Eddie Playfair's Utopian Vision

I've just read an inspiring piece by Eddie Playfair, who sets out a vision for where we will be in the next ten years. His description includes the following passage:

Staff and students see themselves as lifelong researchers. Every student engages in at least one major research project with clear social benefit. These are often collaborative and involve placements, in some cases abroad. Research themes arise from students’ interests or may be stimulated by one of the many speakers or debates on campus. These research projects stimulate passionate discussion on campus and students offer advice and support to their peers and take pride in producing valuable work. These are published and are a vital part of the college’s contribution to the community. Producing a worthwhile project is an important rite of passage.

This sounds like a great vision for Higher Education, albeit one that sets the bar rather high. In fact, as careful readers (or anyone who followed the hyperlink) will have noticed, Playfair isn't writing about Higher Education at all - he's writing about sixth-form college.

This should be a wake-up call for those who regard 'research-led teaching' as something that is unique to Higher Education, since only universities are 'research institutions'. I've been thinking about this recently, because of a quote from a senior academic that I read in Lisa Lucas et. al.'s recent report on Research and Teaching for the Higher Education Academy:

You’d have to be a very, very special type of individual to be able to enthuse year upon year upon year about a subject in which you have no involvement ... other than teaching. How do you keep updated on it? How do you keep motivated on it unless
you’re involved in pursuing knowledge frontiers yourself? (p. 54)

This sounds good until you think about the teachers you had before university. None of the (extremely inspiring) history teachers that taught me in secondary school were researchers, but they were enthusiastic, erudite, and familiar with developments in the field. The line between 'research-active' and 'teaching-only' staff is a fuzzy one, and the same can be true of the line between 'research-active' and 'teaching-only' institutions. Playfair's article is a useful reminder that while we may focus on integrating research and teaching at a university level, we should not expect integrated research and teaching to be limited to universities.

Dan Ariely: Undergraduate Researcher Made Good!

I've just started reading Dan Ariely's very entertaining book about behavioural economics, Predictably Irrational. In his introduction, Ariely describes a class that he took as an undergraduate at Tel Aviv university which, in his words, 'profoundly changed my outlook on research and largely determined my future.' The class was on brain physiology, and the lecturer was Prof. Hanan Frenk. Ariely writes that struck him most about the course was Frenk's 'attitude to questions and alternative theories.' Here's what was so distinctive:

Many times, when I raised my hand in class or stopped by his office to suggest a different interpretation of some results he had presented, he replied that my theory was indeed a possibility [...] and would then challenge me to propose an empirical test to distinguish it from the conventional theory (p. xi).

During the semester, Prof. Frenk gave his student the resources to test a theory about epilepsy on fifty rats. 'In the end,' he writes, 'it turned out that my theory was wrong, but this did not diminish my enthusiasm.' Ariely now teaches at Duke University, and his blog makes it clear that he's taken Prof. Frenk's example to heart - see this post on the launch of a series of short stories by undergraduates that illustrate principles of behavioural economics.

LTEA conference-Day 2

Some highlights:

I came in right at the end of Nadine Wills' presentation about widening the university expectation of 'enquiring' academics and students to include enquiring academic-related and administrative staff. Really compelling stuff, and she'll be writing some of it up over the next couple of months.

Phil Askham gave a strikingly candid talk about being charged with the task of 'embedding' good Enquiry-based Learning practice so that it penetrates throughout Sheffield Hallam University's Faculty of Development and Society.

After this, Norman Powell from the Centre for Excellence in Enquiry-based Learning ( CEEBL) at the University of Manchester spoke about the challenges of evaluating Enquiry-based elements that are introduced to modules. He's written a nice document on CEEBL's evaluation strategy, which you can download here.

The presentation just before my talk was a report on some of the goings-on at Sheffield Hallam University's Centre for Promotion of Learner Autonomy (CPLA). There's some SERIOUSLY cool stuff going on here - an 'eco-house' that students built on the roof of a university building, for example. Also, next year they're planning to replace their presentations with a twenty-minute shot (and translated into Spanish) by students.

Daniel Wilding and Paul Taylor from Warwick's Reinvention Centre gave a really good talk about students being part of a research community, in which they pointed out that no less a figure than President Barack Obama has called for research to be an integral part of the undergraduate curriculum. He brought it up in his speech to the National Academy of Sciences, and here's what he said:

The Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation will be launching a joint initiative to inspire tens of thousands of American students to pursue careers in science, engineering and entrepreneurship related to clean energy.

