This blog post is not about Toby Young

Academic twitter in the UK got very angry on New Years Day. The Guardian broke the story, just after midnight, that Toby Young had been appointed to the Board of the new Office for Students, the HE regulator in England. People were very angry indeed, and quite rightly so, and a lot of digital ink has been spilled. My main thought was that the graun had rather landed on a good way of driving traffic to their website on a dull Bank Holiday Monday.

This might seem a bit of a snarky thought – TY’s appointment is a bad decision – but it does also reflect that, outside of academia, I can’t imagine anyone really gives a shit who has been appointed to the Board of the OfS. Or even that the OfS has replaced the regulatory role of HEFCE and the Privy Council.

I landed on this thought after repeated conversations I had over the Christmas break with non-academic family and friends which started with “so when are you back at work?” and occasionally the blunt “so when are the students back?”. In answer to the first, it was “the 3rd January, and semester starts on the 15th"; the answer to the second was the reverse of that. Having been a lecturer seven years now, I’m getting used to patiently answering this question.

In polite conversation I sometimes almost hate being asked what I do – I usually just say I work at the University of Stirling. I think because of the middle-class circles I am in, this then leads onto this conversation:

“What do you do?”

“I’m a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy.”

“What’s social policy?”

“That’s a good question, don’t ask me!”

“What do you teach?”

(precis of syllabus of second year module, while hoping the conversation ends) etc.

Sometimes the conversation will drift onto my research. Then I’m torn between pinning the poor soul in the corner while I run through my elevator pitch for my next project, or just summarising it as “I’m interested in why we have poor neighbourhoods and rich neighbourhoods”. I can easily end up having to summarise how research funding in the UK works.

I can see why academics socialise with other academics, as it shortcuts a lot of this.

My mum was a social worker, and so she used to dread conversations about her work for similar reasons. For a while she worked in Bradford Council’s office in Manningham. If someone asked her where she worked she would just reply “Lumb Lane”. It was then the location of the red light district, so that would shut down this conversation completely.

The variation on this conversation I find most interesting, and tread warily around, is when people who are quite professional clearly have absolutely no idea what being an academic entails. You don’t want to patronise, but then you don’t want to end up intellectualising either.

Particularly over the summer, academic public reaction to the common comment “oh, are you off for the summer then” is rage. I used to be like that. Now I just politely explain that I take annual leave like anyone else and say where I’m planning on going on holiday.

To get to the point. I think there is quite a lot of snobbery in this response that we need to be aware of, and I will get this blog post back to TY, I promise. Even in these days of mass participation in higher education, the majority of people in the UK have absolutely no experience of higher education except for the fact it’s a big building in their city or town. Not many people will actually no any academics, and even if you have had experience of HE as an undergraduate or even postgraduate taught student, the chances are you will have no idea what academics actually do.

So, when you have no idea about something, what do you do – you reach for something you do know about: your education to-date. Which has been at schools. And school teachers do have most of the school holidays as their holidays. It’s not that big a leap of logic to presume that your teachers when you are an adult live fairly similar lives to your teachers when you were a kid. In fact to presume otherwise would be the greater leap of logic.

I told you I’d get this back to TY.

And, I think this is what we’re quite bad at remembering when things like the TY appointment happen. Yes, it is bad, but it’s particularly bad for us as academics. For most people in the UK, it is completely inconsequential. Higher Education is inconsequential for most people in the UK. This is why Michael Gove can get away with dismissing the “experts”. This is partly one of the reasons, I would suggest, that we seem to be losing the battle for our relevance against some pretty ferocious attacks. My concern has always been that focusing on specific issues like tuition fees, or the appointment of TY, we miss the bigger picture of “reducing barriers to entry to new actors in the market”, and reducing the barriers to exit, that are a key part of these reforms.

So, if you’re an academic reading this, next time someone asks you if you’re off for the summer, can I suggest that you smile and politely explain that you’ll be off on leave and recall that the person asking does not know. Can we ensure that what we do is comprehensible to a wider audience so that we don’t have to rely on liberal, middle-class Guardian-readers as our allies? For me, this is what the radical proposition of coproducing our universities should be about. Being universities in new contexts with diverse communities.

