Re-shaping Practices of Academic Development: The

Disciplinary Commons

Sally Fincher, University of KentJosh Tenenberg, University of Washington, Tacoma

12th December 2007SRHE Conference, Brighton

Dilemma of Academic Development

Horn one: specificity

• Specific educators have specific problems – how to teach auto-ionization, Kant’s ethics, programming a computer in Haskell

• Institutionally-based academic developers can’t have this multiple expertise

• Either spend huge amount of 1-on-1 time, or can’t help

• Not an efficient approach

Horn two: generality

• Some problems are generic – PBL, CATs, action research

• Institutionally-based staff developers can – and do – have relevant expertise. Groups are formed, workshops run.

• But staff have to self-identify that they want it, then adapt the generalised knowledge (“work the bugs out”) for themselves.

• More efficient, but not effective

Disciplinary Commons

Disciplinary Commons: Aims

• To document and share knowledge about teaching and student learning in the UK.

• To establish practices for the scholarship of teaching by making it public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for future use and development by other educators: creating a teaching-appropriate document of practice equivalent to the research-appropriate journal paper.

Disciplinary Commons: Structure

• A Commons is constituted from 10-20 practitioners sharing the same disciplinary background, teaching the same subject – sometimes the same module – in different institutions.

• Meet monthly throughout an academic year.

• During meetings practice is shared, peer-reviewed and ultimately documented in course portfolios

• Part of the sharing is cross-institutional peer observation of teaching.

And this re-shapes academic development how?

• Professional development

• Community development

• Documentation of practice

Re-shaping academic practice: Professional development

• A course portfolio is a set of documents that “focuses on the unfolding of a single course, from conception to results” (Hutchings, 1998)

• In the Commons, the critical reflection involved in creating course portfolios is magnified by a disciplinary intensity, creating what Schon termed a hall of mirrors

[Herbert] Good to find a group where everyone is treated as an equal and ownership is shared. Not a common thing in my experiences of HE up to now!

Re-shaping academic practice: Community development

• A Commons adopts those features of research-based activity which provide value: externality and peer-review (Whilst carefully leaving behind the bath water of inappropriate representation)

• Most common reports: “confidence” “that’s not how they do it at institution x” “17 other institutions do it this way” “Research colleagues respect my knowledge”

[Elizabeth] We know more about each other’s courses and our views and attitudes than we know about our colleagues that we work with day in and day out

[Daniel] I have never had any externality on teaching – the peer review process, the exposure of ideas, you present ideas and get them hammered down, that’s all part of what I do on a day-to-day basis in the research, whereas teaching’s something I keep in my pocket, you know?

[Daniel] the thing that kept me going was the fact that I’m getting externality … this peer reivew. Those things that characterize good research projects … keeping up in the field, being aware of what other people are doing. I didn’t do any of that for my teaching. I do now.

Re-shaping academic practice: Community development

• Unusual practice of cross-institutional peer observation

• Not for QA purposes. Not for appraisal, promotion or professional development

[Elizabeth] Peer observation … a necessary and semi-regular part of my job, I view it like a visit to the dentist; painful but soon over. What about the feedback? I ignore positive comments as, “S/he’s just being kind”. Negative comments support the notion that I should not be in this job. As the observer I always rate myself unfavourably with the other person. What a wretched business. How can this process be helpful?

[Now] I can approach peer observation differently. It’s not meant to “catch me out”. Whether I’m the observer or the observed, I can investigate teaching from a different perspective to my own. I can see what works, what doesn’t and consider alternatives. We can work together. Neither of us is the “expert”. Instead we can both learn.

Re-shaping academic practice: Documentation of Practice

• Documentation of teaching is: Rare In non-standard (& therefore non-comparable) forms

• Commons portfolios have: Common form Persistent, peer-reviewed deliverable

• Power of portfolios is multiplied when there are several examples available for a disciplinary area

• Commons archives provide a rich set of contextualised data, charting and calibrating development over time

So?

• As our professional practices become more complex, our reflective and developmental practices need to be re-examined

• The Commons’ new collaborative form and co-operative culture takes disciplinary activity as its focus, thus over coming the dilemmas of institutionally-based models: a Commons is specific in expertise and general in comparison

Jumping through the horns of the dilemma

• All Commoners are expert

• Commoners work together to discover, interpret and re-interpret new material

• Resultant public documentation is contextual, comparative and collegial

• (As appropriate a representation of teaching as a journal paper is of research? Maybe. Watch this space.)

Acknowledgements (i)

• The US Disciplinary Commons was made possible by funding from the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges, the University of Washington, Tacoma.

• The itp Disciplinary Commons was made possible through the award of a National Teaching Fellowship 2005 to Sally Fincher.

Acknowledgements (ii)

• Funding for project evaluation was provided by a grant from the SIGCSE Special Projects fund.

• The authors also acknowledge the Helen Whiteley Center of the University of Washington for providing a quiet and conducive space for undertaking the project evaluation.

• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.