It will support an educational campaign to capture the imagination of young people who can help us meet the energy challenge. It will create research opportunities for undergraduates and educational opportunities for women and minorities who too often have been underrepresented in scientific and technological fields – but are no less capable of inventing the solutions that will help us grow our economy and save our planet. And it will support fellowships, interdisciplinary graduate programs, and partnerships between academic institutions and innovative companies to prepare a generation of Americans to meet this generational challenge. [full text]

Needless to say, there was a lot more to Danny and Paul's presentation than that, but that's pretty cool in itself.

The last paper I saw was John Creighton's absolutely fascinating analysis of research-teaching links, testing for correlation between departmental RAE results and the results of a Student Survey carried out by Reading, which is itself an extremely interesting evaluation instrument. John is the head of Reading's CeTL in Applied Undergraduate Research Skills (CeTL-AURS), who, by the way, hosted the conference. His findings call into question many of the assumption of Hattie and Marsh's often-mentioned (but perhaps seldom read) paper, 'The Relationship Between Research and Teaching: A Meta-Analysis' (Review of Educational Research, Vol. 66, No. 4, 507-542 (1996)).

LTEA conference at Whiteknights Campus-Day One!

(The LTEA conference is taking place on the 'Whiteknights' campus of the University of Reading, which put me in mind of The White Company by Arthur Conan Doyle - who's much more famous for Sherlock Holmes)

I just got home from day one of the LTEA conference, where I gave a presentation about my oral history project, 'Teaching the Talk', in collaboration with Adam Smith. Really, Adam gave about 90% of the presentation. I introduced the project, but he talked about being an oral history interviewer, as an undergraduate student - a story that begins with him nearly signing up to the project as a first-year, and ends with him managing an oral history project at St. Catherine's School in Sheffield.

Here's a few highlights from the day:

Ursula McGowan gave an eye-opening presentation about citation, plagiarism, and following the Boyer Commission's much-quoted (and less often followed) recommendation that undergraduates should be treated as 'apprentice researchers'.

Ursula's key point was that, in her words, 'whenever we ask students to cite sources, we are asking them to be researchers,' but that rather than saying 'you're now part of a community of practice, and one of our conventions is that we cite sources, for the following reasons...' we just say 'you've got to cite your sources, or else it's plagiarism, which is unforgivable' (I'm embellishing - her description was more measured). She's designed an excellent audio-narrated powerpoint presentation about plagiarism and academic writing, which puts it in the context of the core functions of academia.

Joanna John talked about an undergraduate survey that's been conducted on the impact of UROPs (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programmes) across the UK. There's a PDF from another UROP powerpoint presentation (this one by Joanna's collaborator, John Ceighton) here. Very interesting stuff about research skills, understandings of what research entailed, and whether or not people wanted to pursue research careers before and after taking part in a UROP. Joanna's based at the 'Applied Undergraduate Research Skills' CETL at Reading (CETL-AURS). Their UROP page is here.

And one more paper: Rhi Smith's talk on the great stuff she's doing with undergraduates at the Museum of English Rural Life.

New downloads: Questionnaire and Powerpoint slides

We closed the Undergraduate Survey on 20th June and presented some preliminary findings today at the second annual Institutional Research Conference at Sheffield Hallam University.

We'll be giving another presentation next week at the Learning Through Enquiry Alliance conference at the University of Reading next week- if you won't be there, or just can't wait to hear about our findings, you can download our powerpoint slides as a PDF from our homepage, www.sheffield.ac.uk/lrt. We've also posted a hard copy version of the undergraduate questionnaire- check them out!

Getting the Skills to Pay the Bills

I’ve been thinking about skills: what skills students are supposed to acquire, why they’re supposed to have them, and how they’re supposed to get them. This is on my mind because of an article I just read from Arts & Humanities in Higher Education called 'The "Research-Teaching Nexus" and the Learning-Teaching Relationship: Who's in charge?', by Christopher Rowe and Eleanor O'Kell.

I like this piece a lot, but there was one passage near the end that disturbed me, and got me wondering about both the 'why' and 'how' of skills:

But now we need to ask the larger question: do we believe that Extended Projects and their HE analogue, dissertations, provide the kinds of skills that employers are supposed to be looking for, and that we therefore (presumably) owe it to our students to be offering them? (187).

