Sandra Sinfield

Senior Lecturer/Academic Developer, Centre for Professional and Educational Development, London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom and author of the #Take5 blog

Interviewed December 2020 by Sandra Abegglen

SA Sandra, please introduce yourself.

SS I work in an academic development unit where I work with staff to develop their learning, teaching and assessment practice. The practice of academic development that I do is both theoretical and practical in terms of what can be done both in the classroom and online.

SA Sandra, I know that you have years of experience in what you do, and you have also published widely on the subject.

SS Yes. Years ago, we produced a book called Essential Study Skills: The Complete Guide to Success at University. This was very much aimed at helping students make the most of their time at university. We put a lot of emphasis on creative ways in which students could think about studying and organizing their lives around their studies. We’ve also developed a staff textbook on that, and we found recently that many different staff across our country are using our textbook to develop their staff practice. So that’s quite interesting, and nice to know.

SA With COVID springing up and changing the educational landscape and delivery of courses, what was the biggest challenge for you and how did you experience that move from the classroom to remote teaching?

SS It was very frustrating because, quite often, courses like ours for staff are very theoretical and didactic, but we’d thrown all that up in the air. We have a very creative, embodied, hands-on workshop approach and we want the staff to experience the strategies we are teaching, as if they were real students again. When we suddenly had to switch to online teaching, everything became a huge challenge to overcome. Translating that important experience into a virtual classroom was tough.

SA What would you then say was an opportunity when having to move to remote teaching?

SS In trying to find creative solutions, the biggest challenges became the biggest opportunities. This, I think we did manage. At our university, we have the virtual learning environment (VLE) where we can meet to teach and gather staff into discussion groups very easily, but we do more than that in the physical classroom. We had to find ways of enabling people to write, produce ideas and brainstorm together; to make, play and create together. Although this was a challenge, the solutions were very creative. We feel that we’ve only gone part of the way there, so if we’re still online next year, we’ll have more time to develop a really creative online course.

SA What would you say is the most-used online teaching tool for you?

SS Our university invested in Blackboard as their virtual learning environment, and it is Blackboard that we have to use. That is where we can store resources, but it’s also where we teach. We have a Collaborate room, which works a bit like Zoom so that we have the audio plus visual contact. We can use PowerPoint in there if we want to and the breakout rooms, but within that there are some really useful tools that we’ve used a lot. Actually, we use them even when we do face-to-face teaching. We have online discussion boards where everyone on the course can engage with each other. I find that people won’t use a discussion board unless there’s a real reason to do it though, so we ask all of our participants to write a learning log to reflect on their experiences. Living within the discussion boards, these take the form of reflective blogs in which they reflect on their learning, and also comment on each other’s thoughts. Through the VLE blog function, we get the staff to post their emergent writing and to peer review one another’s contributions, offering supportive, critical feedback on the writing that they do. In this way, they engage dialogically as the course continues. Another tool that we found we could use was Google Docs so that in our class the staff could produce individual or collaborative, synchronous writing. In the VLE, there’s also a Wiki tool, which allows for collaborative writing over time; synchronous asynchronous collaboration, where people can edit what other people write. Sometimes we’ve used that to get the class to produce a glossary of useful terms on the theories and concepts so that they’re engaged in making sense of the course together. These tools allowed us to be able to keep up the sense of actively working together.

SA In terms of pedagogy or approach, is there any resource you come to regularly that you find very inspirational?

SS I would say that it is Google Docs because I love collaborative writing myself. It’s the only way I really feel that I can write, but the resources that I might draw on then would be resources from DS106, which is Digital Storytelling 106. It is a fantastic resource of ideas for digital storytelling, creative and multimodal assignments. They share ideas, and student work. Whole classes can sign up to be part of this thing—this entity or movement. This is what I would recommend to other people.

I think that collaboration is essential. People shouldn’t think that they have to solve all of these problems on their own. There’s a wealth of experience out there and the people in this area are very generous. They want to share their ideas and their experiences, and they want to work with you.

I also reach out to people on Twitter. I think some academics are still very hesitant to use Twitter as a space for sharing ideas. They think it’s just about sharing your breakfast. Reach out on Twitter and find the right people to follow. Find those that are inspirational in this area and the whole thing becomes so much more supportive. It feels like a growing experience instead of a solitary one.

