www.cs.kent.ac.uk

UK National Teaching Fellowships & the Disciplinary Commons

Sally Fincher

Deakin University Seminar

24th January 2006

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A narrative construction

• As this is an on-going process …• … I can’t promise you a happy ending• But I can promise that what you are going to hear now

is a true story …

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Table of Contents

• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship scheme

• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh Tenenberg

• Chapter three: what Josh was doing• Chapter four: how peeved I was• Chapter five: I find my niche• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios• Chapter seven: the next chapter?

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Table of Contents

• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship scheme

• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh Tenenberg

• Chapter three: what Josh was doing• Chapter four: how peeved I was• Chapter five: I find my niche• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios• Chapter seven: the next chapter?

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UK National Teaching Fellowships

• Been in existence 7 years.• Initially 20 per year. In 2004 changed to 50 per year, and three

categories introduced: experienced staff, rising stars, learning support staff.

• Application restricted to three per institution (one per category)• “Institutions should use a fair and transparent system for the

selection of nominees, and a short summary of this should be included with the nomination. The assessment panel would normally expect that any Experienced Staff nominee in particular would have been recognised in his or her own institution in some way prior to their nomination for the Scheme. This might be by the awarding of an internal Fellowship, by promotion, by commendation or by any other locally devised appropriate means.”

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Claim for fellowship

• Applications comprise a claim for fellowship, an institutional nomination and an “outline project plan”• Ability to influence learners positively, to inspire them and to

enable them to achieve specific learning outcomes.• Ability to influence and inspire colleagues in their teaching,

learning and assessment practice, by example and / or through the dissemination of good practice.

• Track record of influencing positively the national community of teachers and learners in higher education in relation to teaching, learning and assessment practice.

• Ability to demonstrate a reflective approach to teaching and / or the support of learning.

• Award comprises £50,000: £45,000 for project, £5,000 for the fellow in support of teaching & learning

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Narrative tension

• It’s OK, I got one.• But I didn’t know I would. • So here’s what happened …

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Table of Contents

• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship scheme

• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh Tenenberg

• Chapter three: what Josh was doing• Chapter four: how peeved I was• Chapter five: I find my niche• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios• Chapter seven: the next chapter?

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Bootstrapping

• I worked with Josh Tenenberg (University of Washington, Tacoma) on two NSF-funded workshops: Bootstrapping Research in Computer Science Education and Scaffolding Research in Computer Science Education

http://depts.washington.edu/bootstrp/ http://depts.washington.edu/srcse/

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Bootstrapping

• These projects were designed to foster and build a Community of Practice in computing education research

• This was an appropriate thing to attempt because of the interdisciplinary nature of CSEd research and the distributed nature of the researchers, generally at most one or two per department.

• And they worked pretty well. (There’s a paper about our design goals and our success metrics in the ASEE conference this summer)

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Table of Contents

• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship scheme

• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh Tenenberg

• Chapter three: what Josh was doing• Chapter four: how peeved I was• Chapter five: I find my niche• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios• Chapter seven: the next chapter?

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So, back to the story …

• Josh was facing a problem of “articulation agreements” between the 2 and 4 year colleges in his area.

• He thought of holding Bootstrapping-type meetings, to get parties talking about the community and their part in it. But he had no common practice, no boundary object.

• So I opened my mouth and said “Nope: you gotta do portfolios” (This is because I’d been to a lecture by Dan Bernstien and was convinced this was a very vital, energising, thing to be doing. I’m pretty susceptible.)

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Table of Contents

• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship scheme

• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh Tenenberg

• Chapter three: what Josh was doing• Chapter four: how peeved I was• Chapter five: I find my niche• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios• Chapter seven: the next chapter?

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A Low Point

• We devised a rough outline and structure. He got funding and went ahead. I sat and pined.

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Table of Contents

• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship scheme

• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh Tenenberg

• Chapter three: what Josh was doing• Chapter four: how peeved I was• Chapter five: I find my niche• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios• Chapter seven: the next chapter?

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Our heroine prospers

• Got the National Teaching Fellowship!• Being tired of standing on the sidelines griping that

“someone should fund this sort of thing” I said “Dammit, I’ve got money, I can fund it. I’ll do a Commons, too”

• But what would I build mine around?

