educational learning strategy

Decolonising Study Skills & The Role of Learning Development

At Newcastle this year, we’ve been beyond fortunate to have an incredible Student Union exec, a team of formidable and inspiring Sabs who have not only worked their hardest to support their fellow students through what they couldn’t have known would be one of the hardest academic years ever due to the pandemic, but who have also somewhere found the reserves of energy to engage with another critical and timely issue, decolonizing the curriculum. Their Decolonise NCL campaign has to date included a series of online events attracting a seriously impressive array of speakers, as well as pulling together resources and pushing the University to pledge a commitment to decolonisation and anti-racist work at all levels. It’s simply awe-inspiring.

Their work has got me thinking about the place of decolonisation in what’s commonly called ‘study skills’, and how it impacts on the role of Learning Developers. I wrote a while ago about coming to understand the related and tricky value of emancipatory practice, a related concept, which I feel is the defining Learning Development value, but even at the time felt I was only just beginning to get a handle on it. Since then, my Leeds colleague Sunny Dhillon has written eloquently both about his ambivalent feelings about emancipation in LD as well as questioning whether universities can feasibly decolonise themselves. Working on projects around student induction this year, at the time of the Black Lives Matter protests, I’ve also examined ways in which an uncritical approach to inducting students to our academic community could be oppressive. The Student Union campaign has prompted me to further this thinking and tie these disparate threads together in the context of my own profession.

To this end, I offered to contribute a session to their programme of Decol NCL events, NOT because I have any expertise in this area, but because I wanted to pick up the challenge they had thrown down and explore how this ‘well-meaning middle class white woman’ might begin doing her own anti-racist work within her professional context. I’ve since taken this discussion to a meeting of my own profession of Learning Developers in Scotland (ScotHELD). This post draws together some of the questions and avenues I explored in those sessions. Our NUSU sabs talk about brave spaces as well as safe spaces, about the need to let people take risks to step outside their comfort zone, and I’d like to take that idea up and step out.

“…universities remain white middle-class spaces. They require students to adopt particular ways of being and doing – those which conform to middle-class practices that define success in higher education – ways of writing, speaking and the use of academic language. Universities measure a particular type of success that is possessed by those from white middle-class backgrounds.”
(Bhopal, 2018)

As I’ve written before, my role is often understood as teaching students to write ‘properly’. Implicitly, that means as white, middle class and male. I’d extend this understanding of ‘academic literacy’ also beyond just academic writing to other practices covered by a Learning Developer, from seminar participation to independent study, reading to critical thinking, time management to revision, which are equally situated in socio-cultural expectations of what it means to be a “good” student – the default norm being a white, middle class, male student with all the resources, privilege, cultural capital and opportunities they possess.

“Academic practices are usually presented as neutral, decontextualised sets of technical skills and literacy that students from socially disadvantaged backgrounds are seen to lack”
(Lillis, 2001).

These practices are not neutral, and those of us who teach them must interrogate what it is that we are doing, and whether it is reinforcing a colonial, oppressive education system rooted in white, middle class, western norms of how we should think, act and communicate at university, thereby positioning Black, Asian, working class etc students in terms of deficits to be remediated. While it may be true as Bourdieu says that ‘academic English is […] no one’s mother tongue’, it’s a language closely related to my own RP middle class English, and one I can learn with greater ease and inhabit more comfortably without challenge to my identity and sense of belonging.

“Through taken- for-granted academic practices, constructions of difference are formed, often in problematic ways. The tendency is to project a pathologist gaze on racialist bodies that have historically been constructed as a problem, and as suffering from a range of deficit disorders (e.g. lack of aspiration, lack of motivation, lack of confidence and so on’)”
(Burke, 2015).

What I’ve learned from the speakers at NUSU’s events so far: Decolonisation is not synonymous with other concepts such as diversity, inclusion, equality or widening participation, laudable as those initiatives may be. They imply an extension of the status quo, an affirmation of it, additive rather than transformational. Decolonisation, while related to these concepts, demands a fundamental change, a dismantling, decentring, disruption, a relinquishing, restitution, restoration. It has a revolutionary quality. “Decolonisation”, we are told, “is not a metaphor” (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Moreover, decolonisation cannot be achieved simply through inclusion or widening participation measures, as the structures and processes of an oppressive system are ill suited to fundamentally dismantling its underlying issues: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde, 18984). To decolonise the HE curriculum means

an underlying transformation from a culture of denial and exclusion to a consideration of different traditions of knowledge. To diversify our curriculum is to challenge power relations and call for deeper thinking about the content of our courses and how we teach them.
James Muldoon