First, the 'why' of education: is the aim of A-level and higher education really to 'provide the kinds of skills that employers are supposed to be looking for'? Personally, I don't think businesses are the ones who should dictate the profile of the ideal graduate, if only because what they will be looking for in three years is not necessarily what they want now (what traits, for example, was the Royal Bank of Scotland looking for from its future investment bankers in 2006, when this year's graduates started their degrees? Whatever they were looking for then, I hope they've changed their priorities during the course of the past year). Not only that, but a student who graduates in 2009 will probably be working until 2049 - so universities owe it to their students to take the long view, which doesn’t necessarily mean following the lead of today’s employers (think about the skills that businesses were looking for in 1969).

And now, the 'how' of education: the quote's phrasing assumes that educators can 'provide' students with 'skills', such as (to take a classic example) 'critical thinking'. But such power is not given to us: we can tell students about critical thinking, we can model it in our own practice, we can create circumstances that are conducive to it, and we can incentivise it, but we can't 'provide' it to anyone. Skills can be acquired by students, but they cannot be granted by teachers.

This might seem like a matter of semantics, but semantics often matter a great deal. Pretty much everybody talks about 'providing' skills to students (I know I've done it), so it's good to remind ourselves that it's not an act that anybody actually has the power to perform.

[Incidentally, if you want to know more about the Royal Bank of Scotland's problems, read John Lanchester's excellent article in the London Review of Books.]

Return to the Nexus

Having talked about jargon in my previous post, I'm now going to do my best to steer clear of it, and discuss current Higher Education research in such a way that anyone who works in HE (and indeed, anyone outside HE) will be able to follow what I'm talking about.

Right now, what I'm talking about is an article in the April 2009 issue of Teaching in Higher Education. It's called 'Re-conceptualising the concept of a nexus? A survey of 12 Scottish IS/IM
academics' perceptions of a nexus between teaching, research, scholarship and consultancy,' it's by Kevin Grant and Sonia J. Wakelin, and it's in Vol. 14, No. 2, April 2009 (pp. 133-146).

Before I go any further, 'IS' stands, in this article, for Information Systems, and 'IM' stands for Information Management.

Grant and Wakelin conducted 12 interview with IS/IM academics from one teaching-oriented university and one research-led university, both in Scotland. They found that for most of the interviewees, 'research-teaching' was less a nexus than a one-way street:most of the academics said their research informed their teaching, but no-one suggested that their teaching influenced their research.

They conclude by arguing that a 'process view' of the 'nexus' is more useful than a 'substantive view'. That is to say, focusing on 'process' rather than 'product' (two concepts that it is often difficult to disentangle when you're looking at academic practice).

Here's what they say about the 'substantive view':

This substantive view seems to suggest that when academics make/take gestures towards the nexus, for example, using a journal paper to teach a particular concept, then they assume that they can control and predict the impact of using that particular journal paper on the students’ learning and, indeed, on their teaching practice, a notion which may be inherently flawed (p. 141).

In place of this, they draw on Complex Adaptive Systems (CASs) to propose a model based on three parts: 'the set of considerations, the network definint the relationships between all elements and the set of outcomes or consequences of the processes' (p. 141). Here's what they suggest, on a practical level:

Academics should not try to control and ‘over plan’ for a nexus to emerge, but instead they should encourage themselves to engage with students in dialogue regarding the topic area and to use everybody’s experiences to support learning in themselves and within the class group. It is further advocated that, when seeking to create a nexus in class, academics should not focus solely on the actual products of academic processes, that is, a particular journal paper, and/or a consultancy experience. Rather, they should find ways to help students to make interconnections themselves, by giving students an insider’s view of the process of research and/or consultancy in their domain.

I think this product/process distinction is useful, and worth exploring further.

Incidentally, this article has a good literature review at the beginnig, so if you're trying to get a sense of the lay of the land in this field, you could do worse than read the first four pages.

Lost in the 'nexus'

First of all, I know that upon seeing the word 'nexus' (as in 'research-teaching nexus'), lots of people reach for the remote control (or their revolver - choose your metaphor according to the extent of your antipathy).

I think this is because it's jargon, and (at least in this instance) it's jargon associated with Higher Education policy, rather than with any particular discipline within higher education.

