A group of people working together can create great things.

We are delighted to welcome Dr John Hilsdon, until recently Associate Professor and Head of Learning Support and Wellbeing at the University of Plymouth. John was one of the founders of ALDinHE following a successful symposium at London Metropolitan University in 2002, and in 2005 he was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship for his invaluable contributions to LD.

We talk here about the classic 2011 book, Learning Development in Higher Education, co-edited with Peter Hartley, Christine Keenan, Sandra Sinfield and Michelle Verity.

Collaboration and co-working has been a feature of John’s life as a learning developer, driven by initial feelings of isolation as a lone practitioner that prompted the founding ALDinHE, his establishment of the Journal for Learning Development in Higher Education, and the writing of this book.

Its origins go back to the 1980s when John worked in FE and sought to make education relevant to his students. The learner’s context has to be the starting point, if they are to fulfil their potential. This belief, and the opportunities that arrived from Government in the early 2000s, led a 16-university consortium to create the LearnHigher CETL in 2005 which culminated in this book, intended both to help colleagues and future colleagues, and get other academics to understand LD. The book was a way to express philosophical and practical ideas and reflect on the values that guide us.

In that sense, the book represents the thinking of the collective but also reflects where those collaborators were grounded in practice, and the key issues that felt pressing.

Does John feel that it had the desired impact? It’s certainly considered an essential resource, and its frequency of citation is testament to that, although whether it’s permeated management consciousness is another question. However, it does remain the only book explicitly on LD, and can be built on in future.

This idea inevitably leads us to thinking about how learning developers can shape the future of their work. The answer, for John, sits firmly with individual agency. Context will dictate how much power we have but there is always the option to exercise some agency. Speak out and ask questions, he says, if only because it’s difficult for those in authority to suppress them!

We ask about developing LD from a field of practice into an academic discipline: John is sanguine about such ambitions, preferring to concentrate on how we work in relationship with colleagues and students. After all, good collaborative work is recognised as such when people feel able to express themselves and know their contribution is valued.

John’s real desire lies in the idea of a Learning Development university, where people come to undertake interdisciplinary, project-based and collaborative work. Even if that seems a little out of our reach, we can still offer students learning conversations that are relevant in our new post-pandemic context. We can even play and create, and find connections. No matter what else might happen, we can still do that.

And here’s where writing can come in. It’s about being in dialogue with multiple others, sharing ideas and interpretations. It’s a hugely complex psychosocial construct - no wonder encouraging students to write is at the heart of LD practice.

We help students succeed every day by starting from the ground up. If that isn’t worth writing about - creatively, and with courage - then what is?

The resources John mentioned:

Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (2010)

Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers (1973)

The Critical Thinking Model: https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/uploads/production/document/path/1/1713/Model_To_Generate_Critical_Thinking.pdf

And the Wrasse project: https://wrasse.plymouth.ac.uk/

And the book we talked about:

Hartley, P., Hilsdon, J., Keenan, C., Sinfield, S. and Verity, M. (eds.) (2011) Learning Development in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan.