Participatory Academic Communities

– connectedness, openness and academic citizenship at the future

university beyond the campus

Rikke Toft Nørgård, Assistant professor, PhDJanus Holst Aaen, PhD Fellow

Center for Teaching Development and Digital Media,Aarhus University, Denmark

Vignette: Participatory Academic Communities

Theme of the talk

This seminar revolves around research and developmental work carried out at Aarhus University around

‘the future university,’ ‘academic citizenship’ and ‘academic virtues for genuine participation in higher education’ coming together under the concept of ‘participatory academic communities.’

A call for a future university grounded in human dignity

A call for a future university grounded in human dignity

Because, universities emanates certain values, calls for certain forms of participation and speaks to us in a certain ‘voice’ (Buchanan, 2006; Nixon, 2008).

Because ‘We should consider what we mean by human dignity and how all of the products that we make either succeed or fail to support and advance human dignity’ (Buchanan, 2006, p.302).

Universities, courses and educational activities as virtuous atmospheres

Universities, courses and educational activities as virtuous atmospheres

The university itself is a force of being, and by dwelling there we become “absorbed” into this being. (Heidegger, 2000)

“[T]he physical resources of the institution, the buildings in which they are held, and the land on which they are built are (…) critical to institutional success.” (Temple, 2014a, p.xxi).

For people to be able to dwell within the university, course or educational activity and not merely occupy its space, they must be ‘enabled’ to dwell there; to have access to resources, be supported, feel encouraged in their projects, and be drawn into worthwhile and collaborative connections (Macfarlane, 2012, p.96ff.)

Academic citizenship and Participatory Academic Communities: being a citizen and participating in society in academic

ways

ACADEMIC CITIZEN

SOCIETY

UNIVERSITY

Academic citizenship and Participatory Academic Communities: being a citizen and participating in society in academic

waysOur notion of academic citizenship are building on the description of the virtuous academic citizen as outlined by Jon Nixon (2008) and Bruce Macfarlane (2007), emphasizing virtues such as engagement, care, loyalty, collegiality, and benevolence, which implies a mutual integration and dialogue (Freire, 1974) between university, academics, and society.

Value-based vision-driven Participatory Academic Communities to support Academic Citizenship at the future

university

Value-based vision-driven Participatory Academic Communities to support Academic Citizenship at the future

university“To be without a place of one’s own – persona non locata – is to be almost non-existent, as studies of the homeless imply” (Gieryn, 2000, p.482)As such, academic citizenship is not something that is acquired at a general level, but a virtue that emerges from the virtuous university offering public engagements in the university and academic engagements in society– a participatory academic community where empathy, dialogue, autonomy, commitment and connectedness prevail

Participatory Academic Communities: A future virtuous university beyond the

campus

Participatory Academic Communities: A future virtuous university beyond the

campusThis possible schism emerges from the fact that educational institutions today are often seen as more or less abstract and secluded spaces withdrawn from the surrounding world, entailing the call for more market-oriented and commodified universities, as critically discussed by Barnett (2011; 2013), Solberg and Hansen (2015), Biesta (2006; 2013) and Filippakou and Williams (2015).

Practicing Participatory Academic Communities

Practicing Participatory Academic Communities

Participatory academic communities was developed as a concept through an iterative design and research process aiming for engagement, empowerment and enterprising in education through transformative and transgressive interactions and experiences of ‘educators’ and ‘educatees’ (terms from Freire, 1974).

Participatory academic communities aim at merging the projects of people, society and institution through value-based vision-driven interactions of educators and educates in the form of open, dialogical and democratic engagements between people, society and educational institutions.

Five core values for Participatory Academic Communities

Empathy:Key concepts: Compassion (Barnett, 2011), care (Dall’Alba, 2012), empathic design (Gagnon and Côté, 2014) Dialogue:Key concepts: integration (Freire, 1974), openness (Thestrup and Dalsgaard, in press), learning through collaboration (Laurillard, 2012), Autonomy:Key concepts: Empowerment (Freire), citizenship (Macfarlane 2007) Commitment:Key concepts: Community (McMillan & Chavis, 1986), engagement, participation (Aaen & Nørgaard under publication).Inquiry:Key concepts: Critical consciousness (Freire, 1974), Academic Citizenship (Macfarlane 2007)

Our transdisciplinary approach to PAC

A certain enactment of PAC

Media and PACA break with the tendency within the field of EdTech research to emphasise technological developments over pedagogy (Oliver, 2011) A turn away from use of ICT in education as predominantly based on transmission of knowledge (eg. xmoocs, e-learning, screencasts and learning management systems)(Dalsgaard, 2009)

Media and PACWe needed a media ecology that supported contact, presence, participation, collaboration and academic citizenship

Pre-media: distance & solipsism 1.0Transmission media/tech: distance 2.0, poor remediation

(watered down classroom experience) PAC media/tech: beyond remediation, overcoming

distance and solipsism through potentials of new media use, like perpetual contact (Aakhus & Katz, 2002), ubiquitous Internet (Aaen & Dalsgaard, forthcoming) collaboration and production tools (Attwell 2007)), social media (Ito et al., 2010), Openness (Dalsgaard & Thestrup, in press) and new communication forms (Aaen & Dalsgaard, in press)

Media Ecology

(Ito et al., 2010)

Media Ecology

The educatees’ media use:- self-governed- emphasized dialogue over transmission- emphasized co-design of multilayered media

communication over fixed unilateral ‘learning management systems’

- to a great extent characterized by openness and collaboration.

