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A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education
By Dilly Fung UCL Press
Copyright © 2017 Dilly Fung
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-911576-34-1
CHAPTER 1
Introducing the Connected Curriculum framework
We are now at a watershed in higher education. We are faced with the need for great change, and we have the yet unrealized opportunities for achieving great change.
Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman (2016b)
1 The Connected Curriculum framework: an overview
What is the Connected Curriculum framework? It is a simple graphical schema (Figure 1.1), designed to be a catalyst for:
• sharing excellent practices already taking place in higher education institutions, and
• stimulating new creative ideas for enriching the curriculum and the wider student experience.
Represented at the centre of the model is the underpinning pedagogic orientation of the Connected Curriculum approach, that of learning through research and enquiry. The contention is that the predominant – although not necessarily exclusive – mode of learning for students should be active enquiry and, where possible, engagement with current research that is pushing forward what is known in a particular field. As knowledge does not confine itself to disciplinary boundaries, however, that enquiry should push across traditional subject borders to create new analyses and connections. This core principle will be examined later in this chapter.
Surrounding the core are six associated dimensions of practice, each highlighting the need for connectivity in a particular area. These values-based dimensions are introduced briefly here, before each is explored in greater depth in subsequent chapters.
The six dimensions of the framework: an overview
1. Students connect with researchers and with the institution's research
This dimension focuses on the importance of explicitly inviting students to connect with researchers and research as an integral part of their learning journey. Students ideally need regular opportunities to learn about their institution's research, as well as other research relevant to their studies. They may, for example, become affiliated to research groups, or investigate the work of one researcher in depth. Through engaging with 'real world' research studies, students can be encouraged to start to formulate their own research questions, and empowered to explore and critique what might be described as the edge of knowledge in their discipline(s) of study (Chapter 3).
2. A throughline of research activity is built into each programme
Each programme of study needs to be designed in such a way that students experience a connected sequence of learning activities that empower them, step by step, to apply the skills and dispositions needed to undertake investigations. The right balance is needed between compulsory and optional modules (or units of study), so that students can make critical, creative connections between apparently disparate elements of their learning. The pattern of assessment and feedback activities across the whole programme, both formative and summative, plays a key part here. Overall, the assessment and feedback activities should encourage students to link different aspects of their learning, for example by requiring them to draw on different themes and skills within a final capstone module or by asking them to work towards a curated Showcase Portfolio (see Chapters 4 and 7).
3. Students make connections across subjects and out to the world
This dimension focuses on the importance of students making conceptual connections between their own subjects and other disciplines. At appropriate points in the programme of study, they should ideally be able to step outside their home discipline(s), for example by studying with students and scholars from outside their main subject field. Not only can students encounter a range of different ways of investigating the world, they can be equipped to engage with some of the complex challenges of modern society, including its systemic inequalities. Students benefit from engaging with international perspectives on their disciplines and from developing an awareness of knowledge traditions from cultures that differ from their own. Through connecting across disciplines and out to the world, students can be empowered to articulate their own values and consider their current and future contributions to society (Chapter 5).
4. Students connect academic learning with workplace learning
Students need to be able to connect academic learning explicitly with the areas of knowledge, skills and approaches needed both for professional work and for lifelong learning. Their programme of study, as a whole, should equip students for life and work in a world in which technological innovations are the norm, and in which social and organisational needs change rapidly. Students also need to become increasingly aware that they are developing a rich range of understandings, skills, values and attributes to take with them into their professional lives, and be able to articulate these effectively. They can also be empowered to engage in critical dialogue with others about the evidence-based application of knowledge to society (Chapter 6).
5. Students learn to produce outputs – assessments directed at an audience
Through some of the work they produce for the purpose of being assessed by faculty members, students can engage explicitly with external audiences. Some of their assessments can become, in effect, 'outputs' from their research and enquiry, which mirror those produced by researchers. The work that students produce should vary in form across the programme, enabling them to develop the digital practices and communication skills needed to engage with diverse audiences. Ideally, some of their work will even be developed in partnership with local or wider communities – whether in person or online – and make a meaningful contribution to society (Chapter 7).
