The Learning Development Project

The concept of third space is one that most Learning Developers have probably encountered at some point, whether in their reading, their writing, or how they understand their role. Celia Whitchurch has a long relationship with LD, first invited into the fold by Janette Myers in 2015. She outlines for us how the idea of third space has developed, from attempting to define what someone is not, to positively recognising and legitimising a new way of working in the university. Third space professionals are adept at networking and negotiating, crossing boundaries and creating new pathways, and similarly third space (never THE third space, for Celia - there are multiple!) has undergone its own metamorphosis. Much of her recent work is on managing a career of shifting identities, and impending retirement doesn’t seem to have allayed Celia’s passion for writing. It starts with an idea, and then a paragraph, and it flows from there, with some headings to ensure all bases are covered. Get a writing mentor, or gather some writing buddies, and learn from each other. But take heart - even Celia Whitchurch can have a paper rejected! So if it’s ever happened to you, you’re in excellent company, and the only thing to do is try again.

Whitchurch, C., W. Locke, and G. Marini. 2023. Challenging Approaches to Academic Career-Making. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/challenging-approaches-to-academic-careermaking-9781350282537/

Texts encountered on screen, printed off, or bound in books can only ever be confronted one or two pages at a time, a situation which Dave Middlebrook contends is detrimental to a complete understanding of the whole text. His solution is to take the pages of the text apart and bring them together into a single continuous scroll, allowing its entirety to be comprehended in a single look. However, a single look is by no means the extent of this action, but only the beginning. The text can be mapped, dissected, demarcated and understood, by an individual or by a group, opening up the printed word to a more discursive treatment, and providing a means for active engagement with reading by making it a physical process as much as a mental one.

In a first for the podcast, we are delighted to share a video resource of Dave demonstrating the text mapping technique, hosted on LearnHigher. Take a look and let us know how it works for you!

The resources we mentioned

http://www.textmapping.org/index.html

And the paper we talked about

Abegglen, S., Burns, T., Middlebrook, D. and Sinfield, S. (2019) ‘Unrolling the text: Using scrolls to facilitate academic reading’, Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, (14). doi: 10.47408/jldhe.v0i14.467.

Although the concept of academic literacies introduced by Lea and Street in 1998 has been transformative in helping us understand the sociostructural context of student writing, it has never put forward a pedagogy. This is where the concept of genre, the signature pedagogy of EAP, can step in, marrying a concrete teaching practice to the theoretical stance of academic literacies. There is a tension between the two approaches yet both aim to be transformative - in the mindsets of those working with students, and in the learning experiences of those students. Yet arguably this transformation has not gone far enough, being limited to those programmes or courses that have successfully worked with a Learning Developer rather than necessarily across the institution. So how can that level of transformation - essentially in how we 'do' higher education - be brought about? Ideally, by expanding the role of the Learning Developer to be embedded in the disciplines and working directly with lecturers to support student-centred teaching and assessment, and to help those lecturers best understand how to develop their students’ writing. You may not agree with this approach, in which case we’d love to hear from you! 

The Language Scholar https://languagescholar.leeds.ac.uk/about/ 

Lea, M. and Street, B. (1998) ‘Student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, Studies in Higher Education, 23 (2), pp.157–172. Available at: DOI: 10.1080/03075079812331380364 (Accessed: 10 October 2019).

Lillis, T. and Scott, M. (2007) 'Defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy', Journal of Applied Linguistics , 4(1) pp.5–32. Available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/17057/ (Accessed: 10 October 2019).

Wingate, U., & Tribble, C. (2012). The best of both worlds? Towards an English for Academic Purposes/Academic Literacies writing pedagogy. Studies in Higher Education, 37(4), 481-495. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.525630 

Writing a doctorate can be a lonely experience, but when compounded by a global pandemic, the desire for connection and community became almost overwhelming for one group of people. Their solution lay in writing together. Despite never having met before, the 10 authors of this paper decided to join forces and create something together that was far richer as a result than anything they could have produced on their own. This act of writing worked to shape their identity as a group, by providing a point of contact, allowing individual voices to be heard, and building a trusted space for sharing ideas. By becoming in a sense their own data, they got to know themselves and each other much better, and collective autoethnography has become the standard methodology for the group. The sense of collective ownership of the group has become a sustaining element, giving it life and prompting all the members to go further and write more. 

Pat Thomson’s blog - Patter https://patthomson.net/ 

Elbow’s free writing technique comes from Elbow, P. (1998). Writing without teachers. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Syska, A. & Buckley, C. (2022). Writing as liberatory practice: unlocking knowledge to locate an academic field. Teaching in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2022.2114337

Johnson, I. P. (2018) Driving learning development professionalism forward from within. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. doi: 10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.470
And the paper we talked about

Bickle, E., Bishopp-Martin, S., Canton, U., Chin, P., Johnson, I., Kantcheva, R., Nodder, J., Rafferty, V., Sum, K., & Welton, K. (2021). Emerging from the third space chrysalis: Experiences in a non-hierarchical, collaborative research community of practice. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 18(7), 135-158. https://doi.org/10.53761/1.18.7.9 

There is joy in writing - real joy! - in its immanence and its ‘nowness’ and its ability to collect and articulate thought. We often see writing as the means to an end, a way of conveying a message, but for Helen, writing has its own identity and its own reason for existing. As Foucault argues, what we do is who we are. We may even write a friendship into existence. Through writing, Helen encourages us to blast the academic discourse open so we can fully work with ideas and respond to the world in which we find ourselves.

