Writing the thesis seems uncommonly hard work tonight, so I thought I’d indulge in a little bit of stream of consciousness writing, trying to theorise about the educational development unit.  This entry probably won’t make much sense to anyone reading. But comments would be most welcome.  

When I think about the educational development unit I see a small unit that sits at the centre of a large organisation – yet, that is probably the way I see it because of the undeniable fact that we are all at the centre of every life experience we ever have. We see everything from our own perspective because we don’t have another. None of us can actually BE somebody else. Following that logic, everyone else sees their own experience as being central to their world, because it is. But we can’t all actually be at the centre. So we have to try and have an “out of body” experience as it were and see the EDU as others see it.

And yet… I do think the EDU is often caught between extremes and so it is central in that sense. It’s just not central to everything.  For example, there is the need to deliver a teaching and learning strategy without necessarily getting involved in the thinking that informs teaching in different disciplines. There is the need to deliver national initiatives, (PDP, some of the work that is being done in the CETLs around the “skills” agenda, managing the NSS,  or at least managing the responses to it). There’s an issue around technology where at one extreme there is pressure to ensure that colleagues have a basic level of competence to deliver the curriculum to students via say a VLE, and at the other to push the boundaries by doing things like creating open access repositories, building islands in second life and so on).  There’s pressure to bid for funding for projects, and then of course to deliver those projects, while still maintaining the unit’s own workload.  There’s also pressure to develop an academic portfolio, both delivering courses, often a PGCE, but quite commonly Masters courses, and occasionally doctoral level courses. There’s also a tension between what you might call learning development theory and the political and environmental realities that we all work within. You can bang on all you like about student centred learning, but there are still very few classrooms where the student is actually at the centre of the action. 

But, then I suppose what all those tensions do is create fairly pragmatic staff, who tend to have a holistic view of the organisation. – Well, more holistic than most colleagues who are based in faculties I suspect. But one of the big drawbacks for many educational development units is that they tend not to work with students very much, and this is something that tends to take them away from the centre, because there is another tension, this time between student expectations and learning theories. I don’t want to sound cynical here, but it is a perfectly rational strategy for a student to work out a way of getting the highest number of marks for the least possible effort. So, students might reasonably resist our efforts to involve them in activities, saying “We’re paying fees – it’s your job to teach us”. And they do have a point. All of which makes our work as educational developers more difficult because we are saying to academic staff – well, to make your students learn more effectively, you need to make them work harder. Persuading others to work harder is hard work in itself – another source of tension.

So, where does all this leave me? Well, I think we, as educational developers do need to work with as many colleague as possible, which I think may well involve us getting out of our comfort zone, and teaching ourselves. The problem is what do we teach? Or more accurately, how much do we teach?  I don’t think the odd lecture on PDP or study skills cuts it, because those are ongoing activities. But neither can we become physicists, sociologists, historians or whatever, because if we did we wouldn’t be educational developers any more. I’m coming round to the idea of academic literacies again -I think we might have something to contribute on how to be a sociologist, a linguist, or a dramatist in HE.  Perhaps the Educational Development Unit should be seen as a sort of cell, surrounded by some sort of permeable membrane which ideas can and do pass through in both directions.

There’s also the vexed question of technology. What approaches should we take to the development of colleagues. Supportive? Didactic? Challenging? Actually that last one isn’t as aggressive as it sounds. I’m thinking of the example of Turnitin, where I do think we should be challenging people to stop seeing it as something that catches people out, but to use it in a much more positive way as a teaching aid. There again there’s the challenge of getting people to stop using PowerPoint (at least in the thoughtless way that it is often used.) There’s another issue, which is that EDUs are using technology to help colleagues to do things that they would rather not be doing. A VLE for example can faciliate the teaching of much larger numbers of students than a technology free environment – but is that a good thing? “Teaching” here might mean exactly the delivery of “learning materials” to students. But are we losing that middle of the class type student who could, with a little individual attention develop his or her talents. I don’t know, of course but it does seem a possibility that they would simply collect their electronic resources, digest and reproduce them and go away with a mediocre degree.

So the EDU is a site of challenge and of struggle between ideas then? Isn’t that what is at the heart of a university?  It’s a sort of academic department with a very heavy service emphasis. Yet working in such a unit doesn’t feel like that because it has to survive in a difficult political environment, and seems to do that best by being as supportive as possible. Even if that support isn’t always aimed at the right target.