ICED2008reflections

Reflections on ICED 2008...

Gail Rathbun: I have been a "lurker" on the ITL-CAD list for almost 2 years, I would say. What attracted me was the counter-culture, yes, almost subversive nature of the group. Throughout my life I have involved myself in several enterprises of that nature...

The ICED conference in Salt Lake City was the first ICED event I have attended. I go to the US Professional and Organizational Developers Network conference annually. What ICED offered me, as it evolved, was the opportunity to have one on one extended conversations with US leaders in professional development in higher education. I have never had that opportunity at POD. But even more energizing was the opportunity to have extended contact with the ITL-CAD members, who compelled me to dredge up theories and conceptual frameworks that I spent much, much time with in the past. In the past because there are few around me who are interested in socio-cultural, participatory, and emancipatory perspectives -- not to mention the power of metaphor, and the notion that educators are architects of aesthetic experience. I attended the Trading Zones workshop, which was an example of a thouroughly engaging, carefully architected, aesthetic experience. What I will remember from it is the "goodness" and the delight that flowed from the presenters and then from the participants. After reflection, I believe that the wonderfully scripted and acted play that began the workshop was not required to be intentionally connected to the activities that followed. Rather it was meant to produce an effect via juxtaposition. That effect was to induce "flow", to loosen inhibitions perhaps, and to create and solidify among us a mutual bond from recognizing familiar "melodies" we have all heard. I am not sure that I have the talent or the intellectual fortitude (or the time) to actively participate, but I am willing to perform some role in the collective.

Brad Wuetherick: The most memorable and inspiring aspects of the most recent ICED meeting were the sessions organized by members of CAD. In particular, I would like to reflect briefly on both the session I participated in exploring Rowland's "A Lover's Guide to University Teaching" and Catherine and Kim's session on "Trading Zones". The session on exploring themes that arose from Rowland's Lover's Guide to University Teaching was inspiring for me in three distinct ways. First, I am still very moved by my own personal reflection on what it would mean to educate '//for love'//; what it might mean to inspire in our students the same love and passion for the discipline that I experienced in my own learning. Second, I was very struck by the challenge that Kathryn Sutherland laid out, as a participant in the session, on changing the question to what it would mean to education '//with love//'. And finally, I would be remiss to not mention how emotionally charged the room was when participants reflected on Tai's contribution (in absentia) on what it means when you love your discipline, your academic pursuits, too much. In the session on Trading Zones, I was amazed to watch the interaction between Huber's ideas (helped along by her presence in the session) and Kim and Catherine's own ideas about the zones of interaction at play within any given educational event. For example, I am still trying to reconcile the potential imagery that comes from Catherine's 'contact zone' metaphor with the metaphor of a 'trading zone'. In addition to the CAD organized sessions, the session that particularly stuck in my mind after the conference was Ray Land's exploration of 'Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge'. A threshold concept, defined by Land as knowledge that is transformative, integrative, irreversible and troublesome, once mastered opens up a new way of thinking and practicing in a given discipline. One issue that has not been thoroughly explored in the literature about threshold concepts is what the threshold concepts might be within Academic Development. What aspects of knowledge within academic development do we find particularly troublesome yet transformative, integrative yet irreversible? What might we do to identify these threshold concepts in academic development in order to explore how we educate/mentor future academic developers most effectively?

Christian Stenby: These are my reflections, as requested. I am quite new to the business of educational development, and at my institution we don’t really have a T&L unit. I work as an administrator for the dean. So I didn’t really know what to expect from the ICED conference, as so many others, my first.

The only CAD session I attended was the one with Trevor and Kathryn, and I sort of stumbled into it. I am one of very few people here who tries to criticise Biggs, and open up to more agendas. So I wanted a little “ammunition” in that struggle and found CAD.

The session itself was quite hectic and unpredictable. One of the other participants I talked with afterwards expressed his disappointment in not fully understanding what we actually learned from the session. I find that this is exactly the wrong way of understanding understanding so pervasive in my institution: That we do not need to know (beforehand) what we must know in order to claim that we are now knowledgeable. And knowledge is NOT to know something, to learn a subject by heart, but to understand it. To me, the session really opened my eyes to two things: 1) There is a different perspective, and it is articulated 2) The learning is something that is an interaction between the learner and the teacher – how can constructive alignment contribute to achieving understanding when we cannot know (as we cannot know the students’ minds) exactly what to align – or put a little differently: we cannot know what would be “the best” alignment. We were not to learn some tricks and share methods, but to realise that there are other ways of doing things. Or – this was at least what I could take home from the session. I am not a student of pedagogic nor teaching and learning, so please forgive me if I sound simple.

The rest of the conference assured me, that CAD was something that I needed to look into further, as there was a massive underlying assumption that we can plan learning. And maybe we can? I think we should strive to be learning- and student-centred, but to do so beforehand in the curricula and assuming that we can test and control learning in cost-benefit analyses and return on investment strikes me wrong.