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Lauri Malmi’s question

• “When someone joins your research group, you say ‘read these articles’. When someone comes to teach a subject for the first time we say ‘just get on with it’. Why don’t we give them a set of articles?”

Lauri Malmi

Koli Calling

17th November 2005

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Lee Shulman’s answer

• “How many professional educators, when engaged in creating a new course or a new curriculum, can turn to a published, peer-reviewed scholarship of teaching I which colleagues at other colleges and universities present their experiments, their field trials, or their case studies of instruction and its consequences? … In this respect the scholarship of teaching is dramatically different from the scholarship of investigation. It’s one of the reasons why any sort of progress is so hard to come by pedagogically—because blindness and amnesia are the state of the art in pedagogy”

Taking Learning Seriously Change Magazine, July/August 1999. Volume 31, Number 4. Pages 10-17.

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Table of Contents

• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship scheme

• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh Tenenberg

• Chapter three: what Josh was doing• Chapter four: how peeved I was• Chapter five: I find my niche• Interlude• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios• Chapter seven: the next chapter?

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Interlude: Antecedents of the Disciplinary Commons

• Elinor Ostrom Governing the Commons• “Common pool resources: a general term for shared resources

in which each stakeholder has an equal interest.”

• Lawrence Lessig: the Creative Commons

• Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin West

Antecedents of the Disciplinary Commons:Elinor Ostrom

Private Goods: bread, shoes, cars, haricuts, books …

Toll Goods: theatres, libraries, telephone service, toll roads…

Public Goods: peace & security, air pollution control, pavements, weather forecasts …

Common Pool Resources: water from the ground, fish from the sea, crude oil …

Exc

lusi

on

Feasible

Infeasible

Subtractive Joint useConsumption

Education is a Public Good. Like the research publications (on which other sorts of knowledge are built) could teaching information be a Common Pool Resource? Because “ ‘more people pooling resources in new ways’ is the history of civilization”

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Antecedents of the Disciplinary Commons:Lawrence Lessig

• Lawrence Lessig: the Creative Commons• Realisation that old copyright laws were useless in

digital age. • So formed a non-profit organistaion that offers an

alternative to full copyright. Offering work under a Creative Commons license does not mean giving up copyright.

• The built on the "all rights reserved" of traditional copyright to create a voluntary "some rights reserved" copyright.

Antecedents of the Disciplinary Commons:Frank Lloyd Wright

• Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin West

He found schematic carvings on the rocks made by previous inhabitants of the land. In particular, a representation of two joined hands - palm to palm - fingers curled together.

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Antecedents of the Disciplinary Commons

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Table of Contents

• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship scheme

• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh Tenenberg

• Chapter three: what Josh was doing• Chapter four: how peeved I was• Chapter five: I find my niche• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios• Chapter seven: the next chapter?

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itp Disciplinary Commons

• So, no geographic leverage. Around what would my Commons be built?

• Evidence, and practitioner relationship to it. How would we articulate our common practice? Through similarity of content. Our aims:• To document and share knowledge about teaching and

student learning on introductory programming courses in the UK.

• To establish practices for the scholarship of teaching by making it public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for future use and development by other educators: creating a teaching-appropriate document of practice equivalent to the research-appropriate journal paper.

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Participation and Reification

Participation• We all meet, we all share, we have the deep and

meaty discussions about the minutae of our practice

Reification• We document our otherwise invisible practices - via our

portfolios - so it exists without our continuing presence.

Portfolios: what is the genre?

• Artists• Models

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What do “portfolios” have in common?

• The purposeful selection of artefacts to achieve an end• Selection is not random: you choose the contents to

reflect the parts that are most important to you (and/or your theme)

• What end? This requires consideration of audience and purpose

• Our Commons portfolios may be quite different from a portfolio you would compile for teaching moderation, or for promotion – different audience, different purpose

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The Lab Report

• Title• Hypothesis• Materials• Procedure• Data• Calculations• Results• Conclusions

• Title page• Abstract• Introduction • Materials and

Methods• Results• Discussion • Literature Cited

The Journal Paper

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The power of form

• Allows comparability• Allows for different sorts of research, with different

emphases• Content is guaranteed by peer review• The Journal paper is to research as …

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… the Portfolio is to teaching ?

