Keywords

The question leading this project began with: What lessons can we take from the COVID-19 crisis to prepare the educational sector for the future? Why ask ‘what if’ questions in precarious times in higher education? The project team found that speculative SoTL is a playful, provocative, and possibility thinking approach to scholarly teaching, learning, and research in times of uncertainty. The speculative idea that underpinned this pandemic project and is found within this edited collection of chapters was a figuring (Grocott, 2012) exercise designed to build on connections, create new opportunities, and generate new SoTL imaginaries for the future. The Scholarship of Teaching of Learning (SoTL) think tank as a thought experiment was underpinned by a design-based research (DBR) method to reimagine educational opportunities in and for these precarious times through iterative and relational ideation and prototyping. This think tank project was designed and developed to create space to reimagine the futures of education, strengthened by collaborative dialogues, innovation and agility to conceive new approaches to inform policy and practice in the ‘new covid-normal’ world of education. As with all think tanks, there is a proposition and an idea that seeks to provoke and spark a new series of concepts, themes, and ideas that will be followed. The premise begins with ‘what if,’ and then ‘what next’? We began: What if as a group we put out an invitation to the faculty? What if these people came together? What might we imagine and reimagine? What might we rethink to be curious and wonder about together for higher education? The think tank series was framed around particular questions at a time none of us had known before—a time when as educational researchers we had to rethink what research we did, who educational research was for, how to reimagine educational research and what the possibilities for researching the present and past to understand preferred futures and next practices might afford.

Our experiment started with co-created visual abstracts of imagined futures as we formed teams around common interests. A speculative design-based research approach was chosen to underpin the educational turn project because it is an iterative and emergent ‘figuring’ practice that builds from shared propositions and ideas that seek to provoke and spark wonderings, concepts, and ideas that were followed in each collaborative figuring session that followed. The cracks in our colliding worlds of work and home, health and illness, refuge and danger became openings to let light in, and to invite other knowledges and ways of doing into our practices and pedagogies. “As a practice, figuring calls for disturbing the already fragile balance by introducing elements into the process of designing that consciously pull the designer in two directions” (Grocott, 2012, p.3). This design practice and method offered new possibilities for doing relational interdisciplinary SoTL rather than being siloed in one discipline or methodology. What emerged in each chapter as a result of this professional learning community project was a series of ‘what if’ questions that could be used in other educational sites to provoke speculation and wonder about SoTL in your context. They were extracted using the following Python programming language with its own grammar of ‘if’s:

  •               # grab sentences with a ?

  • qs = []

  • ifs = []

  • sent_text = nltk.sent_tokenize(justText) # this gives us a list of sentences

  • # now loop over each sentence and tokenize it separately

  • for sentence in sent_text:

  •     if ‘?’ in sentence:

  •         qs.append(sentence)

  •         if ‘if’ in sentence.lower():

  •               ifs.append(sentence)

  • qs

  • with open(‘questions.txt’,‘w’) as f:

  •        for q in qs:

  •            f.write(“%s\n” % q)

  • with open(‘ifquestions.txt’,'w’) as f:

  •        for q in ifs:

  •            f.write(“%s\n” % q)

We knew that these questions could be used for speculative SoTL beyond the project and open opportunities to see this edited collection used for professional learning in a range of other educational sites. To achieve this, we thought of the book and its chapters as a collation of sentences; a model that sees text as a collection of structured, punctuated words without needing to understand the meanings encoded in the text. This model allowed for the code written by Amanda to read the text and extract all the questions and 'ifs' from each chapter. The very human work of data curation is becoming a simpler task after computational extraction. Our computational-extraction-to-human-curation pipeline is now ready for a communal figuring exercise and wondering in thoughtful and relational dialogue using our collective ‘what if’ questions. These curated ‘what ifs’ could be used in large or small group conversations about SoTL and the educational turn.

The following questions could be used in a design thinking workshop for teaching teams, provocative discussion protocol with teachers or used as a writing prompt for SoTL:

  • What might we reimagine if given the chance?

  • Can we speculate on the new bodies of evidence that need to be identified and documented about what has worked and what can work through new methods of storying as SoTL? And if we did, what kind of a problem should we consider it to be?

  • What if we imagined and reimagined together across our roles and responsibilities what our research could look like during the pandemic?

  • If, as we argue, SoTL is central to the academic role, then how is this manifesting in practice?

  • How might it be differentiated from discovery scholarship described in Boyers model?

  • How do we know if our innovation worked within our discipline, and how generalisable is what works in our discipline to other disciplines?

