Slides from Assistant Professor Rikke Toft Nørgård and PhD Fellow Janus Holst Aaen's invited talk at the Center for Higher Education Studies, Institute of Education, UCL on November 8th 2015 where Rikke Toft Nørgård have been a visiting academic in the Fall 2015: https://www.ioe.ac.uk/research/189.html

2. Participatory Academic Communities
– connectedness, openness and
academic citizenship at the future
university beyond the campus
Rikke Toft Nørgård, Assistant professor, PhD
Janus Holst Aaen, PhD Fellow
Center for Teaching Development and Digital Media,
Aarhus University, Denmark

3. Vignette: Participatory Academic Communities

4. Theme of the talk
This seminar revolves around research and developmental work carried
out at Aarhus University around
‘the future university,’ ‘academic citizenship’ and ‘academic
virtues for genuine participation in higher education’ coming
together under the concept of ‘participatory academic
communities.’

5. A call for a future university
grounded in human dignity

6. A call for a future university
grounded in human dignity
Because, universities emanates certain values, calls for certain
forms of participation and speaks to us in a certain ‘voice’
(Buchanan, 2006; Nixon, 2008).
Because ‘We should consider what we mean by human dignity and
how all of the products that we make either succeed or fail to
support and advance human dignity’ (Buchanan, 2006, p.302).

7. Universities, courses and educational activities
as virtuous atmospheres

8. Universities, courses and educational activities
as virtuous atmospheres
The university itself is a force of being, and by dwelling there we
become “absorbed” into this being. (Heidegger, 2000)
“[T]he physical resources of the institution, the buildings in which
they are held, and the land on which they are built are (…) critical
to institutional success.” (Temple, 2014a, p.xxi).
For people to be able to dwell within the university, course or
educational activity and not merely occupy its space, they must be
‘enabled’ to dwell there; to have access to resources, be supported,
feel encouraged in their projects, and be drawn into worthwhile and
collaborative connections (Macfarlane, 2012, p.96ff.)

9. Academic citizenship and Participatory
Academic Communities: being a citizen and
participating in society in academic ways
ACADEMIC
CITIZEN
SOCIETY
UNIVERSITY

10. Academic citizenship and Participatory
Academic Communities: being a citizen and
participating in society in academic ways
Our notion of academic citizenship are building on the description
of the virtuous academic citizen as outlined by Jon Nixon (2008)
and Bruce Macfarlane (2007), emphasizing virtues such as
engagement, care, loyalty, collegiality, and benevolence, which
implies a mutual integration and dialogue (Freire, 1974) between
university, academics, and society.

11. Value-based vision-driven Participatory
Academic Communities to support Academic
Citizenship at the future university

12. Value-based vision-driven Participatory
Academic Communities to support Academic
Citizenship at the future university
“To be without a place of one’s own – persona non locata
– is to be almost non-existent, as studies of the homeless
imply” (Gieryn, 2000, p.482)
As such, academic citizenship is not something that is
acquired at a general level, but a virtue that emerges from
the virtuous university offering public engagements in the
university and academic engagements in society– a
participatory academic community where empathy,
dialogue, autonomy, commitment and connectedness
prevail

13. Participatory Academic Communities: A future
virtuous university beyond the campus

14. Participatory Academic Communities: A future
virtuous university beyond the campus
This possible schism emerges from the fact that
educational institutions today are often seen as more or
less abstract and secluded spaces withdrawn from the
surrounding world, entailing the call for more market-
oriented and commodified universities, as critically
discussed by Barnett (2011; 2013), Solberg and Hansen
(2015), Biesta (2006; 2013) and Filippakou and Williams
(2015).

15. Practicing Participatory Academic
Communities

16. Practicing Participatory Academic
Communities
Participatory academic communities was developed as a
concept through an iterative design and research process
aiming for engagement, empowerment and enterprising
in education through transformative and transgressive
interactions and experiences of ‘educators’ and
‘educatees’ (terms from Freire, 1974).
Participatory academic communities aim at merging the
projects of people, society and institution through value-
based vision-driven interactions of educators and
educates in the form of open, dialogical and democratic
engagements between people, society and educational
institutions.

