Excellence in HE Conference 2017
A little earlier this year something possessed me to think it might be a good idea to present something at the Excellence in HE conference that Leeds Beckett hosts annually. It’s run by the quality team so goodness knows what I was thinking. I either wasn’t or I was feeling disruptive and a bit naughty.
I have some poorly thought through thoughts on Excellence in HE and have spent some time doing a few bits of research that speak to the issue. I’ll come back to that in a moment. When the day came and I stood at Crossflatts station in the rain I was cursing myself. A day, a WHOLE DAY, away from writing my book and having to engage with people who can say ‘Excellence in HE’ with a straight face.
I actually had a great day. After the usual welcome we heard from Ant of WonkHE who told us all about TEF and how it tells us nothing about teaching (or excellence) and how the results are totally meaningless but there is some quite interesting data we should all go away and look at – because it tells us something – even if that something isn’t about teaching. I’m ok with that. The day had started with something that made sense. Then came the second keynote on the role of governing bodies in HE. I’m afraid I tuned out. I heard ‘accountant’, ‘leadership foundation’ and ‘committee of university chairs’ (or something) and saw white slides with lots of black text and I was gone – I spent a delightful 40 minutes in my own head – sorry. My bad, I’m sure.
Then we had coffee and split into groups. I’d really wanted to go to the session on Research Informed Teaching but I couldn’t – I had to be in the Learning from Research session to give my talk. The first presentation was great – about dissertation bootcamps and a field trip to Malham youth hostel to walk, think, write. How awesome is that. Such a great opportunity to engage properly with students and treat them as humans rather than numbers. What a great way to foster individual excellence and to inspire and be inspired. Then I was up. Not using a powerpoint confused the organisers for a minute or two but then I was off. The paper after mine was also interesting – matrix learning and resilience in a number of disciplines. The last paper I didn’t really ‘get’ (and I heard it twice because it was repeated in the afternoon) – it was about Dance education and university students going into schools to teach dance (I think, but I sort of tuned out. I needed more coffee and was getting hungry).
After lunch the sessions were repeated so the Dance paper was first up and then it was me again and then my colleague Teresa told us about her work on transition from 6th form to university and how we can’t really expect students to be independent learners overnight. Then we had coffee and finished with a plenary summarising all sessions. It had been an unexpectedly good day.
So what were my thoughts on Excellence in HE. Well I’m interested in the rhetoric around excellence. And I think it’s all wrong. Excellence is a buzzword – it’ll fall out of favour soon enough and we’ll all be talking about something else. It’s hard to define and we all see it differently. But because it is hard to define we struggle to measure excellence so we measure a proxy or rather lots of proxies instead and pretend that they tell us something about excellence but usually they don’t – they tell us how many students got jobs or how much they earn or what grades they came and left with. Excellent teaching is measured in module evaluation scores covering all sorts of proxies. But when, through my research and informally, I talk to people about excellence it is rare for tangible things that can be ticked off lists to be mentioned – usually it is about the emotion of a situation or context, about how a teacher made us feel, how a research paper made us think, how a well timed and well constructed question by a teacher made us see something in a different light altogether. Excellence is not always (or even often) synonymous with a good student experience of being happy and getting what you want – students I spoke to often talked about excellent teaching making them deeply uncomfortable and being very challenging.
I’m also interested in how universities present ‘Excellence’ claims and mostly on the websites I studied they don’t unpick their assertions at all. Some (guess which ones) claim they are excellent teaching facilities and offer excellent student experience because they are highly ranked research institutions. Others claim to offer excellent teaching because their staff all (or mostly) hold teaching qualifications and others claim that excellence because their staff hold professional (industry) qualifications. None of those claims are justified or explored further. Anyway, I rambled on about all of this for a while but my thinking sort of got to this: We need to move away from thinking about excellence as something that can be achieved, measured or even really articulated and accept that it means different things to different people – as such we can all be excellent to some people (students, colleagues, managers, funders….) some of the time but we can never be excellent to everyone or even to some all of the time (and for me that means choosing who is my priority – some things that make it more likely that students get an excellent learning experience might be in conflict with what management expectations of my excellence are – guess who wins). Also, because excellence means different things we can and should take a more personal approach to excellence and remember that our students are not numbers, they are people, people who all have the potential to be excellent some of the time. I think, and this was prompted by one of the comments in the plenary, that we need to shift our focus away from what good or excellent teaching is because that isn’t getting us anywhere and instead think about what conditions we need to create to allow for excellent learning. I said in the first iteration of my paper that inspirational teaching might be excellent teaching and that was picked up in the plenary with a throwaway remark that I had possibly just come up with that on the day or ‘maybe she had thought about it before’. I wasn’t quite in punching distance to the bloke who said that (of course it was a bloke) but I thought that was a bit rude and I wondered whether he would have said it about a bloke. He also didn’t use my title when he referred to me but he did use the title when he referred to one of the blokes. Every day sexism for you but that’s not the point of this post…
I’ll keep thinking about this stuff. There’s something about the way we talk about excellence in HE that is fascinating.
