There were two texts given to read prior to the first lecture of the Teaching and Learning Unit. One was a paper by Gloria Dall’Alba, titled “Improving teaching: Enhancing ways of being university teachers”.
In the paper she discusses achieving this aim “through integrating knowing, acting and being”, whereby epistemology is serving ontology and is not been seen as an end in itself.
I found this paper particularly interesting as in many ways it resonates with what we do on the CSM MA Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries (AICI) and curiously as well partly with my practice as a therapist – I will go into that in a bit. Dall’Alba describes how the participants in this course are doing pedagogic research, analysing their own practice critically, but also design interventions “in the form of an action learning project.“ Our whole MA AICI is based on action research as a process. The aspects of iteration and collaboration with stakeholders and experts is also an important part. This MA is therefore process driven – and with the students coming from various different creative disciplines the focus is not on epistemology as an end in itself, but serving ontology: the students are first losing then finding themselves and defining their core interest and research question before tackling it. Also by its whole nature our MA AICI is not following any old-fashioned “teacher as authority” model. Interestingly quite a few students, often from particular backgrounds, are quite confused by this and sometimes even unsettled. They sometimes directly ask as that they would like to be “told what to do” and at first find it difficult that, as Dall’Alba describes it, “knowledge or, more accurately, knowing is not exclusively cognitive, but is created, enacted and embodied ”
When students come round to it and experience it, it really is as well a transformation of self.
Even though not directly linked to the PgCert I also found it interesting how I saw my work as a therapist reflected in the Dall’Alba’s paper as well. Working with embodied feelings and past experiences, hypnosis, imagination as well as Acceptance and Commitment therapy (ACT) clients are often surprised what they find out about themselves – things they couldn’t get to grips with through cognitive analysis. It is such a parallel to Dall’Alba’s statement of knowing not being exclusively cognitive, but being created, enacted and embodied.
Today in the Teaching and Learning lecture, me and a group of other PgCert students had been given the following statement to discuss: “The student is infinitely more important than the subject matter.” This statement was very fruitful to discuss and we had various answers depending on what context it would stand in. To me this statement also seemed to link directly to the above Dall’Alba paper and it’s core statement of epistemology not being an end in itself but serving ontology. Interesting!
Anyways, the lecture and session today contained a broad variety of educational techniques and methods, and we heard about and discussed many other important events and aspects of education. I thought I just focus for this blogpost on the Dall’Alba paper though which to me and my experiences provides such a plethora of connections.