students learning

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/

License

Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)

5 Remote Friendly Teaching Strategies to Deepen Empathy

During Universal Human Rights Month this December and every month, optimizing classroom activities to foster learning and caring about global human rights is a crucial task of modern educators. For all of the vital information that is available about histories of struggles for human rights and coverage of ongoing struggles, teaching this material demands parallel attention to deepening our capacities for empathy and perspective taking. Based on a bedrock of social-emotional learning (SEL) methodology, Facing History offers these 5 remote-friendly teaching strategies to aid thoughtful teaching in remote and mixed learning environments:

Contracting for Remote Learning
Contracting is the process of openly discussing with students how classroom members will engage with each other and with the learning experience, and it is an important strategy for making the classroom a reflective and respectful community. Since remote learning deeply affects the progression of classroom communication, it is important to update your class contract so it accounts for any new logistical circumstances so students can feel engaged, valued, respected, and heard.

Bio-poem: Connecting Identity and Poetry
“Who am I?” is a question on the minds of many adolescents. This activity helps students clarify important elements of their identities by writing a poem about themselves or about a historical or literary figure. By providing a structure for students to think more critically about an individual’s traits, experiences, and character, bio-poems allow students to build peer relationships and foster a cohesive classroom community.

Reflection upon the complexity of one’s own identity is also crucial for building an empathic bridge to the inner worlds and social lives of others.
[NOTE: We invite you to make logistical tweaks to ensure alignment with your current teaching situation.]

Text-to-Text, Text-to-Self, Text-to-World
Reading comes alive when we recognize how the ideas in a text connect to our experiences and beliefs, events happening in the larger world, our understanding of history, and our knowledge of other texts. This strategy helps students develop the habit of making these connections as they read. When students are given a purpose for their reading, they are able to better comprehend and make meaning of the ideas in the text.

Promoting processing on these multiple levels also trains students to carry this mode of analysis beyond the classroom and apply it in situations where they have the potential to make a difference.
[NOTE: We invite you to make logistical tweaks to ensure alignment with your current teaching situation.]

Graffiti Boards
Virtual Graffiti Boards are a shared writing space (such as Google Docs, Google Jamboard, Padlet, Flipgrid, or VoiceThread) where students can write comments or questions during a synchronous session or during a defined asynchronous time. The purpose of this strategy is to help students “hear” each other’s ideas. Virtual Graffiti Boards create a record of students’ ideas and questions that can be referred to at a later point, and give students space and time to process emotional material.

Students’ responses can give you insight into what they are thinking and feeling about a topic and provide a springboard for both synchronous and asynchronous discussions. Further, this strategy allows students to practice taking in the perspectives of others and trying on others’ experiences in a manner that also provides them with space to process material that may be challenging.

Journals in Remote Learning
Journals play a key role in a Facing History classroom, whether the learning is in person or remote. Many students find that writing or drawing in a journal helps them process ideas, formulate questions, retain information, and synthesize their perspectives and experiences with those of classmates.

Journals make learning visible by providing a safe, accessible space for students to share thoughts, feelings, and uncertainties.

Invest 300$ to get $1200 in a week completely real and legit

They also help nurture classroom community and offer a way for you to build relationships with your students through reading and commenting on their journals. And frequent journal writing helps students become more fluent in expressing their ideas in writing or speaking.

—

Facing History and Ourselves invites educators to use our resource collection for remote and hybrid learning, Taking School Online with a Student-Centered Approach.

Topics: Online Learning, Empathy

By Kaitlin Smith
Kaitlin Smith is a Marketing and Communications Writer for Facing History and Ourselves. At Facing History and Ourselves, we value conversation—in classrooms, in our professional development for educators, and online. When you comment on Facing Today, you’re engaging with our worldwide community of learners, so please take care that your contributions are constructive, civil, and advance the conversation.

Kafoople Land

WATCH NEXT ▶ https://youtu.be/-mzXW_uBU1w *Hey Hey!* Do you need some remote, distance, online learning hacks to incorporate into your teaching? These tips and strategies for remote teaching will enhance your work-life balance as a teacher and (hopefully) keep you sane during this time. Let me know in the comments if you have any other distance learning/teaching tips that may help other teachers; especially if you are further along in the remote teaching journey than I am! #distancelearning #remotelearning #remoteteaching *SIGN UP* for regular updates HERE https://mailchi.mp/4b53faf5e751/kafoo… *SUBSCRIBE HERE* https://goo.gl/njMj9G Please consider subscribing as I am keen to hit 2000 subscribers this year. 🙂 I’m currently at 1789 at the time of this upload…) *GET* your 2020 Digital Teacher Planner HERE https://gum.co/KHetUa *WATCH* SIMILAR VIDEOS HERE Remote Teaching playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list… Teach From Home Teacher Tag https://youtu.be/sW9TF7v8l1E Classroom Management Tips https://youtu.be/X3TJjNXVcWI 5 Mistakes New Teachers Make https://youtu.be/qygFew2gjZ0 Google Classroom for Beginners https://youtu.be/fRlmgO4FVa0 Remote Teaching in Australia https://youtu.be/-mzXW_uBU1w *CURRENT FAVES* These are the YouTube channels that I am currently watching (and LOVING!) … Janice Wan Vlogs https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvEp… Chronicles of Teacher Tay https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0He… The Michelaks https://www.youtube.com/user/alittleb… Sarah’s Day https://www.youtube.com/user/sarahsda… *GET* your 2020 Digital Teacher Planner HERE https://gum.co/KHetUa Here at Kafoople Land my passion is for you to be able to: 🌸TEACH WELL 🌸LIVE WELL and 🌸BE WELL

