POST-LECTURE NOTE. This lecture was written to be spoken rather than read - which
accounts for some of the eccentricities of style contained within it.
The only substantive change that has been made since 24 November is the addition of
reference details at the end.
BRIDGES AND TOWERS:
ACTION LEARNING & PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT IN HE
24 November 1998
Inaugural lecture
by
Tom Bourner
Professors come in different varieties, but the range seems to be limited to three: absent-minded
professors, mad professors and nutty professors, For some reason I find that strangely
comforting.
I’ve checked the dictionary definition of ‘inaugural’ and I found the phrases “admit to office
with ceremony” and “enter with ceremony into”. The common word is ‘ceremony’. This is
reassuring too; it tells us that what we are engaged in this evening is not a learning lecture but
a ceremony lecture. That is probably why inaugurals take the form of a ‘lecture’. If this
occasion had been about learning rather than ceremony we might have had an ‘inaugural
workshop’. But workshops aren’t old and venerable so we have inaugural lectures instead.
I intend to read this lecture, which is something I’ve never done before. This may or may not
work. You can let me know on the feedback forms which I may or may not distribute at the
end of the lecture ... your feedback will enable me to do a better job next time I do an
inaugural lecture.
Actually, there is a wicked irony in me giving an inaugural lecture because one of the things
I’ve tried to do in recent years is to help to reduce the university’s dependence on the
‘lecture’.
It’s wicked because if you find this lecture dull and unrewarding you’ll think I’m trying to
prove a point, and if you’re enriched and inspired by it I’ll undermine my own work.
SLIDE 1
“Lecturer, n, One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your
patience.” (Ambrose Bierce)
That definition by Ambrose Bierce is only partially correct; This evening I don’t have my hand
in your pocket. But I do have my faith in your patience.
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SLIDE 2
Figure 1. Level of performance during a lecture
(from ‘Twenty Terrible Reasons for Lecturing’ by Graham Gibbs)
The figure is from that fine publication ‘Twenty Terrible Reasons for Lecturing’ by Graham
Gibbs. Incidentally that’s quite a venerable publication now as it was written in the early
1980s. You can see from the slide that if this was a ‘learning lecture’ rather than a ‘ceremony
lecture’ we’d all be performing at our maximum at the moment. Its distressing to think it
would be all downhill from here on.
By the way, when I looked up the dictionary definition of ‘inaugural’ I also checked it’s
context within the dictionary: the words that come before it and after it - I found it was
sandwiched between the words ‘Inaudible’ and ‘Inauspicious’. I just thought I’d mention
that.
Now the inaugural lectures I’ve enjoyed most have been ones that bring some
autobiographical material into the theme of the lecture so I’ll try to reflect a little on my
personal experience with the issues I raise.
I know some people here would like there to be some inter-action in this lecture. I’m not sure
how that fits into the concept of an ‘inaugural’ lecture but I’m willing to try. On one or two
occasions I shall go interactive - which means that you get something to do.
What I intend to do this evening is take us on a short journey between the land of Higher
Education and the land of Management Development. I’ll start with those towers and
bridges. But there is a story within the story.
SLIDE 3
•
The start of this journey
Personal development in Higher Education
Personal development in the undergraduate curriculum
•
Action learning
Action learning for personal development: an idea
•
A glimpse of practitioner-centred research
•
The end of this lecture
•
•
•
2
The inner story is designed to illustrate the use of bridges between academic towers. The
inner story is about personal development in Higher Education and, in particular, the
problem of ‘doing’ personal development with first year undergraduates. I want to explore
the idea of using action learning with these students and I want to end with just a glimpse
of practitioner-centred research.
First, however, I’ll say a few words about the towers and bridges.
One of the problems of HE is increasing specialisation associated with an accelerating rate of
growth of knowledge. I understand that in the year 1665 there was only one scientific journal
published in the whole world, The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Two hundred
years later, in 1865, there were already over a thousand journals. And one hundred years
after that, in 1965, the number had risen to one hundred thousand. The rate of growth is
clearly accelerating. What do you think the number might be now? ... Especially now that
the Internet has ‘kicked in’ with on-line journals?
As the stock of knowledge rises it’s only possible to stay up-to-date with the leading edge in
a field by reducing the breadth of the field - that is, by specialisation. Specialisation in Higher
Education means academics increasingly know more and more about less and less.
How can we prevent academic specialisation fragmenting the map of knowledge, creating
gaps between subject disciplines that are the towers of academia. How can we save subject
disciplines from the need to re-invent and re-discover solutions to problems that have been
solved in other separated disciplines?
