stories and streams

Chapter X

Stories & Streams: a problem-baseddesign for student-led collaborationand peer-to-peer teaching across

media practice modules

Paul Bradshaw, Birmingham City University

Jonathan Hickman, Birmingham City University

Jennifer Jones, University of the West of Scotland

IntroductionStories & Streams is a learning and teachingexperiment being undertaken at the BirminghamSchool of Media, Birmingham City University.It was devised as a response to our ownobservations made during the delivery of twomodules on an undergraduate programme, the BA(Hons) Media & Communication. It alsoconsiders feedback from external examiners andstudents, and students’ attainment andsuccesses or otherwise on the modules.Finally, Stories & Streams reimagines ourpedagogy in light of wider macro-trends and

our own personal teaching styles andeducational philosophies.

Stories & Streams is an experiment, and wassupported as such institutionally both interms of permission (from the Course Director)and investment (through the institution’steaching and learning support unit). A keypoint in the design of the experiment was towork within the limiting factors of coursestructure (modularisation, student progressionpathways) to produce a learning environmentwhich allowed students to have a rich andengaging experience whilst still being able toachieve the learning outcomes required forthem to gain course credit.

The project is ongoing at the time of writing,and as such this paper represents a waypointin the project. We will outline the problemspace, the design of our response, and themethods being used for evaluation. We valuefeedback on our approach and our findings todate and through this article we invite mediaeducators to become involved in a continuationof the project through a forthcoming resourcekit.

Stories & Streams

Problem SpaceIn this section we describe the institutional context of ourlearning and teaching project, and frame this in wider debatesin media education. The design of Stories & Streams is aresponse to these issues and debates.

Institutional context of the project

Media programmes across UK higher educationvary a great deal in their philosophies,course structures and delivery as we know onlytoo well from our own experiences as students,lecturers and external examiners across atleast a dozen institutions. It is thereforepertinent for us to outline the structure ofour course so as to frame this projectappropriately.

The Birmingham School of Media is locatedwithin a post-92 institution, Birmingham CityUniversity. The BA (Hons) Media &Communications degree has been offeredcontinuously since the early 1990s. A range ofpostgraduate awards have been offered for sometime, and this was recently expanded with aseries of a new awards validated since 2009.We are an increasingly research activeacademic community, and our cohort of

Paul Bradshaw, Jonathan Hickman, Jennifer Jones

postgraduate research students grows as ourreputation for research grows.

The BA programme is a modular course. It hasalways been structured to give equal emphasisto media theory and media practice; modulesare designated as being within one or othermode of working. Students have always beenable to negotiate a programme of study thatcovers a range of media fields. For the pastten years students have been able to formallyincorporate a specialism in the name of theiraward thanks to the introduction of namedpathways which currently include: journalism,public relations, media photography, web & newmedia, radio, television, music industries,and events & exhibition management. Students’learning experiences are not limited to theirnamed specialism; all students study fourdifferent media areas in year one, narrowingto become increasingly specialist throughoutthe course. This structure allows students tochange specialism as they develop a sense oftheir personal direction, although changes ofdirection become limited as the studentprogresses due to learning prerequisites atlevels five and six. Students may also elect

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to remain on the ‘broad course’ meaning theydo not have a named award, and can take a moregeneralist approach to studies.

Lecturers working on our BA programme have acentral educational philosophy that underpinsthe programme: ‘to create thinking mediaworkers’. The named degree system defines aclear field of intellectual enquiry andreflective practice through which students canbecome thinking media workers. However, nameddegree specialisms are also useful devices forrecruiting students. The named degree speaksto a job role, which frames the degreeprogramme in terms of opportunities foremployment post-degree. It also generatesexpectations within students - they have aperception of what their role is, and willexpect their specialist course to deliver theskills that they think are necessary for thatrole.

Students are positioned into job roles firstlythrough their choice of pathway, and secondlythrough the modules which they study. Modulenames, descriptors, and learning outcomes allserve to provide anchor points to students butalso affect their sense of identity in aparticular context. Modules can therefore


become sites of performance of expertise,where expertise is the students’ perception ofdominant professional discourses.