Brexit and Law Schools – my thoughts
I attended an event at Northumbria University today. It was titled Brexit and the Law School and I was asked to contribute some thoughts on ‘Learning, Teaching and the University: The Changing Shape of the University Community’. Below is a summary of my brief talk. I’ll try and summarise the rest of the day’s discussion in another post
- Law Schools are, in my view, distinct little communities within the wider university community, within the wider local, regional and national communities and, again in my view, communities are shaped by those who inhabit them. Therefore, to understand the impact of Brexit on Law Schools we need to understand how Brexit might change the make-up of the Law School and university communities and what that change might mean on the ground
- So how will the make-up of Law School and University inhabits change post Brexit? We don’t know!
- Here’s what we do know
- UCAS figures show that applications from UK students for Law Courses for 2017 entry are up by 7% whereas applications from EU students are down 3%
- UCAS figures also show that applications from UK students across the board for 2017 entry are down by 4%, whereas applications from EU students are down by 6%
- The proportion of EU students studying law is relatively small when compared to the proportion of EU students studying some other subjects
- The number and proportion of EU students varies quite dramatically between institutions
- There is lots of anecdotal evidence that EU national academic staff are considering or actively looking to leave the UK and work elsewhere in Europe or the rest of the world
- There is also anecdotal evidence of EU nationals discounting the UK as a possible destination for work
- However there is also anecdotal evidence of EU national colleagues making plans to stay in the UK long term and also of some recruitment of EU national staff since the referendum
- The UCU survey about academics’ views on Brexit suggests that 76% of non-UK national academics are considering leaving the UK. That’s pretty damning. However, I would urge caution over that figure because ‘considering’ is very different from ‘planning to’ and the considering may be the result of quite significant uncertainty. Thing may change as we get clarification on what rights exactly will be available to our EU colleagues
4. This leads me on to what these figures don’t tell us
- Whether they are a trend or a blip. The applications for Law from EU nationals are still higher in number than for the 3 years running up to 2016 so was 2016 just a bumper year and we are returning to ‘normal’?
- What will the figures be over the next 5-10 years? Only once we know that can the data really tell us something about whether Brexit had a significant impact on the number of EU national (law) students in the UK
- If it is more than a blip, is it really Brexit or the uncertainty around Brexit that has caused the drop?
5. In short we don’t know how the make-up of Law School inhabitants might change. We really don’t. But let’s assume the worst – that we will loose the majority of our EU students and colleagues and that we will loose access to the Erasmus+ programme and research mobility/exchange programmes – what would the impact of that be? Well I think it would be devastating. I think we could see
- a shift on who and what is valued in Law Schools
- a more inward looking and insular approach to scholarship and teaching
- less engagement with EU and international issues and in particular with non-common law issues and approaches
- less well rounded curricula -explicit and hidden
- a reduction in the opportunities to learn from each other and a loss of the sort of creativity that happens when you tackle a problem together with people who bring different ways of thinking and doing things to the table
- less tolerance for different ideas and approaches and ways of thinking
- less well rounded lawyers – whether academics, practitioners or ‘just’ citizens of (a possibly much more narrowly defined) world
So my question really is – how do we make sure that we don’t become insular and inward looking law schools that irrelevant to the rest of the world or possibly just irrelevant?
They’re Not Just Toilets!
A couple of days ago my institution opened a new entrance to one of the university buildings. Not exciting, but in that entrance area (it’s a glorified porch really) there are new toilets, not exciting either, but these toilets are gender neutral toilets. Now this is exciting. I was going to blog about them then but somehow it didn’t seem important enough. Well I think I was wrong about that. I actually think that having those toilets there is massively important and an email sent by a colleague mocking them and noting (sarcastically it seems) ‘As tens of thousands of innocent people are being cynically and perhaps routinely slaughtered in Aleppo, this remains the most compelling issue facing Students & Staff today’ suggests that maybe celebrating the toilets is even more important than I thought. Stick with me as I try to unpick this and try not to rant.