It’s simply not realistic to expect anyone to be familiar with the leading edge of many
different subjects. ‘Polymaths’, those people with an acquaintance with the leading edge of a
wide range of subjects are a dying breed, if not already extinct. What does seem possible,
however, is to envisage a tribe of boundary-spanning individuals within academia who are
reasonably up to date with the leading edge of two or possibly three different fields of study
and can act as channels of communication for the ideas being developed in those different
fields. This tribe builds the bridges between the academic towers of knowledge, looking for
ideas and information in the developments in one area that can be of value in another area.
That’s the tribe to which I aspire.
What I’ve tried to do in my professional life is to become familiar with developments in
Higher Education and in Management Development and to build a bridge for ideas to pass
between those two fields. I hasten to add I’m not alone in working on that bridge.
At other times and in other places, I’ve carried ideas from Higher Education to management
development. For example, in the early 1990s I worked on using the research process to
enhance the process of management development. I believe that work has acquired a new
significance with the rapid growth in professional doctoral programmes over the last 5 years.
In this lecture, however, I want to cross the bridge in the other direction, from management
development to higher education, and in so doing I’ll be returning to my roots in
management development, to action learning. If you don’t know what action learning is,
don’t worry, I’ll get to it later.
As an example of the process of conveying ideas across bridges I want to address a particular
problem in Higher Education; how to engage first year undergraduates in personal
development.
First I’d like to address a prior question: why should we want to engage first year
undergraduates in personal development? Where does personal development fit into higher
education?
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To answer that question let’s look at the big issues in the field of learning in Higher Education
over the last 40 years. I’ll be doing the same with management development later.
SLIDE 4
1990s
Critical reflection
1980s
Personal transferable skills
1960s and 1970s
Transmission of knowledge and understanding
This slide is the result of asking myself the question: ‘If I had to choose the main field of
discussion in HE curriculum for each decade what would it be?’
During the 1960s and 1970s the issues in learning in Higher Education were within the
paradigm of conveying knowledge and understanding, and the focus was the subject of
study. Most of the key debates were inside of this paradigm eg teaching machines, intrinsic
and extrinsic motivation, deep and surface approaches to learning, holistic and serialist ways
of learning and so on.
During the 1980s ‘competencies’ and ‘personal transferable skills’ appeared on the agenda.
The rafts of personal transferable skills that were suggested in the 1980s have subsequently
been honed down and rebadged under the name ‘key skills’. And in this area, the focus
shifted from the subject of study to the student. There was, incidentally, no suggestion in the
1980s that we should cease conveying knowledge and understanding. Rather, the teaching
task of Higher Education simply expanded.
In the 1990s ‘reflection’ became a hot issue in Higher Education together with ‘critical
thinking’ and for some people these have fused into ‘critical reflection’. The focus again is on
the student rather than the academic subject. There is increasing interest in developing the
capacity to learn from experience and this resonates with the current concern with life-long
learning. Lifelong learning implies emergent learning as well as planned learning.
Few people suggest that in bringing ‘reflection’ on to the agenda ‘key skills’ should be taken
off the agenda or that we should neglect to ‘convey knowledge and understanding’. The
teaching task of Higher Education has simply expanded further.
The more perceptive of you will have noticed an inverse relationship between the so-called
unit of resource (i.e. resources per student) and the size of the teaching task.
Where does personal development fit into this picture? I think that it is located within the
domains of transferable skills and reflection.
That’s my view of where personal development fits into Higher Education in terms of the
changing Higher Education curriculum. But where does personal development fit into my
own story?
In the mid-1980s I was principal lecturer in an institution of higher education and doing a lot
of research for the Council for National Academic Awards. I felt recognised as a researcher
and respected as a teacher. I was clear I didn’t want to move on to Head of Department or
into academic administration so in that sense I’d run out of professional ambition. It was then
I experienced a strange realisation that I had got everything I wanted from work ... and it was
not enough!
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At that time I did some deep thinking and a lot of reading and talking to people about this
unexpected twist in my life. Perhaps this is what is termed a ‘mid-life crisis’. I learned that
my dissatisfaction was caused by a dissonance between my achievements and my values.
At that time, in ascending order of accomplishment, I felt I was a person who was a
teacher/researcher in higher education who was an economist.
SLIDE 5
Economist
Teacher/researcher
Person
I realised that by my late thirties my values had the reverse ordering from my
accomplishments: in ascending order of what I valued, I recognised I was an economist who
was a teacher/researcher who was a person.
I came to believe the significance of my professional roles in higher education lies in the
extent to which they contribute to myself as a person. I’ve since read a book on the
experience of being a Jew in a WW2 prisoner of war camp in which the author , Victor Frankl,
suggests that to ask about the meaning of life is misguided; it’s for life to ask about the
meaning of us!
The effect of recognising the mismatch between my accomplishments and my values was to
change my priorities as a lecturer. Rather than seeing students through the telescope of
Higher Education I came to see higher education through the telescope of the lives of the
students . I’m struck by how often the problems in my life are transformed rather than solved.
This often happens when I am enabled to take a broader perspective.