What do we actually do when we do impact?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (well, when we had a UK Government that was thinking about localism and “The Big Society”) the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme funded three projects, along with the UK Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), to see how the research the programme had invested in so far could help policy. Skip forward a year and the teams involved in doing these reviews concluded that they had not, exactly, gone to plan. So, I ended up joining them on a project called Translation Across Borders to try and find out why.

Well, I have a paper out based on this project in Evidence & Policy. I’ll attempt to summarise it here.

Now, there is absolutely oodles of research out there, across numerous disciplines, on how and why policy-makers use evidence in their decisions, and the barriers to this. The unique value-added of this project was that it was co-produced with a civil servant who was actually involved in policy-making. Our co-author, Robert Rutherfoord, is a Principal Social Research at DCLG, and did fieldwork with me.

My role was to interview all the academics who had participated in producing the original policy reviews, with Robert, and find out what they had done and the barriers they found in taking their evidence into a policy-making environment. Our literature review found that doing this is remarkably rare – us academics seem to love asking policy-makers what they think the barriers are, and how they use evidence, but we don’t ask us academics what we think the barriers are. This is all the more surprising given all the wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding the Research Excellence Framework’s measurement of socio-economic impact since 2013.

What did we find? In the interpretive approach we took to analysing the data, three things stood out. Firstly, as academics, we construct our identities as biographies (like everyone else on the planet). These are key meaning-making devices for us and help situate us, and our practices in the here-and-now. Secondly, these biographies are strongly linked to disciplinary identities. Unsurprisingly, some disciplines – like policy studies – more commonly do work with policy-makers, or attempt to affect change in policy, than other disciplines. This is a bit of a “no shit, Sherlock” finding, but surprisingly it is not dealt with a lot in the literature, perhaps because the need for diverse disciplines to affect policy-making has only emerged in the last decade and they are only just beginning to self-reflect. On this count, I find the delightfully naïve debates in mainstream political science interesting when you compare them to policy studies, who have been concerning themselves with this issue for the last 70 years. The final insight was that institutional pressures, particularly the demand to produce 4* journal articles for the REF means that the sorts of activities that are recognised to help deliver “impact” – developing working relationships with policy-makers and networks of influence – are not prioritised or encouraged within internal performance management systems.

Now, a lot of this will come as no surprise to many academics. Indeed it didn’t necessarily come as a surprise to us. What did come as a surprise to us, and why this research is important, was that this our civil servants we were co-producing with did not know about much of this, particularly things like the impact of the REF on behaviour and incentive structures. Therefore, our recommendation as to what should be done better is a bit different to most other similar projects. Whereas a lot of “toolkits” and other training focused on getting academic evidence into policy-making focuses on “knowing your audience”, from a variety of different perspectives, we instead focused on the need for academics to know themselves better. Because, basically, academics are weird. We behave in a lot of ways that are completely alien to those outwith academia. And we need to pause and think about this every now and then. And also, policy-makers who want to work with academics would do well just to spend a short amount of time learning about what makes them tick, and understanding that there is diversity in what academics do, and how they do it.

To this end we did create some tools from this project to try and make this process a bit easier. One of these is some fun “academic archetype” cards that can be used to prompt reflection, and also help policy-makers understand academics a bit better. If you want to use these, please drop me an email, and this can be arranged. I’ll be presenting them at a “Research Bite” seminar in the University of Stirling Library Enterprise Zone on 2 August at 12:30. I’ll also probably bring them out at a session at the Australian National University on 11 October at 13:00, and possibly when I’m at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford from the 13 November for a week.

We’re just organising Gold OA or Green OA for the paper, but in the meantime drop me an email if you want a copy and you don’t subscribe to E&P.

Park Run and Common Pool Resources

As a tri-afflete I run. Or, I ran. I’ve currently got problems with my ITB at the moment, so I’m not running as much as I’d like to. Although from that Wikipedia article, I think I’ve worked out why (I’m a pigeon-toed cyclist). Anyway, among the running community in the UK the decision of the Stoke Gifford Parish Council to charge their local Park Run for use of a park has caused a bit of a furore – a petition has currently reached 20,000 signatures. From a governance perspective, I find this fascinating.

Let’s start up with what I don’t know about this particular case:

•  It’s not clear from the reporting if there is an issue of conflict, with other users of the park regularly feeling they cannot use this particular park on a Saturday morning because it is over-run with runners (pun not intended).
•  I don’t know the population of the village concerned, or whether the Park Run is a lot of incomers.
•  I do not know if the Parish Council considered increasing their precept on the Council Tax to pay for further maintenance of the park concerned.

What I do know is this – it appears to be a classic case of the difficulty in managing a Common Pool Resource. In economics, a Common Pool Resource is one where you can’t easily stop people using it (it’s non-excludable) but where people using the resource deplete it until it cannot be used by anyone (it’s rivalrous). In this case the park is a Common Pool Resource because the Parish Council couldn't stop Park Run in the first place (it's non-excludable) and it create rivalry in two way: you can't easily share a path with hundreds of runners; and all those stomping feet will create wear-and-tear. This is different to an apple (a private good) which is excludable, no one else can eat it at the same time as you, and once you have eaten it, it has gone (it’s rivalrous); or street lighting (a public good) which is non-excludable (my A-Level economics teacher used to have a great skit on coin-operated street lights) and non-rivalrous, unless someone casts a particularly large shadow.

Neo-classical economics suggests that unless common pool resources are brought into the market (made excludable in some way), or are managed by bureaucracies, then the natural outcome will be the tragedy of the commons: every man (I use the pronoun purposefully) will use up the resource to their maximum extent which will mean it is eventually depleted for everyone. It sounds like this is what Stoke Gifford Parish Council believed was happening here. The Park Run was using the resource and it was being depleted to the detriment of everyone. Therefore a market solution was to make them pay.

The only woman to ever win the Nobel Prize for economics, the wonderful Elinor Ostrom, through actual empirical research, not fancy econometric modelling, basically said the neo-classical argument was rubbish. There were thousands of examples across the world where people had got together to manage common pool resources themselves. Close-knit webs of social ties meant that people trusted each other to use just enough of the resource. It also meant people were aware of the needs of others, so that if they over-used the resource then other people would suffer. Management of such resources can be co-produced by communities and government actors.

It sounds like the organisers of this Park Run wanted to get something like this going. The BBC reporting states:

“Geoff Keogh, a Parkrun organiser, told the meeting he did not believe the run had a significant impact on the park, but volunteers would be willing to undertake maintenance activities or litter picks "as a way of offsetting whatever the perceived costs might be to the council".”

The organisers wanted to give a bit, and ensure their event was still accessible, and regain the trust of the Parish Council. But the Parish Council view is that “it was "unfair" to expect non-running residents to pay for path upkeep”.

The fact that “fairness” has been thrown into the argument does suggest that a level of trust has broken down in this case. It also highlights that where there are difference in culture – in the case of my own research I’m interested in social class dynamics – getting collaborative management of common pool resources going can be very difficult. In this case, it would be really good if the District Council could come in and mediate, but I doubt now that they have the resources – as Helen Sullivan commented, such “Big Society” action to deliver collaborative management actually requires a “Big State”.  

Anyway, I don’t have any solutions for the residents of Little Stoke, or those runners. But it’s a fascinating case, and I hope someone is planning some doctoral research on it. What is more, as local authority budgets get cut more and more and basic maintenance becomes a luxury, I think we are going to see many more example of such battles of common pool resources. 

Reflections on Teaching Practice - Student-led Learning

Reflections on teaching practice – student-led learning

In a previous post on here I reflected on how different it was going from small(ish) classroom-based teaching at Heriot-Watt to mega-teaching at Stirling. In this post I want to reflect on my experience of something quite the opposite – last semester I dabbled in student-led learning with a module of 14 students who were in their honours years (third and fourth years).

