Pedagogic Frailty and Resilience in the University

Transcription

1 Pedagogic Frailty and Resilience in the University

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3 Pedagogic Frailty and Resilience in the University Edited by Ian M. Kinchin and Naomi E. Winstone University of Surrey, UK

4 A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: (paperback) ISBN: (hardback) ISBN: (e-book) Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands All chapters in this book have undergone peer review. Cover image by Ian M. Kinchin Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved 2017 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

5 To Neil and to The memory of Ann & Miles Kinchin

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7 TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword Robert R. Hoffman ix 1. Mapping the Terrain of Pedagogic Frailty 1 Ian M. Kinchin 2. Framed Autoethnography and Pedagogic Frailty: A Comparative Analysis of Mediated Concept Maps 17 Christopher Wiley and Jo Franklin 3. The 3 Rs of Pedagogic Frailty: Risk, Reward and Resilience 33 Naomi E. Winstone 4. Semantic Waves and Pedagogic Frailty 49 Margaret Blackie 5. Teaching Excellence in the Context of Frailty 63 Jacqueline Stevenson, Pauline Whelan and Penny Jane Burke 6. The Role of Values in Higher Education: The Fluctuations of Pedagogic Frailty 79 Simon Lygo-Baker 7. Integrative Disciplinary Concepts: The Case of Psychological Literacy 93 Naomi E. Winstone and Julie A. Hulme 8. Re-Framing Academic Staff Development 109 Jo-Anne Vorster and Lynn Quinn 9. Trajectories of Pedagogic Change: Learning and Non-Learning Among Faculty Engaged in Professional Development Projects 123 Linor L. Hadar and David L. Brody 10. Pedagogic Frailty and the Research-Teaching Nexus 135 Anesa Hosein 11. Breaking Down Student-Staff Barriers: Moving towards Pedagogic Flexibility 151 Catherine Bovill 12. Academic Leadership 163 Sandra Jones vii

8 TABLE OF CONTENTS 13. Enhancing Quality to Address Frailty 179 Ray Land 14. Profiling Pedagogic Frailty Using Concept Maps 195 Paulo Correia and Joana Aguiar 15. Pedagogic Frailty: Opportunities and Challenges 211 Ian M. Kinchin and Naomi E. Winstone About the Contributors 227 viii

9 ROBERT R. HOFFMAN FOREWORD The chapters in this book explore a great variety of topics and issues that revolve around the basic question of what makes for a good academy. Chapters take multiple perspectives on the matter, embracing the teacher s view, the student s view, the disciplinary view, and the institutional view. As such, the book serves as a compendium of the issues, concepts and approaches for dealing with what is called pedagogic frailty. This concept might be understood in contrast with adaptability and resilience. The adaptive and resilient system is one that is able to achieve its primary goals despite changing circumstances and challenges to its integrity. There are many challenges to the adaptability and integrity of the academy. My own autoethnography is rife with frailty stories. Faculty members witness and benefit from administrators who are wise as Solomon, and yet they also suffer under administrators who seem heartless and unduly controlling. Faculty members bask in the light shone by the rare and genuinely outstanding student, and yet implode under the emotional weight of the many students who should arguably still be in secondary school. Academics flourish if permitted to engage in continuous learning and personal development, and yet are not provided nearly enough resources or afforded nearly enough time. They are fed some carrots and yet are threatened by too many sticks. Conundrums abound. The university teacher is expected to engage in good teaching, publish research, get grants, and serve the academy, and yet there is not nearly enough time to do any three of them, or any two of them really well. The new recruit to teaching is provided a lab and yet if she or he does not get funding, they ve got no lab in year two. Academicians are held to lofty standards yet are actually judged on the basis of simplistic measures such as student evaluations and publication counts. There are tensions within disciplinary departments, to be sure. Every department has dead wood, as allowed by a system of tenure (in the US) that has become something it was not initially intended to be. Agendas, rivalries, egos, and historical baggage exist by the truckload and make department meetings less enjoyable than the chewing of radium. Are there any genuinely high-functioning academies? Indeed, can there be such a thing? One approach to this question is empirical, that is, the exploration of how it is that people come to be good academicians, in the sense of being adaptive and resilient as opposed to frail. We know from numerous studies of a great variety of professional domains that people come to be experts largely through on-the-jobtraining and mentoring. While graduate students in some given major or department ix

10 R. R. HOFFMAN might be afforded opportunities to teach courses to undergraduates, historically they have not been given much of any explicit instruction in how to teach. Most of what they acquire in terms of teaching strategies and methods is ancient, if not merely traditional: The professor vibrates the air and the students act as scribes. So if you, the student, take good notes, you transform them into lectures and Ta Da!, now you are a teacher. How do people who are really good teachers at the college and university level come to be really good? How can a culture of co-creation be nurtured to substitute for an ingrained pedagogy? How is it that some academicians come to be good mentors to junior academics? Can faculty members who have the potential to become good mentors to junior colleagues be somehow identified and then specially groomed to become mentors? Many universities have programmes through which more experienced colleagues volunteer to mentor the junior faculty members. This is of course, no guarantee that they will be good as mentors. The primary activities tend to be advising the junior faculty member about the paradoxes of their academy, its political climate, and the rivalries and historical baggage of the department, rather than the matter of becoming a better teacher, or an individual engaged in personal growth and improvement. So much for my own autoethnography. My research has focused on the question of how to measure resilience in sociotechnical work systems, that is, human-machine engineered systems. This is different from resilience in the academy, in that resilience is understood more in terms of work performance than in terms of affect (emotional response to stress). But the concept of resilience in engineering is at the same time similar to its meaning in pedagogy, as adaptation to a changing environment and uncertain circumstances. Given the emerging importance of resilience concepts, even in such fields as engineering, it is both reasonable and expected that the question will be raised about resilience in the academy. The question of how to create and sustain a high functioning academic environment, and the problem of how to avoid or mitigate the vicissitudes and toxicities that emerge in the academy are questions that have vexed teaching professionals for their entire careers. If we are to realise the promise of higher education in all forms of academy, we will need the concepts, methods, and reflections contained in this book. I should note, finally, that the Concept Mapping method has served quite well in the analysis and engineering of sociotechnical work systems, just as it has served in the understanding of complex concepts in many domains of human activity. I encourage readers of this book to consider applying the method in their own personal development and pedagogic meditations. REFERENCES Hoffman, R. R., & Ward, P. (2015). Mentoring: A leverage point for intelligent systems? IEEE: Intelligent Systems, 30(5), Hoffman, R. R., Ward, P., DiBello, L., Feltovich, P. J., Fiore, S. M., & Andrews, D. (2014). Accelerated expertise: Training for high proficiency in a complex world. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor and Francis/ CRC Press. x

11 FOREWORD Hoffman, R. R., & Hancock, P. A. (2017). Measuring resilience. Human Factors (in press). Hollnagel, E., Woods D. D., & Leveson, N. (Eds.). (2006). Resilience engineering: Concepts and precepts. London: Ashgate. Moon, B. M., Hoffman, R. R., Cañas, A. J., & Novak, J. D. (Eds.). (2011). Applied concept mapping: Capturing, analyzing and organizing knowledge. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor and Francis. Robert R. Hoffman Institute for Human and Machine Cognition Pensacola, Florida, USA xi