All the best

Christian

Gail again: As an instructional designer, we are taught to plan. So much so, that I have often thought of the courses that I have taught as "DOA" -- dead on arrival. (But I had such fun planning and learning.) It is much more in the spirit that I think your entry expresses to think of planning learning as remembering to bring certain supplies along on a journey. You may need them, you may not. And you shouldn't feel badly if you use none of them. The key determinant is who is traveling with you. The people will change, so the needs and desires of the journey will change. This takes courage and confidence. It also takes having a notion of a goal. So this is one way to conceive of the role of planning.

Trevor Holmes:

This was my third ICED conference; in 2004 I attended the Ottawa version that piggybacked on STLHE. I remember at the time feeling awestruck by the contrast (STLHE seemed so much more practice-based, and when research-based, entirely empirical in its orientation). At ICED 2004, I was able to talk about continental philosophy, literary criticism, and performance theory in ways that seemed anathema to most STLHE attendees. It was as though the few of us who had been quietly muttering about our dissatisfaction with the atheoretical (even antitheoretical) stance of STLHE had suddenly found friends we hadn’t up until that moment knew existed. Perhaps the most powerful memory for me is meeting the people who would go on to start the CAD Collective (and whose work is well-documented elsewhere now). In Sheffield in 2006, I was excited to present creatively, to push the bounds of the workshop as event, and to bring that same creativity back to STLHE (without any sleep, mind you). I felt part of an international community and I started questioning my own happiness, wondering about the colonizing aspects of my emergent practice (atttempts to help developing world academic development). A series of accidents after that led to more thoughts along both lines (creativity and postcoloniality in academic development), and so I approached ICED 2008 with a hungry and open mind. It is against this backdrop that my reaction to ICED 2008 might need to be framed. ICED 2008 had some of the highest highs yet for me in my career, but also some of the biggest frustrations. I now think some of this has to do with locale: it’s the first time I’ve been to an academic developers’ conference in the United States (I’ve stayed away from POD conferences based on a bias I have against what I see as a particularly evangelical approach among some members of that organisation). On the positive side, I was thrilled to hear my colleagues from CAD speak about and dramatize the difficult intersections between disciplines, like history and anthropology. That we were in America made it that much easier to start tracing the connections possible between, say, the Carnegie work on Scholarship of teaching and Learning, and the CAD work in translating between disciplinary fields. Mary Taylor Huber, for example, participated in the McShane/Manathunga session to a degree that I found tremendously rewarding. The session had been inspired in large part by her work, and the fact that we attempted to dramatize something, then share within and between disciplines, seemed to enact the problematic addressed in her work. Another thrill for me was to present with Kathryn Sutherland. We took a huge risk in making a session about Biggs’ alignment that itself was deliberately without certain pieces (like explicit objectives tied to some kind of assessment). Effectively, we made a happening and the audience became the weavers of meaning. Arguably, the woven patterns and the woven words became a form of assessment, but enough people missed that point that I’m not sure it was as successful for them as it felt for us as facilitators. The next day, however, some criticisms of the session by folks from Europe left me very happy, for in the end, they talked their way into “getting it” -- whatever it was that they needed to get out of it. Ironically, this became a form of assessment for me (something I had vowed, perversely, not to seek in this particular setting, for the simple reason that we were trying to exceed rather than fit the imperative to align everything). I’m looking forward to 2010 and an opportunity to try out some staging of ideas with more colleagues. The down side, or at least the odd side, of being in the U.S. for ICED seemed to me to be the America-centrism (all the good teaching ideas have originated in the last two decades in the U.S., apparently) and blind spots of the political dimensions of the conference. We were told about the practices of freedom while meeting on a campus cosily nested basically in a military base, next to some of the military-industrial complex’s companies. We were ushered to our tables with Mexican music by people wearing sombreros, while at the same time our dirty dishes were cleared by Mexican workers. We were entertained by aboriginal dances and dancers, but we applauded them because they were not only dancing but also pursuing degrees with high achievement. These juxtapositions are everywhere, but in Utah they were the most undertheorized, the most uncritically deployed -- perhaps this is what makes it so easy for Baudrillard and others to analyse America in terms of simulacra. My comments are, of course, general -- some of the critical friends in the circle of developers trying to “do difference” in the field hail from the U.S. -- but I must say that I got a hundred times more out of the European and Australasian sessions I went to than the ones hosted by my American cousins. One caution overall as ICED goes forward is that it still hasn’t grappled adequately with the question of colonization and economic development in a global frame, in spite of conference thematics over the years and in spite of pointed questions by some of us in attendance. This problem is not unique to Utah, but should be addressed openly whenever we are in a position of “having” something (knowledge, expertise, good books) that we think others should want. Are we creating a need for ourselves to go in and save the world through teaching development?