More on ECER 2010

Jocelyn Wishart's overview of ECER below allows me to take different approach and with my allowance of 400 words (writing concisely for blogs is tough!) I have picked out 3 papers to discuss in more detail (abstracts available on the ECER website).

On the first morning I went to a paper by Len Cairns (Monash University) and Margaret Malloch (UEL) on workplace learning and cultural change. They argued that workplace learning needs to move on from the narrow consideration of the development of workers' competence to considerations of capability. Working in the Vocational Education and Training sector they described their research on the three dimensional learner - including dimensions of Lifelong, Lifewide and Lifedeep. They made a good case for considering the learner along these dimensions to work towards avoiding a dichotomy of 1) a few narrowly but deeply skilled workers and 2) a great many shallowly skilled workers.

Rosemary Deem of Royal Holloway University of London gave a paper titled 'Cultural Change, Change Agents, Government Reform and Isomorphism in UK Universities: The Growth Of Leaderism?' Based on 30 interviews in 2007 with senior management teams (SMTs) in 6 UK universities (with some repeat interviews the following year) Deem found some evidence of leaderism (whereby a charismatic leader focuses on re-imagining the public service user as a consumer or co-producer (O'Reilly & Read, 2010). However, the interviews also showed that 'new managerialism' amongst SMTs was also still evident. This multi-layered presentation (of which I have only mentioned a fraction) was concluded with a discussion of organisational isomorphism which although appeared to be encouraged by policies (coercive) & fashion (normative) was not clearly evident in the UK HEIs studied here.

It was a great please to attend the talk by Carol Taylor of Sheffield Hallam University - I had read about some of her work in a recent ESCalate newsletter article in which she discussed the use the videonarratives to promote doctoral students’ reflexivity on their doctoral journeys (an ESCalate funded project). At ECER, Carol explored the ethics of student participation in the production of academic knowledge. The case studies she presented really illustrated some of the dilemmas which can surface when engaging in 'students as researchers' work.

On the final morning I presented the work I'm doing as part of a team for the Teaching International Students project. I've written a separate report for this (focusing especially on papers relevant to the internationalisation of HE) which should be available later this month via the TIS Newsletter; and the slides, abstract & photos are available here.