Ruth Healey

Associate Professor in Pedagogy in Higher Education, University of Chester, United Kingdom

Interviewed September 2020 by Martina MacFarlane

MM Dr. Healey, could you please tell us what you do?

RH I am a lecturer in geography at the University of Chester in the UK. I think I’ve been invited to do this primarily because of my interest in students as partners and the research work I do in that area. I’m delighted to be here and to talk a little bit more about the current situation, and how we’re approaching teaching in my context.

MM What does your teaching look like in this term, in the 2020/21 semesters?

RH My institution adopted what they’ve called the “Chester Blend,” which is effectively a form of blended learning so that we have some asynchronous online materials, the work that students do in their own time, and then synchronous work as well. Now, some of the synchronous work is via Microsoft Teams and some of it is face-to-face. We had plans in terms of timetabling and then in the UK the social distancing parameters moved from being two metres apart to one metre plus. So we were able to get a few more people into a room and that slightly changed how many classes we were doing with face-to-face sessions. But it’s all quite flexible at the moment, because we’re just in a situation where the cases are rising (September 2020) and we’re uncertain whether we might be going into another national lockdown. I’m not entirely sure what that will mean for higher education. Everything is just a constant marathon of flexibility.

MM From your experience in the past winter term, what opportunities do you think are created by digital education?

RH In some ways, I’m quite excited about the opportunities. For one, my own learning. I was in a fortunate position that when everything happened toward the end of March 2020, the majority of my teaching was already done. I was able to attend a lot of webinars and seminars to learn more about what was going on and what we could do in terms of the online side of things.

I also like the flipped classroom idea. With the Chester Blend version that we are now doing, there’s a possibility that we might be taking these models forward. There are opportunities within the flipped classroom model that can make learning and teaching more flexible for both students and staff. From my perspective, with the opportunity to use that face-to-face time in whatever form, we get to spend much more time discussing, actively learning, and developing ideas.

I know that the flipped classroom is quite an old model. It’s been around for a long time, but it’s not been a common practice in a lot of institutions. This is an opportunity to experiment with these ideas and try things out in quite a low-risk environment because everybody’s understanding is that this is new to everybody. I’m hoping that it will build capacity and confidence for both students and staff. Then hopefully when we return to face-to-face teaching there will be more emphasis on learning from one another, both in terms of staff and students, and students and students.

I appreciate that there are a lot of challenges still within the flipped classroom model, not least of which is being able to ensure that the online content up is interesting and engaging, but also in terms of motivation, which is one of the things I’ve been talking with my students about. Undertaking asynchronous work, getting your head around that and in a timely manner that is relevant to the timing of the class is challenging. Support for this can come from tutors, in terms of the design of the asynchronous material but also by emphasizing why that’s so important and demonstrating how it then connects with what we do when we are together in the same room. Hopefully, we’re all learning together.

MM Could you tell us about your interest in student-staff partnerships?

RH In my mind, student-staff partnerships are about working together and working collaboratively on what we do. It’s generally been my practice to work in terms of active learning, which I think is a form of student-staff partnership. Sometimes it’s the constraints and expectations of university structures that make it difficult to undertake. We’re quite fortunate at my institution that we don’t have fifty-minute lecture slots. We have two-hour sessions with our students, which enable a lot more opportunity for those activities and interactions. Unfortunately, some colleagues will just lecture for two hours, and I’m sure they have activities in there as well, but it’s more content driven, whereas I view those face-to-face opportunities as ways of working with students and making it more research-based by enabling students to identify and develop skills that they then think they can take forward. It’s not about just knowing stuff, which, if you have a memory like me, will go out of your head very quickly. It’s about developing the skills to be able to undertake research and understand issues that you can then go on and use in the future.

MM Wonderful. What are some of the challenges that you’ve experienced when moving to teaching online?