Five Simple Strategies That Can Help Any Student Learn – Teach Thought Staff

Empowered with some basic information about how the mind and brain work during learning, teachers can plan to use some new strategies for supporting high student achievement. Through the years we have facilitated the use of brain-based strategies that help foster growth mindsets through the internalization of learning successes, individual choice, positive self-talk, and teacher modeling. Teachers tell us that using these teacher-friendly tools can jumpstart the learning process early in the year……

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

3 Ways to Instill Lifelong Digital Learning Skills in Students – Matthew Lynch

Millennials value tech training and development from their employer, above all else, because they know that it will help them compete in a global economy. Interestingly, appropriate tech training and professional development equates to higher job satisfaction. Additionally, improving your tech skills will not only ensure you are a more productive employee, but also a more fulfilled individual overall.

While milestones like high school and college graduations are worth ones to celebrate, they are never an end date for learning new tech skills. Lifelong digital learning, the kind that goes beyond what is needed in the moment or to perform well at modern jobs, is essential.

Yet the U.S. tends to put a time stamp on learning and it is often assumed that individuals learning and education halts at age 18 or 22, when they enter the workforce. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, on average by age 40 a person has held 10 different jobs.

That means those job-specific tech skills learned in college classrooms, while still valuable, aren’t as relevant when the next job or career comes along. With technology changing job fields so drastically, it is now more even more imperative to continue learning new tech skills, in order to be the most well rounded, productive worker possible.

So what are some ways that the education and edtech community can foster this spirit of continued digital learning while children are still in classrooms?

Teach basic tech literacy.

All kids, regardless of what they hope to accomplish in their careers, need a basic technology skill set that simply did not exist a generation of K-12 students ago. This tech literacy must happen early, and be fostered in ways that are feasible from home too. A good example of a foundational tech initiative is Code.org’s Hour of Code program. It focuses on children and their involvement in computer science and coding and offers lessons for students as young as Kindergarten.

Likewise, President Obama’s K-12 Computer Science for All program is also concentrated on providing students with the computer skills necessary to thrive in today’s job market. Just as learning to read opens countless doors throughout the rest of life, learning coding and other tech basics will serve this generation of K-12 learners well for the rest of their lives.

Cultivate a “learning for learning’s sake” atmosphere.

The climate of our classrooms today is one of strict adherence to a set of benchmarks. If a topic isn’t on a standardized test or in that year’s outlined curriculum, it matters less or not at all. It’s not really the fault of the teachers. Educator accountability, after all, is tied to test results. Whenever possible, though, teachers should look for opportunities for learning that will not be tested later.

Maybe it’s unplanned visits to a school garden or a related lesson that won’t be on any graded or tested materials. Show students that learning is not just about answering test questions later on; sometimes it is just about gaining more knowledge.

Offer accelerated learning.

The job market is evolving rapidly and our education system hasn’t caught up. The weight of large undergraduate student loans means that it isn’t feasible for workers to take 2 to 3 years off to pursue higher education. Accelerated online learning programs that cater to working individuals fit the bill here. Several companies including One Month, Codecademy and General Assembly use varying methods but all aim to address the same issue: getting students on track in a flexible, affordable, and fast way.

New skills, such as computer programming, can be taught online via specialized learning platforms to people on their own time and won’t interfere with their full-time employment. The K-12 community can take a cue from these higher education initiatives: Find ways to offer learning that goes outside the traditional school hours and shows students that learning can happen on a flexible scale.

Becoming a lifelong digital learner truly is invaluable, both personally and professionally. Instilling this trait in our students is important for their own sake, and for ours. The next generation of graduates must value learning simply for its inherent greatness — not just the knowledge that lets us accomplish a simple goal.

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

Tag: students learning

Decolonising Study Skills & The Role of Learning Development

Related

License

Like this:

5 Remote Friendly Teaching Strategies to Deepen Empathy

Like this:

Five Simple Strategies That Can Help Any Student Learn – Teach Thought Staff

Like this:

3 Ways to Instill Lifelong Digital Learning Skills in Students – Matthew Lynch

Like this:

Related

License

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: