UK National Teaching
Fellowships & the
Disciplinary Commons
Sally Fincher
Deakin University Seminar
24th January 2006
www.cs.kent.ac.uk
A narrative construction
• As this is an on-going process …
• … I can’t promise you a happy ending
• But I can promise that what you are going to hear now
is a true story …
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Table of Contents
• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship
scheme
• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh
Tenenberg
• Chapter three: what Josh was doing
• Chapter four: how peeved I was
• Chapter five: I find my niche
• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios
• Chapter seven: the next chapter?
‹#›
Table of Contents
• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship
scheme
• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh
Tenenberg
• Chapter three: what Josh was doing
• Chapter four: how peeved I was
• Chapter five: I find my niche
• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios
• Chapter seven: the next chapter?
‹#›
UK National Teaching Fellowships
• Been in existence 7 years.
• Initially 20 per year. In 2004 changed to 50 per year, and three
categories introduced: experienced staff, rising stars, learning
support staff.
• Application restricted to three per institution (one per category)
• “Institutions should use a fair and transparent system for the
selection of nominees, and a short summary of this should be
included with the nomination. The assessment panel would
normally expect that any Experienced Staff nominee in particular
would have been recognised in his or her own institution in some
way prior to their nomination for the Scheme. This might be by the
awarding of an internal Fellowship, by promotion, by
commendation or by any other locally devised appropriate
means.”
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Claim for fellowship
• Applications comprise a claim for fellowship, an
institutional nomination and an “outline project plan”
• Ability to influence learners positively, to inspire them and to
enable them to achieve specific learning outcomes.
• Ability to influence and inspire colleagues in their teaching,
learning and assessment practice, by example and / or
through the dissemination of good practice.
• Track record of influencing positively the national community of
teachers and learners in higher education in relation to
teaching, learning and assessment practice.
• Ability to demonstrate a reflective approach to teaching and /
or the support of learning.
• Award comprises £50,000: £45,000 for project, £5,000
for the fellow in support of teaching & learning
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Narrative tension
• It’s OK, I got one.
• But I didn’t know I would.
• So here’s what happened …
‹#›
Table of Contents
• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship
scheme
• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh
Tenenberg
• Chapter three: what Josh was doing
• Chapter four: how peeved I was
• Chapter five: I find my niche
• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios
• Chapter seven: the next chapter?
‹#›
Bootstrapping
• I worked with Josh Tenenberg (University of
Washington, Tacoma) on two NSF-funded workshops:
Bootstrapping Research in Computer Science
Education and Scaffolding Research in Computer
Science Education
http://depts.washington.edu/bootstrp/
http://depts.washington.edu/srcse/
‹#›
Bootstrapping
• These projects were designed to foster and build a
Community of Practice in computing education
research
• This was an appropriate thing to attempt because of
the interdisciplinary nature of CSEd research and the
distributed nature of the researchers, generally at most
one or two per department.
• And they worked pretty well. (There’s a paper about
our design goals and our success metrics in the ASEE
conference this summer)
‹#›
Table of Contents
• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship
scheme
• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh
Tenenberg
• Chapter three: what Josh was doing
• Chapter four: how peeved I was
• Chapter five: I find my niche
• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios
• Chapter seven: the next chapter?
‹#›
So, back to the story …
• Josh was facing a problem of “articulation agreements”
between the 2 and 4 year colleges in his area.
• He thought of holding Bootstrapping-type meetings, to
get parties talking about the community and their part
in it. But he had no common practice, no boundary
object.
• So I opened my mouth and said “Nope: you gotta do
portfolios” (This is because I’d been to a lecture by Dan
Bernstien and was convinced this was a very vital,
energising, thing to be doing. I’m pretty susceptible.)
‹#›
Table of Contents
• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship
scheme
• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh
Tenenberg
• Chapter three: what Josh was doing
• Chapter four: how peeved I was
• Chapter five: I find my niche
• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios
• Chapter seven: the next chapter?
‹#›
A Low Point
• We devised a rough outline and structure. He got
funding and went ahead. I sat and pined.
‹#›
Table of Contents
• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship
scheme
• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh
Tenenberg
• Chapter three: what Josh was doing
• Chapter four: how peeved I was
• Chapter five: I find my niche
• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios
• Chapter seven: the next chapter?
‹#›
Our heroine prospers
• Got the National Teaching Fellowship!
• Being tired of standing on the sidelines griping that
“someone should fund this sort of thing” I said
“Dammit, I’ve got money, I can fund it. I’ll do a
Commons, too”
• But what would I build mine around?