Now, discipline-specific jargon tends to annoy everybody outside its home-discipline, but it's no big deal because most academics are rarely forced to decipher jargon from from other peoples' disciplines because, well, it's somebody else's discipline, and if you really wanted to know what they were talking about, you would've got your degree in their field rather than yours.

But phrases like 'research-teaching nexus' concern EVERYONE in higher education, though not many people are conversant in HE jargon. Hence, it's both baffling and relevant - which is a combination that's guaranteed to raise hackles. Most people's immediate response to this sort of language is 'seeing as you're talking about what I do for a living, surely it's YOUR problem if I don't understand what you're talking about, not mine.'

Another way of putting it is that Higher Education research treats academics as practitioners rather than 'experts' (in the academic sense). And as a result, many people within academia respond to HE research the way that practitioners around the world respond to academics: with impatience and suspicion.

Co-production: useful for collecting rubbish, and for teaching!

There's an interesting article in the most recent issue Studies in Higher Education called 'The student as co-producer: learning from public administration about the student-university relationship' (Alistair McCulloch, Vol. 34, No. 2, March 2009, 171–183). McCulloch proposes that we start describing students as 'co-producers' rather than as 'consumers'. He gives a nice account of the history of the 'consumer model', and its appeal, before (rather convincingly) tearing it to shreds, drawing on McMillan and Cheney's 1996 article, 'The student as consumer: The implications and limitations of a metaphor' (Communication Education, vol. 45, No. 1, 1–15).

In place of the 'consumer model' he proposes 'co-production', which describes

a situation in which public services, which by definition involve the provision of public goods, are provided jointly by paid public sector actors with the voluntary involvement of the private actors who enjoy the output of the coproduction process (175).

Co-production was first applied to domestic waste collection (nobody pays you to wheel your bin to the curb once a week, you just do it because you benefit from 'the output of the coproduction process'). 'Curbside' rubbish collection was only introduced in the USA in the 1970s, and co-production was theorised based on this model (worryingly, one of the 'benefits' was that the city could reduce its rubbish-collection staff, but let's not dwell on that).

McCulloch plucks this concept from its unglamorous context and tries it out as a model for the student's role in higher education, leading to this rather stirring assertion:

If it is acknowledged that both teachers and students are engaged in the activity of knowledge development, dissemination and application, then the current wide gap between teaching and research begins to narrow and, for the undergraduate, learning involves explicit engagement with knowledge and the processes by which it is produced. For the university and the individual academic, it helps to bring a greater degree of consonance between, respectively, the various elements of mission and role (178).

I couldn't agree more. I'm going to stop lifting quotes from his article now, and recommend that you read it in its entirety.

More about what research means in different disciplines

Doc Brown, of Back to the Future: a researcher whose significance transcends disciplinary boundaries.

There's a really good (and freely available) project that Dr Lisa Lucas, Prof. Mick Healey, Prof. Alan Jenkins, and Dr. Chris Short conducted for the Higher Education Academy, which explores, I quote,

the experiences and perceptions of academics by locating them within specific institutional/departmental and disciplinary cultures and exploring how this may impact on their conceptions of 'research', 'teaching' and the relationships between them.

You can download the report from the HEA website.

What we talk about when we talk about research

One of the first big surprises of this project was the range of models for 'research': what they spend their time doing in microbiology looks very different from what they're doing in politics, as Rose and Richard can testify, and so on throughout the university. Jane Robertson and Gillian Blackler did an interesting study in which they interviewed students from physics, geography, and English lit., and analysed the students' use of spatial and temporal metaphors (Robertson, J. & Blackler, G. (2006) Students’ experiences of learning in a research environment, Higher Education Research and Development 25(3), pp.215-229).

Generally speaking, physics students tended to talk about research being 'out there', going 'further', and crucially, taking place at a 'higher level' then their own.

Geography students also talked about research happening 'out there', but they meant it in terms of literally 'going out into the world and gathering information', in other words, doing field work.

For English students, research involved '"looking into", "gathering", and "putting it together"' (p. 223).

I thought this was a nice way of doing research. Nadine Wills has done a lot of work about metaphors on the teachingcommons Good Practice blog, which I recommend taking a look at.

Autonomous Apprenticeship

The Sorcerer's Apprentice - when autonomous apprenticeship goes wrong...