SA Where do you think that we are going with higher education?

SS Well, I suppose my worst fear is that there will be an elitist division in higher education in the future where the elite and the children of the elite will go to wonderful physical spaces and there they can engage in face-to-face, online, or blended versions of learning and the non-elite will be relegated just to online learning. Now, I do think that online learning can be fabulous. It can be creative, emergent, and inspirational, but I also think there’s something very valuable about the physical university. Within the space and the time of the university, there exists that notion that it is your time to be in and to fully inhabit your learning body. I hope that everybody gets to go to face-to-face universities, as well as to inhabit beautiful online spaces.

SA What would you recommend for tutors, instructors and academics at this time in preparing for the Fall semester?

SS I think when you’re teaching, try and teach without using a PowerPoint. Try and think, what can I get my students to do or make or talk about, even though it’s virtual and at a distance? Trust your students. Don’t think that you need to be a master of all of the technology yourself. I think you can set creative assignments and challenges so that the students play with the technology and get creative in answering your assignment challenge. They will surprise you. Let yourself be surprised and delighted by your students.

Reflection

And so, what are my thoughts on the future of higher education after the pandemic, the “pivot” and a collective experience of online teaching, learning and assessment?

Firstly, I cannot believe that sixteen years after the UK government published Harnessing Technology,1 its vision for e-learning, we are still talking about technology enhanced learning (TEL) as if it were separate from teaching/learning. The world is digital and multimodal. We, for example, use collage, painting, poetry, writing, reading, making, doing, animation, video, podcasting and more in our practice.

Some context: in 2009 my colleagues and I published A Journey Into Silence, a discourse analysis of the Harnessing Technology document, with a special focus on university teaching and learning.2 We agreed with David Noble that this policy revealed a dystopian picture of higher education with students as “consumers” rather than actors and agents in their own learning;3 where the economic model of unit cost takes pedagogy and educational judgment away from the expert tutor/subject specialist and places it firmly in the

hands of management; and rather than “education,” we have only “a shadow of education, an assemblance of pieces without a whole.”

In Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, Noble argued that what we now call TEL is inextricably bound up with the denaturing and de-professionalizing of higher education, both for staff and students. He stressed that whilst the push for TEL is predicated upon cost cutting, rationalization and staff reduction, “education” relies on the quality of interpersonal relationships, and good education requires a labour intensive, personal relationship between students and quality academics.4

Harnessing Technology marked a fundamental shift away from the practitioner as an innovator and toward a systemic and politically driven model of TEL delivering the “training” that facilitated the development of “IT skills for business” (where any assertion of the self is subversive) and where “hard to reach” students would be plugged into remedial packages to be “fixed,” and would be grateful to experience “anywhere, anytime” education online. More disappointing now is how pertinent our critique remains.

Post–pandemic, TEL policies remain driven by financial, managerialist and technocratic concepts rather than pedagogical ones. Many staff who have been creatively teaching online for eighteen months are being called to new ways of working: clear their desks and pick up their “surveyed” equipment; and stand ready to work in silence in bookable “work zones.”

We know that students need “owned” space, dialogue with their peers, playful practice and respect for the experience they bring to the educational encounter in order to facilitate significant learning. Yet, despite the expertise that academics have gained over the intense pandemic months, they will have to work to yet another management-generated version of TEL over which they have had no say and have no control.

The future of higher education? Many academic staff will be on-site, office-less and more isolated than ever. They will have no say over their pedagogy or how they integrate the digital in their practice. Harnessing technology or harnessed to it? Plus ca change. Plus ca meme chose.

About

Sandra Sinfield is a senior lecturer/academic developer in the Centre for Professional and Educational Development at London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. She is a co-founder of the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE), and co-author of Teaching, Learning and Study Skills: A Guide for Tutors, and Essential Study Skills: The Complete Guide to Success at University (4th Edition). Sandra has worked as a laboratory technician, a freelance copywriter, and an executive editor (Medicine Digest, circulation 80,000 doctors). With Tom Burns, she has developed theatre and film in unusual places—their Take Control video won the IVCA gold award for education. Sandra is interested in creativity and play as emancipatory practice in higher education.