Zeugma

Beyond Text Conference, 21-22 June, day two

I missed the first panel session.  Later in the morning Gillian Calder from the University of Victoria, BC facilitated an excellent session where she showed us aspects of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, and his Tree of Theatre.  And she did so by getting us to do it – experiential learning.  

Beyond Text Conference, 21-22 June, day one

We re-convened for the final session of this project in the David Hume Tower, Edinburgh University (see here for posting on one of the early sessions last year).  Zen and Maks introduced the two-day conference, then their key papers were briefly summarized and commented upon by Julian Webb and Tony Bradney. Interesting comments on fine papers.  Wished there had been more time for this part of the conference.  Zen referred to his earlier work on parable, and I had a déjà vu moment, for almost exactly 30 years ago in the DHT as a doctoral student I attended an inspirational seminar on parable by the (then) Yale literary critic, J. Hillis Miller.  It was only when I mentioned this at the start of my session that, astonishingly, it turned out that one of the Beyond Text conference participants, Anne Pirrie, had attended the same seminar, and told Zen about it, starting his own work on the topic.

Oñati workshop on legal education

At Fiona Cownie's invitation I gave a paper at the Oñati Workshop on Values in Legal Education, 23-24 April.  First day, first session was my paper: '"Associated thought"': social software, professional relationships and democratic professionalism'.  Slides here, draft paper here.  Discussion on the issues of technocratic vs democratic professionalism was fairly extended.  

Radio silence

Cartoon courtesy of toothpastefordinner.com.

It's been a l-o-n-g time but [terminator voice] I'm back.  No excuses, just life & writing got in the way of blogging.

ALT conference overview

Some very good sessions -- of the ones I went to, Paul Catley's work on MCQs and their effect on student learning deserves a mention. Follow his work if you're interested in the use of quizzes, etc. Caroline Maughan's session with Jonathan Tecks on simulation, though I didn't attend it, looked excellent from the paper they produced. Caroline Strevens and Roger Welch produced a very good presentation on simulation and transactional learning. These and some other papers showed groundbreaking work being carried out at a range of institutions.

ALT conference: Affect plenary session

Am blogging (not quite live -- not enough laptops for the presenters so mine had to be borrowed) the ALT conference organised by Hugo de Rijke here at the Tropenmuseum.  Hugo has recently re-organized the ALT web site, which is now hugely improved, and will be a real resource for law academics in the UK -- assuming that it will be populated with resources...  Caroline Maughan and I collaborated on the first session -- an innovative 'gallery session' (appropriately enough for a conference nearly of of which was hosted in the remarkable Tropenmuseum) on our jointly-edited book on emotion and legal education.  We had a little over two hours, and we had put out a call to our dozen or so authors to contribute to the session.  Nine of them volunteered.  Here's now we planned it, if anyone wants to do the same...

Blogging ALT conference, Amsterdam

... from my iPhone, cos my laptop is being used in another session. S L O W but possible. More when I'm reunited with my laptop...

Paulo Lopes & final session

Great session by Paulo Lopes on Managing Inerpersonal situations' -- so interactive that I cdn't live-blog it, so utterly engaging it was.  Learned a lot re facilitation from this.

Presented SIMPLE, and felt once again, as after ANU, that a quick canter around the theory and practice is just not useful any more.  But perceptive conversations and useful points were made about how the software could be used.

Final wrap-up session facilitated by Norman Jackson included delegates saying how the conference had been helpful for them (or not).  At the start of the conference there was a call put out for stories, real life accounts, of what professionalism actually meant to conference delegates.  The stories were collated and presented by two delegates, looking for patterns in the stories.  For example under 'awareness and understanding', they identified issues of understanding, trust, etc. Not sure of the methodology, and it wasn't explained to us (and maybe the sample of 19 stories was too small to be able to be able to do anything meaningful).  Not terribly helpful analysis, but one of the few dips in an otherwise incredibly useful conference, from which I took away a lot of ideas.  