'Autonomous Apprenticeship' is an idea I've been kicking around recently, ever since reading Carol Colbeck's study, 'Merging in a Seamless Blend: How Faculty Integrate Teaching and Research' ( The Journal of Higher Education Vol. 69, No. 6 (1998), pp. 647-671).

Colbeck points out that teaching in the sciences often follows a 'master-apprentice' model in which lecturers work alongside undergraduate and postgraduate 'research apprentices' (p. 658).

I think the benefits to both learning and research are pretty self-evident, as long as the student isn't getting exploited (all the dangers of internships - another example of the 'master-apprentice model' also apply here).

The 'apprentice' model is much more common in the sciences than in either the social sciences or the arts. Conventional wisdom has it that this is in the nature of the different fields - 'research' means different things in different disciplines, and some forms of research just don't lend themselves to group endeavors. As Colbeck puts it, the distinction is supposed to be that sciences explore 'subdividable problems' while the arts and social sciences tackle 'holistic issues' (p. 659).

Colbeck herself is having none of it. According to her research,

the contrasting methods of research training in physics and English [the subjects of her research] did not appear to be a natural consequence of [...] knowledge structures, but of taken-for-granted social norms within each discipline (p. 659).

So far, so compelling. But one 'taken-for-granted' social norm of the humanities is research autonomy: you research what YOU want to research, and your supervisor advises you. This brings me to the notion of 'autonomous apprenticeship': a model for creating group research projects in which students become 'research apprentices', but preserve a measure of autonomy not necessarily present in large science projects (this is a model that could be applied to the sciences as well as to the arts).

The 'Teaching the Talk' project that I run, which is a part of the Theatre Archive Project, is - I like to think - a good example of 'autonomous apprenticeship'. I'd love to hear about any other models that people would like to offer.

LRT on the Conference Circuit!

pre-powerpoint conference presentation

The LRT Project will be giving presentations at the IR2009 Institutional Research Conference at Sheffield Hallam University on 8-9 July, and at the LTEA2009 'Learning Through Enquiry' conference at the University of Reading on 15 July.

Book early to avoid disappointment!

Who's afraid of the Scholarship of Teaching?

I discovered a great article on the 'Scholarship of Teaching' from way back in 1999, in an online journal called 'Inventio', published by George Mason University. The article's by a lecturer in English named Randy Bass, and it's called 'The Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?'. Bass begins with an elegant appraisal of what it means to have a 'problem' in research, vs. a 'problem' in teaching:

In scholarship and research, having a "problem" is at the heart of the investigative process; it is the compound of the generative questions around which all creative and productive activity revolves. But in one’s teaching, a "problem" is something you don’t want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it. Asking a colleague about a problem in his or her research is an invitation; asking about a problem in one’s teaching would probably seem like an accusation.

From here, he writes candidly about his own teaching, and how a precipitous decline in his students' evaluations of his teaching (after he'd introduced a set of e-learning methods) inspired him to start looking more deeply at his teaching.

This article is full of good models for examining your own teaching, as well as some very interesting teaching techniques. And it's freely available online, not just (as most articles I talk about will probably be) through a subscription service.

The undergraduate Survey is live, and being administered by an infinite number of monkeys...

Digitally speaking, our survey administrators look like this

The LRT Project survey went live last week. We built it on SurveyMonkey, an online survey builder that I (so far) can't praise enough. Seriously, I don't want to jinx anything, but it did just about everything we wanted it to do on the design side, and its analysis looks pretty robust, if not spss-level.

In the interest of keeping noise out of our results, I'm not posting any links to the survey here, but if you're an undergraduate at the University of Sheffield in the Faculty of Science or Social Sciences, you've received an email about this and I suggest that you follow the link and take the survey-you could get £50 out of it if you're the lucky winner.

If you aren't an undergrad in Science or Social Sciences, but you know someone who is, encourage them to fill the survey out. And if they win the prize, don't let them forget who it was that convinced them to go for it.

The Warwick Conference on 'Research-Teaching Links in the Physical Sciences – Politics and Practise'

So this is my first post, flying the flag for all Science students. Not onlythat, but turned out I would represent whole University at the Warwick Conference on RT Links in the Physical Sciences.

Disclaimer: This is not a picture from the actual day, unfortunately

After a gruelling 5am start, I arrived at the Warwick Reinvention centre. Now, I’m new to the research-teaching links area, but I’m aware the Reinvention Centre is famous for good practice in IBL, aptly demonstrated by their‘innovative learning space’. The room was a bare, brightly lit studio scattered with unusual seating (bean bags, a single recliner, stools and benches). This was fun for about 5 minutes, but even those of us with young backs were struggling after a full day. In a professional setting it did feel very unnatural and awkward, but perhaps that is the point.

