Trends and Implications for the Educational Turn

Abstract

The speculative idea that created this edited volume was a figuring exercise to build on connections, create new opportunities and generate new Scholarship of Learning and Teaching imaginaries for the future during the initial stages of the global pandemic. The project began by inviting interested colleagues at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education to participate in a think tank series as a thought experiment. Underpinned by a co-design process to reimagine educational opportunities in and for these precarious times through iterative ideation and prototyping to create connection and collaboration through co-creation. A speculative inquiry approach was chosen to direct the project because it is a relational and emergent “figuring” practice that builds from the shared propositions and ideas that seek to provoke and spark wonderings, concepts, and ideas that will be followed in each collaborative session that follows. This chapter will discuss how the research collaborations were fostered to result in the chapters presented and conclude with implications for the educational turn. The educational turn represents a shift of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning from the peripheries of higher education to legitimate scholarly work within the academy that can inform and strengthen evidence-based approaches for impact on student learning in the future.

2.1 Introduction

We now know that the pandemic disrupted the status quo in education (OECD, 2021), society (Lupton, 2021) and educational research (Pokhrel & Chhetri, 2021) in Australia. Many of us are still feeling the resonations of international and state border closures that limited access to new student cohorts and necessary funding; an increasing casualized workforce and institutional professional and academic divide ruptures; and sector wide financial devastation. During the pivot to remote teaching and learning and working and researching from home educators and educational researchers had a multitude of demands placed on them. For some, these demands initiated an opportunity to innovate and create new ways of practicing as teachers and researchers. For others, it widened gaping disparities and inequities in and across faculties and institutions, communities, and societies.

Before the pandemic, the university sector had been shifting. Many in the academy were doing the hard work to decolonize curriculum, rupture structures, and turn toward a relational production of knowing and knowledge. There were questions about the purpose and role of higher education in our communities as teaching, learning, assessment, and graduate preparedness continued to change. “In an age of supercomplexity, a new epistemology for the university awaits—one that is open, bold, engaging, accessible, and conscious of its own insecurity. It is an epistemology for living amid uncertainty” (Barnett, 2000, p. 420). Barnett twenty years ago was in a different time and space, but this reference to bold change demonstrates that this is slow work, as our ways of knowing and being evolve and respond to policy. As Freire and Ramos (1970) argued last century, “knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (p. 72).

During the initial stages of the global pandemic, the pandemic turned our focus sharply toward a care for students and their well-being in more diverse ways. Our relational encounters (Crownover & Jones, 2018) between physical and digital spaces, and for some post-digital sites (Knox, 2019) changed how we taught and thought about teaching. With financial difficulties, access and equity issues, and political agendas playing out in and around the university sector, the catalyst for the educational turn in higher education was not the pandemic on its own, but several increasing demands that contributed over many years. Educators reached the tipping point in lockdown.

2.2 A Speculative Project in Action

In the early days of the pandemic, the editorial team felt a need to archive and capture what was occurring in the learning, teaching, and scholarly work at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. Not long after the University of Melbourne closed its physical doors early in Semester 1, 2020, and opened new digital doors that allowed the pivot from face-to-face into remote emergency teaching, learning, and assessment; the imperative was clear. We began by asking, what might the futures of education look like?

This seeded an ongoing co-design project that the editorial team facilitated during 2020–2021. We drew on the conceptual resources of practice theory as informed by the work of Lave (1996) and Wenger (1998), and further developed these within speculative inquiry (Dunne & Raby, 2014) and co-design (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). The initial project involved a series of think tank workshops to facilitate new connections and discourse while we worked at home. What emerged was foretold by Barnett and Hallam (1999) pre-pandemic:

… higher education is faced with the challenges of preparing graduates not just to cope with this world but to prosper in it and to go on adding to its supercomplex character. This will require considerable thought and collective effort if our pedagogical processes are to be adequate to the task. (p. 140)

Initially designed for early- and mid-career academics interested in researching curriculum, teaching, learning, and assessment practices through a rapidly growing field of research known internationally as the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). The aim was to collectively engage in scholarly collaboration to reimagine what the futures of education might be. Provoked by Bass (2020), the inquiry was furthered by this question: “What could it mean to turn the current crises and challenges of higher education into a set of problems to be investigated? And if we did, what kind of a problem should we consider it to be?” (n.p.).

