Building Subject Communities: Bringing students and teachers together around their area of common interest - a cross-C

1. Building Subject Communities:Bringing students and teachers together around their area of common interest - a cross-CETL initiative Pat Atkins, PILS CETL Director, 22nd Feb 2007

2. PILS concerns - overview • Personalising student support • Integration of learning, teaching and student support • Subjects can integrate and personalise • Where do communities fit?

3. PILS – subject concerns • Subjects and motivation – why study psychology? • Information and identification – what does it feel like to be an OU chemistry student? • Pathways and planning – how do I actually get an OU degree in molecular science? • Employability – what do I do with my degree when I get it? • Associate Lecturers are overlooked resources

4. PILS – themes for 2005-2007 • student success • identity and community • pathways and planning • employability • AL reward and development

5. Can communities help with Integration? • Subject communities: from course to course, along student pathways, into employability or other futures • Staff communities: integrating production and presentation; joining up teaching, learning and student support; blending people, ICT and other media • University-wide community: integrating functions along a student journey • Integration for each student within the University through their communities and ours

6. Cross boundaries working – a community?

7. Teaching &Scholarship FacilitatedLearning Cognitive Support Student Support Team Reflective AffectiveSupport Support Information, AdviceandGuidance SSR – Subject/Programme based Student Support Team – a community? Support from Generalists & Specialists Systemic Support

8. Can communities help with Personalisation? Going beyond the essential basics such as each student’s name on their web pages and our use of VOICE • Relationships • Relevance • Reliability • Continuity • Confidence • Community and identity

9. Can communities help with University strategy? • Murray Saunders: the CETL as a ‘bridgehead to new embedded practices’ • Bringing together learning, teaching and student support • Personalised, integrated, with continuity (SSR p. 38) • Raising the status of teaching – AL role • Blending/integrating rather than bolting on ICT – design • Building subject communities – web presences • Other big issues – employability, workbased learning, groupwork, assessment, mobile technologies….

10. Communities of practice:learning, meaning, and identity • Etienne Wenger – PBPL CETL engagement • ‘proposes a framework for thinking about learning in terms of communities, their practices, the meanings they make possible, and the identities they open’ • negotiation of meaning, participation, and reification • three dimensions of this relation between practice and community: mutual engagement, a joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire of ways of doing things. • learning as an interplay of experience and competence

11. Communities of practice:learning, meaning, and identity • Etienne Wenger on ‘identity’ • Shared characteristics between practice and identity: meaning, community, learning, boundary, locality • Belonging: engagement, imagination and alignment • Belonging: identification and negotiation – issues of power and different levels of ownership • ‘a learning community, whose practice it is to keep alive creative tension between competence and experience’

12. Communities of practice:learning, meaning, and identity • Etienne Wenger on ‘design’ for education communities of practice • CoPs are ‘about content - about learning as a living experience of negotiating meaning - not about form’ • CoPs ‘can be recognized, supported, encouraged, and nurtured, but they are not reified, designable units’ • ‘education is about opening a field of possible identities that can be understood as actual trajectories of participation in practice’