For students who take an instrumental, surfacelearning, approach to their studies, educationis constructed as a set of competencies whichare attained through the consumption oflearning programmes (modules and pathways):this widens the common question ‘is this inthe exam?’ to ‘is this in the job?’.

Consumption of education: online journalism

‘Online Journalism’ is a level 5 / year 2module offered as part of the journalismpathway. It offers students an opportunity toexplore new approaches to journalism affordedby online technologies and changes in patternsof consumption of media.

Two problems recur in students’ work in thismodule: a reversion to traditional printjournalism practice (writing to ‘the story’rather than the more iterative and networkedpractices that online journalism makespossible); and ‘processing content’ ratherthan digging deeper into issues. These are

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also wider issues in journalism education andthe journalism industry itself as it moves toconverged production practices. Some studentsare unable to breakaway from establishedproduction practices (which by this stage theymay have seen reinforced through workplacements in newsrooms). They do not take upthe opportunity to interrogate those practicesand reflect on their own sense of identity asa journalist, instead they seek to negotiatethe unknown (online) through the known(journalism) without synthesising a newposition.

Consumption of education: alternative media

‘Alternative Media’ is a level 5 / year 2module offered as part of the web & new mediapathway. It offers students an opportunity toexplore the relationship between new mediatechnologies and media alternativeness.

The student group seemed to understand theaffordances of new media technologies in thecontext of alternative and community mediaproduction. However in application they tendedto get too lost in setting up platforms andimplementing tools, and didn’t engage withmessages and causes. We summarise this


position with the maxim: ‘if you teachPosterous, you get Posterous’. (Posterous is ablogging platform which was offered as anexample of a technology that could engage non-technical people in media publishing). Thistypifies a tendency amongst web specialists toslip into a service mode: they often see newmedia as instrumental, as something that youbuild, which is technical in nature; they seethe web as serving other parts of the mediaecology and not as a primary text in itself.In consuming their education to attain theexpertise of web designer, students believethey must build platforms, to a brief, thatwill be filled with the content of other mediaworkers.

Moving beyond consumption

These modules - Online Journalism, AlternativeMedia - have a common problem: how do weencourage critical praxis, and move morestudents from the notion of consuming theireducation? There are employability benefits toanswering this question: the personalised,independent and often freelance nature ofjournalism and new media production requires

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those who work in this area to thinkcreatively but also proactively if they are tobe successful. There are also intellectualbenefits to answering this question: the verynotion of being a ‘thinking media worker’ isin play when we enable a student to work asautonomous producer of their own reality;unlocking philosophical reflection on one’sown practice is what marks out a student’sexperience as higher education rather thanmedia training (a quality that is sometimesknown as ‘BA-ness’).

To produce the best outcomes for students wemust find a new way to generate a space ofenquiry by removing their reliance on theknown roles and structures which we see as abarrier to their learning. This issue is notlimited to our course nor to these modules,but we found in these two modules anopportunity to change our pedagogy through ateaching and learning experiment we calledStories & Streams.

Design of the Stories & Streams PilotIn this section we describe the design of the Stories & Streamspilot in a manner which makes the approach replicable. In thesubsequent sections we will begin to evaluate the pilot.


What is Stories & Streams?

The Stories & Streams approach is problem-based, student-led and peer-to-peer. It bringstogether the teaching and learning activityfor the Online Journalism and AlternativeMedia modules into one classroom and onecommon framework of directed study activity.Students are still enrolled on specificmodules - from the point of view of assessmentand university administration - but studywithin an environment that is not so tightlytied to a narrow field of experience. Bothmodules are unchanged in terms of theirlearning outcomes and summative assessments,so no revalidation or minor modifications wererequired to the module specifications. Stories& Streams is financially supported byBirmingham City University’s Centre forEnhancement of Learning & Teaching, and wasrun in the full knowledge of the CourseDirector for the BA (Hons) Media &Communication.