However, that aside, there were some interesting attendees from around the country, but it was a small conference (there were 22 there in total, 11 ofwhich were presenting). The opening was useful overview of the current, growing status of research-teaching links. The discussion afterwards raised interesting issues such as avoiding ‘Google’ answers to IBL questions, difficulties in assessing IBL projects, and diversity & disability (eg groupwork can be a problem for some students).

After this intro, there were 2 core presentations, beginning with Ros Roke on behalf of the research issued to Nigel Thrift (VC of Warwick) by John Denham (SoS for Innovation, Universities and Skills). Based on the attractiveness of research careers for undergrads, case studies and research concluded that initiatives need to start in schools and, of course, need more funding. Second, Simon Bates talked about the Scottish QAA audits, which focuses on enhancement as well as assessment. Notably, they studied academics’ views, and found some thing they called ‘the oxygen problem’ – some academics see LRT linkages as innate in the University experience as breathing air.

Following this were 6 short case studies from other universities, which are listed in the link at the end of this post. If you want more information on these, please ask me (or them) but otherwise I’ll stick to the issues raised throughout the day. The question cropped up of ‘How to trace students who undertaken these IBL projects possibly into research careers, as evidence to funding councils?’

After this came what I saw as the crux of the day – the discussion session. This was meant to incite policy discussion more than anything else. Unfortunately, it was shorter than scheduled due to presentations over-running, which was a great shame. It meant that the inevitable side-tracking prevented us talking about issues like assessment and accreditation. There was lengthy conversation about the state of he A-level system and the effect it’s having on HE institution curriculum design, possibly leading to academics' presumption that all lower-year students lack knowledge. This lead to comments about how the University league tables are trivialising many IB aspects of student learning. Some of the older academics there remember that IBL used to be very common in schools and Universities, before ‘Health and Safety’ became such a cult. Most at the conference agreed that the current teaching theory regarding knowledge is ‘breadth not depth’ and that this should be the other way around.

At this point, taxis started arriving and the discussion was cut short, much to my disappointment. However, I had to start the long journey home, with these ideas floating round my head for most of it. What did seem to strike me was the comment about league tables and schools; I remember the effect of OFSTED inspections when I was in school (and my parents were both teachers), and the ‘putting on appearances just to get through’ atmosphere. It struck me that I hear similar phrases in the University setting regarding the league tables too, a prospect I find quite worrying given the effect it has clearly had on education at the lower levels.

The conference programme and description of some of the presentations can befound at http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/ps/documents/events/2009/rt_link_prog.pdf. Comment if you would like more info on a particular project.

University of Sheffield and Thornbridge Brewery team up for Brewteam09-now THIS is knowledge transfer

Brewteam09 is one of my favourite examples of knowledge transfer, student research, and public-private partnership at the university. It's been going for at least two years, and I don't think it gets nearly the publicity it deserves.

It's a very simple concept: students work with Thornbrdige brewery to design a beer that gets served in the university's pub.

Has anyone tried the student-brewed beer at the University Arms yet? If you have, tell us what it's like!

NewScan-14 front pages on one webpage

My friend Kyle and his business partner Craig have created a really cool website called NewScan that lets you read the front pages of 14 different newspapers. At first glance, this doesn't sound that exciting, since reading a newspaper online isn't particularly cutting-edge. But when I say front page I don't mean the newspaper's home page, I mean the thing you see when you sit down with your cup of coffee and unfold a materially present, printed-on-newsprint newspaper in its corporeal form.

This lends itself to US newspapers a bit better than to UK newspapers, since American papers tend to cram more onto their front pages (the cover of the Independent would be an especially quick read). As it is, the UK is represented by the Guardian and the Times. Then there's Gulf News and Haaretz, and the rest of the newspapers are all American (well, the International Herald Tribune is a borderline case).

The South Bank: Public Sector-Private Land

I was standing outside the National Theatre yesterday afternoon, and a few feet away a man with a video camera was filming the theatre. Two security guards came up to him and told him 'You'll have to put your camera away. There's no filming on the South Bank, it's privately owned.' Apparently the 'no filming' rule was South Bank Centre policy.