Michael Eraut - Improving the Quality of Work Placements

Next up, Michael Eraut in a plenary session.  I've followed Michael's work for years, and it's had a major influence on what we've done at the GGSL.  He began with theory, looking for instance at interactions between time, mode of cognition and type of process.  For example, contrast of type of process, instant reflex, and the forms of reaction that agents have in the situation, eg rapid intuitive response, or deliberative analytic response.  So when the agent is making an assessment of the sitation int will involved pattern recongition (intstant reflex) rapid interpretation & comm. on the spot (rapid intuitive), and in the deliberative analytic mode, prolonged diagnosis, involving also review, discussion and analysis. 

He took us through a typology of learning modes, focusing on work processes with learning as a by-product; agentic activities  located within work or learning processes, and learning processes at or near the workplace.  The first (learning as a by-product), involved:

• participation in group processes
• working alongside others 
• consultation 
• working with clients 
• tackling challenging tasks & roles 
• problem solving 
• trying things out 
• consolidating, extending and refining skills 
• working with clients 

 Michael focused on how working alongside others in the workplace allows students to observe & listen to others (thinking here of Lave & Wenger, and legitimate peripheral participation literatures...), participate in shared activities, learn new practices, become aware of different kinds of knwledge, and gain a sense of others' tacit knowledge.  Quaere: how do they recognise that knowledge as tacit?  Or is that Michael's comment, as it were?

He presented his ideas on factors affecting learning at work: the two triangle model -- like an inverted CHAT framework, but without the driving dialectic line -- the first called learning factors, the second, context factors.  So, eg, what matters in context triangle are allocation & structuring of work, encounters & relationships with people at work, and individual participation and agent expectations...

There was much more of the same that he skipped over, and which is in the handout -- great stuff.  He then focused on what he had been doing at the SCEPTrE centre, at the invitation of Norman Jackson.  He was working with staff and students to use these and other tools to help students on placements, and across four faculties, so the range of his work with students is pretty extensive.  Data was derived from an online questionnaire, and preliminary analysis of this.  Noted that the numbers were small from each faculty; but nevertheless some interesting findings coming out of the analysis.  He focused n stupport there was for learning tasks, support for project work, support for responsible roles, views of career outcomes, etc.  One interesting finding was who the students thought were the most influential people.  Supervisors (academic) came out tops, with manager & senior person next.  Michael didn't raise this, but if the legit. periph. part. literature is applied to this, wouldn't there be higher marks for work colleagues who gave advice and worked alongside the students?  

Impressive work, huge amounts of data, and he could really only skim the surface of an interesting project.  First question suggested that we replace 'placement' with 'learning', noting the alignment between teaching, learning & assessment.  Michael agreed with the idea (though I think that really, it doesn't get us terribly far): there is of course work that is learning in the placement -- that's the whole point of the placement activity, surely?  Norman clarified that the diagnostic tool was helpful for students to understand what was happening in the placement.  Third questioner asked if there was any relationship between type of placement and the learning that took place -- eg computing engineering workplace vs client-based workplace.  Michael answered by saying that of the accountants, engineers and nurses, the 'best deal' for students was that of the accountants, who had a well-organised and structured work placement, and structured it well especially in the first three months.  Nursing placement roles weren't well structured at all, were stressful, and where the culture in the ward could be grown successfully.  Engineers had huge differences -- the reason being allocation of work, lack of challenge (eg in computing).  

As a diagnostic tool, Michael's work could be of interest to us in Law in Scotland, particularly at the PEAT 2 stage, where students go into traineeships.  We might be able to use it there as a diagnostic instrument.  Fine session.  

Learning to be Professional Conference, SCEPTrE, University of Surrey

At the Learning to be Professional conference at the University of Surrey.  No web connection for the first day, which was a pity since I'd like to have blogged the interesting presentations -- see conference wiki here.  I was invited by Norman Jackson to present on our work at GGSL (draft paper & slides up soon).