• Context• Content• Instructional Design• Delivery• Assessment• Evaluation

• Allows comparability• Allows for different sorts of

practice, with different emphases

• Content guaranteed by the nature of the evidence (and how it is structured) and peer review

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Problem with teaching portfolios

• They are done individually, for benchmark or development

• There’s a nice one in Drawing over here, a couple of interesting ones in Maths over there but little comparable

• Creating a Commons archive of similar material, our common pool resource, should give a multiplier effect

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The Nature & Structure of our Portfolio Content

• Each section consists of paired elements.• Nothing is admissible without an evidential artefact .• That means you have to pay attention to capturing

artefacts.

Artefact – Commentary

Evidence – Analysis

What – Why

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Situated practice

• The portfolio, therefore, documents a specific course, siuated in its time, place, institution. With the students that that institution takes (good or bad) and the curriculum that is fashionable. Not idealised, not abstracted.

• The academic community especially prizes abstraction: “details of practice have come to be seen as nonessential, unimportant, and easily developed once the relevant abstractions have been grasped”

(Brown & Duguid, 1991)

• We invert this. A portfolio celebrates the situated, the particular.

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Situation: a familiar power

“To cook rice correctly requires not only patience and skill but an abstract conception of an idealized form.

So what I turned to for help was the basic artisanal sense of task. Make it simple by making it particular: what can I do with this rice, this rice pot, this need, this temperament?”

“The problem, I gradually realized, was that I wanted to simply follow a set of instructions, whereas what was required of me was to establish a close working relationship with a particular cooking vessel—my personal rice pot.”

(Thorne & Thorne, 2000)

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Our artefacts

• Don’t think recipes: think ricepots

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Table of Contents

• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship scheme

• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh Tenenberg

• Chapter three: what Josh was doing• Chapter four: how peeved I was• Chapter five: I find my niche• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios• Chapter seven: the next chapter?

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UK National Teaching Fellowships

• Changed this year (in fact, on 18th January)• Still 50 fellowships awarded per year, still three

nominations from institutions, but the categories abandoned

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UK National Teaching Fellowships (2006)

• Nominations are required to demonstrate excellence in three areas:

• Individual excellence - evidence of promoting and enhancing the student learning experience.

• Raising the profile of excellence - evidence of supporting colleagues and influencing support for student learning in (and if appropriate beyond) your institution, through demonstrating impact and engagement beyond your immediate academic or professional role.

• Developing excellence - commitment to your ongoing professional development with regard to teaching and learning (and/or learning support).

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UK National Teaching Fellowship Awards

• Award is now £10,000 “for you”• So what happens to the other £40,000 x 50?• Because, that’s two million pounds, right?• They are being made available as a separate project

fund “Teams will be able to bid for funds of up to £200,000 for use over a period of up to three years.”

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UK National Teaching Fellowship Projects

• Projects must be:• “ … designed to develop and disseminate good

practice in learning and teaching across the whole higher education sector” and must “… align with one or more of the Higher Education Academy's four institutional themes”• innovations in the curriculum and student support • quality management • student assessment • academic leadership

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Best of all …

• “At least one member of the bidding team must be a National Teaching Fellow”

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

The End …

• So, sort of a happy ending.• Oh, and:

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References

• Slide 10: Josh Tenenberg and Sally Fincher Building and Assessing Capacity in Engineering Education Research: The Bootstrapping Model, ASEE Conference Chicago, 2006

• Slide 21: Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom Public Goods and Public Choices in Alternatives for Delivering Public Services: Toward Improved Performance E.S.Savas (ed) ,1977

• Slide 21: "Whenever a communication medium lowers the cost of solving collective action dilemmas, it becomes possible for more people to pool resources. And ‘more people pooling resources in new ways’ is the history of civilization in... – pause – ... seven words“ spoken by Marc Smith, p. 31, Smart Mobs, Harold Rheingold, 2002

• Slide 35: John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice : Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning and Innovation Organization Science, 2:1, 1991.

• Slide 36: John Thorne and Matt Lewis Thorne Pot on the Fire: Further Exploits of a Renegade Cook, 2000