What I want to know is this: first of all, how MUCH of the South Bank is private property? Second, how on earth is it privately owned when nearly every building is subsidised by the British Government? I'd read about the privatisation of public space in Joel Bakan's excellent book (and film) The Corporation, but I'd thought it was more of a US phenomenon than a UK one-and it hadn't occurred to me that a private corporation would own the land on which sit the National Theatre, BFI, Hayward Gallery, etc.

Now, in keeping with this blog's focus on learning, research, and teaching, I'm putting out a general call to anybody from any discipline who can shed light on this: social geographers, civil engineers, economists, political scientists, theatre researchers, etc. What's the deal with the South Bank being private?

'She Brings me Coffee in my Favourite Cup...' or, how Tom Stafford became an authority in China

OK, I'd say the following was a cautionary tale, but I can't figure out how Dr. Tom Stafford could have handled this situation any differently-what it is, however, is hilarious.

Tom appeared on The Today Programme a couple weeks ago (listen to it here) talking about the psychology of coffee, and making what you would've thought was an uncontroversial claim that coffee tastes better when he drinks it out of his favourite mug. He (and his comment feed) describe what happened next very well on his blog, idolect.

IBL and Research - 'A Live Political Issue'

The fifth 'conference theme' for the 2009 LTEA Conference in Reading (that's the 'Learning Through Enquiry Alliance') is 'Enquiry-based Learning and Policy - where now?'. This is a very good question, and it's one half of the question that's guiding the research of The LRT Project (the other half of the question is 'Research and Policy - where now?'). But the reason that this blog is launching with the fifth conference theme of the LTEA conference is that the following phrase, which comes from the conference literature:

EBL and its linkage to fostering the next generation of researchers is now a live political issue

Now, before I go any further, EBL stands for Enquiry-based Learning - only, at Sheffield we call it IBL (for Inquiry-based Learning). To me, the distinction is much like the difference between UK and European plug sockets: both work perfectly well, both do roughly the same thing, and you don't want to sink into parochialism you need to get comfortable using both. If you're unfamiliar with the phrase 'Enquiry (or Inquiry)-based Learning', click here.

Back to politics. I was gratified to see the LTEA organisers use the phrase 'live political issue' so readily, and it got me thinking about something that I've been wondering about a lot recently: why do the political opinions of academics command so little respect? Here's a good example of this disrespect - it's the final paragraph of John Lanchester's article about the financial crisis, 'Melting into Air', published in the New Yorker.

Are there any unreconstructed Marxists left, anywhere in the wild? (Universities don’t count.) If there are, now would be a good moment for one of them to publish a book saying that the man in the beard would regard himself as having been proved right.

'Universities don't count.' Let's dwell on that for a moment, because Lanchester isn't being dismissive of Karl Marx (the title of the article is itself a tribute to the 'man in the beard'). He's specifically dismissing any academic who follows Marx. This probably doesn't come as a surprise to you - the 'unreconstructed academic marxist' is sort of the left's Colonel Blimp - but leaving aside our prejudices for a moment, isn't it slightly crazy that academics' political ideas would be regarded by as thoughtful a writer as John Lanchester as automatically unworthy of consideration? After all, universities are supposed to be places where consideration of evidence, testing of hypotheses, and interrogation of truth claims are more rigorous than they are elsewhere - that's one of the main reasons we have universities. So why this sense that politically, academia is full of buffoons?

This is a big question, and I'm not going to try to answer it, but I want to make one suggestion, and to do so I'm going to quote from Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father. Obama's writing about being an undergraduate at Occidental College:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling consuaints. We
weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted from [...] my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated (pp. 100-101).

I think Obama's final phrase - 'white and tenured and happily tolerated' - gets close to the nub of the issue: at the end of the day, the university is part of the establishment (in fact, within its particular realm it is 'the establishment'), so anybody working within it who claims to have taken an 'oppositional' stance can expect to be taken exactly as seriously as a high-level civil servant who announced that she regarded herself as a utopian anarchist.

If you are dissatisfied with the current state of politics, and have decided that your vocation is in academia, then you have decided that the best way for you to create change is from within the system. If you don't acknowledge this, then neither John Lanchester nor anyone else should feel compelled to take you seriously.

Less a blog post introducing the project, more an extended digression. But my colleague Rose will soon be pulling this blog back onto its intended course.