Vikki Hill is an Educational Developer in the Academic Enhancement Team in the Teaching, Learning and Employability Exchange at UAL. Her focus within that is on Attainment, particularly as it relates to Identity and Cultural Experience. One of the key ideas she is working with is the idea of compassionate pedagogy.
As with each UAL employee I meet, I begin by trying to understand how their role fits into the structure of the university, reflecting on the opacity for students of said structure. Vikki explained that educational developers have historically been focused on working with courses that had high attainment differentials or low NSS scores. This is starting to change, as they look for ways to broaden the access to more courses as that data is not always reflective of courses’ need for support.
She explained about a project of hers, Creative Mindsets, that was developed and implemented as workshops for over 1,000 students and staff as a way to develop a Growth Mindset and address issues of bias. But now the information exists online, and course leaders can opt into working with the materials. I’m not sure if metrics exist about the use levels of these resources now.
This led me to a reflection and question about how change is implemented in the university, as I have noticed many pilot projects or projects like Creative Mindsets, that begin and then seem to trickle off or end. I asked her how things are implemented in a sustained, university-wide way. Her answer was that she didn’t know because it hadn’t happened, which has its benefits and downsides. Because of the disparate structure of UAL and individual approaches, climates, and needs of the different schools, programs aren’t rolled out in a systematic way across the university. Or even across whole schools—it was usually an opt-in sort of thing, where courses have the ability to choose what programs they want to supplement theirs. She said one of the biggest challenges was even getting people into meetings at the same time, because of scheduling difficulties.
This led to more discussion of what factors played into scheduling difficulties and silozation, including hourly part-time tutors and agency. She discussed how she is seeing the institution as ecology and shifting her focus to more policy issues that can begin to address some of these problems.
We discussed this collaborative paper she wrote, one point of which is discussing the importance of building socialising into curriculums, learning and classrooms rather than thinking of socialising as being something that happens extra-curricularly. I explained some of what my work has been doing and about my growing appreciation for the social theory of learning and partly why I began hosting the socials was because there was no in-built classroom socialisation, not even a set of introductions between classmates.
She reflected that it was very nice to hear from my student perspective and that raising issues like this can be what pushes policy and curriculum recommendations. She also recommended I speak with Jonathon Carson, the Dean of Studen Experience at CSM. We will keep in touch in the fall as my work and research continues.
I’ve emailed Jonathon about a meeting; he is on leave until mid-July.