Transforming
education
at UCL
Dr Dilly Fung
Director, Centre for the Advancement of
Learning and Teaching (CALT)
D.Fung@ucl.ac.uk
@DevonDilly
Research, education
and professional practice:
separate endeavours - in competition?
Or necessarily interdependent?
Recognising education’s relationship with
academic practice more widely, and
with leadership, is enabling us to transform it.
The ‘ecological’ university
Recognising the true interconnectedness
of our activities can help us to build a new
‘feasible utopia’ (Barnett, 2011)
Three
interconnected
developments
at UCL
Connected
Curriculum
UCL Arena
UCL
ChangeMakers
A space for dialogue about education
• Welcomes you if you teach, supervise
research and/or support students’
learning, no matter what your job title
• Provides wide menu of activities and
opportunities, on all aspects of education,
including learning, teaching, curriculum
design, assessment and feedback, student
support and education leadership
• Encompasses wider dimensions of
academic practice, including building a
research career
• Leads to HEA Fellowship awards
Job titles, reward and recognition
• Looking at synergies between HEA awards and
promotions criteria
• Review of roles: does the division between
‘teaching’ and ‘academic/research’ roles serve
our needs?
• Building on opportunities for promotion to
Professor through leadership in education:
underlines parity of esteem in institutional
culture.
• Need to address serious inequalities of
opportunity, and reward all those who
contribute to the institution’s ecology (see
Locke, 2014 and Cashmore et al., 2013)
A Connected Curriculum for UCL
A new approach to research-based education
UCL’s Connected Curriculum
(Fung, 2014)
Students
connect with
each other,
across phases,
and with
alumni
Students learn
to produce
outputs –
assessments
directed at an
audience
Students
connect with
staff and their
world-leading
research
Students
learn through
research and
enquiry
Students
connect
academic
learning with
workplace
learning
A
‘throughline’
of research
activity is built
into each
programme
Students make
connections
across
subjects and
out to the
world
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/teachinglearning/strategic_priorities/co
nnected-curriculum
There are many contemporary ideas for curriculum
change in higher education. They include researchbased education, internationalisation, the global
classroom, interdisciplinarity, public engagement, ease
with the digital age, students as authors of their own
texts and the development of students as critical
citizens.
The extraordinary thing about UCL’s ‘Connected
Curriculum’ initiative is that it is attempting to do
justice to all of these possibilities. The world of
higher education will be watching with fascination to
see how this very ambitious strategy unfolds.
Professor Ronald Barnett
Emeritus Professor of Higher Education, Institute of Education,
London
(17 Nov 2014: email correspondence)
UCL ChangeMakers
UCL ChangeMaker Projects
• New scheme to be launched at UCL at
Teaching and Learning Conference,
13 April 2015
• Aims to provide an opportunities for
students (UG/PGT/PGR) to identify an
aspect of their education that they would
like to enhance, develop or innovate
• Funded research projects, leading to
recommendations and research ‘outputs’
at a UCL ChangeMakers Conference
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/changemakers
‘Rare are those who dare even to
dream utopian dreams about
possible alternatives.’
Slavoj Zizek (2009) First as Tragedy, Then as Farce p.77,
cited in Barnett’s Being a University (2011, p.16)
References
Barnett, R. (2011) Being a University Routledge, Oxford and New
York
Locke, W. (2014) Shifting academic careers: implications for
enhancing professionalism in teaching and supporting learning
https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/node/10079
Cashmore, A., Cane, C. & Cane, R. (2013) Rebalancing Promotion
in the HE Sector: is teaching excellence being rewarded?
https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/HEA_Reward_
Publication_RebalancingPromotion_0.pdf