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Lauri Malmi’s question
• “When someone joins your research group, you say
‘read these articles’. When someone comes to teach a
subject for the first time we say ‘just get on with it’. Why
don’t we give them a set of articles?”
Lauri Malmi
Koli Calling
17th November 2005
‹#›
Lee Shulman’s answer
• “How many professional educators, when engaged in
creating a new course or a new curriculum, can turn to
a published, peer-reviewed scholarship of teaching I
which colleagues at other colleges and universities
present their experiments, their field trials, or their case
studies of instruction and its consequences? … In this
respect the scholarship of teaching is dramatically
different from the scholarship of investigation. It’s one
of the reasons why any sort of progress is so hard to
come by pedagogically—because blindness and
amnesia are the state of the art in pedagogy”
Taking Learning Seriously Change Magazine, July/August 1999.
Volume 31, Number 4. Pages 10-17.
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Table of Contents
• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship
scheme
• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh
Tenenberg
• Chapter three: what Josh was doing
• Chapter four: how peeved I was
• Chapter five: I find my niche
• Interlude
• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios
• Chapter seven: the next chapter?
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Interlude: Antecedents of the Disciplinary
Commons
• Elinor Ostrom Governing the Commons
• “Common pool resources: a general term for shared resources
in which each stakeholder has an equal interest.”
• Lawrence Lessig: the Creative Commons
• Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin West
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Antecedents of the Disciplinary Commons:
Elinor Ostrom
Subtractive
Exclusion
Feasible
Infeasible
Consumption
Private Goods:
bread, shoes, cars,
haricuts, books …
Joint use
Toll Goods:
theatres, libraries,
telephone service,
toll roads…
Education is a Public Good. Like the research
Public
Goods:
peace
Common
Pool
publications
(on which other
sorts
of knowledge
& security, air
Resources:
water
are built) could
teaching information
be a
control,
from
the ground,
Common
Pool Resource?pollution
Because
“ ‘more
weather
fish
frompooling
the sea,
people
resourcespavements,
in new ways’
is the
forecasts …
crude
historyoilof…civilization”
Antecedents of the Disciplinary Commons:
Lawrence Lessig
• Lawrence Lessig: the Creative Commons
• Realisation that old copyright laws were useless in
digital age.
• So formed a non-profit organistaion that offers an
alternative to full copyright. Offering work under a
Creative Commons license does not mean giving up
copyright.
• The built on the "all rights reserved" of traditional
copyright to create a voluntary "some rights reserved"
copyright.
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Antecedents of the Disciplinary Commons:
Frank Lloyd Wright
• Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin West
He found schematic carvings on the rocks made by
previous inhabitants of the land. In particular, a
representation of two joined hands - palm to palm fingers curled together.
Antecedents of the Disciplinary Commons
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Table of Contents
• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship
scheme
• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh
Tenenberg
• Chapter three: what Josh was doing
• Chapter four: how peeved I was
• Chapter five: I find my niche
• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios
• Chapter seven: the next chapter?
‹#›
itp Disciplinary Commons
• So, no geographic leverage. Around what would my
Commons be built?
• Evidence, and practitioner relationship to it. How would
we articulate our common practice? Through similarity
of content. Our aims:
• To document and share knowledge about teaching and student
learning on introductory programming courses in the UK.
• To establish practices for the scholarship of teaching by
making it public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for future use
and development by other educators: creating a teachingappropriate document of practice equivalent to the researchappropriate journal paper.
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Participation and Reification
Participation
• We all meet, we all share, we have the deep and
meaty discussions about the minutae of our practice
Reification
• We document our otherwise invisible practices - via our
portfolios - so it exists without our continuing presence.
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Portfolios: what is the genre?
• Artists
• Models
What do “portfolios” have in common?
• The purposeful selection of artefacts to achieve an end
• Selection is not random: you choose the contents to
reflect the parts that are most important to you (and/or
your theme)
• What end? This requires consideration of audience and
purpose
• Our Commons portfolios may be quite different from a
portfolio you would compile for teaching moderation, or
for promotion – different audience, different purpose
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The Lab Report
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Title
Hypothesis
Materials
Procedure
Data
Calculations
Results
Conclusions
The Journal Paper
•
•
•
•
Title page
Abstract
Introduction
Materials and
Methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Literature Cited
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The power of form
• Allows comparability
• Allows for different sorts of research, with different
emphases
• Content is guaranteed by peer review
• The Journal paper is to research as …
‹#›
… the Portfolio is to teaching ?