In this case the ‘problem’ of how to get students in higher education to learn the material I
presented to them was transformed into the broader issue of how to enable higher
education to have a larger impact on the lives of my students. This placed personal
development firmly on my agenda for higher education. I believe personal development is
part of the mission of education at all levels and a key element in life-long learning.
I’ve also come to believe that personal development impacts in a major way on the
effectiveness of people in their professional roles.
Its time for an activity, when I’d like you to do something...
Consider this: think back to the most effective manager you’ve ever had. ...
You can have a few moments to do that. ...
Have you done that? Thank you.
Now think back to the least effective manager you’ve ever had, ...
Take a few moments for that too. ...
Have you done that ? Thank you.
Now what was the difference that made the difference? Specifically, what was it that made
the more effective manager more effective?
Please spend a few more moments thinking about that, then I’m going to ask you to share
your answer with someone sitting near you. ...
Right, now ask someone sitting next to you, or near you, what answer they came up with.
Lets hear a few - please call them out.
....
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I’ve often done this exercise with managers and my experience is that they very rarely offer
differences in terms of knowledge of ‘statistics’ or ‘economics’ or ‘marketing’ or ‘corporate
strategy’, etc.. Instead they usually offer qualities for which the pre-requisite is self-knowledge
and the ability to act on that self-knowledge: ‘flexible’, ‘visionary’, ‘calm in a crisis’,
‘developer’, ‘inspirational’, etc. How do these compare with what you came up with? ...
Personal development addresses these issues and has a key role to play in professional
effectiveness.
A person with a high degree of self-knowledge has a sense of “this is the person I am, I know
these are my values, these are my capabilities and this is my purpose”. With that kind of selfknowledge a person can bend without fear of breaking. That combination of flexibility and
resilience comes from self-knowledge.
Moreover, if self-knowledge is related to wisdom, as I believe it is, then personal
development is probably about as close as Higher Education gets to the explicit pursuit of
wisdom.
Here’s a riddle from my friend Paul Levy:
“Q.
A.
How can you become a perfect manager?
Become perfect, and then act naturally.”
Its a joke ... and yet, in another way, its not...
What form does personal development take in Higher Education? When people use the term
‘Personal Development’ they don’t always mean the same thing. For some people it means
‘key skills’. For some people it means transferable skills that are related to graduate
employability, so-called ‘work-readiness’. For others, it refers to study skills. For some people
it’s focused on ‘learning how to learn’. For some people it’s about reflective practice, the
ability to be self-critical and the development of the capacity for critical reflection.
Exploring the different conceptions of personal development that are held in Higher
Education would be a great project for research for someone in this room.
Now I’d like to introduce a model to represent my own view of where personal development
is located within the domains of learning:
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SLIDE 6
External
2.
Outer skills
1.
Knowledge about the
world
Eg Learning how to play chess
Eg Learning how to drive a
Eg Learning about history
car
Eg Learning about the theory
of managing change
in organisations
Skills
Knowledge
4.
Inner skills
3.
Self-knowledge
Eg Learning how to manage
stress
Eg Learning how to be
comfortable making
‘cold calls’
Eg Learning about own
learning style
Eg Learning about own
strengths and
weaknesses as a
manager
Internal
In this model we have the conventional distinction between knowledge and skills on the
horizontal axis. And on the vertical axis we have ‘external’ (i.e. the ‘world’) at the top and
‘internal’ (i.e. the ‘self’) at the bottom . This gives 4 quadrants which I’ve numbered 1, 2, 3,
and 4.
In quadrant 1 (the top right hand quadrant) we have ‘knowledge about the external world’.
I’ve given a couple of examples ‘learning about history’ and ‘learning about’ managing change.
This is the domain of knowledge with which we’re probably most familiar. It’s the traditional
domain of academic knowledge and was the focus of Higher Education at least until
‘transferable skills’ came along in the 1980s.
In the quadrant labelled 2 (top left hand quadrant) we’ve got knowledge of ‘how to’.
Competencies and transferable skills are located in this quadrant - as is other kinds of
learning how to do and act in the world.
In the bottom right hand quadrant (labelled 3) we have self-knowledge, self-understanding
and self-awareness. There are many times when we don’t know ourselves well enough to
know how we will react. If you were asked in your job to make people redundant, how will
you respond? How will you respond if some of those people were your close friends? How
will you respond if you are placed under much greater pressure at work? How much of your
family life will you sacrifice to do a good job at work? There’s much we don’t know about
ourselves and can’t know until we are tested. We can speculate about how we would feel and
act in particular situations but we cannot be sure. Sometimes we surprise ourselves.
Sometimes we’re shocked by our responses. Knowledge in this quadrant is about being clear
about our own capabilities, values and purpose - all aspects of that which we call our ‘self’.