RH Well, not all people have the devices or the Internet connections to be able to use these kind of mediums and interact online. There are also the issues surrounding how … I think that it’s great to have people with their videos on, but some people are in environments where they don’t want to show where they are. They’re working in their own bedrooms, spare bedrooms, they’ve got family situations, and so on. That means that there are certain people who, because of their circumstances, may not want to contribute to discussions in this kind of medium. They don’t want their videos on, which immediately disenfranchises them slightly. I think there are other ways in which you can engage people in these mediums. For example, the chat function can in some ways be more interactive than some of the lectures I’ve been to. Some people don’t want to put their hands up but are a bit more comfortable with texting in the chat area. And of course, there are always technological challenges across the various platforms. The main interface we use is Moodle. That is always a little bit slow in the first week of courses and requires a bit of refreshing. Then there is Microsoft Teams, which usually seems to be working okay, but then there are occasional glitches with things such as uploading PowerPoint presentations and so on. It’s the little technical things, which if you’re comfortable and have had a chance to play with stuff you know your way around and you can figure out alternatives. But it knocks people’s confidence if they can’t figure it out. If you’re a student, particularly if you’re new to the university, you’re not having the chance to necessarily ask other people because you might not know your peers yet. I think that’s really hard. If you’re a bit more established, I think sometimes people are forgetting that you may never have used these interfaces before.

Some of these are the challenges that I’ve seen, but of course, there are different challenges for different people depending on their particular online experiences beforehand. We’re always trying to cater for the common situation, not necessarily the extremes of this because we can’t cover everything in one go. I suppose that’s exactly the same in face-to-face teaching—it’s going to work for some and not for others. I think it can be more intimidating online for students to try and connect and ask the questions that they need help with. It’s a different form of interaction, and a different level of confidence is needed. To some extent, these are skills that you’re going to need in the workplace, so these challenges are also opportunities to develop those skillsets. With the change to remote learning though, this all becomes a little more complex.

MM So, as you move forward and try and deal with some of those issues, what is your most-used software or tool?

RH The most-used tool is Microsoft Teams. What I’ve found nice, is that I’ve started using it to message my students. My sense is that there’s a greater comfort with that format as opposed to e-mail, which feels more formal. Our institution went down the Microsoft route rather than using Blackboard and other similar programs. I think the updates that have happened with Teams over the last few months, things like breakout rooms, are absolutely fantastic. Blackboard Collaborate has this great function where you can write on a white slide so everyone can scribble away. I quite like that, but unfortunately that’s not there yet in Teams.

They do now have another tool, Padlet, which I’m using to facilitate a sort of whiteboard space, which I’m sure many people knew about already, but I’ve only started using it within the last couple of weeks. It was recommended to me months ago, but I never got around to testing it out, and now it’s like, oh, this is actually really cool. I can work with this. I can see this working on a whole range of things. That’s probably my newest exciting piece of software and we’ll see how that goes. A Padlet where people can write at the same time together is more inclusive than a physical whiteboard on one wall in a face-to-face classroom where maybe two people can write at the same time. Everybody has equal access to it, and then there’s a chance that somebody who perhaps wouldn’t have volunteered to contribute to the whiteboard will be willing to write online, particularly if you set it as anonymous … although there are issues if something’s anonymous, and someone wants to be cheeky. However, there are ways around that in terms of the settings, so it’s okay. You just need to maintain a certain amount of confidence that it’s going to work out no matter what happens.

MM Moving to a broader picture, what do you expect higher education might look like in the next ten years?

RH Such a big question. What do I expect, or what do I hope? These are slightly different. I think that there is really great potential for partnership working on the back of the changes due to the pandemic. One of the things that I noticed very early on in the pandemic was how much my students were caring about my welfare in terms of the context we were in. We were very much connected, because we were all experiencing the responses to COVID at the same time. I think it was very much a levelling experience. I would hope that we maintain this opportunity to recognize and break down those barriers to enhance the ways in which we can work with students and that students recognize their expertise as students in developing and enhancing higher education. Then we might be able to work on creating these knowledge and learning-based communities by having opportunities to interact with each other in different ways that aren’t necessarily so focused on the kind of “sage on the stage” model that predominates in lectures. In a way, the students were literally being brought into my home at the same time as I was being brought into theirs. It helps us recognize the power relations that are inherent in a lot of higher education structures—that we’re genuinely all in it together.

