The Learning Development Project

Third space. It’s a concept most of us will have heard of before, and many of us will identify with it. But what does it actually mean in practice? For Natalia Veles, third space is a space for collaboration and the building of collaborative capital. When the focus of a project is on the learning and the people involved, rather than outputs alone, everybody wins. It involves having a global mindse...

Show notes Decolonising the curriculum is more than diversifying the authors on a reading list. It’s about the nature of knowledge, and questioning where that knowledge comes from and why, so that we can better understand the history of the paradigms within which we work and live. As such, responsibility for it lies beyond the subject, extending into third space and Learning Development. But it ne...

Show notes The term ‘third space’ is, these days, readily familiar and recognisable, the concept well rehearsed since Celia Whitchurch first applied it to those boundary-crossing ‘blended professionals’ in higher education, in 2008. However, its definition remains somewhat elusive, its apparent capaciousness also risking a loss of meaning through being too broad. Third space can therefore be disco...

Show notes A previous career in Marketing has proven useful in helping Sonia advocate for Learning Development in her institution, and in doing so for the students who benefit from it. When we learn to speak the language of strategy, and to align what we do with our colleagues’ institutional priorities, it becomes easier to integrate LD provision by presenting it as a means for achieving goals and...

Show notes In a values-driven profession like Learning Development, pedagogies and praxis must almost by necessity go beyond the activities and practices of the classroom, to embrace the socio-political structures in which those pedagogies are situated. By discussing agency (of students, but also of Learning Developers) in relation to structure – whether institutional, ideological, or both – Steve...

Show notes Writing is magical. It can take your thoughts and ideas and spread them further than you could reach alone. It can unite a group of colleagues in pursuit of a common goal to build a field. And it can mediate and strengthen a creative and rewarding friendship. Alicja and Carina share their experiences of writing together and collaborating on the production of their book, How to be a Lear...

Show notes After a career as a marine biologist, Trevor washed up in London to discover a love of teaching and an aptitude for writing, which became something of a compulsion. Just as writing has become a fundamental part of his own identity, so he is also committed to helping students develop that writerly part of their own identities too, to think holistically about what they are writing and who...

Show notes As someone who has been passionately engaged in the craft of teaching for over 20 years - and who has practised at every level from primary to higher education in that time - Virna was keen to explore how to engage an increasingly diverse student body in interesting and relevant teaching. Her journey in producing this fantastic book was triggered by the pandemic, which suddenly made ine...

Show notes We might see predominantly our own little slice of the higher education sector but something we all have in common is a concern with the knowledge ecology and how we think with students about their learning. For this, writing matters. Writing is a way of thinking and being; it is a form of dialogue, and conversation matters too - with each other, and with our students. By writing long-f...

After an eclectic career that has involved extended stays in vastly different countries, Julian Edwards is familiar with the need to find a way to integrate his experiences into his sense of who he is. He is also familiar with how easy it is for students to feel bamboozled or at the mercy of something they don’t understand, and the detrimental impact that can have on the curiosity so vital for tru...

Show notes Lee would be the first to admit he’s a tech nerd (in fact he does at least twice, in this conversation!) and has been since building his first website as a child. However, he never loses sight of the person in front of the screen, and he has never forgotten what it was like to be the only one of his school friends not to have access to a computer. That sense of inclusion has driven him...

Show notes The concept of third space is one that most Learning Developers have probably encountered at some point, whether in their reading, their writing, or how they understand their role. Celia Whitchurch has a long relationship with LD, first invited into the fold by Janette Myers in 2015. She outlines for us how the idea of third space has developed, from attempting to define what someone is...

Texts encountered on screen, printed off, or bound in books can only ever be confronted one or two pages at a time, a situation which Dave Middlebrook contends is detrimental to a complete understanding of the whole text. His solution is to take the pages of the text apart and bring them together into a single continuous scroll, allowing its entirety to be comprehended in a single look. However, a...

Although the concept of academic literacies introduced by Lea and Street in 1998 has been transformative in helping us understand the sociostructural context of student writing, it has never put forward a pedagogy. This is where the concept of genre, the signature pedagogy of EAP, can step in, marrying a concrete teaching practice to the theoretical stance of academic literacies. There is a tensio...

Writing a doctorate can be a lonely experience, but when compounded by a global pandemic, the desire for connection and community became almost overwhelming for one group of people. Their solution lay in writing together. Despite never having met before, the 10 authors of this paper decided to join forces and create something together that was far richer as a result than anything they could have p...

There is joy in writing - real joy! - in its immanence and its ‘nowness’ and its ability to collect and articulate thought. We often see writing as the means to an end, a way of conveying a message, but for Helen, writing has its own identity and its own reason for existing. As Foucault argues, what we do is who we are. We may even write a friendship into existence. Through writing, Helen encourag...

After a long and varied career teaching in a range of educational contexts with a diverse student population, Dr Amanda French is troubled by our relationship with writing. It’s a task often approached as a neutral operation but trying to teach it in this technical, mechanistic way - with all that potential for seeing it as a skill in deficit - is closing off for students that sense of writing as...

Professor Alison James, free range educator, coach and play enthusiast, describes herself as a fellow explorer and a companion to those wishing to explore play and creativity in higher education. Academic identity can often resist play because of traditional conceptions of what academia is or should be, and it can take real bravery and courage to try something new and playful. People find their wa...

In this podcast, Sunny Dhillon takes us on a long journey, through philosophy, pedagogy and personal training, in a testament to the power of metaphor. Although wellbeing sounds like an innocuous, even desirable goal for students and for higher education to pursue, Sunny’s thesis is that it is ill-advised to be well adapted to a society that is so sick. In our individualised, neoliberalised form o...

Throughout a chequered career, Professor Debbie Holley has striven to make a difference for students, with a strong thread of belonging and wellbeing running throughout all her roles. Her overriding interest in technology has led her to challenge and investigate the inequalities of the digital divide, particularly since nothing seems to have changed much in the last ten years. Disadvantaged studen...

How do you prepare students for the mysterious world of university? Sandra and Tom used their own experiences and the stories of other students to create strategies that empower learners to have a meaningful learning journey in HE. Learning Development is about demystifying practices so people can navigate them on their own terms. What Sandra and Tom want to add to that is happiness – helping stud...

How do you write when you hate writing? The answer might be to support others in writing and hope some of it comes back round to you! Kate Coulson, Head of Learning and Teaching Enhancement at the University of Northampton, is driven by the desire to show that LD is central, important and has an impact on students - for their sake, and for ours too. Impact is a broad and slippery concept, difficul...

A group of people working together can create great things. We are delighted to welcome Dr John Hilsdon, until recently Associate Professor and Head of Learning Support and Wellbeing at the University of Plymouth. John was one of the founders of ALDinHE following a successful symposium at London Metropolitan University in 2002, and in 2005 he was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship for his inva...

A brief introduction to the Learning Development Project podcast.