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If the bottom right hand quadrant is about self-knowledge, the bottom left hand quadrant
(labelled 4.) is about what we can do with that self-knowledge. It’s about inner skills. Its one
thing to know you have difficulty making cold calls; its another thing knowing what to do
about it. If it’s not fanciful to think of people as being in charge of a ‘self’ that includes their
beliefs , feelings and emotional responses etc, then it makes sense to talk about the skilful use
of self. Most of what’s been written about self-management seems to be about developing inner
skills. For me, this quadrant is the key to big issues such as:
•
•
Managing stress
Managing time
•
Coping with change
•
Staying calm in a crisis
•
Learning how to forgive
Once the ideas of reflective practice and gaining self-knowledge have been absorbed into the
curriculum I believe attention in the HE curriculum will shift to the inner skills quadrant.
Let’s move on ... So far, I’ve said a little about Personal Development in Higher Education.
Now I want to move on to a problem: personal development in the undergraduate
curriculum.
Some groups of students are more inclined to engage in , and be engaged by, personal
development activities than others. In my experience, the students with the greatest
propensity to engage in personal development are post experience students in senior
positions on part-time courses. Those with experience of professional employment are much
more aware of the significance of the contribution of personal development to professional
development. This makes them willing accomplices in personal development activities. At
the other end of that spectrum, the students who I’ve found least inclined to engage in
personal development work are younger students fresh from school.
This is the group I want to focus on now. Why are school leaver undergraduates reluctant to
engage in personal development?
Here’s a couple of possible reasons:
1.
They bring expectations about the nature of learning and education from their senior
schools i.e. many expect higher education to be like the other education they’ve
recently experienced at school except it’s at a higher level.
2.
They’re more vulnerable and therefore heavily defended. Why are they more
vulnerable? Many have recently experienced the difficult age of adolescence and the
biological changes associated with adolescence. Many are away from home for the
first time, are coping with their own finances for the first time, are away from the
friends they made at school, are in a new environment. And when we’ve got lots of
changes going on in some areas of our lives we often look for stability and sameness
in other areas.
I’m sure you can think of other reasons.
Does that mean we have to wait until students are old enough and mature enough to want to
do personal development work? Should we leave it until they return to the university as
post-experience, part-time students in senior positions?
I think not. What are the alternatives?
One alternative is to ‘motivate’ students towards personal development i.e. to make them
want to engage in personal development. For example, we could try to convert the want into
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a need: “There will be a three hour unseen examination in personal development at the end of
the semester.” Only joking!!!
A second alternative is to relate personal development as closely as possible to what school
leaver undergraduates want.
So the challenge for personal development on undergraduate programmes is to find how it
can be related to the learning agendas of undergraduate school leavers. It was only when I
sat down to write this lecture that I realised how little we know about the intended learning
outcomes of school leaver undergraduates at the point of entry to Higher Education. Here is
an up-to-date book, published in 1998, titled ‘Motivating Students’, edited by Sally Brown,
Steve Armstrong and Gail Thompson. It contains new research and the reflections on the
current state of knowledge by 32 people who have worked in this field. It’s a good summary
of current knowledge in this area. And it didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. The nearest
thing I found was in the research findings of Linda France and Liz Beaty on orientations to
study and Gillian Winfield and Selena Bolingbroke from Warwick University on student
development beyond the curriculum. We know about the intended learning outcomes of
academic staff but we know precious little about the intended learning outcomes of school
leavers bound for university before they’ve any experience of Higher Education. This would
be another good research project for someone in this room.
In the absence of systematic research on the subject I’m thrown back on my own experience.
What did I want to learn as an undergraduate? Well, it was a long time ago... but I think I
wanted to learn:
1.
Enough subject knowledge (economics) to get a reasonable job and possibly even
some sort of career.
2.
Knowledge and understanding that would enable me to make a difference in the
world.
My own first degree delivered well on the first of these learning outcomes but poorly on the
second, which was a great disappointment to me.
With the idealism of youth I wanted to make a difference to the world and I wanted to learn
some economics that would help me to do so.
In my first undergraduate year the core analytical process in my core subject (economics) was
called “indifference curve analysis”. I was disappointed; I wasn’t looking for indifference but
‘involvement’, engagement and passion. On my first degree course there was no place for
this.
I suspect both these two motives count for much among school leavers: they want to learn
that which will enhance their material life chances and they have a sense of social concern. I
suspect also that the relative strengths of these two motives ebb and flow with the economic
climate and the level of graduate unemployment. As graduate unemployment rises then
there is more concern about personal employment security and as it falls students become
more concerned about others in the world.
When I was 18 about 5% of school leavers went to university. One consequence of the
movement to a mass higher education system has been the filtering down of graduates in the
labour market so new graduates find themselves working in jobs that are less desirable, from
their perspective, than earlier generations of graduates. This phenomenon also will have
raised their concern about their own employment prospects and served to cloak their social
concern motives.