With a commitment to co-design, we focused on process and outcomes over outputs to figure out pre-pandemic pedagogical problems as a collaborative, while providing space for ideas to emerge as the crisis unfolded. The speculative design was underpinned by a desire to explore supercomplexity (Barnett, 2000), through the shifts and turns in practice, pedagogy, and policy within different educational contexts and to create novel resources for publication as SoTL. The invitation to participate in the project in 2020 began: Early- and mid-career academics willing to be creative, explore new ideas, are comfortable with unconventional approaches, collaboration and seek a broader perspective on the scholarship of teaching and learning in the graduate school are invited to participate.

Stage 1: Creating a library of wicked problems, issues, and questions at MGSE

Dear Colleagues,

This current COVID-19 must be the most intrusive natural experiment we have experienced. As academic researchers, we have a major role to play at this time, and we know we all have many tasks in front of us in our on-going research programs, and there has been a sudden upsurge in teaching particularly moving to online, but it would be a missed opportunity to not think about the research and public service/ engagement role we can play at this time.

Jim, Sophie, and John invite you to participate in various activities relating to these times. The first stage will involve completing this short survey to collate your ideas for studies, for research, for exciting and wicked questions that these COVID-19 times invite.

Let’s create a compendium of wicked problems to start our MGSE discussion about how we can be involved to help work through this crisis. At this stage, we do not want answers, but to build a library of issues and questions. This stage is open until April, 17, 2020. We will then be contacting collaborators who have shown interest through their participation in this stage.

What are the research questions that need to be asked?

Fifty-seven colleagues across the Melbourne Graduate School of Education responded with a plethora of questions that they felt a need to be explored and archived. The library includes eight broad themes and were visualized for analysis and shared back to participants in an early workshop as Word Cloud visualizations (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1

Voyant visualizations were drawing the wicked questions together and highlighting connections through corpus analysis

To move from this fuzzy stage of the research collaboration we asked more open-ended questions of participants to develop the series:

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

• What might we wonder about together as we developed our questioning from individual to collective further?

A co-design and co-creation method (Sanders & Stappers, 2008) was chosen to generate innovative ideas through active participation and collaboration. This practice of research communicates the “work” being produced as prototypes and emergent ideas that act as feedback loops throughout the process, developing and building connections through active participation in each session (Fig. 2.2). As each new idea or concept emerges, it is developed into a prototype for discussion to lead the next stage.

Fig. 2.2

Sketch of an early project design to generate an iterative process of speculation

A co-design and co-creation method of speculative inquiry can often be uncomfortable for participants. There was no designed object or product in mind. However, this early phase is critical to develop the project as a collaboratory that all participants could see themselves practicing within. While we worked at home, this was an important design consideration to support and connect colleagues who may have felt disconnected or may have lost their research sites due to the continued lockdown. We understood knowing in this SoTL project as “an ongoing social accomplishment, constituted and reconstituted in everyday practice” (Orlikowski, 2002, p. 252). Knowledgeability is therefore continually enacted and re-enacted in ongoing actions (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011, p. 1243) that we facilitated through speculative querying as a professional learning community. In 2020, we did not know what might emerge, and with each discussion, more ideas were refined or rejected that lead to this edited collection. To do this, we asked our colleagues to commit to four key principles:

• 1. Immerse oneself in the process of connection and trust, and to share power in research, discussion and decision making.

• 2. Be open to speculative inquiry, curiosity, and creativity through forming new social, cultural, and professional relationships.

• 3. Active participation to discover, design, collaborate, and refine ideas through as SoTL in action.

• 4. Adopt new ways of being and doing research in an iterative collaborative process, to learn from others, and build agency as a community of scholars.

2.3 The Power of Collective Collaboration

During what felt like a bleak and worrying time at home, with colleagues quickly re-designing remote emergency learning and teaching while preparing our homes for winter and the precarity of the pandemic, the project began to take shape. Many of our conferences had been canceled, and our usual academic discourse conducted over coffee, conference dinners, and chance meetings in the hallway were missed. The project provided time and dedicated space for new ways to connect. As many academic and administrative staff channeled their energies into teaching; the teaching research nexus became sharpened through the curated wicked questions we had collected.

Dear colleagues,

Thank you to the people who engaged with the survey and contributed their research questions. We have clustered the main questions into the list below, and they provide opportunities for new and existing groups within MGSE to work collaboratively and across disciplinary contexts.