6. Students connect with each other, across phases and with alumni
Taught programmes and co-curricular opportunities should enable diverse students to connect with one another, both in their year group and across phases of study. This can be cultivated, for example, through designing collaborative assessment tasks and by putting on departmental events. Postgraduate research students can have structured opportunities to engage with students on taught programmes, for example by delivering seminars on their emerging work. Peer mentoring can be offered and alumni invited to get involved as inspirational partners and advisers. The focus for this final dimension is on ensuring that students feel a sense of belonging as they study and of being part of an inspirational learning and research community. The key is to work in partnership with students and alumni to make this happen in ways that are authentic and sustainable (Chapter 8).
2 The purpose of the framework
The Connected Curriculum framework aims to open up areas of dialogue among faculty members, students, professional staff and others and to cultivate new possibilities for practice. It is designed to stimulate discussion about important relationships – between research and education, between diverse people and their different knowledge horizons, and between academia and wider communities.
The initiative is underpinned by the notion that education is relational: not just in the sense that we need to engage in dialogue to learn as we study and/or research but that the purpose of education itself is to create societies in which dialogue, respect for others and openness to new ideas are promoted. It is not therefore the intention that the framework closes down possibilities but that it leads to creative, original ideas for new directions of travel.
The six dimensions of the Connected Curriculum build on a commitment to the integration of education and research for the benefit of all. The focus is not just on the 'effective' learning of individuals, but also on higher education as a values-based, research-education ecosystem that needs to be developed as a connected whole. The dimensions are underpinned by a conception of education as a 'common good', as a collective social endeavour characterised by 'shared responsibility and commitment to solidarity' (UNESCO 2015, 78). Do the educational opportunities we offer reaffirm the collective dimension of education: the sense that education is a shared social endeavour? And in what ways do educational practices draw on and even influence the work of researchers?
Building on philosophical underpinnings, the Connected Curriculum framing elicits a series of important questions about the nature of higher education. These questions are considered here, before we turn to practical applications in each of the following chapters.
3 Universities in a changing world
In the context of a changing global landscape and the development of new technologies, universities have complex challenges. As multifaceted and multi-layered organisations, they need on the one hand to achieve cultural and economic sustainability and on the other to maintain focus on multiple objectives. The volume and impact of an institution's research remain, in many areas of the world, key criteria for success. Yet in the UK and internationally universities are educating increasing numbers of people; they are therefore seeking to develop an institutional ecosystem which enables them to provide excellent education for students and high-quality research. How can this best be done?
When addressing this challenge, fundamental questions arise. What are universities for now? Those of us who work in universities could ignore this question and choose to focus simply on quick, instrumental initiatives designed to solve immediate problems – to improve student satisfaction rates, for example, or to improve operational efficiency. But decision-making can surely be set much more productively within the context of exploring fundamental values and purposes. As Barnett (2016) puts it, we need to consider our possibilities afresh and examine what it is to be an 'authentic' university in the twenty-first century. Within the complex and interconnected ecology of political, social, economic and cultural imperatives and practices, what do we want our university, our department, our research and our taught programmes of study to be?
In a diverse educational sector, with very diverse participants from many nations and backgrounds, to speak of shared values at all may itself seem challenging. Those with a stake in higher education include potential and current students, their families and communities, and all the organisations (including charities, community groups, corporations, professional bodies, funding bodies and governments) that benefit from citizens' education. So the range of people who have a stake in higher education is vast. Perhaps values in relation to the purpose of higher education are not and cannot be shared?
Certainly there are perceived tensions within universities between those who see education predominantly in terms of training for the benefit of economic success, whether that of the individual or society, and those who conceive of education as being a more rounded set of cultural practices which are fundamentally about human development and 'becoming', human relations, and the development of a 'good' society. A parallel set of tensions is associated with research: should it always be directed at doing – at solving problems, and making a demonstrable impact on the world – or is research to be seen less instrumentally, as pushing the boundaries of what it is possible to know and think?