BUT, When youngsters undertake Voluntary Service Overseas they are expressing their social
concern. When students engage in community action they are expressing their social concern.
The 15,000 students covered by SCA (Student Community Action) are expressing their social
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concern. When we use the term ‘youthful idealism’ this is what we mean. When students
have taken to the barricades they have been expressing their social concern.
Insofar as Personal Development has addressed the learning aspirations of graduates it’s done
so by appealing in an indirect way to the more self-oriented of the two motives, through the
route of key skills. Hence: personal development has been ‘sold’ as “a means of increasing
your key skills which is what employers of graduates are looking for”.
I suggest we take ‘the road less travelled’ and that could make all the difference. I suggest we
engage students in personal development through their social concern. How can we do this?
Now we could return to first principles within the field of Higher Education and try to devise
a way of doing it. Or we could look at other subject disciplines for ideas and knowledge that
might help.
I naturally look to the field of management development.
If I had to choose one big issue per decade in the field of management development I’d come
up with:
1960s:
Management training and the problem of transfer of knowledge from course
to workplace.
1970s:
Learning from work experience (work-based projects and all that)
1980s:
Management self-development
1990s:
The learning organisation
Underlying the work on management self-development and the learning organisation has
been action learning. And that’s the element of management development that could provide
the solution we’re looking for.
So what is action learning? I want to focus on what I understand as the essence of action
learning rather than on its practice. What is its essence?
To answer this question I turn to the first person to use the term ‘action learning’, Reg Revans.
In discussing the origins of action learning Reg Revans has sometimes referred to his
formative experience as a physicist in the Cavendish laboratories at Cambridge. For example,
last year, Reg Revans, aged 92, spoke at the Annual Conference of the International
Foundation for Action Learning. The main theme of his talk was knowledge and reality. He
said that in 1928 he worked with eight Nobel prize winners at the Cavendish Laboratory.
Every Wednesday they met together to discuss their experiments. They didn’t meet to
convince each other how clever they were but “to see if we can understand our own
difficulties.”
In other words, these eminent scientists came together to speak not of their triumphs but to
discuss the problems they were encountering in their work, in order to learn from one another.
For me this is the essence of action learning: a group of peers, each seeking to bring about
some change in the world, who meet regularly to discuss where they are each experiencing
difficulty and then testing in action the ideas arising from that discussion.
For those who are not familiar with action learning I ought to say just a few words about how
it is usually practised, through action learning sets. An action learning set is a group of 5 or 6
people, each working on a separate project, who meet regularly to discuss the problems
they’re each encountering with the object of learning with and from each other - you see the
similarity with the Cambridge physicists? At a set meeting the time is usually split equally
so that everybody can focus on the issues of each person in turn. It has been found useful for
a set to have a facilitator to help along the discussion and the learning. Between set meetings
the members of the set test out in action the ideas that emerge from the discussion.
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The things that I want to stress are (1) there is a clear structure to the set meetings. And (2)
the set meetings are only part of the process. The other part is the testing out of the ideas in
action, and that happens in the time between the set meetings. The group helps each
individual in turn to reflect on the outcomes of their recent actions and develop ideas for
overcoming obstacles to further progress.
I’ve recently been toying with the idea of a new structure for action learning set meetings that
would make this more explicit: the first half of the meeting would be devoted to looking back
to learn the lessons of experience since the last set meeting and the second half of the meeting
would be devoted to looking forward and identifying actions that will move the projects
forward.
Testing out ideas in action seemed a refreshingly rigorous approach to me as someone steeped
in the social sciences of the 1960s and 1970s.
The benefits claimed for action learning include the following:
•
It provides set members with their own personal ‘think-tank’
•
It provides set members with a sounding board for testing out their ideas
•
It provides traction i.e. motivation for the individual set member to complete the
project
•
It sets aside time and space for reflection.
•
It provides vicarious learning i.e. each set members learns not only from reflection on
their own change project but they learn from each other’s change project too.
•
It develops a bias for action.
•
It provides support and encouragement, so to that extent it acts as like a self-help
group
In summary, action learning helps people to learn what they need to learn to bring about
change in the world.
When I first read about action learning I decided to test it out with a group of friends ... and
then I got a surprise. Sure, people learn about the problems and the projects that embody the
changes they are trying to bring about but the surprise is they also learn about themselves.
“An important thing happens every time we make a decision- we come closer to knowing who
we really are. That’s because we pour our ethics, priorities and values into every decision.”
(Roger Dawson)
People start with projects that are ‘out there’ in the world. And then at an action learning set
meeting in one way or another they keep being asked ‘what obstacles are getting in the way
of your accomplishing what you’ve set out to do?’ And they often discover the main
obstacles are not ‘out there’ in the world but inside of themselves.
A good symbol of the action learning process is the mobius strip: you can start on the outside
and if you keep moving you’ll eventually find yourself on the inside.