The Stories & Streams process

Students are assigned roles within teams aspart of a class-wide project. As they pursue

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that project (‘stories’) they encounterproblems, and in attempting to solve thoseproblems they choose to sign up for one ofseveral short teaching sessions (‘streams’)taught at the class’s halfway point. These‘streams’ replace the traditional lecture-driven format, and can be delivered bystudents as well as lecturers. In the finalpart of the class, students rejoin their teamsand exchange learning.

By scheduling the project work at the start ofthe class and as the driver of the process,teaching is related to students’ own problemcontext (whereas traditionally therelationship is reversed). By requiringstudents to make an active choice in thelearning that they experience, we push them toexplicitly opt-in to their learning, andidentify its relevance. And by givingdifferent students different skills – and theopportunity to host their own ‘streams’ – weare encouraging peer-to-peer teaching.

Roles

Students are allocated to specific roles.Roles are initially allocated for the firsthalf of the module using a Google Docs survey


tool in order to establish students’strengths, weakness and preference. The rolesavailable are Editor (who took an overallgroup management role), Network Journalist,Data Journalist, Community Manager andMultimedia Journalist. Only the editor isconcerned with ‘the story’, other roles arefocused on the constituent parts of thatstory. A data journalist, for example, istypically responsible for gathering data anddocuments around the issue (sometimes throughFreedom of Information requests). A networkjournalist gathers background and context; acommunity manager finds community concerns andcase studies; and a multimedia journalistfinds and creates media to ‘enrich’ thetelling of the story (for example, videointerviews, maps, galleries).

Groups

Groups are allocated members from across theroles. Each initial group includes studentsfrom both module cohorts. The groupsbrainstorm topics in order to come up with aninvestigation for them to undertake for thefirst six weeks of the module. As the

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investigation proceeds, groups are required topublish the results of their own activity aspart of progress towards a final long formpiece of journalism, making ‘product out ofprocess’ in doing so.

Themes

In order to maintain focus and to guide thestudents through their investigations, theyare presented with a limited set of thematicconcerns, which are relevant contemporarysocial and political contexts. The lecturersdelivering the class should have a level ofexpertise and standing within the thematicareas. This enables them to easily facilitateand mentor students, removing the potentialbarrier of access to specialist knowledge andallowing students to focus on process.Lecturers are also able to afford access tonetworks of contacts which lifts the activitybeyond the classroom and into the ‘realworld’. The themes frame the group ledinvestigations which constitute the ‘stories’element of the project.

Problem-based

Problem-based learning affords solutions tosome of the problems we have observed in the


background to this project. Problem-basedapproaches allow media educators to createlearning environments that reflect work-basedlearning environments:

‘(Problem-based learning has) thebenefit of being fun, while involving asignificant degree of exploratory orexperiential learning. Isn’t this how welearn in the industry – “on the job”?Isn’t this also at the heart of mediapractice education?’ (Hanney 2005,p.109)

Stories & Streams is designed to engagestudents more in processes than in products,and to focus them on their own learning,something which again problem based learningwould seem to offer:

‘It gives us a useful methodology forlooking at how we can shift the focus ofassessment away from the final productand towards the process of production’(Hanney 2005, p.111)

Problem-based learning is a key element of ourapproach in Stories & Streams. Theme-based

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(story) discussions pose problems and theclassroom adapts to this. Lecturerobservation, and student feedback (facilitatedthrough the use of Post-It notes) allow theprocess to be monitored, and the teaching tobe directed.

Student-led

Students are used to working within a narrowlybound activity (a module) which has beenexplicitly designed for them to obtainknowledge and competence. By working in onecommon space which does not seem purposelydesigned to instrumentally train them fortasks, Stories & Streams ask students tonegotiate their field of expertise alongsideothers’ and to shape their learning to achievecommon goals. Stories & Streams dispenses withthe usual lecture/workshop format that isoften expected by both student andadministration and instead curates a moreflexible space which not only reflectspractices in creative sector, but also allowsfor adapting, responding and adopting changesbased on the skills and identities of thepeople taking part in the module(s). In thissense the approach is student led; Stories &Streams manages to exist within the course’s


modular structure, but learning is notprimarily determined by that modularstructure.

