Repositioning myself within the HE landscape
The way in which I have positioned myself as a deliberate professional within the context of higher education has evolved dramatically throughout my 15-year career and will continue to evolve going forwards. This change has occurred in response to the rapidly shifting nature of the higher education landscape over time and as my sense of agency as an educator has grown with experience across diverse types of higher education institutions. My deepening experience has led me to gravitate away from focusing on improving the delivery of discipline-specific skills and knowledge, to positioning myself as an interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary educator who specialises in the creation of inclusive and human-centred classrooms that prioritise innovative active learning methods and encourages empathy, curiosity, and adaptability.
Coinciding with conjecture surrounding Australia’s higher education sector reaching its peak and requiring reinvention for survival (Friday & Cairns, 2021), my discipline of design more specifically has received a recent decline in interest due to increasing popularity in other fields within the creative industries, in response to the decrease in print media and an increase in AI-driven design software and design crowdsourcing platforms (Office, 2019). Taking this into consideration, along with informal conversations with superiors as to what is probable, possible and impossible in relation to job security and hiring practices within my specific workplace environment, I have identified with Stuart and Shutt’s argument that higher education needs to “embrace a more fluid, more contingent world” (Stuart, 2019). As such, I have taken deliberate steps to broaden the range of material I can facilitate and built transferrable skills and qualities as an educator that are less discipline-specific. As interest and enrolment within higher education declines, I aim to embody and promote the values of curiosity, critical reflection and lifelong learning within my classes and regularly question how things could be with the intentionality to improve the world around me and ignite a lifelong love of learning within my students.
Intersecting agendas at play within higher education have impacted how I view myself as a deliberate professional within such a labyrinthine landscape and led me to reposition myself as an interdisciplinary educator who generates ongoing opportunities for professional learning for myself by regularly critically reflecting on my own practice and participating in collaborative conversations with peers. With the arrival of Covid, the already high level of complexity has only increased, and I have found competing pressures to modify my teaching approach to prioritise digitalisation, course commercialisation and diversity and inclusion practices. This has occurred in tandem as job security has become less certain and compensation for professional development and training has reduced. Being adaptable and able to pivot swiftly into new opportunities aligns with my values as a designer and an educator and has allowed me to think about how I can increase the capacity for myself and my students to collaborate and co-create across discipline and sector boundaries. Specifically, I identify strongly with Wenger-Trayner’s (2020) conditions for social learning and working across boundaries to co-create new approaches with colleagues in other disciplines by embracing uncertainty, allowing for diverse perspectives and being intentional with the positive outcomes I wish to make.
Within my discipline of design, students are encouraged to question the world around them using human-centred approaches and critically reflect to form new perspectives and connections. This approach prompts students to engage in an ongoing independent inquiry into themselves and their surroundings and is the same way in which I contextualise my own practice as an educator. I relate strongly to Don Norman’s conception of a designer’s role as being to bridge the gulf between execution and evaluation and explore the liminal space between theoretical knowledge and the successful application of this knowledge (Norman, 1988/2013, pp. 38–39) and apply this user experience principle within my work as an educator. I make time to continually question the status quo and identify possibilities for how I can take responsibility for actions within my practice that evolve my conception of professionalism (Trede and McEwen, 2015, p. 467). My workplace prioritises an active learning approach that promotes student agency and is complimentary to how I position myself as a deliberate professional who embraces change and intends to inspire and encourage excitement about learning and self-development.
Brookfield’s (1995/2017) four lenses for critical reflection perform an important role in my practice as a deliberate professional and I regularly engage with student feedback, critical reflection of myself as a practitioner, engagement with teaching and learning theory and peer feedback using the five conditions for constructive pedagogical conversations identified by researchers in Conversations on Learning and Teaching: Changing Conceptions and Practice (Pleschová et al., 2021). Within my professional practice, as well as within the educational context in which I operate, I intend to increase vertical literacy (Scharmer, 2019) and self-awareness. I do this by consciously integrating my personal and professional selves to embody, with integrity, the transferrable skills and individual qualities that are applicable in both my professional and personal contexts. I aim to operate in a co-creative way with students, peers and supervisors to shift consciousness from ego-system awareness to eco-system awareness (Scharmer, 2019). Whilst I acknowledge this is an idealistic goal in many ways, it is reflective of how I would like the world to be and to this point has allowed me to pivot efficiently and alter the strategies and approaches for how I connect with students and evolve my position as a deliberate professional in a complex and constantly evolving space.
The values of empathy, curiosity, kindness, and adaptability underpin my approach as an educator and within my personal life. Working within different types of institutions within the private college and university space I have encountered a variety of learners with diverse needs and learning preferences. Alongside current institutional agendas to focus on diversity, inclusion, and accessibility, this has presented me with opportunities to create differentiated student-centric learning experiences within my classrooms which align with my values and allow me to connect with students authentically using a pedagogy of kindness (Rawle, 2021). Connecting with my students by modelling empathy within my communications with them, encouraging reflection and student agency, and encouraging open conversations is foundational to my conception of myself as a deliberate professional. The way in which I have positioned myself within the context of higher education continues to evolve relative to how the context in which I operate shifts, however, the foundational values under which I operate remain consistent and are reflective of my conception of a deliberate professional.
References
Brookfield, S. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. Jossey-Bass Publishers. (Original work published 1995)
Friday, C. F., & Cairns, A. (2021, August 16). The peak of higher education – a new world for the university of the future. Www.ey.com. https://www.ey.com/en_au/government-public-sector/the-peak-of-higher-education
Norman, D. A. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things (pp. 38–39). Mit Press. (Original work published 1988)
Office. (2019, January 22). Creative skills for the future economy | Office for the Arts. Arts.gov.au. https://www.arts.gov.au/publications/creative-skills-future-economy
Pleschová, G., Roxå, T., Thomson, K. E., & Felten, P. (2021). Conversations that make meaningful change in teaching, teachers, and academic development. International Journal for Academic Development, 26(3), 201–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144x.2021.1958446
Rawle, F. (2021, August 20). A pedagogy of kindness: the cornerstone for student learning and wellness. THE Campus Learn, Share, Connect. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/pedagogy-kindness-cornerstone-student-learning-and-wellness
Scharmer, O. (2019, April 29). Vertical Literacy: Reimagining the 21st-Century University. Medium. https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/vertical-literacy-12-principles-for-reinventing-the-21st-century-university-39c2948192ee
Stuart, M. (2019, November 22). A manifesto for the 21st century university. Wonkhe; Wonkhe. https://wonkhe.com/blogs/a-manifesto-for-the-21st-century-university/
Trede, F., & McEwen, C. (2016). Carving Out the Territory for Educating the Deliberate Professional. Educating the Deliberate Professional, 15–28. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32958-1_2
Wenger-Trayner, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2020). Learning to Make a Difference. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108677431
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