  • Can we communicate the implications of SoTL work in the humanities using a humanities-based methodology to those working in the sciences, and if so, how?

  • Are there such fundamental differences in teaching and learning between the humanities and sciences that mean communication is not possible?

  • Are there such fundamental differences methodologically that communication is not possible?

This collection of ‘What If’ questions can, as Dunne and Raby (2013) suggest, help in “creating an idea of possible futures” through and as SoTL (p. 2):

  • What if instead, I had acted courageously, with an ethos of care?

  • What if we acknowledged, developed, and resourced educator competencies around wellbeing in the same way that we bolstered technical competencies in online delivery?

  • What if we considered that rather than being a distraction from meeting learning outcomes, wellbeing and connection are a crucial part of our pedagogy that brings them to life?

  • What if we didn’t wait for pandemics (or other disasters) to catalyse a deep embrace of SoTL in our teaching practice?

  • What if we committed to using class resources/platforms to discuss collective matters of care and concern?

  • What if we allowed these discussions to call out our differences and relatedness rather than play at false universalisms?

  • What if care was a core academic capability that infused teaching and learning practices and the ways of being together as educators, researchers, colleagues within the academy (as has been the experience of this group in writing this chapter)?

  • What if we embraced the opportunity to make this change in our world?

  • What if we had in our possession a letter from a future imagined?

  • What if the teens who lived through lockdowns and protests, family ill-health and bushfire-driven displacement, were running higher education in the future?

  • What if the current tensions in higher education were to escalate, causing a revolution?

  • What if there will be a shift in focus, during the 2030s, to wellness?

  • What if higher education assemblages could be expressed through a collective concern for wellbeing?

  • What if students lose patience?

  • What if we imagined and reimagined together across our roles and responsibilities what our research could look like during the pandemic?

The following questions found within this collation of questions could be used to open spaces of discussion and debate about the educational turn.

Policies and Practices

  • How can assessment play a role in changing old notions of homogenous and uniform policies and practices?

  • How can preservice teacher programs provide theories and opportunities to critically engage in dominate educational discourse to speak back to policy and pedagogy that silences diversity and difference?

  • To what extent does preservice teacher training adequately prepare teachers to apply age specific, applied learning pedagogies to their teaching?

  • If higher education is in chaotic flux, and we are simultaneously called upon to do the work that we should not expect oppressed people to do, do we have reason to pause, lest our impatience and sense of certainty does more harm than good?

Higher Education

  • What might higher education be twenty years from now?

  • What if the grieving work being done by the teenagers of 2021 changes university education systems in the future?

  • If connection with a physical university is a diminishing part of the student and educator experience, what kind of new connections will emerge?

  • How does online learning differentially impact students from diverse backgrounds? How does that differ based on different individual, interpersonal, and contextual factors?

  • What information is/will be available that will help us understand the outcomes for subgroups within our diverse student populations (that differ in terms of equity, access, advantage/disadvantage, disability, language background, gender norms, etc.)?

  • Are we modifying and redefining the way we can now teach based on changed affordances and limitations?

These curated ‘what if’ questions serve as a collection of generative speculative questions drawn from within the educational turn and might be used for professional learning opportunities in range of educational contexts. They have been computationally extracted from the chapters that emerged from our SoTL think tanks and here are curated to problem pose and invite new openings for academics and third space professionals to wonder and wander about the educational turn. The educational turn has reified the need for interdisciplinary and speculative SoTL to emerge as a relational theoretical and methodological inquiry. ‘What if’ questions are a great tool to explore new fields, make felt things tangible, and to start a discussion about SoTL and what has shifted within the educational turn.

As a product of co-designing faculty professional learning in higher education, these questions are offered as a shared resource and speculative SoTL toolkit to involve faculty participating in the design of their own professional learning as scholarship of teaching and learning. Just as speculative design (Johannessen et al., 2019) is a design method for addressing big societal problems and looking toward the future through complexities and precarities, these ‘what if’ questions can be used to spark, provoke, or trouble in small teams, generate further questions or speculatively consider future scenarios in which they are redundant. It is not an exhaustive list; it is intended to provide a useful snapshot of what lies within this edited collection ready to be used and adapted to various contexts in which you work. The questions should be emergent, evolving and adapt to new realities and calls for change with the scholarship of teaching and learning as your site needs them. The lessons for next practice speculative work are important contributions to collaborative inquiry as SoTL in the future. This way of being and thinking in the world has provided space for colleagues to connect and transform their personal, professional, and organisational selves. As such, the chapters in this book are products of this project that asked, what if?