•
•
•
•
•
•
Context
Content
Instructional Design
Delivery
Assessment
Evaluation
• Allows comparability
• Allows for different sorts of
practice, with different
emphases
• Content guaranteed by
the nature of the evidence
(and how it is structured)
and peer review
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Problem with teaching portfolios
• They are done individually, for benchmark or
development
• There’s a nice one in Drawing over here, a couple of
interesting ones in Maths over there but little
comparable
• Creating a Commons archive of similar material, our
common pool resource, should give a multiplier effect
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The Nature & Structure of our Portfolio Content
Artefact – Commentary
Evidence – Analysis
What – Why
• Each section consists of paired elements.
• Nothing is admissible without an evidential artefact .
• That means you have to pay attention to capturing
artefacts.
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Situated practice
• The portfolio, therefore, documents a specific course,
siuated in its time, place, institution. With the students
that that institution takes (good or bad) and the
curriculum that is fashionable. Not idealised, not
abstracted.
• The academic community especially prizes abstraction:
“details of practice have come to be seen as
nonessential, unimportant, and easily developed once
the relevant abstractions have been grasped”
(Brown & Duguid, 1991)
• We invert this. A portfolio celebrates the situated, the
particular.
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Situation: a familiar power
“To cook rice correctly requires not only patience and skill
but an abstract conception of an idealized form.
So what I turned to for help was the basic artisanal sense
of task. Make it simple by making it particular: what can
I do with this rice, this rice pot, this need, this
temperament?”
“The problem, I gradually realized, was that I wanted to
simply follow a set of instructions, whereas what was
required of me was to establish a close working
relationship with a particular cooking vessel—my
personal rice pot.”
(Thorne & Thorne, 2000)
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Our artefacts
• Don’t think recipes: think ricepots
‹#›
Table of Contents
• Chapter one: I hear of the national teaching fellowship
scheme
• Chapter two: in which we find out how I know Josh
Tenenberg
• Chapter three: what Josh was doing
• Chapter four: how peeved I was
• Chapter five: I find my niche
• Chapter six: in which we learn all about porfolios
• Chapter seven: the next chapter?
‹#›
UK National Teaching Fellowships
• Changed this year (in fact, on 18th January)
• Still 50 fellowships awarded per year, still three
nominations from institutions, but the categories
abandoned
‹#›
UK National Teaching Fellowships (2006)
• Nominations are required to demonstrate excellence in
three areas:
• Individual excellence - evidence of promoting and
enhancing the student learning experience.
• Raising the profile of excellence - evidence of
supporting colleagues and influencing support for
student learning in (and if appropriate beyond) your
institution, through demonstrating impact and
engagement beyond your immediate academic or
professional role.
• Developing excellence - commitment to your ongoing
professional development with regard to teaching and
learning (and/or learning support).
‹#›
UK National Teaching Fellowship Awards
•
•
•
•
Award is now £10,000 “for you”
So what happens to the other £40,000 x 50?
Because, that’s two million pounds, right?
They are being made available as a separate project
fund “Teams will be able to bid for funds of up to
£200,000 for use over a period of up to three years.”
‹#›
UK National Teaching Fellowship Projects
• Projects must be:
• “ … designed to develop and disseminate good
practice in learning and teaching across the whole
higher education sector” and must “… align with one or
more of the Higher Education Academy's four
institutional themes”
•
•
•
•
innovations in the curriculum and student support
quality management
student assessment
academic leadership
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Best of all …
• “At least one member of the bidding team must be a
National Teaching Fellow”
‹#›
The End …
• So, sort of a happy ending.
• Oh, and:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence
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References
•
•
•
•
•
Slide 10: Josh Tenenberg and Sally Fincher Building and Assessing
Capacity in Engineering Education Research: The Bootstrapping Model,
ASEE Conference Chicago, 2006
Slide 21: Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom Public Goods and Public
Choices in Alternatives for Delivering Public Services: Toward Improved
Performance E.S.Savas (ed) ,1977
Slide 21: "Whenever a communication medium lowers the cost of solving
collective action dilemmas, it becomes possible for more people to pool
resources. And ‘more people pooling resources in new ways’ is the history
of civilization in... – pause – ... seven words“
spoken by Marc Smith, p. 31, Smart Mobs, Harold Rheingold, 2002
Slide 35: John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, Organizational Learning
and Communities-of-Practice : Toward a Unified View of Working,
Learning and Innovation Organization Science, 2:1, 1991.
Slide 36: John Thorne and Matt Lewis Thorne Pot on the Fire: Further
Exploits of a Renegade Cook, 2000
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