How does this relate to Learning Development? Well, by extension, to decolonise the curriculum means not only what we teach and how, but also how we expect students to learn. Lea and Street’s tripartite framework of approaches to the teaching of academic writing offers us a lens to examine our practice. The second level, the academic socialisation model, maps onto ideas of inclusion and widening participation: “ [it] is concerned with students’ acculturation into disciplinary and subject-based discourses and genres. Students acquire the ways of talking, writing, thinking, and using literacy that typified members of a disciplinary or subject area community” (Lea and Street, 2006). These ways also typify the ideal or assumed white, middle class, male member of that community, for whom that system was created and in whose interests it operates. This is Academic Literacy as The Thing That We LDers Teach to students.

A Learning Developer whose primary guiding model is an academic socialisation approach is upholding this status quo. No matter how welcoming the gatekeeper, no matter how wide we throw open those doors and how helpful we are in orientating those we admit within the walls, we are still insisting that students enter on the terms of a white, middle class academy. We are also closing our ears to our students’ experiences; what is just a surface feature and linguistic or practice quirk to us is a troubling challenge to their identity or weighty burden to enact, for some students.

Colonialism assimilates or destroys; this is Learning Development as colonial assimilation. Become like us, or fail. We don’t want the bits of you that don’t conform. But not only does a predominantly academic socialisation approach assume that “once students have learned and understood the ground rules of a particular academic discourse, they are able to reproduce it unproblematically”, it also assumes that those ground rules are unproblematic.

‘Inclusion tends to be more about fitting into the dominant culture than about interrogating that culture for the ways that it is complicit in the social and cultural reproduction of exclusion, misrecognition and inequality.’
(Burke, 2015)

The third model identified by Lea and Street maps more closely onto the decolonisation agenda. It not only notes that academic writing is not homogeneous but a multiplicity of practices or meanings, but also acknowledges that these meanings are bound up with epistemology and identity, that they consist of socio-cultural practices situated within hierarchies of power and authority and are therefore contested on unequal terms. I’d like to raise an observation I’ve frequently made when listening to or reading accounts of Academic Literacies as a model, both in Learning Development and EAP. Very often, these accounts focus on one implication of Academic Literacies, that academic writing is not generic or monolithic and therefore our work needs to differentiate multiple discipline-specific discourses and tailor provision, at the expense of the other: that these discourses are situated in hierarchies of power and authority. That critical, radical observation is right there in the model, and yet is frequently downplayed or overlooked.

Similarly, it positions study skills not as surface tools to be adopted at will, but fundamentally entwined with identity, and therefore belonging. Education is supposed to change you, but not to the extent that you can only learn if you become someone else entirely, or fragment your identity, your self. And if Learning Development’s defining value is its emancipatory practice, then it is these more critical implications that we need to foreground, or what we have is a tailored academic socialisation model (Ivanic’s 2004 four tier model acknowledges this better perhaps than Lea and Street’s, separating out writing as a contextualised event from writing as a sociocultural and political practice).

The principal function of student writing is increasingly that of gatekeeping.
(Lillis, 2001)

Due to the nature of our work, Learning Developers have a special relevance to the project of decolonisation in Higher Education. Decolonisation is often spoken of in terms of adding a more diverse range of authors to a reading list, or including broader topics in a module, mostly applying to Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Put a few Black authors on the English Literature curriculum, hire a couple of BAME lecturers and be done with it. But decolonisation applies to the whole system of how we teach, the way we expect students to learn, and how we recognise and assess that learning, a system which, if it’s not designed for you, makes everything harder, if it doesn’t exclude you outright. It forces you to learn on someone else’s terms, and ‘Study Skills’, the core remit of Learning Development, cross-cuts and underpins all aspects of the curriculum at every level, in every discipline.

It’s our role to not only to help students better understand their curriculum, institution and discipline better, but also to negotiate it successfully. Negotiate – it’s a wonderful word in this context, meaning both to find your way through obstacles, but also to bring about a desired outcome through discussion between parties. Negotiation demands dialogue and change on both sides to progress. I’m not sure decolonisation is something Learning Developers can really choose to disengage from or remain neutral on.