• Student wellbeing and belonging

• Student engagement

• Equity and access

• Indigenous knowledges

• Assessment

• Higher education

• The academic profession

• Local/global communities

• Teaching.

We would like to invite you to participate in the next stage of this collaborative research approach.

Stage 2 involves you providing comments and further suggestions to the questions below by using the add new comment option in the review tab above. We would also invite you to indicate your preference to the cluster of research questions that you would like to be involved in.

This will allow us as a group to further refine the questions that will guide the development of research teams for Stage 3.

Stage 2 will close Tuesday 5 May, 2020.

In Stage 3 we will invite you to participate in research teams to work through the questions and outline what the team plans to achieve. More details on Stage 3 will follow, including ways that MERI staff will be able to support this work and opportunities to highlight the research undertaken via media, website and possible publications.

With a commitment to speculative thinking and focusing on future possibilities, we designed creative ways to make connections between the wicked problems and new questions emerging. This method of participatory thinking was developed to connect colleagues to new ideas and give “voice to people who were previously not even a part of the conversations” (Sanders & Stappers, 2008, p. 9).

Stage 2: An invitation to think tank 1 and 2 participants:

As a professional learning community of educators, we have much to contribute to COVID-19-related research. Together we can contribute to new understandings from this time of crisis and great change in our part of the world. Our individual practices and research are already focused on the needs of education today; the rationale behind this project is to co-design how we might bring these sites of research together to pose bigger questions and provoke new ways of thinking as a team of educational researchers with a shared interest in reimagining educational opportunities during and post-COVID-19.

The process

As potential collaborative authors and co-researchers, having posed and proposed to be a part of the process in phase 1 and 2, we now invite you to consider a collaborative and cooperatively written 300-word abstract (max). This should include keywords, potential audiences for your work with an idea that stems from the sections below, and a reference list that includes work you have previously published in this field/area with other key authors you will cite.

This research is designed as a collaboration with all the authors, online, using methods that each team devise in this Microsoft Teams space or beyond. Each big idea that was collected in phase 1 has been curated into a concept with identified contributors in phase 2.

You will find a folder in Files with each concept, and here we ask you to begin planning what your collaboration might look like. Again, we ask to think big. For instance, what could an MGSE podcast series contribute to discussing the widening gaps of educational disadvantage caused by this health crisis? There is no one direction to take here, but as editors of our project, we can support you as you develop a co-working strategy and potential place to do your work.

We can help you in these initial team meetings, and we are keen to see you develop writing/method processes that suit the team such as sprints, mini-workshops, or co-lab writing sessions. Together your team could think about writing around your proposal for a Pursuit article, op-eds in The Conversation, and AARE EduResearch Matters. You may see a place for co-authored journal articles, book chapters, or even developing a proposal in an edited series.

Proposal

The proposal should include the following:

• 1. name(s) and corresponding email for team lead;

• 2. 300-word abstract outlining the focus, form, and content of the proposal;

• 3. Proposed audiences, publication, and dissemination;

• 4. 4–5 keywords for the proposal;

• 5. Selected references, please include work of your own that contributes to the proposal;

Timeline

300 word submission Friday 22 May, 2020.

Please ensure you make time between now and the 22 May to meet, discuss, and make a plan for a team approach to your idea. This 300-word submission needs to be uploaded into the Teams folder. Go to Files and open Phase 3, within that folder each Phase 2 proposed idea has a folder.

The project editorial team will then workshop the ideas and possibilities to provide feedback and potential supports for the research proposals that ask the BIG questions for education - What will the future of education look like? MGSE May, 2020.

Using the questions and revised refinement of ideas into topics and professional learning communities, we developed the following ideas for a series of collaborative writing and discussion points:

• 1. Student wellbeing and belonging

• 2. Student engagement

• 3. Equity and access

• 4. Indigenous knowledges

• 5. Assessment

• 6. Higher education

• 7. The academic profession

• 8. Local/global communities

• 9. Teaching.