Reflection

Since recording the above in September 2020 and writing this in July 2021, in the UK we have been through two more lockdowns and are experiencing an ongoing intensive vaccination program. We are now expecting to open up fully on 19 July 2021, with no more legal public health requirements, e.g., wearing masks and socially distancing. This appears to be a high-risk strategy with rapidly rising cases of the Delta variant. This uncertain context, on the back of a year of perpetual change, reminds me of the importance of being flexible to adapting my teaching to ensure the best pedagogy in whatever format is possible at any given time.

Whilst we were able to undertake the Chester Blend up until Christmas, for the rest of my teaching in this academic year we were entirely online (lockdown 3, which prevented most HE students from attending classes in the UK ran from the end of December 2020 until the middle of May 2021). This included running a virtual field course in February 2021. Instead of spending four days in Snowdonia National Park, we worked with the Carneddau Landscape Partnership—a scheme to help people discover and care for this culturally important area—to enable our students to focus on projects investigating the impact of climate change, sustainability, tourism, and questions of access, especially around disadvantaged groups in the area, but at a distance. I missed several aspects of face-to-face teaching, particularly the informal social contact, but I have also been astounded by the way in which many of my students have embraced such a difficult situation to make excellent academic progress and achieve their potential.

In addition to the anxieties due to the pandemic, more recently students and staff (including myself) have had to face further uncertainties as financial losses on the back of lower student numbers, both domestic and international, have led several institutions across the sector to propose redundancies. This presents a bleak picture for the future of higher education. But there have also been successful Union campaigns that have been successful at either reducing or cancelling the redundancies. Students and staff have come together to demonstrate the value of individuals and/or departments and have succeeded in their goal to recognize how universities are the people that work and study in them.

When we fully emerge from the pandemic and it is possible to re-start traditional modes of delivery, I hope that we will remember what is important. It is the people, and the connections that we make with one another, between students and staff, between students and students, and staff and staff, which are the basis for academic learning communities. There is no one fixed way of teaching that works for everyone, and we should remember that the new methods have worked very well for a significant proportion of the HE sector, whilst recognizing that for others they have significantly limited the experience. The term “HyFlex” has begun to be used to refer to the simultaneous face-to-face and online delivery, enabling students and staff to teach and learn in a more personalized way. Whilst many would like to return to campus, as a sector we can no longer refuse to offer flexibility to students and staff who for a variety of reasons may not be able or willing to join them. Fundamentally, HE institutions can no longer offer a one-size fits all model. These are strange times, but by working in partnership with students and staff we can identify how best to adapt in our individual contexts to develop adaptable and inclusive learning communities.

About

Ruth Healey is an associate professor in pedagogy in higher education at the University of Chester in the United Kingdom, where she has been since 2009. In 2016, she also joined Healey HE Consultants. She has actively researched learning and teaching issues since 2004. Her pedagogic research interests include teaching for social transformations, debates, ethics, and students as partners. Ruth has written over thirty pedagogic papers, chapters, and reviews, with her work being cited over 450 times. Ruth’s article about the “power of debate” was shortlisted for the Journal of Geography in Higher Education Award for Promoting Excellence in Teaching and Learning 2012–13. She became a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2014; in 2017 she was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship (NTF); and in 2019 she was awarded one of nine inaugural fellowships of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL).

She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Geography in Higher Education (2009–) and is one of the inaugural editors of the International Journal for Students as Partners (2016–). She is chair of the Geography and Education Research Group (formally the Higher Education Research Group) of the Royal Geographical Society.