How do you do that? Be brave. Take the risk and write the work you feel should be out there. We have to seek out the spaces where we can find joy, collaborate, share, and talk about our writing. We also need to create space for other ways of expressing knowledge. Writing is very much like LD in that sense; it’s a space for us to meet, share and learn. If that process is painful, then interrogate that pain, which is probably linked somehow to the expectations we have of ourselves and of our writing.

Try writing for the sake of it - you too might find that joy!

Cixous, H. (1991) Coming to writing and other essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Lipsitz, G. (1998) The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Manning, E. and Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: passages in the ecology of experience. University of Minnesota Press

Pelias, R. (2004) A methodology of the heart. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press

St. Pierre, E. (1997a) ‘Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data’, Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(2), pp.175-189.

St. Pierre, E. (1997b) ‘Circling the text: nomadic writing practices’,

Qualitative Inquiry, 3(4), pp.403-417.

St. Pierre, E. (2004) ‘Deleuzian concepts for education: the subject undone’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(3), pp.283-296.

Tillmann-Healy, L. (2003) ‘Friendship as method’, Qualitative Inquiry, 9(5), pp. 729-749

Syska, A. and Buckley, C. (2022) Writing as liberatory practice: unlocking knowledge to locate an academic field. Teaching in Higher Education https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2022.2114337

Winterson, J. (1989) Sexing the cherry. New York: Grove Press

Bowstead, H. (2011) Coming to writing. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education (3). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i3.128 

After a long and varied career teaching in a range of educational contexts with a diverse student population, Dr Amanda French is troubled by our relationship with writing. It’s a task often approached as a neutral operation but trying to teach it in this technical, mechanistic way - with all that potential for seeing it as a skill in deficit - is closing off for students that sense of writing as a social act. It’s a part of who we are and how we think; it allows us to be part of and develop the discourse and to connect to each other. So, while it can act as a vehicle for thought, it’s not (or shouldn’t be) the product in itself. We can think of it as part of a rhizomatic environment, people entangled with their situated writing, and learning developers can be at the centre of that in helping students unpack it and figure out how to express not only what they want to say, but who they are.

The main message is, don’t be scared of writing! Start by writing anything down and write every day. The most sustainable approach is to allow for a slow, gradual accretion of confidence, almost like an artisanal approach, and in doing so you become part of a wide and diverse community.

Julia Molinari (2022) What Makes Writing Academic: Rethinking Theory for Practice

Rowena Murray (2014) Writing in social spaces

Helen Sword https://www.helensword.com/

Pat Thomson https://patthomson.net/

The Thesis Whisperer https://thesiswhisperer.com/

Sara Ahmed (2014) The cultural politics of emotion

French, A. 2020. Academic writing as identity-work in higher education: forming a

‘professional writing in higher education habitus’, Studies in Higher Education, 45:8,

1605-1617, DOI:10.1080/03075079.2019.1572735

French, A. 2022. A Philosophical Approach to Perceptions of Academic Writing Practices in Higher Education. Routledge

Professor Alison James, free range educator, coach and play enthusiast, describes herself as a fellow explorer and a companion to those wishing to explore play and creativity in higher education. Academic identity can often resist play because of traditional conceptions of what academia is or should be, and it can take real bravery and courage to try something new and playful. People find their way to play through various routes: encountering it in a training session, through curiosity, by trying and failing with traditional methods, and that visceral feeling that comes from experiencing something themselves and wanting to do more with it.

Writing can take the same approach, in that it is best experienced socially, with peer support, conversations, sharing, and making your ideas visible. True literacy, after all, is about being able to learn, unlearn and relearn. So make space for some play, and we can all take ourselves and our work more lightly!

Engaging Imagination https://engagingimagination.com/

Helen Sword - The Writer’s Diet https://writersdiet.com/

Helen Sword, zombie nouns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNlkHtMgcPQ

Professors at Play https://professorsatplay.org/

Stephen Nachmanovitch (1993) Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

Johnny Saldaña (2009) The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers

James, A. R. (2013) “Lego Serious Play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development”, Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, (6). doi: 10.47408/jldhe.v0i6.208.

James, A., & Nerantzi, C. (Eds.). (2019) The power of play in higher education: Creativity in tertiary learning. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

In this podcast, Sunny Dhillon takes us on a long journey, through philosophy, pedagogy and personal training, in a testament to the power of metaphor. Although wellbeing sounds like an innocuous, even desirable goal for students and for higher education to pursue, Sunny’s thesis is that it is ill-advised to be well adapted to a society that is so sick. In our individualised, neoliberalised form of responsibility, it can be difficult to see that ‘wellbeing’ might in fact mean deliberately discomfiting ourselves and embracing the ambiguity of true inquiry. This pedagogy of discomfort is all about having difficult conversations, challenging accepted viewpoints, and resisting the hegemonic discourses around the notions of success and wellbeing in academia. Taking decolonisation in his sights as the next means by which higher education seeks to address the problems of retention and student satisfaction without necessarily tackling the systemic sources of those problems, Sunny proposes that learning developers have an important role to play, being both outsiders and insiders and having the ability to create space for these difficult conversations.

Mumford method: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/Arts/Documents/MumfordMethod.pdf

Etymologist: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3234647.Mark_Forsyth

Decolonisation article: https://journals.sfu.ca/pie/index.php/pie/article/view/1377

Personal blog - https://dsdhillon.medium.com/

Dhillon, S. (2018) “Whose wellbeing is it anyway?”, Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. doi: 10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.460.

Throughout a chequered career, Professor Debbie Holley has striven to make a difference for students, with a strong thread of belonging and wellbeing running throughout all her roles. Her overriding interest in technology has led her to challenge and investigate the inequalities of the digital divide, particularly since nothing seems to have changed much in the last ten years. Disadvantaged students still struggle with access, not necessarily because of the technology itself but as a result of the structural inequalities that determine who uses what and how, and how confident they feel in doing so.

For us in the Learning Development community, we must not assume that everyone can access and use all the resources we create and provide. However, there’s a lot we can do with learning design that need not require extensive training or institutional investment. Most students have a mobile phone so let’s think about bitesize learning. Isn’t this the better starting point?

Publications discussed:

Biggins, D., Holley, D. and Zezulkova, M., 2017. Digital Competence and Capability Frameworks in Higher Education: Importance of Life-long Learning, Self-Development and Well-being. EAI Endorsed Transactions on e-Learning, 4 (13), e1. DOI: 10.4108/eai.20-6-2017.152742

Holley, 2019. https://wonkhe.com/blogs/everything-you-think-you-know-about-universities-and-technology-is-wrong/

Holley & Oliver, 2011. Negotiating the digital divide: narratives from the have and the have-nots

Kirby, A. (2009) Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Resources mentioned:

Abegglen, S., Burns, T., & Sinfield, S. (2021). Supporting Student Writing and Other Modes of Learning and Assessment. A Staff Guide. Environmental Design. http://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/6970/1/Writing-guide-2021_2021.05.25.pdf

Pauline Ridley, Drawing to learn https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/visuallearning/drawing/

How do you prepare students for the mysterious world of university? Sandra and Tom used their own experiences and the stories of other students to create strategies that empower learners to have a meaningful learning journey in HE. Learning Development is about demystifying practices so people can navigate them on their own terms. What Sandra and Tom want to add to that is happiness – helping students learn how to enjoy learning and find their voice in a creative, reflective space, because when students write about their learning for themselves in their own voices, they become confident in writing itself, and their academic writing improves. It’s about creating a space for students to flourish, and where they can understand that feeling fear isn’t the same as being a failure. As Sandra says, ‘that’s the joy of being a learning developer: finding HOW we can help the students’.

And how can we help ourselves with our writing? For Sandra and Tom, it’s simple: ‘When we say “write to learn” we really mean it…Quite often we do something that we don’t know yet what we want to say about it. So we’ll open a Google doc and we’ll all plunge in.’ So be brave, work with other people, and be kind.

Publication discussed:

Burns, T. & Sinfield, S. 2022. Essential study skills: The complete guide to success at university (5th ed.). Sage.

Resources mentioned:

D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (2005)

The Cornell note taking system https://lsc.cornell.edu/how-to-study/taking-notes/cornell-note-taking-system/

Pattern note taking https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/globalpad-rip/openhouse/academicenglishskills/reading/note/example2/

Dave Middlebrook, The Textmapping Project http://www.textmapping.org/

Read more about textmapping in: Abegglen, S., Burns, T., Middlebrook, D. and Sinfield, S. (2019) ‘Unrolling the text: Using scrolls to facilitate academic reading’, Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, (14). doi: 10.47408/jldhe.v0i14.467.

Jim Davis, ‘Don’t waste student work’, TEDxOttawa (2011)

Sally Mitchell (2010) ‘Now you don’t see it; now you do: Writing made visible in the university’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1474022210361452

Theresa Lillis (2001) Student writing: Access, regulation, desire. Routledge.

Peter Elbow’s books on writing http://peterelbow.com/books.html

Molinari, J. (2022) What makes writing academic: Rethinking theory for practice. Bloomsbury.

Abegglen, S., Burns, T., Sinfield, S. (2021) Supporting Student Writing and Other Modes of Learning and Assessment. A Staff Guide. Calgary: University of Calgary. http://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/6970/1/Writing-guide-2021_2021.05.25.pdf