17. Five core values for Participatory Academic
Communities
Empathy:
Key concepts: Compassion (Barnett, 2011), care (Dall’Alba, 2012), empathic design
(Gagnon and Côté, 2014)
Dialogue:
Key concepts: integration (Freire, 1974), openness (Thestrup and Dalsgaard, in
press), learning through collaboration (Laurillard, 2012),
Autonomy:
Key concepts: Empowerment (Freire), citizenship (Macfarlane 2007)
Commitment:
Key concepts: Community (McMillan & Chavis, 1986), engagement, participation
(Aaen & Nørgaard under publication).
Inquiry:
Key concepts: Critical consciousness (Freire, 1974), Academic Citizenship
(Macfarlane 2007)

18. Our transdisciplinary approach to PAC

19. A certain enactment of PAC

20. Media and PAC
A break with the tendency within the field of EdTech
research to emphasise technological developments over
pedagogy (Oliver, 2011)
A turn away from use of ICT in education as
predominantly based on transmission of knowledge (eg.
xmoocs, e-learning, screencasts and learning management
systems)(Dalsgaard, 2009)

21. Media and PAC
We needed a media ecology that supported contact, presence,
participation, collaboration and academic citizenship
Pre-media: distance & solipsism 1.0
Transmission media/tech: distance 2.0, poor remediation
(watered down classroom experience)
PAC media/tech: beyond remediation, overcoming distance
and solipsism through potentials of new media use, like
perpetual contact (Aakhus & Katz, 2002), ubiquitous
Internet (Aaen & Dalsgaard, forthcoming) collaboration and
production tools (Attwell 2007)), social media (Ito et al.,
2010), Openness (Dalsgaard & Thestrup, in press) and new
communication forms (Aaen & Dalsgaard, in press)

22. Media Ecology
(Ito et al., 2010)

23. Media Ecology
The educatees’ media use:
- self-governed
- emphasized dialogue over transmission
- emphasized co-design of multilayered media
communication over fixed unilateral ‘learning
management systems’
- to a great extent characterized by openness and
collaboration.

24. Shadowy siblings

25. Educational designers must acknowledge to and embrace
the shadowy siblings emerging from the application of
their core values. For every idealistic, positive and
“cheerful” virtue for academic knowing and practice
(Nixon, 2008), a number of entangled, distorted and
“shadowy” sensations, experiences and values mirror it
(Bengtsen and Barnett, 2015).
There is a dialectic relationship between core values and
shadowy siblings that gradually appears when listening to
the the voices of the educatees.
Shadowy siblings

26. Shadowy siblings

27. The “shadowy side” of education (Bengtsen and
Barnett, 2015 in press; Bengtsen and Nørgård 2014)
must be embraced as an ever-present and powerful
counterpart to the guiding values of any kind of
educational activity – including participatory
academic communities.
Shadowy siblings

28. FutureMaking:
PAC as a new
empathic design pedagogy
for the future university

29. A 6 point manifesto for
PAC as a new empathic design pedagogy
1. PAC is to practice education as something collective, connected,
dialogical, and empathic.
2. To teach for PAC we cannot extend these values to them, we
need to practice what we preach, both on a professional and institutional
level.
3. PAC is to invite for participation in education through empathic
design pedagogy where:
“To achieve [the future university], we have to understand each
other. We have to listen and see the points of view of people who
are committing themselves to their everyday life [...] empathy in
design implies to learn to be empathic towards the users [as
institution, academics, and society], to empathically communicate
insights from users to the design team and to develop empathic
teamwork within multidisciplinary context” (Gagnon & Côté, 2014 p.
1-3).

30. A 6 point manifesto for
PAC as a new empathic design pedagogy
4. In PAC knowledge is assessed, analyzed and used in the pursuit of what
design thinking calls ‘intentional change in an unpredictable world’ (Nelson
& Stolterman, 2012), adopting an interventionist proactive and
future-oriented approach to institutions, courses, and educational
activities aimed at education the day after tomorrow
5. PAC is to approach education as a ‘design practice.’ In this way,
educational practice and research shifts from the paradigms of deductive
and inductive reasoning towards abductive thinking about
educational designs as ‘envisioning possible futures’ (Brandt &
Binder, 2007) inside and outside institutions.
6. In PAC academics critically reflect on how institutions, courses and
educational activities are conceptualized and how that affect our responses
to these designs. These designs can play a nurturing role for the
academics, creating a sense of belonging to a shared endeavor that can
change academics perception of the nature of their academic identity,
practice and citizenship (Laurillard, 2012).

31. Future PAC work
PAC as a new empathic design pedagogy?
Is Particpatory Academic Communities important in HE?
Is Academic Citizenship important in HE?
Collaboration, connectedness and citizenship as core values for the
future university?
Universities, courses and educational activities as virtuous
atmospheres?
How to best move this further? how best to investigate it? how to best
substantiate it?
Rikke Toft Nørgård: rtoft@tdm.au.dk
Janus Aaen: jhaaen@tdm.au.dk

32. References
Aaen, J. & Dalsgaard, C. (forthcoming).Expanding the context for learning: How does
the ubiquitous internet change the conditions for education? First Monday
Aaen, J. & Dalsgaard, C. (in press). Student Facebook groups as a third space: Between
social life and school work. Learning Media & Technology
Aaen, J.H. & Nørgård, R.T. (2015, in press). Participatory Academic Communities. A
transdiciplinary perspective on participation in education beyond the institution. To
appear in Conjunctions.
Aakhus, M. A., & Katz, J. E. (2002). Perpetual Contact. Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge
University Press.
Attwell, G. (2007). Personal Learning Environments - the future of eLearning? eLearning
Papers, 2.
Barnett, R. (2015b). In Search of a Public: Higher Education in a Global Age. In
Filippakou, O. & Williams, G. (Eds.). Higher Education As a Public Good. Critical
Perspectives on Theory, Policy and Practice. New York: Peter Lang
Barnett, R. (2013). Imagining the University. London & New York: Routledge
Barnett, R. (2011). Being a University. London & New York: Routledge
Bengtsen, S. & Barnett, R. (in press). Confronting the Dark Side of Higher Education. In
Journal of Philosophy of Education
Biesta, G.J.J. (2013). The Beautiful Risk of Education. Boulder & London: Paradigm
Publishers

33. Biesta, G.J.J. (2006). Beyond Learning. Democratic Education for a Human Future.
Boulder & London: Paradigm Publishers
Brandt, E., & Binder, T. (2007). Experimental design research: genealogy, intervention,
argument. International Association of Societies of Design Research, Hong Kong.
Buchanan, R. (2006). Human Dignity and Human Rights: Thoughts on the principles of
human-centered design. In A. Bennett (ed.) Design Studies. Princeton Architectural
Press. (pp.300-305)
Dall’Alba, G. (2013). Re-imagining the University. Developing a Capacity to Care. In
Barnett, R. (Ed.) The Future University. Ideas and Possibilities. New York & London:
Routledge
Dalsgaard, C. (2009). From transmission to dialogue: Personalised and social knowledge
media. MedieKultur, 25.
Dalsgaard, C., & Thestrup, K. (in press). Dimensions of Openness: Beyond the Course as
an Open Format in Online Education. The International Review of Research in Open
and Distributed Learning.
Freire, P. (1974). Education for Critical Consciousness. London: Bloomsbury
References

34. References
Gagnon, C. and Côté, V. (2014). Learning from Others – a five-year experience on
teaching empathic design. in Lim, Y. et al (eds.) Proceedings of DRS2014: Design’s Big
Debates, Design Research Society Biennial International Conference 16-19 June 2014,
Umeå Sweden ,p. 113-127
Gieryn, T.F. (2000). A Space for Place in Sociology. In Annual Review of Sociology, 26
(pp. 463-496)
Heidegger, M. (2000). Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson. Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell
Ito, M. et al (2010). Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and
Learning with New Media. MIT Press.
Laurillard, D. (2012) Teaching as a Design Science – building pedagogical patterns for
learning and technology. London: Routledge.
Macfarlane, B. (2012). Intellectual Leadership in Higher Education. Renewing the Role
of the University Professor. London & New York: Routledge
Macfarlane, B. (2007). The Academic Citizen: The Virtue of Service in University Life.
London & New York: Routledge
Nelson, H. G. & Stolterman, E. (2012). The design way – intentional change in an
unpredictable world. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

35. References
Nixon, J. (2008). Towards the Virtuous University. The Moral Bases of Academic
Practice. New York & London: Routledge
Nørgård, R.T. and Bengtsen, S.S. (2015, under publication). “Academic Citizenship. A call
for the placeful university.” Forthcoming special Issue of Journal of the Higher
Education Research And Development
Oliver, M. (2011). Technological determinism in educational technology research: some
alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between learning and
technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 27(5), 373–384.
Solberg, M. & Hansen, F.T. (2015). On Academic Bildung in Higher Education. A
Scandinavian approach. In Fossland, T., Mathiasen, H., Solberg, M. (Eds.). Academic
Bildung in Net-based Higher Education. London & New York: Routledge
Temple, P. (Ed.) (2014a). The Physical University. Contours of space and place in higher
education. London & New York: Routledge