I don’t really get the obsession with toilets split by gender. It’s a toilet. I actually think it would make perfect sense to just have toilets – full stop. That would just be so much more inclusive and, well equal. Who gets to pee where isn’t about biological differences, it never has been. It’s about some old-fashioned concerns about what women should and shouldn’t be doing in public. It’s about anxiety and the misplaced perception that there is a need to protect women (or just generally protect us from each other). The research into public toilets is fascinating (see for example Molotch and Norens 2010 book ‘Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing’ which also contains a chapter by Terry Kogan on segregation) and I wish I had the time to read more of this stuff (yep, maybe I should have been a sociologist after all!). There are a number of issues around gender neutral toilets which jump out at me. I know there’s research and I am also keenly aware that most of it I haven’t read. What follows is my gut feeling about this and my initial reaction to the email I got at work which, to put it mildly, made my blood boil. I have tried to sense check my gut feelings and perceptions by talking to friends and reading some stuff but I know there’s a whole load of stuff I’m missing. If you have ideas for something I should read to help me get a fuller and more nuanced picture please leave me a note in the comments
- Gender neutral toilets are for everyone. They make sense. In buildings where there is limited space for toilets – just have toilets. Don’t make (almost always) women walk further and wait longer to pee.
- We don’t need segregation. Women do not need protecting. Segregation just encourages us to deal with each other in a slightly artificial and negative way. (I hadn’t really thought about this until one of my friends mentioned this – thanks, you know who you are). Segregation encourages us to view each other with suspicion. Well, as someone who routinely skipped the lines for the Ladies’ and walked into the blokes’ toilets – there’s no mystery. You might encounter a few more hairbrushes and a little more make-up in the little girls’ room but that’s it. Also – segregation doesn’t work. There is no magic safe space. See a recent Guardian article for examples
- Toilets can be the venue for many a drama, many tears and confidential chats and comforting. This has come up in conversation several times with female friends whose best friends are men. If the toilet is the only area at work or wherever where you can have a private conversation and a bit of a cry when you’re having a rough day, and your best friend or trusted colleague is male, you’re stuffed. You have to do your crying on your own leaving your bestie outside feeling properly useless. That doesn’t make sense
- Gender neutral toilets also make sense for parents – it means they can take their child of whatever gender to the toilet without any awkwardness whatsoever. None.
- Gender neutral toilets are also imperative for trans people. Here I think safety is an issue. The US trans survey results are pretty scary – 59% have avoided using public bathrooms (including at work and school) because of fear. Just think about that for a minute – 59% of respondents to that survey did not go to the loo because they were scared. That alone makes gender neutral toilets not just a good thing but absolutely crucial in any society or organisation that takes equality in any way seriously.
- I have re-written this paragraph several times now and I can’t quite get it right. The email I received (which went to a selection of people in response to the announcement that we now had these gender neutral toilets) was dismissive of ‘gender dis-specific’ people and pointed to the fact that there may be 3 in the institution and that ‘their survival is threatened by both a lack of tolerance and the lack of an arena where they can take a dump without the wolf-whistles’. I don’t even know what to say to this. Yep, there’s a lack of tolerance – nicely exemplified by the email. And yes actually their survival (in some cases, actual survival) and safety is threatened. Have a look for example at this article in the advocate which highlights some of the issues.
- Perhaps the most upsetting bit in the email is the assertion that because we care about gender neutral toilets we don’t care about Aleppo. I stopped breathing for a second when I read that. I care, as do my friends, about injustice. If I care about having gender neutral toilets, I can still care about Syria, about Human Rights abuses, about the gender pay gap, about every day sexism, about trans equality, about whatever f-ing injustice there is. I don’t have a finite amount of ‘caring’. Using one massive injustice to justify doing nothing about other injustices (on the basis that this means we don’t care enough about the massive one) is just idiotic. But of course I am missing the point here – if you don’t see not having gender neutral toilets as an injustice…
- For my institution as a university those gender neutral toilets are a great first step. There is somewhere to go for staff and students who do not want to deal with the ‘which toilet is the right one for me’ debate or issue every time they need to pee. I don’t care what the reason for that debate might be, nobody should have to worry about going for a pee at work/uni. I’d like to see gender specific toilets disappear – I don’t see the point in having them
So there we are. Do you see now why they are not just toilets? Why they are much more than that, a symbol of inclusiveness and equality or at least a step towards those values. They can also be genuine life-savers and certainly stress savers for many – and it’s not for me, you or anyone else to decide who gets to pee where.
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