Student as Producer (Warwick)

Student as Producer:
reinventing the undergraduate curriculum

Context of Higher Education : no consensus

 Innovation: pedagogy and politics
Independent Study
Teaching Space

Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate
Research

Teaching in Public


 No consensus about the ‘idea’ or the ‘uses’ of the university (Newman,
1873; Kerr, 1963)

 ‘realised and reshaped’ (Barnett, 2000; 2005)

 ‘rethought’ ( Rowland, 2007)

 ‘redefined’ (Scott, 1998)

 ‘neo-liberal’ (Callinicos, 2007)

 ‘ruination’ (Readings, 1996)

 ‘death’ of the university (Evans, 2004).


Independent Study
Intellectual history: Pedagogy and Politics

 Humboldt’s Berlin University, 1813
 Benjamin’s, Author as Producer, 1930s
 Debord’s, Paris, France, 1968
 North East London Polytechnic 1977
 Barr and Tagg’s ‘productive learning’ 1995
 Boyer’s ‘Scholarship of Engagement, 1990s


The Polytechnic Experiment 1965 -1992

 North East London Polytechnic

 a course to embody ‘left-wing’ ideals

 Independent study Module 1974 – 1991: ‘a completely
different approach to Higher Education’ - to meet the
needs of the new type of student (Pratt, 1997: 138)

 Robbins, D. (1988) The Rise of Independent Study: the
politics and philosophy of an educational innovation, 1970-
1987


Humboldt’s Berlin University, 1813

“It is furthermore a peculiarity of the institutions of higher
learning that they treat higher learning always in terms of not
yet completely solved problems, remaining at all times in a
research mode [i.e. being engaged in an unceasing process of
inquiry].

Schools, in contrast, treat only closed and settled bodies of
knowledge. The relationship between teacher and learner
is, therefore, completely different in higher learning from what
it is in schools.

At the higher level, the teacher is not there for the sake of the
student, both have their justification in the service of
scholarship.”


Benjamin, W. ( 1930) Author as Producer

„What matters is the exemplary character of
production, which is able, first, to induce other producers
to produce, and, second, to put an improved apparatus
at their disposal. And this apparatus is better, the more
consumers it is able to turn into producers – that
is, readers or spectators, into collaborators‟ (777)


1968

„We work, but we produce nothing‟ (p.41)
Cohn-Bendit, D. (1968) Obsolete Communism: the Left
Wing Alternative

Debord, G. (1970) The Society of the Spectacle


‘When people are thrust into history and forced to participate in the work
and struggles that constitute history, they find themselves obliged to view
their relationships in a clear and disabused manner.

This history has no object distinct from what it creates from out of
itself, although the final unconscious metaphysical vision of the historical
era considered the productive progression through which history had
unfolded as itself the object of history.

As for the subject of history, it can be nothing other than the self-production
of the living — living people becoming masters and possessors of their own
historical world and of their own fully conscious adventures’
(Debord, Society of the Spectacle)


The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

‘The most important obligation now confronting colleges and
universities is to break out of the tired old teaching versus research
debate and define in more creative ways what it means to be a
scholar’ (Boyer, 1990: xii)
 The scholarship of discovery – research
 The scholarship of integration – interdisciplinary connections
 The scholarship of application/engagement – knowledge applied in
wider community
 The scholarship of teaching – research and evaluation of your own
teaching

Brew – the core characteristics of academic professionalism

Boyer, E. (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities for the Professoriate, University of
Princeton


Productive learning

 From teaching to learning: a new paradigm for undergraduate
education, R Barr and J Tagg 1995

 http://critical.tamucc.edu/~blalock/readings/tch2learn.htm

 From instructional paradigm to learning paradigm for
productive learning

Warwick and Brookes:
Sociology/Built Environment

Research-based learning

Academic
Fellowships, £10,000

Student Research £1,500

Redesign spaces in which
student learn

Research–led:
subject content of teacher
Students as Producers

Reinvent the Research–based:
relationship students doing research
between teaching
and research by
bringing students Research-orientated:
more closely into how knowledge is produced
department
research cultures
Research-informed:
researching teaching and
learning


Undergraduate Research Scholarship
Scheme ( URSS) [ 8-20-58]

 Research placement for student ( 2nd yr) with academic

 extra curricula

 £1,500

 10 weeks in summer vacation


Student Projects
 Universities Plc – learning enterprise in HE (documentary)
 Sort’d – community education with young offenders
 Water schemes in rural Africa
 Gender and US sports
 Twentieth Century oral history
 Legacy of Solidarity
 Womens microcredit in Africa
 Democracy in Venezuela
 Tanzania literacy schemes
 Broadcast student writing


Centre for Human Rights in Practice

 „The key issue is that students feel as if they own the projects and the
research and to use it as they see fit. The problem with most teaching on
modules is that students to the work for assessment and write it up in the
way in which they feel the marker wants it to be done. But with this work
they are released from that constraint and take ownership of the whole
process so that it is not just research but a whole learning experience…it‟s
life changing stuff…Leading to the development of community projects in
their own way and by making their own connections‟.

 „At the department level it is beginning to have a real impact, colleagues
can see …there is a sense of real exposure to real things that are happening
and that they are already teaching about…it‟s a natural fusion of their own
research and what students can get into…‟

 Short-listed for the National Law Teacher Award, 2007


History: Galleons

 The point is that there is the space for the students to
adapt the module in ways that they are interested in. The
students who are doing this approach the subject in a
different way, because they know that their research is
being taken seriously, and that it is making a serious
contribution to the course as a whole, and in that sense the
module is very much doing what I want it to.

 This means that their approach is more critical and engaged
and that they have a real sense of ownership with the
ability to change the module, and not simply passively
listening to what we tell them.

Students

 I think it’s a really good idea, with freedom to develop
ideas and to get involved. In normal lectures and
seminars there is no real input from the student, its
more like school, where you are told what to do and
what to write, but this is more like proper
research, encouraging new ideas and not depended
on secondary material.
 It makes everything more diverse and the module is
very much student led, everyone has real input and
can make lots of different suggestions in a more
relaxed and productive environment. The world has
changed and it is important that methods of teaching
reflect that change.

The Reinvention Centre
at Westwood
Complexity not Flexibility

Democratic

Grounded

Technologically enabled

Acoustics

Light/Colour

Collaboration

External Partners

 HEA Subject
Centres
 Ruskin College
 UWE
 Aston
 City, U., HK
 Anglia Ruskin
 Sydney
 UCE
 Queens, Belfast


Teaching in Public

 Students as ‘first public’
 Public Sociology (Burawoy, 2004)
 Teaching as Public Space
 Academics as Public Intellectuals
 HE as ‘public good’: reinvent
university

Student as Producer (Warwick)

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