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.