How should we respond to decolonisation? Do we need to decolonise study skills? I think it’s clear that we must, and that Learning Development has a key role to play in this. I’ll look at how we might do that in my next post…

By: RattusScholasticus Head of Writing Development Service and Learning Developer at Newcastle University. View all posts by RattusScholasticus

Decolonising Learning Development: Doing the WorkIn “LD Values”

Emancipatory practice: the defining LD value?In “LD Values”

A Manifesto for Learning DevelopERs

SOAS University of London

Dr. Meera Sabaratnam and SOAS students talk about the university’s efforts to decolonize the curriculum and provide a more global education. Our blog: https://www.soas.ac.uk/blogs/study/de… Study at SOAS: https://www.soas.ac.uk/admissions/

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This 31-Year-Old’s Company Rocketed To A $1 Billion Valuation Helping Workers Get Degrees

Its 9 a.m. two days before Thanksgiving, and Walmart executives are dragging their suitcases around a windowless Arkansas office building in search of a large conference room. They settle on an interior lunchroom with dull gray carpet, claiming one side of a long table in the corner and gesturing for their guests to sit opposite them.

Ellie Bertani, Walmart’s director of workforce strategy, says she’s struggling to find qualified people to staff the company’s expanding network of 5,000 pharmacies and 3,400 vision centers. Her fellow Walmart execs are silent, but Rachel Romer Carlson, 31, cofounder and CEO of Guild Education, sees her opening. Without hesitation she says her team can work with Walmart and find a solution fast. “You guys and us,” she says, “let’s do it!”

Carlson flew to Bentonville from Guild’s Denver headquarters the day before. Dressed in a sensible navy blazer and black slacks, she’s hardly bothered with makeup. Since 7:30 that morning she’s been huddling with teams of Walmart brass, going over options to train workers for those new jobs. They range from a one-year pharmacy technician certificate program offered by a for-profit online outfit called Penn Foster to an online bachelor’s degree in healthcare administration at nonprofit Southern New Hampshire University.

Carlson’s groundbreaking idea when she launched Guild four years ago: help companies offer education benefits that employees will actually use. Many big employers will pay for their workers to go to school (it’s a tax break), but hardly any workers take advantage of the opportunity. Applying and signing up for courses can be cumbersome, and in most instances employees have to front the tuition and wait to be reimbursed.

Meanwhile, many colleges are desperate for students because they have small—or nonexistent—endowments and are financially dependent on tuition. Many nonselective online programs spend more than $3,000 to attract each new student. Carlson charges schools a finder’s fee (she won’t say how much) for the students she delivers from her corporate partners.

So far Guild has signed up more than 20 companies, including Disney and Taco Bell. Guild gets paid only if students complete their coursework, so a full 150 of the company’s 415 staffers serve as coaches who help employees apply to degree programs and plan how to balance their studies with work and family.

When a company like Walmart requests a customized training course, Guild solicits proposals from as many as 100 education providers (nearly all of them online) and recommends the programs it deems best. It also negotiates tuition discounts and facilitates direct payments between employers and schools, a big plus for workers who would otherwise have to wait months to be reimbursed.

Carlson, an alumna of the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 list and a judge on the 2020 list, says she has already channeled more than $100 million in tuition benefits to workers this year alone. Forbes estimates 2019 revenue will top $50 million, and Guild investor Byron Deeter of Bessemer Venture Partners predicts 2020 revenue of more than $100 million.

In mid-November Carlson closed her fifth round of financing, led by General Catalyst, bringing her total money raised to $228 million at a $1 billion valuation. In the sleepy, well-intentioned world of edtech, Guild is one of only a few startups whose values have soared, says Daniel Pianko, a New York-based edtech investor with no stake in the company.

“I can see a path for Guild to be a $100 billion company,” says Paul Freedman, CEO of San Francisco venture firm Entangled Group, who has known Carlson since she was in business school and was one of Guild’s earliest investors.

When asked to detail Guild’s inner workings, like its strategy for soliciting custom courses, Carlson eschews specifics and delivers what sounds like a political stump speech: “The economy’s moving so fast,” she says. “We can’t let higher education dictate the skills and competencies that we need five to ten years from now.”

There’s a reason she talks this way. Her grandfather Roy Romer was a three-term (1987–1999) Democratic governor of Colorado before spending six years as superintendent of Los Angeles’ public schools. Carlson started riding along on his campaign bus when she was 6 years old; occasionally she would even speak at his rallies. When her father, Chris Romer, a former Colorado state senator, ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Denver in 2011, she served as his finance director. (“The loss was devastating,” she says.)

Along with politics, the Romers were committed to increasing access to education, especially for working adults. Roy Romer helped start Salt Lake City-based Western Governors University, a pioneer in online adult education. In the wake of Chris Romer’s mayoral bid, in 2011, he cofounded American Honors, a for-profit company that offered honors courses at community colleges (the company struggled, and the brand is now owned by Wellspring International, a student recruitment firm).

