The Learning Development Project

Why do we have exams? The idea of the memorisation and narrative regurgitation of facts being a measure of learning is, in many ways, quite absurd. The exam system can also be excluding of students with different linguistic, cultural and social capital from those for whom the system was originally developed (nearly 200 years ago, for Oxbridge candidates, if you’re interested). We know that authent...

When is ‘transparency’ not transparent? When it comes in the form of policy that carries different levels of risk for staff and students. For Chahna Gonsalves, the biggest issue with institutional AI policies is that it adds what she terms ‘interpretive load’ to students: the idea that they have to weigh up the risk of declaring their uses of generative AI in an environment that doesn’t adequately...

Student-staff partnerships (SSPs) offer multiple benefits to all participants. While we might most often think about the pedagogic, employability or experience gains for students, SSPs can also help staff think through various issues from new perspectives, for example the potential gains brought by technology enhanced learning and AI advances and developments. There are a healthy set of challenges...

Remember when you started as a Learning Developer? What it was like to welcome a student into a tutorial for the first time, and stand in front of your first class ready to run a workshop? Do you remember what it felt like to flounder? For Joy Igiebor, that feeling of floundering and unknowing, and the questions it prompted – who am I as an LD? what does the job mean? – came to seem like a rite of...

We talk about wanting to empower our students, but what does that really mean? For Laura Dyer, it means that we are the ones holding the power and we extend it to our students – whereas what we could and should be doing instead is helping students to tap into the power that they already have. This makes power such an important outcome of the humanistic pedagogy model she has developed, which bring...

All learning is social, but not all learning is social learning. For Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, the distinction between the two lies in three crucial factors: the pursuit of learning to make a difference; the engagement of uncertainty; and the paying of attention to what might emerge. Learning then becomes embodied, the engagement of the whole person in their world and a willingness to sh...

What has philosophy got to do with learning development? And why should learning development be concerned with philosophy? For Jason Eyre – indeed, for all philosophers – philosophy gives us new ways to think about things and new concepts we can work with, to understand not necessarily the answer to a question (such as, What is LD?) but alternative ways we can engage with that question. Jason (wit...

Belonging is one of those abstract concepts that seems to be something whose meaning we can all relatively easily grasp, but when we come to look at it more closely, actually appears to be much more slippery and elusive. Belonging itself is an objective fact about an individual’s membership of a group or community. A sense of belonging – that mysterious element that occupies us in this conversatio...

How do we make the body not only our partner in learning, but our friend? And why would we even want to? The mind-body dualism espoused by Descartes in the 17th century continues to influence our thinking today, with the body – or more specifically, the emotions it houses – often represented as an obstacle to rational thought and therefore its enemy. This is little more than an enduring misogyny t...

Learning does not happen without attention. But in a world so full of distractions, how can we ensure our students are paying attention? For Professor James Lang, the answer lies in deliberating cultivating attention in our students, rather than trying to limit distractions. And how do we do that? Think about what makes you pay attention. How do you help yourself focus? How, then, can you create t...

The eruption of generative AI into higher education prompted many educators, worried about the integrity of their courses (and the personal integrity of their students), to redesign their assessments, rejecting essays and other long-form pieces of writing in favour of ‘AI-proof’ reflective pieces or so-called authentic assessment formats instead. Lily Abadal, in contrast, believes not only that wr...

We’ve been thinking about the connections between professional identity and writing in the context of third space for a few years now, and it seems ever more pertinent in these times of uncertainty, transition and change. We see colleagues change roles or leave academia, not always of their own volition, and we experience it ourselves. With change inevitably comes loss, but some of the things we h...

Sandra's secrets of collaboration: Openness to the experience and what it brings Recognition of our human nature and the need for being with other We can - and must? - make time and space for each other. Hold onto the in-between spaces where we can come together; create meetings without agendas, where things can emerge. Collaboration is more than simply working with others. It’s more, even, th...

What matters to us and what do we value? These are two key questions posed by Karen Gravett as she explores ideas around relational pedagogies and mattering and how they can contribute to creating a more caring university. In a neoliberal HE context laden with metrics-driven performativity, the call to care can feel like another layer of emotional labour, one disproportionately carried by women. I...

What does it mean to liberate learning? Who is doing the liberating, and what do we think someone being liberated from? For Becky Lindner and Martin Compton, the answer to the first question is essentially to find, nurture, and celebrate the inherent joy of learning and teaching. For fifty years (at least), as they point out, we have been having these conversations about rekindling joy and love of...

As an American transplanted as a young adult to the UK, Jennie Blake knows a lot about what it means to belong somewhere. For her, belonging is an action: it is about having the agency to make choices, and for that to be realised, belonging cannot be something that we do for students; it must be enabled in all of our systems, structures and processes, so that we can recognise it by its presence an...

Lucy’s interests in pedagogy have expanded over the last couple of years to draw AI into her work on learning design. Using AI in the classroom, in an ethical and responsible way, with learners with diverse needs and backgrounds, can level the playing field and support learners in doing things and thinking in ways that might not otherwise be available to them. For learning design to be thoughtful...

At the moment, there is no evidence that generative AI is a transformative tool for higher education. Making something more efficient is not the same as being better for learners or learning, and efficiency is not transformation. If we come from a critical perspective, focused on social justice and care, rather than a neoliberal one, then AI currently has little to offer. But it is also important...

Academic Literacies (AL) is an approach to teaching and supporting learning that seems to be integral to Learning Development - but should it be? Apart from the focus of its purported transformational value on seeing and being but not doing, leaving it thin on practical pedagogical value, it bundles up tensions and contradictions that are difficult – some might say impossible – to reconcile. Rathe...

Student engagement is complex and multifaceted. Ten years ago it meant engaging the student voice. Since then it’s become much more about attendance, attention, motivation, presence on campus, belonging, engagement with the curriculum, and more; ‘student engagement’ covers all of these, so it’s important for us to be clear what we mean when we talk about student engagement. What’s already clear is...

‘I’m a perfectionist’ is often a glib response given in job interviews when we’re asked to identify a weakness. We offer it up modestly, sure that it will be received as intended: a desirable trait, one showing dedication, commitment, and high quality. Yet what if that were not true? What if, in fact, perfectionism was rigid, unattainable, and damaging? Jane explains that the internal critical dia...

Critical thinking is one of those concepts that we teach and use with students, but Emily Danvers makes clear that it is actually much more complex, contextual and contingent than it might first appear. It’s a practice of asking deliberate questions about knowledge and claims to truth, and it can very much depend on who you are, what you’re thinking about, and why. It also involves a type of confi...

The intensifying neoliberalisation of HE over the past few decades is all part of a long trend of universities producing who and what the dominant powers in society wish, according to Chomsky. However, the university has always been a contested space with emancipatory possibilities existing alongside domination and oppression. LD, as part of higher education, is also part of that contested space,...

Third space, while rightly celebrated as a vital engine for collaboration in higher education, brings with it also the risk of becoming no space at all. Although working in the margins and between the cracks can bolster change and act as a point of resistance, there is also a danger of retreat, defence, and invisibility. Julie contends that it is our role as third space professionals to push into...

Race is missing from Learning Development, but it is inescapably present in our lives and in the lives of our students. Why, then, this disconnect? Ryan’s proposal for a pedagogy of race consciousness (PRC) is a way for us to wake up to the realities of racial difference, to allow students the opportunity to not just bring their lived experiences into the classroom, but to value them. PRC, with it...