As a team, we felt the turn within our ecologies in the responses we were receiving by email and continued active participation in each session. Between the collaborative research workshops, we were collecting and curating our own aspirations for higher education post-pandemic. As an editorial team, we were also building internal networks, while challenging ideas for co-designing and co-researching big ideas together as SoTL. We were facilitating a reciprocitious, self-organizing SoTL professional learning community that was also sustaining us as educators. We know that “well-implemented professional learning communities are a powerful means of seamlessly blending teaching and professional learning in ways that produce complex, intelligent behavior in all teachers” (Sparks, 2005, p. 156). To build this SoTL professional learning community we developed a calendar of one-hour Zoom sessions, designed to be tight, provocative, and generative as we collectively reimagined research collaborations for next practice thinking.

Using a prototyping method, supported by Amanda Belton, Data Scientist from the Melbourne Data Analytics and Platform (MDAP) to visualize the individual and collaborative dialogues, we co-designed each stage by exploring what had come out of the previous session. The next stage was an intervention lead by four sparks:

       Think tank 1: What can the futures of education look like?

          Keynote 1 (7 min spark): Professor Gregor Kennedy.

                Keynote 2 (7 min spark): Professor Chi Baik.

Workshop facilitators: Dr Kathryn Coleman & Dr Bella Blaher.

    Think tank 2: The teaching research nexus post-Covid.

   Keynote 1 (7 min spark): Associate Professor Mike Prosser.

         Keynote 2 (7 min spark): Professor Sophie Arkoudis.

Workshop facilitators: Dr Kathryn Coleman & Dr Bella Blaher.

2.4 Collaborative Research Teams

Following these spark provocations was an invitation to join four collaborative research workshops. The aim was to develop the ideas and connect the sparks as we reimagined and speculated. As lockdown continued through winter and into spring of 2020 in Melbourne, Zoom had become a stable in our digital classrooms, and with ease colleagues began to share more as collaborators. The contribution of the lived experience began to drive the process of connection as the workshops became an important connection point for academics across early, mid and interested later career colleagues to discuss their teaching, student learning and lives during lockdowns as SoTL. We knew that a “professional community amounts to more than just support; it also includes shared values, a common focus on student learning, collaboration in the development of curriculum and instruction, and the purposeful sharing of practice” (Louis, et al, 2010, p. 42). To do this, the editorial team met iteratively to re-design the next stage while considering the needs of colleagues and sharing all co-creation prototypes as outputs generated in the MS Teams’ site and Padlet (Fig. 2.3) to ensure that we were responsive and relational.

Fig. 2.3

Padlet screenshot developed for the SoTL think tanks

It was important that we practiced a cultural intelligence and widening inclusion through use of the data we were iteratively creating, collating, and curating to provide professional learning experiences to support the collective creativity of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. As Timperley (2008) suggested pre-pandemic, “findings from many studies suggest that participation in a professional community with one’s colleagues is an integral part of professional learning that impacts positively on students” (p. 19). We found that the think tanks provided space to reflect and respond to different demands on our teaching, learning, and assessment and created a connection between us as facilitators to follow the lead set by Barnett (2000), “The university can be reborn” (p. 421).

The collaborative research workshops facilitated as Zoom sessions followed each fortnight using the Pomodoro method with each 1-h session divided into 25-min writing chunks. Using individual writing sprints and collaborative discussion and review in Zoom break out rooms, we continued to sharpen the questions we were asking using playful and creative writing methods. The writing sprints were refined and developed into new questions that emerged from each co-design process. Each writing sprint was emailed and collated in the project MS Teams site and Padlet (see Fig. 2.3). We collated and curated photographs from our work from home remote stations. Working with Data creative Kenna McTavish, these were images drawn as single works and created into “Postcards from the Pandemic” (see Fig. 2.4) to capture our collective data in new ways through a postcard sent to the self (past, present, or future) to archive this moment in our careers.

Fig. 2.4

Illustrated Home Office[s] is a digital painting developed out of a series of photographs of home office/workspaces colleagues from home set ups. It illustrates the cohesive nature of a home/office, as well as highlighting patterns in the types of objects and domestic spaces that everyone has been working collectively within (Kenna McTavish, 2020)