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer teaching is a particularlyimportant element in this pedagogical design,as it offers a number of opportunities forincreased student engagement and learning.Firstly, students will bear someresponsibility for passing on their skills toother members of their teams, which shouldencourage greater attention. Secondly, thistransfer of skills will reinforce theirlearning. And thirdly, the status conferred bythis responsibility should encourage furtherindependent interest in their particularfield, as well as personal confidence,preventing disengagement with their studies.

In addition to peer-to-peer teaching in thephysical classroom, students can continue tosupport one another through the university’svirtual learning environment. Groups are askedto form a thread within the forum, allowingfor them to discuss the topic. Lecturers cancontribute to this space, sharing links,

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opportunities and contacts who would be ableto support the activity. Additional forumthreads feature general calls relating to thethemes. After the module mid-point threads areavailable to discuss roles; this allows peer-to-peer mentoring on practice within aproduction role.

Finally, it is worth emphasising that studentsare working on a live news site, so theirinvestigations are growing and evolving onlineand in public, offering a third level ofonline support where lecturers, peers (andpotentially the general public) can commentand feedback on their topic.

Evaluation of the Stories & Streams PilotIn this section we outline the manner by which the Stories &Streams pilot is being evaluated, before moving on to adiscussion of initial findings.

Scope of the project and the pilot

Stories & Streams is being piloted during the2011-12 academic year. Scheduled classes andlearning activities run from February to May2012, including a three week Easter break


after the ninth teaching week. OnlineJournalism is the largest cohort in thecombined classroom, with 32 studentsregistered at the beginning of term, droppingto 30 at the Easter break; Alternative Mediahad 12 students registered at the start,dropping to 5 by Easter.

The pilot is being evaluated with a view torefining the approach and informing debates onmedia education, in particular those regardingemployability, the student as consumer, andthe future of media (higher) education. Assuch our project will be disseminated both aspedagogic research and as a resource handbook.

Design of the project evaluation

The evaluation of the project takes a casestudy approach. Case studies are particularlyuseful for ‘preliminary, exploratory stage(s)of a research project’ (Rowley 2002, p.16).This article discusses just one case study,and as such we cannot claim that the resultscan be generalised, however we offer it hereto stimulate debate and encourage furtherinvestigation of this mode of learning; thiscase study may be used not in a positivist

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sense but as an indication of a workinghypothesis (ibid. p.25). The approach taken tocollecting research data is replicable withother groups of students and further casestudies will indicate the extent to which thismaterial might be generalised. Whilst theactivity under study represents an innovationin our teaching and learning this researchproject is not what Roblyer (2005, p. 196)refers to as ‘objective’ or ‘experimental’research, rather it is what he terms‘naturalistic enquiry’ (ibid.); our mode ofteaching and learning is an experiment, butour research seeks to gather qualitative dataabout student and staff experience.

We have implemented a mixed-method of datacollection to inform the case study. It is inthe spirit of this project to give thestudents an active voice in the evaluation ofthe project, so we have designed data capturewith this in mind. Data has been obtainedthrough the following means:

A team of students were offered thechance to work on the evaluation, aspaid partners in the project.

o One student was specifically askedto record and edit elements of the


class using video recordingequipment (informal recording usingFlip cameras).

o Two students were specificallyasked to write weekly (minimum)blog posts reflecting on theirlearning experience.

Two lecturers wrote weekly blog postsreflecting on the project.

We looked at students’ results insummative assessments.

An interim questionnaire was used togather feedback from students prior tothe final assessment.

After the final assessment, a focusgroup will be convened to discuss theproject in more depth.

FindingsIn this section we will discuss initialfindings from the evaluation of Stories &Streams to date.

Student responses to teaching & learning format

Students expressed a preference for theStories & Streams teaching and learning

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approach over traditional methods: in ourinterim questionnaire only 27% felt that thelecture-and-workshop format suited thembetter; 55% preferred the peer-to-peer andstream approach suited them. 18% detailedother options, most of which involved elementsof the new format such as one-to-one supportand project-driven work.

Improved quality of work

At the time of writing, only Online Journalismstudents had been formally assessed via a mid-term submission. Objectively measured throughgrades, there has been little change instudent attainment, however, subjectively weare able to say that the students haveproduced work that is more in keeping with ourexpectations and ambitions for them. The workis more distinctive, succeeding in breakingaway from the ‘churnalism’ that hadcharacterised previous cohort’s efforts; workis now original, unique and in-depth.

Motivations to learning

In the assessed work, the quality ofnewsgathering (research) was significantly


higher than that of production (technicalskills). We attribute this to the reducedfocus on technical skills in teaching, whichwas anticipated and recognised with a lowerweighting in assessment. Notably, in thesecond half of the module students appeared tobe particularly motivated to develop thosetechnical skills. We suggest that this may bedue to lower marks, or because they had a goodstory to tell. Further research is needed totease these distinctions out.

40% of the 20 online journalism students whoreturned the interim questionnaire reportedbeing more motivated than usual; 30% reportedthat their motivation was unchanged, and 30%reported being less motivated.

Notably, while one student identified theabsence of ‘homework’ and intermittentdeadlines as a reason for lower motivation,others said they were more motivated because‘Week by week work makes it easier to keep ontop of the assignment which means less stressand helps your motivation’ and ‘there isalways something new to do revolving theassignments’. Or: ‘As blogging isn't something

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you can do the day before the assignment isdue in, as you need views and also data needsto be in date’.

The peer-to-peer nature of learning was astrong factor influencing motivation. Onementioned: ‘The support (or sometimes lack of)from other students ... For example, if theeditor keeps on their game, they can providemotivation.’; others: ‘meeting weekly with mygroup and interacting online’; ‘When othersare also following your blog you want to makeit as good as possible = motivation.’

Roles and 'comfort zones'

There was some evidence that the emphasis onroles met its objectives in exposing studentsto the variety of online journalism roleswhile also allowing them to develop depth intwo areas, addressing the problem of having‘too much to teach’. As one student said, itwas: ‘very useful, as you can concentrate onyour own role, and then can have a feel foreach role’. The theme of being able to ‘focus’recurred in a number of students’ statements,while at least one noted that: ‘It takes youout of your comfort zone and allows you tofunction as a team, quickly and precisely.’


Streams focussing work

The use of stream workshops, rather than wholeclass lectures, appeared to be successful ingenerating more activity in the students thanwe normally expect. A workshop on FOI, forexample, resulted in more students using FOIrequests as part of their investigation thanhad happened in two previous years when thewhole class were given the workshop.

In addition to ‘formal’ streams, ad-hoc streamworkshops emerged to work through issues asthey occurred, allowing peer-to-peer learningto cascade more effectively than it mightthrough one-to-one discussions.

Peer-to-peer learning

The objective to facilitate peer-to-peerlearning appeared to have been met, with only13% reporting less learning from peers, 52%reporting that it was unchanged from othermodules, and 35% reporting more.

Most students independently establishedFacebook groups to facilitate intra-groupcoordination outside of the class, and manystudents mentioned the value of speaking to

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other students in class and learning fromdifferent approaches to their work anddifferent tools and resources used by those,as well as learning from looking at eachothers’ work (the forum on the module’svirtual learning environment was updatedfrequently with feedback on specific posts):

‘We have much more opportunity to getinto groups and discuss our roles anddifficulties we have had.’

‘We have learned a lot about how toovercome problems from each other. Wecan help others overcome the challengesthat we have faced, by sharing ourexperiences.’

Another added that they had learned morebecause:

‘We are helping each other out withproblems that we come across, givingeach other tips and ideas on how to findinformation and how to presentinformation in a better way. Also we areworking in groups with people we may notwork with, so I think this has helpedthe class communicate a lot more.’


‘We aren't usually given so much timeduring a lecture to interact with eachother and find out how everyone isgetting on with the module and setassignments. Working with others allowsme to better the skills I was previouslyunaware of as well as learning newskills. Not only have I benefitted fromthe students in the class but alsooutside of class. Overall this is one ofmy most comfortable modules when itcomes to interaction.’

There was also repeated reference to learningfrom others who had previously performed thesame role:

‘it means I am able to talk to them tolearn more about the role I'mundertaking now (and vice versa).’;

‘When we transitioned from assignment 1to assignment 2 I learnt a lot fromtheir experiences in my new role.Additionally the students who were doinga lot of work in certain areas shedlight on my investigation and usefulwebsites/techniques.’

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This ‘passing of the baton’ was left toinformal learning within investigation groups;it could, however, be more formally organizedwithin the structure of the module.

Soft Skills

Soft skills emerged as an area which studentsconsistently identified as an area where theywished to develop. We were able to respond tothis need, contrasting sharply with thetypical structure of modules which tend to beskills-, knowledge- and technology-focused.Areas that students asked for support withincluded managing team members, communication,project management and focus, motivation, andpersistence.

In responses to the questionnaire remarksincluded:

‘From fellow students I have learnedskills that other modules cannot teach.For example, learning how to manage andwork with difficult people or those whodo not want to do as well as you.’;

‘Because people are different I got morefrom other students who had different


opinions to mine. Hence I got to thinkin a different way than I usually do.’

ConclusionAs we have mentioned, the project is ongoingat the time of writing, and as such this paperrepresents a waypoint in the project. Ourinterim findings suggest that Stories &Streams has been a useful intervention inmedia pedagogy. It has not produced highergrades or increased student retention, but ithas produced richer learning. We hope to offerthe approach for refinement and adoption inother institutions and we invite feedback andcritique of our approach.

In these days of change in higher education,as we move to the new fee regime fromSeptember 2012, the employability agenda loomsever larger. Policy, parents and prospectivestudents make sense of our activity throughthe way we align to labour markets. Theexpectation of work runs throughout all of ourexchanges as educators, and whilst we mustcertainly speak to those agendas we must alsospeak to the project that is higher education,for if we do not then we are not producing

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thinking media workers, we are simplyproducing technicians and terminal operators.

We saw an opportunity to address thisinstrumental consumption of media education,to work within the structure we are providedto make a new space for learning. In a sense,we are pushing against the employabilityagenda which we see as problematic to our jobas educators. And yet through our actions wehave actually better equiped our students forthe world of work.

The International Employer Barometer study of2007 found that, when making recruitmentdecisions, specific subject skills were afairly low priority for employers; much moreimportant were broader undergraduate skillssuch as analysis, planning, and generalintellectual ability (Archer and Davison2008). Additionally employees focus on softskills such as team work and communicationskills (ibid.), which Stories & Streams seemsparticularly suited to developing. Byrejecting the strictures of employabilitybased teaching we have ironically produced apedagogy that is richer for developingemployable graduates.


The student ‘customer’ may sometimes balk attheir investment not coming dressed within thetrappings of delivered learning, but the morewe pander to that the more difficult we makeour jobs. Instead we should be seeking to markourselves out as experts: experts in oursubjects and experts in our teaching practice.Students come to us for those things, and thisis the deal we broker with them: we will teachyou these things using the best methods andapproaches, you will engage with those ideas,by those methods, and you will do more besidesif you wish to truly be successful. We mustremind students throughout their degree of thedeal we have made with them and theirresponsibilities to deliver to that agenda, tocreate their own learning through theiractions and interactions. The students in thiscase study took us to our word, and overall wehave succeeded in meeting our aims.

ReferencesArcher, W. and J. Davison (2008). Graduate

Employablity: what do employers think and want? London: The Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE).

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Hanney, R. (2005) Competence or capability: Work-Based Learning and Problem-Based Learning. Journal of Media Practice, 6(2), 105-112.

Roblyer, M. D. (2005). Educational technology research that makes a difference: Series introduction. Contemporary Issues in Technology andTeacher Education, 5(2), 192-201.

Rowley, Jennifer (2002) ‘Using case studies inresearch’, Management Research News, 25(1), 16 - 27.

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