After graduating from Stanford undergrad and working briefly in the Obama White House, Carlson launched her first venture, Student Blueprint, while getting her M.B.A. (also at Stanford) in 2014. Student Blueprint sought to use technology to match community college students with jobs.

It was a noble idea, but she decided to finish school and sold the software she had developed to Paul Freedman’s Entangled Group in 2014 for a negligible sum. In 2015, after she wrapped up her M.B.A., she pitched the idea for Guild to one of her professors, Michael Dearing, and to seed investor Aileen Lee, of Cowboy Ventures, raising $2 million.

After relocating to her home turf in Denver, she landed her first major corporate partner in the summer of 2016 when she sent a LinkedIn message to a Chipotle benefits manager that played up the fast-food chain’s “strong Denver roots and social mission.”

With help from Guild, Chipotle’s $12-an-hour burrito rollers are now pursuing online bachelor’s degrees from Bellevue University in Nebraska or taking computer security courses at Wilmington University in Delaware. In October 2019, Carlson persuaded Chipotle to lift its cap on tuition benefits above the $5,250 the IRS allows companies to write off.

Guild’s biggest competitor is a division of Watertown, Massachusetts-based publicly traded daycare provider Bright Horizons, which has offered tuition benefit services since 2009. It works with 210 companies including Home Depot and Goldman Sachs. Under Bright Horizons’ system, the companies—not the colleges—pay. Much of the genius of Guild’s business model is that it correctly aligns incentives: The colleges are the most financially motivated party, so they foot the bill. Another competitor, Los Angeles-based InStride, launched in 2019 with funding from Arizona State University, and like Bright Horizons it charges the corporations.

“I see our competition as the status quo,” Carlson says. “Classically, employers have offered tuition-reimbursement programs, but no one is using those programs.”

The nonprofit Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation has done five case studies showing returns on investment as high as 140% for companies that offer tuition-reimbursement programs. “We saw powerful impacts on retention,” says Lumina’s strategy director, Haley Glover.

“Walmart and Amazon are in a death struggle,” proclaims Joseph Fuller, a professor at Harvard Business School. “If a Walmart worker can say, ‘I got an education that allowed me to get promoted,’ they’re going to be someone who speaks generously about Walmart and they are more likely be a Walmart shopper.”

Like a good politician, Carlson is working to please everyone. “We found a win-win,” she says, “where we can help companies align their objectives with helping their employees achieve their goals.”

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As an associate editor at Forbes, I cover young entrepreneurs and edit the 30 Under 30 lists. I’m particularly interested in companies finding unique ways to make our world more sustainable. I previously wrote for The American Lawyer, Corporate Counsel and the Weekend Argus in Cape Town, South Africa. I graduated from Northwestern University where I studied Journalism, Environmental Policy and Political Science. Follow me on Twitter @AlexandraNWil.

Source: Class Act: This 31-Year-Old’s Company Rocketed To A $1 Billion Valuation Helping Workers Get Degrees

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Bertani says Walmart is using technology to increase productivity and help workers focus on customer service.

6 Resources to Help Students With Information Literacy – Laura Ascione

Information literacy skills top many lists of must-have abilities, especially in the age of fake news. Not all results in a Google search are legitimate–but how many of today’s students know this?

Children have access to devices at younger ages, which underscores the importance of teaching them how to look at news with a critical eye and to evaluate the information’s origin. Because today’s students are growing up in an age where information is easily accessed, they need to know how to apply critical evaluation skills when met with information purporting to be truthful.

Last year, a Stanford University study determined that students from middle school through college were not able to distinguish between reliable news sources and sponsored content or advertising.

“In every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation,” the study’s authors write. “Never have we had so much information at our fingertips. Whether this bounty will make us smarter and better informed or more ignorant and narrow-minded will depend on our awareness of this problem and our educational response to it.”

During the 2016 presidential election, fake news stories were more popular than legitimate media reports.

A BuzzFeed analysis found that in the last three months of the U.S. presidential campaign, the most-viewed fake election news stories on Facebook elicited more reader engagement than legitimate top stories from sources such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, and NBC News. In all, top-performing fake news stories received roughly 1.3 million more shares, reactions, and comments than did the legitimate top-performing news stories.

Here are some resources to help teachers and students navigate media and information literacy:

1. The American Association of School Librarians notes that the definition of information literacy has changed as technologies and resources have evolved, but critical thinking and evaluation skills will help students succeed in a tech-based global economy.

2. In Media Literacy: Where News Comes From, the American Press Institute explores how students can determine if news is reliable. They also participate in a mock press conference to experience the process and challenges of effectively communicating and disseminating information.