Shadowy siblings

Educational designers must acknowledge to and embrace the shadowy siblings emerging from the application of their core values. For every idealistic, positive and “cheerful” virtue for academic knowing and practice (Nixon, 2008), a number of entangled, distorted and “shadowy” sensations, experiences and values mirror it (Bengtsen and Barnett, 2015).

There is a dialectic relationship between core values and shadowy siblings that gradually appears when listening to the the voices of the educatees.

Shadowy siblings

Shadowy siblings

The “shadowy side” of education (Bengtsen and Barnett, 2015 in press; Bengtsen and Nørgård 2014) must be embraced as an ever-present and powerful counterpart to the guiding values of any kind of educational activity – including participatory academic communities.

Shadowy siblings

FutureMaking:PAC as a new

empathic design pedagogyfor the future university

A 6 point manifesto forPAC as a new empathic design

pedagogy1. PAC is to practice education as something collective, connected, dialogical, and empathic.

2. To teach for PAC we cannot extend these values to them, we need to practice what we preach, both on a professional and institutional level. 3. PAC is to invite for participation in education through empathic design pedagogy where:

“To achieve [the future university], we have to understand each other. We have to listen and see the points of view of people who are committing themselves to their everyday life [...] empathy in design implies to learn to be empathic towards the users [as institution, academics, and society], to empathically communicate insights from users to the design team and to develop empathic teamwork within multidisciplinary context” (Gagnon & Côté, 2014 p. 1-3).

A 6 point manifesto forPAC as a new empathic design

pedagogy4. In PAC knowledge is assessed, analyzed and used in the pursuit of what design thinking calls ‘intentional change in an unpredictable world’ (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012), adopting an interventionist proactive and future-oriented approach to institutions, courses, and educational activities aimed at education the day after tomorrow5. PAC is to approach education as a ‘design practice.’ In this way, educational practice and research shifts from the paradigms of deductive and inductive reasoning towards abductive thinking about educational designs as ‘envisioning possible futures’ (Brandt & Binder, 2007) inside and outside institutions.6. In PAC academics critically reflect on how institutions, courses and educational activities are conceptualized and how that affect our responses to these designs. These designs can play a nurturing role for the academics, creating a sense of belonging to a shared endeavor that can change academics perception of the nature of their academic identity, practice and citizenship (Laurillard, 2012).

Future PAC workPAC as a new empathic design pedagogy?

Is Particpatory Academic Communities important in HE?

Is Academic Citizenship important in HE?

Collaboration, connectedness and citizenship as core values for the future university?

Universities, courses and educational activities as virtuous atmospheres?

How to best move this further? how best to investigate it? how to best substantiate it?

Rikke Toft Nørgård: rtoft@tdm.au.dkJanus Aaen: jhaaen@tdm.au.dk

ReferencesAaen, J. & Dalsgaard, C. (forthcoming).Expanding the context for learning: How

does the ubiquitous internet change the conditions for education? First Monday

Aaen, J. & Dalsgaard, C. (in press). Student Facebook groups as a third space: Between social life and school work. Learning Media & Technology

Aaen, J.H. & Nørgård, R.T. (2015, in press). Participatory Academic Communities. A transdiciplinary perspective on participation in education beyond the institution. To appear in Conjunctions.

Aakhus, M. A., & Katz, J. E. (2002). Perpetual Contact. Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

Attwell, G. (2007). Personal Learning Environments - the future of eLearning? eLearning Papers, 2.

Barnett, R. (2015b). In Search of a Public: Higher Education in a Global Age. In Filippakou, O. & Williams, G. (Eds.). Higher Education As a Public Good. Critical Perspectives on Theory, Policy and Practice. New York: Peter Lang

Barnett, R. (2013). Imagining the University. London & New York: RoutledgeBarnett, R. (2011). Being a University. London & New York: RoutledgeBengtsen, S. & Barnett, R. (in press). Confronting the Dark Side of Higher

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References

ReferencesGagnon, C. and Côté, V. (2014). Learning from Others – a five-year experience on

teaching empathic design. in Lim, Y. et al (eds.) Proceedings of DRS2014: Design’s Big Debates, Design Research Society Biennial International Conference 16-19 June 2014, Umeå Sweden ,p. 113-127

Gieryn, T.F. (2000). A Space for Place in Sociology. In Annual Review of Sociology, 26 (pp. 463-496)

Heidegger, M. (2000). Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell

Ito, M. et al (2010). Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. MIT Press.

Laurillard, D. (2012) Teaching as a Design Science – building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology. London: Routledge.

Macfarlane, B. (2012). Intellectual Leadership in Higher Education. Renewing the Role of the University Professor. London & New York: Routledge

Macfarlane, B. (2007). The Academic Citizen: The Virtue of Service in University Life. London & New York: Routledge

Nelson, H. G. & Stolterman, E. (2012). The design way – intentional change in an unpredictable world. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

ReferencesNixon, J. (2008). Towards the Virtuous University. The Moral Bases of Academic

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Citizenship. A call for the placeful university.” Forthcoming special Issue of Journal of the Higher Education Research And Development

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