The last meeting of the collaboratory in 2020 was to discuss the potential for a book to further the generative, speculative, and innovative pandemic research collaboration into an edited collection. We discussed timelines for the potential chapters in 2021, voted on the suggested titles, talked about who our intended audiences were and discussed plans for what we thought 2021 might look like. It was decided unanimously that this book would be developed for faculty and administrators, educators, and educational leaders from a variety of contexts and their communities of practice. In 2021 the editorial team and participants met again, facilitating writing workshops and peer feedback in and across the practices, pedagogies, and policies through active professional relationships. As a collaborative process, this volume enabled further collaborations as section authors were invited to read and provide feedback to each other to connect, link and transform the scholarship of teaching and learning across the year as work from home and teaching remotely continued. As Melbourne was in longer lookdowns as the pandemic seemed to worsen each day, the teams worked across the chapters providing feedback, discussing the themes and ideas arising and developed their chapters for publication. As a result, this edited volume captures and curates the turn as it was felt through our project of “speculation-led reflection” (Grocott, 2012, p.11). This collaboration between new colleagues while working apart and at home in uncertain times created an opportunity for a range of disciplinary methods to intertwine, bringing a range of onto-epistemic beliefs and practices that stem from disciplinary cultures they were practicing within into new places and spaces.

To connect our colleagues and transform the collaborations we facilitated, we worked to create the conditions for caring and trusting critical friendships to develop across the collaboratory. MacPhail et al. (2021) found that critical friends have three defining characteristics:

• (i) a reciprocal, collaborative relationship,

• (ii) a willingness to be challenged, and

• (iii) an intrinsically motivated willingness to engage in the relationship. (n.p.)

As critical friends, this equalizer was transformative in its power to provide agency to early-, mid-, and late-career academics who would not normally read, discuss, review, provide feedback or have time and space and listen to each other’s scholarship because circumstances of hierarchy would keep them apart. In this 2nd phase of the project in 2021 as the chapters created new connections, we watched and listened to our colleagues develop new and necessary professional and personal friendships. We have heard from colleagues that this was transformational as they were able to engage in invaluable, open, and honest critique in these new professional learning communities.

2.5 Lessons for Next Practice Thinking

Within the educational turn, we have created new ways of knowing, being, and doing that emerged from practice, pedagogy, and policy shifts as colleagues looked to learn from each other. The educational turn represents a shift of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning from the peripheries of higher education to legitimate scholarly work within the academy that can inform and strengthen evidence-based approaches for impact on student learning in the future. The chapters reference an understanding of the implications of the “educational turn” which are timely and will continue to be of significance through the next waves of the pandemic and include a range of work that have implications for the futures of higher education.

The lessons we have learned make important contributions to collaborative inquiry as SoTL in the future. The central thematic that emerges from the project and through the book renders the educational turn; the shift to a relational paradigm of practice as we traversed the ecological possibilities of learning and leading collaboration in turbulent times. We found that SoTL must be facilitated, supported, co-designed, and co-created to be meaningful, futures oriented and transformative for all involved. We believe that this edited collection provides some clarity around the purpose of SoTL in the academy to support professional learning going forward. However, there is a need to move away from the evaluation of our teaching toward a SoTL methodology of educational research to continue to develop next practices, pedagogies, and policies and we rethink SoTL to strengthen the evidence around impact on student learning. The editorial team facilitated this project as a professional learning community within one faculty; however, we can see opportunities to develop this across the intuition to coordinate interdisciplinary networking and connection to further SoTL. This can be achieved through reconceptualizing and retheorizing SoTL in action with academics at the precipice of change as our students are now more globally dispersed and able to study anywhere. We suggest a shift away from the individualistic nature of teaching and learning, toward a breaking down of disciplinary silos to foster and grow communities of inquiry. This will prepare graduates to thrive in a world that is constantly changing. To do this, we will need to create opportunities for faculty connections across disciplines and practices as our campuses expand beyond the local to the global and higher education becomes much more competitive.

2.6 Concluding Thoughts

When we set out in the early fuzzy days of this inquiry, we did not know what might emerge from this co-creation. But this book frames, captures, and curates the lived experience of the scholars and educators who participated during the pandemic in 2020/21 and our productive co-creation. As the UNESCO Futures report (2021) suggests, “extending educational experiences and innovations to new settings through sharing of practices and policies will be crucial” (p. 129) in the future. What we have encountered during the pandemic is a change of direction within SoTL, and this has important consequences for higher education research. Together, we have reimagined SoTL as an emergent next practice for researchers in the academy seeking to make an impact across higher education and make new contributions to knowledge about teaching and learning as a collective. SoTL in action must be facilitated, supported, co-designed, and co-created to be meaningful, future-oriented, and transformative for all involved.