<<<Do Demonstration with Mobius strip here>>>
So long as you keep moving you’ll go from outside to inside to outside to inside etc in a
natural way.
With the mobius strip its the twist in the paper that causes the movement from the outside to
the inside and back. In action learning its the question: “What obstacles are getting in the way
of your accomplishing what you’ve set out to do?” asked in a set meeting in a myriad of
different ways: “What’s stopping you?”, “So what’s the problem?”, “What’s getting in the
way now?”.
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What do people actually learn from the action learning process in practice. My friend and
colleague Paul Frost and I have written to people who had been in action learning sets and
asked them what, if anything, they had learned from their experience of action learning, in
addition from what they learned about the specific project they were working on. Most of the
people we wrote to are managers and that was reflected in their responses.
Here are a few of the responses:
“... It was difficult at first to understand how to get the most out of the set, I wanted to solve
everyone else’s problems and hoped for solutions to mine. This doesn’t happen. We are
helping each other solve our own problems. This was a major lesson for me as my
management style needed change from a ‘solver of other people’s problems’ to that of an
‘enabler’ who helps others to solve things for themselves.”
“... People ask you questions in a set that you wouldn’t think of on your own”
“... Silly things can count for a lot, we have each learned how to juggle and we have each
learned to improve on this skill as a result of our own and collective efforts. Juggling is just
an overt reminder of the benefits to us of this learning environment, and we have each learned
a great deal more than how to juggle”
“... has enabled me to express and understand aspects of my personality that I would normally
choose to bury. I am not suggesting that set meetings are conducted in ‘psychiatrist’s chair’
mode. On the contrary, discussion has tended to be constructive and practical directed
towards our projects and philosophical aspects of learning.”
“... I discovered that action learning requires action.”
Generally, I’d suggest they learned:
•
about the change project they brought to the set
•
about themselves
•
some skills
•
about how they personally learned
•
the value of cycles of action and reflection in learning
There’s another activity coming up for you in a moment, so please prepare yourselves.
Could anyone in this theatre who has ever been in an action learning set please raise a hand.
Please raise a hand now if you’ve ever been in an action learning set.
Thank you. From where I’m standing, that looks like about X per cent of the people who are
here this evening have experience of working in an action learning set.
And now could you please turn to your neighbour and ask any questions about action
learning that you have at this stage. And try to answer each others questions. Please make a
note of any questions you can’t get an answer to. In 2 minutes I’m going to ask a couple of
pairs what are their outstanding questions about action learning. And then I’ll try to answer
them.
<<<Activity>>>
How does action learning relate to the problem of working with first year under-graduates on
personal development?
First a recap:
1.
My premise is that personal development is an important part of the mission of
higher education.
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2,
3.
4.
Many of us find it is difficult to ‘do’ conventional personal development with first
year undergraduates.
It could be more effective to link personal development directly to the social concern
motivation of students rather than indirectly to the self-oriented motive.
How can action learning help us to do this?
How about this for an answer: we could create a level one module in personal
development using action learning as the learning process.
Question.
Answer:
Question
Answer:
What change project would the students work on within their action learning
sets?
The project brief would be to “go out of the classroom and bring about some
positive change in the world”. Let me repeat that, because its important: the
project brief would be to “go out of the classroom and bring about some
positive change in the world”.
This would probably mean making a positive difference to the lives of others.
It would involve finding, planning, designing and implementing a project
intended to bring about some positive change that is manageable within the
space of one semester.
Yes but what sort of project might they undertake?
The range is as wide as their creativity and ambition.
Question:
Answer:
OK, what sort of project would it not be?
It wouldn’t be about ‘study service’, worthy though that is eg. stuffing
envelopes for a charity wouldn’t do the job (...though the job might include
stuffing envelopes to bring about the change sought).
SLIDE 7 (Photograph of Tiananmen Square in 1989)
It wouldn’t be about taking heroic stands, worthy though that may be. On
this slide we see a student holding up 4 tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989 (..
the picture came from Ron Barnett’s book about the critical business of
Higher Education). That wouldn’t necessarily involve planning, designing
and implementing a project intended to bring about some positive change
that is manageable within the space of one semester.
Question.
Answer:
Can’t we at least have a few examples?
OK. OK. OK Here are a few:
1.
Organise a charity event
2.
Run an after-school club in a local school
3.
Enable a local literacy centre to make a bid for lottery funding
4
Produce and circulate a handbook about Brighton for overseas
students
5.
Organise a Christmas party for kids at the Unemployment Centre
6.
Organise a spell as tutor assistant in a local school
... there’s a charity called ‘Youth for Britain’ which has set up a volunteering
database of projects with over 250,000 projects lasting from one week to a
year or more for students at university or college or after they graduate. That
could be a useful resource for the students.
