff, focusing on the contributions that this group of staff makes to the design, development and maintenance of learning spaces, both physical and virtual. This research is part of ongoing doctoral research into the work of professional staff at one Australian university. Following a preliminary framing study, a case study was undertaken using semi-structured interviews with a range of professional staff. Emerging from these interviews is a conceptualisation of the work of professional staff in relation to student outcomes, from the perspective of professional staff themselves. This research is illuminating the working lives of professional staff, the changing and increasing complexity of their roles, and the contributions professional staff make to their institution's student outcomes.

Interconnecting networks of practice for professional learning

The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2011

The article explores the complementary connections between communities of practice and the ways in which individuals orchestrate their engagement with others to further their professional learning. It does so by reporting on part of a research project conducted in New Zealand on teachers’ online professional learning in a university graduate diploma program on ICT education. Evolving from social constructivist pedagogy for online professional development, the research describes how teachers create their own networks of practice as they blend online and offline interactions with fellow learners and workplace colleagues. Teachers’ perspectives of their professional learning activities challenge the way universities design formal online learning communities and highlight the potential for networked learning in the zones and intersections between professional practice and study. The article extends the concepts of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) communities of practice social theory of learnin...

Life Behind the Screen: Taking the Academic Online

Springer eBooks, 2011

The prospect of taking academic life online offers a range of challenges and opportunities for staff and students in higher education. This paper focuses on some of the many transformative experiences encountered by academics in adjusting to, and participating in, networked learning environments. Moving on from our initial reluctance to 'inhabit' social networking spaces, we adopt the well-used metaphor of the screen to find a framework for evaluating and developing questions raised in an earlier paper. We use personal experiences of becoming disconnected from traditional practices while at the same time drawing on the familiar to enable an effective transition to networked learning. We have conceptualised our route as involving a projection towards a screen, adjusting our focus to negotiate barriers and optimise enablers. But before we are fully immersed in a virtual world, we still have a stake in the 'real' one. This has implications for our identity as academics when we find ourselves operating in both kinds of environment simultaneously. It affects language too as existing expressions become transformed or superseded to refer to new kinds of practice. It entails new relationships with time, where speed and lag both change the nature of the activities engaged in. And academic engagement itself must be looked at anew, amid competing demands for attention. Identity, language, time and engagement are viewed as both barriers and enablers in the movement from behind the screen to full participation online. We illustrate in the paper how we ourselves are adjusting to networked learning. We aim to capture snapshots of these transitional states to support our work as educational developers, anticipating a future where we have to take on roles as projectors of new forms of practice. The process is raising questions about the extent to which academics can or should replicate old practices, and how we disaggregate and re-aggregate academic habits and values. In exploring transformation in transition from traditional spaces to networked learning environments, we seek to highlight how academics are variously encouraged or discouraged, inspired or hindered, empowered or disconnected. A future paper will consider the implications of our roles as 'projectors' and complete our analysis of life behind, on and through the screen.

Losing, and finding, spaces to learn in the university

Emotion, Space and Society, 2013

The issue of healthy environments for learning became a focal point in a peer research group at a university, where a change of physical meeting place galvanized a discussion about losing and finding spaces in which to know and learn. This paper presents a 'postcard' conversation exploring in presentational forms our experiences of these places as students and scholars. We present this as an example of an artsbased methodology giving rise to themes of neglected ways of knowing and learning, and the yearning for spaces for creativity and collaboration. We offer representations of and reflections on experience in order to further discussion about what it means for universities to be healthy settings for students and staff in the age of academic entrepreneurship.

Dialogues of Space, Time and Practice: Supporting Research in Higher Education

2014

Dialogue can be seen as entirely functional, as a way of disseminating research or increasing the effectiveness of teaching and learning. Here, it is seen as of value in its own right; as having a central role in the nature of learning and of research. This second model of dialogue in higher education is associated with work on the nature of learning communities or communities of practice. In consequence, the model can contribute to discussion of the purpose of higher education and its role in society. Recent work theorising dialogue using the approach of Buber, has looked more specifically at the dialogue that takes place in particular settings and circumstances in higher education. The article presented here concerns dialogue related to support for staff research, complementing previous work on dialogue in assessment contexts, and dialogue in times of crisis. Despite the challenges of supporting staff research in higher education, this paper is not crisis-oriented, but builds on t...

Navigating old and new terrains of academic practice in higher education: indelible and invisible marks left from the Covid-19 lockdown

London Review of Education, 2023

Higher education has been (re)shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic in ways which have left both indelible and invisible marks of that period. Drawing on relevant literature, and informed by an exchange catalysed through a visual narrative method, authors from four European universities engage with two reflective questions in this article: As academics, what were our experiences of our practice during the lockdown periods of the Covid-19 pandemic? What might we carry forward, resist or reimagine in landscapes of academic practice emerging in the post-Covid future? The article explores how academics experienced and demonstrated resilience and ingenuity in their academic practice during that turbulent time. Particular insights include entanglements of the personal and professional, and the importance, affordances and limitations of technology. In addition, the authors reflect on some of the ongoing challenges exacerbated by the pandemic, such as education inequalities. The article concludes by reprising the key points about what marks are left behind in the post-Covid present, and how these relate to the future in which relational pedagogy and reflexivity are entangled in the ways in which we cohabit virtual and physical academic spaces.

Developing communities of practice within and outside higher education institutions

British Journal of Educational Technology, 2008

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are largely built on the assumption that learning is an individual process best encouraged by explicit teaching that is, on the whole, separated from social engagement with those outside the university community. This perspective has been theoretically challenged by those who argue for a social constructivist learning theory and a more collaborative approach to learning. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) afford lecturers and students an opportunity for extending the boundaries of a learning experience, not merely beyond the lone individual, but beyond the limits of discipline boundaries within a specific university community and beyond the institution into the local community. This paper illustrates how a collaborative effort between lecturers and students from the Computer Science and Education Departments at Rhodes University, teachers from the local community, the provincial Department of Education and a non-governmental organisation developed into an unfolding virtual and physical community of practice which enabled ICT take-up in a number of schools in the Grahamstown District, South Africa. This discussion of what has become known as the e-Yethu project provides an example of how ICTs, underpinned by the insights of social constructivism, the notion of ‘community of practice’ and in particular Hoadley and Kilner's C4P Framework for Communities of Practice, can serve to help HEIs understand ways in which ICTs can provide opportunities for developing collaborative learning within HEIs, and between the HEI and the local community.

Intertwined Higher Education Places and Spaces

Journal for the Study of Postsecondary and Tertiary Education, 2020

Aim/Purpose: This essay highlights how the way educational places and spaces are imagined impacts higher education research, policy, and practice. Background: Drawing on the rapid transition to online education in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, dichotomous thinking about education space is problematized by examining how the physical (e.g., the lecture hall) is intertwined with the digital (e.g., an online course shell). Methodology: Conceptual essay Contribution: I illustrate how shifting towards conceptualizing higher education as an intertwined environment, that which is a blended mix of the physical and the digital is a more robust construct that can better assist researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. Findings: Dichotomous— online or on campus—thinking masks issues of equity and justice deserving of higher education leadership research, policy, and practice in need of attention, which COVID-19 has brought to light. Recommendations for Practitioners: By embracing an inter...