3. The National Association for Media Literacy Education offers resources, lesson plans, and member-submitted ideas to teach students about information literacy and how to critically evaluate news.

4. Common Sense Education’s News and Media Literacy is an educator toolkit, grouped by grade, to help teachers show students just how important critical thinking and evaluation skills are for today’s world.

5. PolitiFact, a nonpartisan, Pulitzer Prize-winning website, fact-checks news reports and aims for transparency, fairness, and thorough reporting. It also offers a section that exposes fake news and false claims reported in the media.

6. The CRAAP Test continues to be an educator favorite. It was developed by university librarians and focuses on currency, relevance, authority or source, accuracy, and purpose of a piece of information.

Your kindly Donations would be so effective in order to fulfill our future research and endeavors – Thank you

Implementing Student Accessibility Strategies – coralee czinkota

I am proud that Saskatchewan Polytechnic, the institution I teach in, is committed to meeting the needs of its diverse student population. In particular, it has dedicated support to ensure equal access to students with disabilities. This support requires students to self-identify as having an intellectual, learning or mental/physical disability. For these students, and those that do not self-identify, I also have a responsibility that the online learning environment I design is accessible.

Below I have shared student accessibility strategies I have implemented in the design of my prototype and identified areas that need additional work or resources.

Formatted instructional materials for assistive technology

I used a variety of digital media tools to present course content, including text, images and video that includes audio as one of my efforts to create an engaging learning environment. The following are strategies I used or need to consider to ensure the instructional materials in these various formats are more accessible:

Text: Adding a text to speech or speech to text option is helpful for students with physical impairments and EAL students. I found the suggestion of Google Read&Write Chrome extension from a resource my classmate, Colleen, shared on Twitter. There are many possibilities for student support in this extension, including a text to speech player, translator, dictionary, picture dictionary and web search features. Students can also use the talk and text feature when contributing to the discussion board.

I found the text to speech player adequate for the text materials within Brightspace and Adobe Spark Page. However, I found the language options for the translator limited and are not representative of the first languages of most of our international students. ImTranslator, a free alternative Chrome extension, translates English to over 22 languages with audio presentation and dictionary. I tested it on my prototype and believe it may be a useful tool for EAL students.

Video: Providing closed captions and/or a video transcript is typically targeted to those who are hearing impaired. However, providing text with videos can also provide greater accessibility to students whose first language is not English and students who have special learning needs. In addition, viewing text with videos can provide greater knowledge comprehension and retention for all learners. To ensure students were aware of these accessibility options, I indicated that closed caption option and transcript below the videos I included in my prototype.

Images: Adding alternative text to an image provides students with an explanation of its contents when using a screen reader. I tested this function using Google Read&Write and found it useful with images embedded in Brightspace webpages. However, when testing with Adobe Spark Page I was disappointed this feature did not work. This is a limitation I had not considered when developing online content using Adobe Spark Page. This is an area I will need to further investigate to make this content more accessible.

Layout of content is easy to navigate and read

Consistent and logical content layout is important to enhance the user experience, especially for those who have low digital literacy skills and users of assistive technologies. Brightspace provides templates to ensure content is provided in a format that is compatible with assistive technologies, including suggested headings to differentiate blocks of text and colour contrasts to signal new topics. I was pleased with this feature within Brightspace to assist designers in increasing accessibility for students.

Accessibility offline

For students who have limited access to the Internat, each webpage within Brightspace can be downloaded and viewed offline. Currently, Adobe Spark Pages cannot be downloaded in a PDF document. When this course does go live, I will convert these pages into a format that can be downloaded.

Group, Team, Feedback, Confirming, Balloons, Clouds

One of the most important ways to meet the needs of students is to ask them the preferences. Students who are users of assistive technologies or require other accommodations are a great resource to ensure the instructional materials and learning environment is engaging and accessible. While I don’t have this opportunity with my prototype, I will solicit student input when it does go live.

In summary, I grateful accessibility was a suggested topic for discussion. Although I had considered basic accessibility options including offline access and closed captioning and video transcripts, I now recognize there is much more an educator can do to ensure learner accessibility in an online learning environment. Before going live with my prototype I plan to consult with our accessibility office and instructional designers to find a comprehensive solution.

Can you suggest other assistive technologies or strategies that I can implement in an online learning environment? What other benefits do you see for accessibility in online education?

Your kindly Donations would be so effective in order to fulfill our future research and endeavors – Thank you

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Decolonising Study Skills & The Role of Learning Development

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