Question:
Answer:
What would the learning outcomes be for this module?
1.
To develop the skills of reflection (and possibly the capacity for
critical reflection)
2.
To understand the differences between planned learning and
emergent learning and to develop the capacity to capture emergent learning
3.
To gain self-knowledge
4.
To develop key skills
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Possibly also....
5.
To discover the value of action, reflection and questions in enabling
learning
6.
To learn about some of the obstacles to bringing about change in the
world and some things they can do to address the obstacles.
Question:
Answer:
How would it be assessed?
The way that any other module should be assessed. Students would be
asked to provide evidence of the degree to which they have achieved the
learning outcomes of the module.
Question:
Answer:
What are the benefits of this approach to personal development?
Enabling school leaver undergraduates in their first year of higher education
to achieve the learning outcomes of this module would be a major benefit.
But there are more:
1.
It would support every one of the aims of HE according to Dearing
(NCIHE, 1997)
SLIDE 8
THE AIMS OF HIGHER EDUCATION
(...according to the Dearing Report)
“•
•
•
•
to inspire and enable individuals to develop their capabilities to the highest
potential levels throughout life, so that they can grow intellectually, are wellequipped for work, can contribute effectively to society and achieve personal
fulfilment;
to increase knowledge and understanding for their own sake and to foster
their application to the benefit of the economy and society;
to serve the needs of an adaptable, sustainable, knowledge-based economy at
local, regional and national levels;
to play a major role in shaping a democratic, civilised, inclusive society”
Underlining added
Would it inspire and enable individual students to develop their
capabilities? I think it would.
Would it contribute effectively to society and achieve personal
fulfilment? I think so.
Would it foster the application of knowledge and understanding to
the benefit of the economy and society? I think so.
Would it serve the needs of an adaptable economy? I think so.
Would it play a role in shaping a civilised and inclusive society? It
would do that too.
2.
It would also provide space in the curriculum, and encouragement,
for young students to express their energy, enthusiasm and idealism
and foster their sense of social responsibility.
3.
As student cohorts get larger students can feel very lonely in large
groups. The phenomenon of the ‘lonely crowd’ has been noted
before. Action learning sets for first year students could greatly
reduce that loneliness and provide support for new students.
4.
Students will have something very powerful to put on their CVs
when they leave the university.
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15
Question:
Answer:
SLIDE 9
Are their any potential obstacles?
Lots!
•
Potential obstacle 1. What if some students have no sense of social
responsibility and don’t want to make a difference?
•
Potential obstacle 2. How could the resources be made available to facilitate
the process?
•
Potential obstacle 3. Do we have sufficient staff with sufficient experience of
action learning to run the module?
•
Potential obstacle 4. It’s too radical. No other university is doing it.
•
Potential obstacle 5. Its OK in theory but it won’t work in practice
This is not the place for systematically working through the obstacles so I’ll provide some
selective responses:
Potential obstacle 1. What if some students have no sense of social concern and do not want to make a
difference?
In this case there are several options. We’ll look at just one option here. The module could be
flexible in terms of allowable projects. They don’t necessarily have to be selfless projects; selforiented projects could be permitted eg “to devise and implement a legal and ethical scheme
to generate enough money to fund myself through the rest of my university career”. That
could be a viable project.
Potential obstacle 2. How could the resources be made available to facilitate the process?
I’ve thought about this and have some answers but the answers involve making logistical
assumptions that get detailed and that’s too dull for this evening so I’ll pass on to:
Potential obstacle 3. Do we have sufficient staff with sufficient experience of action learning to run the
module?
One of the features of the University of Brighton that makes it unique is the high level of
expertise and experience many staff have in action learning. According to a survey of courses
by Alan Cooper, Linda France and myself, by the end of 1997 there were 29 separate courses
at the University of Brighton using action learning. A relatively high proportion of our staff
have delivered learning through the medium of action learning and an even higher
proportion have had first hand experience of action learning as a participant on a course
using action learning (eg on our Post Graduation Certificate in Teaching & Learning in
Higher Education and our Certificate in Research Methods).
Potential obstacle 4. Its too radical. No other university is doing it.
Actually, it is very much in the spirit of the ‘student development movement’ (STADIA and
all that). And the ‘student development movement’ has a strong presence at most of the older
universities. And it has government backing via the DfEE. And even that most responsible
and respectable of HE institutions, the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE)
now has a Student Development Network. If anything, this is an area where the University of
Brighton has lagged.
An alternative way of looking at the idea is to realise we have, through our experience and
expertise in action learning, a means of bringing student development within the
undergraduate curriculum instead of outside of it and making it uniquely effective. It is an
area where our experience and expertise give us the opportunity to take a lead.
16
Potential obstacle 5. Its OK in theory but it won’t work out in practice.