These tensions relating to the purposes, policies and practices of higher institutions are well documented in the academic literature produced by universities: the higher education sector draws on many of its disciplines to engage critically with its own characteristics and practices as a sector, producing nuanced arguments. It can be difficult for participants within higher education – leaders, faculty members, professional staff and students – to see the wood for the trees in this debate. Equally, external stakeholders – including governments, funding bodies, employers and parents – may find it hard to work out what the higher education sector, with its different mission groups, is trying to achieve.
The Connected Curriculum framework creates a lens, shapes a window, through which the higher education community can look afresh at its own possibilities. It allows a light to shine on the strange, customary separation of education from research in the strategies and practices of institutions. It is very common for institutional mission statements and strategies to treat the various strands of their activity as if they were separate. Research and student education (or 'learning and teaching') are the most prominent of these strands; other related areas include widening participation, knowledge exchange, enterprise, global and public engagement and lifelong learning. But these all spring from and/or contribute to education and research as the two core activities. Building on the synergies between all of these areas is no mean feat and the rise of the so-called audit culture in recent years has arguably made it more difficult than ever (Blackmore, Blackwell and Edmondsen 2016). We will briefly consider issues relating to the audit culture, before examining the theoretical framing and underpinning values of the multidimensional Connected Curriculum framework.
4 Audit cultures: tensions and opportunities
An issue of key importance to universities in many parts of the sector internationally is that of assuring the quality of their provision. The notion of quality management is pervasive and quality judgements are made regularly both internally and externally, leading to the ranking of institutions in league tables. In the UK, a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) (QAA 2016b) has been introduced, with the declared aim of incentivising universities to 'devote as much attention to the quality of teaching as fee-paying students and prospective employers have a right to expect' (BIS/Johnson 2015).
The TEF mirrors the UK's now-established Research Excellence Framework (REF), which ranks the quality and strength of research produced by individual scholars, their disciplines and their institutions. These quality review cycles in the UK are echoed in many parts of the world, forming a repeated motif in the life-rhythms of scholars and institutions.
It is easy to highlight the problems with such an audit culture in both education and research, and this has been done extensively in academic literature (see, for example, Morley 2003; Apple 2005). Certainly there is evidence that quality reviews can be expensive and time-consuming, and that they may sometimes have perverse consequences. Even in an era of learning analytics and big data, the things that we can reliably evaluate through 'metrics', for example the number of times students attend class or access a virtual learning environment, we may see as less important than the deeper impact of education on individuals and communities. The latter needs more nuanced, qualitative expressions and judgements. The introduction into English and Welsh universities of student fees, which have seen significant increases in a short time and which are set to rise again with the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework, has added to the spotlight on quality in the UK. Will student 'customers' be happy with what they have purchased? And will situating students as customers adversely affect the educational and research culture? These are all legitimate questions for analysis.
However, the notion that there need be no accountability for the quality of institutional practices, for the effectiveness of education and research, is also problematic. Academic freedom to research and teach without political or 'managerial' interference is a traditional tenet of the academy but does this mean that anything at all can go? Are unengaged teaching and low-quality research, even if rare, acceptable? Surely scholars cannot legitimately see themselves as actors who should be entirely free to follow their own choices and habits, regardless of who is paying their salary, regardless of the values, intentions and standards of the wider research and learning community and regardless of their students' needs. As Ernest Boyer argued, 'scholarship ... is a communal act' (Boyer 1996, 16).
There is clearly a tension here between the dangers of an overly draconian quality management approach to university life and an entirely personalised academic free-for-all, in which no one is accountable. The pros and cons of quality review principles and processes have been problematised at length in recent literature (Bendermacher et al. 2016), and there is now a promising movement away from an emphasis on 'quality management' towards the development of a shared 'quality culture'. The European University Association (EUA) defines a quality culture as:
an organisational culture that intends to enhance quality permanently and is characterized by two distinct elements: on the one hand, a cultural/psychological element of shared values, beliefs, expectations and commitment towards quality and on the other hand, a structural/managerial element with defined processes that enhance quality and aim at coordinating individual efforts. (EUA 2006, 10)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education by Dilly Fung. Copyright © 2017 Dilly Fung. Excerpted by permission of UCL Press.
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