This is the big one. I’ve made a case that action learning can be used to enable personal
development in the undergraduate curriculum by engaging students sense of social concern...
and I may be wrong!!! But there is not a lot of point debating the issue when we can check it
out empirically. If action learning is about anything it’s about the rigour of testing ideas in
action. Hence I suggest we pilot the idea on a single course with volunteer students and
volunteer staff and then evaluate the outcome.
Question:
Answer:
Any more questions?
No. ... because we’re approaching the end of the lecture.
In this lecture I’ve carried an idea, action learning, developed in the field of management
development across a bridge into that part of the land of HE called ‘the first year
undergraduate curriculum’. Using action learning in Higher Education, in the way I’ve
suggested, would be an innovation.
This raises the general issue of how the ideas and innovations of one practitioner can be
shared with other practitioners. It’s one thing to share knowledge, but another thing entirely
to share practice. Even if one practitioner can make an innovation work what’s the likelihood
others can do so? This is a problem I’ve worked on, with my colleague Sue O’Hara, in the
context of a branch of research which we term ‘practitioner-centred research’. This is the
subject of another lecture, not this one, but there is one aspect of it I want to draw your
attention to.
A key question is usually not whether an innovation can work in professional practice but
rather who can work it. Sue and I have concluded it is important for practitioner researchers
to be explicit about their beliefs and values as these provide the personal context which enable
a practitioner innovation to be used or not used1. All beliefs and all values2? No, of course
not. Just those beliefs and values that are most relevant to the question in hand.
We’ve found a useful discipline in this context is to try to find the 2 beliefs and 2 values most
likely to be significant in terms of implementing an innovation in professional practice.
If I’m to practice what I preach then I should be clear about those of my beliefs and values I
see as most significant in terms of implementing the idea I’ve suggested in this lecture.
I think the key beliefs underlying the successful implementation of the idea are:
1.
An important way of learning is by testing out beliefs and ideas in action.
2.
Gaining self-knowledge is a key to self-mastery.
And two key values? To stress the following are values I’ll express them in the form of
‘shoulds’:
1.
Higher Education should foster and support the development of a passion for learning
in all its forms, including learning from experience.
2.
The ultimate purpose of learning should be to make a difference to people’s lives.
This usually involves action of some sort.
1In
much the same way as physical researchers have to be explicit about the physical context
of their innovations and social researchers have to be explicit about the social context of their
research outcomes so practitioner researchers have to be explicit about the personal context of
their innovations, since practitioners are using their self as the instruments of their work.
2That would be unrealistic ... as unrealistic as providing all the details of the methods used in
any research project.
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I think those who share those key beliefs and values can make the idea work.
And finally, what four messages would I like you to take away from this lecture:
First, I’ve argued for building bridges between the academic disciplines across the gaps
caused by academic specialisation.
Second, personal development is an important part of the Higher Education curriculum.
Third, it is difficult to engage undergraduate students in personal development, especially at
the first year level and we need a radically different approach.
Fourth, action learning might provide that approach. Lets try it out. Who’s willing to take up
the challenge? .... See me after the lecture.
RETURN TO SLIDE 2
Level of performance during a lecture
From ‘Twenty Terrible Reasons for Lecturing’ by Graham Gibbs
So here we are back at
the diagram from Graham Gibbs and we’ve now reached the time for your performance to
peak ... ... ... the end!
References
Barnett, R. (1998) Higher Education: A Critical Business, Milton Keynes: SRHE and Open
University Press.
Bierce, A. (19933) The Devil’s Dictionary, London: Dover Publications Inc.
Bourner, T., Cooper A. and France, L. (Forthcoming) ‘Action Learning: from Management
Development to Generic University Learning Method’. Accepted for publication in
Innovations in Education and Training International.
Brown, S., Armstrong, S. and Thompson, G. (1998), Motivating Students, London: Kogan
Page in association with the Staff and Educational Development Association.
Dawson, R. (1994) Make the Right Decision Every Time, London: Nicholas Brealey.
France, L. and Beaty, L. (1998) ‘Layers of Motivation: Individual Orientations and Contextual
Influences’ in Motivating Students edited by Brown, S., Armstrong, S. and
Thompson, G., London: Kogan Page in association with the Staff and Educational
Development Association.
Frankl, V. (1946) Man’s Search for Meaning. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Gibbs, G. (19841 Twenty Terrible Reasons for Lecturing, London: SCEDSIP.
NCIHE (National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education) (1997) Higher Education in
the Learning Society (The Dearing Report), London: HMSO.
Winfield, G. and Bolingbroke, S. (1998) ‘Learner Autonomy Beyond the Curriculum:
Students’ Motivations and Institutional Community’ in Motivating Students edited
3Originally
published (as Volume VII of the Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce) in 1911 by
the Neale Publishing Company, New York.
18
by Brown, S., Armstrong, S. and Thompson, G., London: Kogan Page in association
with the Staff and Educational Development Association.
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