The module was called Governance and Society and it is ordinarily convened by a colleague who was on research leave. I offered to convene it when I started at Stirling to fill a gap and because I felt reasonably comfortable delivering a module on governance. The time spent wrapping up a research project and running my gigantic module in autumn semester meant I’d had very little time to prepare for running the module, but I knew I would do something along the lines of student-led learning as this was a teaching style I was comfortable with and it would meet the learning outcomes.

The teaching style I’d experienced at Heriot-Watt and that I implemented myself there because I realised it worked, used a lot of techniques that are seen as “trendy” and new, such as the flipped classroom, as just good, interesting teaching. Also, on reflection, I realised that the supervision/tutorial system of Oxbridge, that I had such an interesting experience of, is essentially student-led learning to the max.

I ran the module by doing a deal with the students. They chose three topics from a list I had prepared (I said they could chose others if they wanted) and then they would work in groups to deliver teaching materials in the final three weeks of semester for their colleagues. If they produced good quality materials then I would guarantee that they would not fail the exam – I would give them 40% just for writing their name and leaving the room (I did this on the basis that they were likely to get 60%+ on the question for the topic they had researched anyway, so would probably not get under 40% for the whole exam). In the end they accepted the deal and chose: co-production and the governance of public services; the governance challenges of wind farm developments; and Bourdieu, Putnam, social capital and governance.

For the first eight weeks of semester I led the teaching giving students a basic grasp of ideas around governance, such as governance as a descriptive term (i.e. the rise of the network society) and governance as a normative concept (something governments should do instead of governing). I broke this up with a really interesting trip to Stirling Council to hear their Community Planning manager talk about how they do governance and also brought in a colleague who has decades of experience on governing boards and committees, including an NHS board, who spoke about “good governance” and accountability.

I really wanted the students to get a good grasp of theoretical approaches to power within the module. One of the key parts of this was spending an entire two hour class discussing the second edition of Luke’s Power: A Radical View. It was a book I had not read for a long time and wanted to revisit it. Revisiting with the small group of students was a brilliant, enlightening process for all concerned. It is a difficult book, and the second section of the second edition adds a lot of theoretical meat onto the previous discussion and gets into some challenging discussions on the ontology and epistemology of power. Overall, it worked brilliantly – the students stepped up to the mark.

This section of teaching gave the students the basis for their coursework essays. The student-led teaching formed the basis of the exam. I want to focus on the co-production group as they taught me the most about teaching and learning. In the first week all groups took a very formal approach and basically did a 50 minute presentation of their work to date. I gave each group feedback verbally in class and online through the VLE. The following week the co-production group picked up every point I’d made the previous week and answered the comments through their presentation – it was a case of “you say jump, I say how high”. In the feedback to the group I asked them “were they co-producing?” and “how could they co-produce the teaching in the final session”.

In the end they did co-produce the final class by highlighting how student-led teaching was, in effect, co-production and co-producing a discussion about this. Rather wonderfully it started off as a bit of a love-in as to how much they’d enjoyed the module, but it also worked brilliantly in delivering learning. We covered key issues in co-production theory: inequalities, power, professional knowledge and expertise, the opportunities for transformation. It was great stuff.

Ultimately the student attainment was good – not spectacular, but I imagine the small group were more engaged and therefore stretched themselves more than if I had used standard broadcast techniques of teaching. As one of the students said though, they probably put more work into the module than they had in any module in their studies (these were mainly third and fourth years) and they really enjoyed it. They accepted the responsibility for their own teaching and learning. And I got fantastic feedback.

I don’t know if I’d do it again for this sort of module, but I’ll definitely learn lessons from the experience and try and encourage more moments of student-led collaborative learning within my teaching. I’m looking after another module this coming spring semester and am going to start that with a collaborative problem-definition world-café, for example. And it’s interesting, it probably didn’t save me that much academic labour, it just shifted a lot of that to a different time – commenting after a class using the VLE, rather than producing PowerPoints before a class. But, overall I’m glad I carried out this little experiment with my wonderful honours students. 

Contemporary coproduction

Back in March - 18 March to be precise - thank you very much to the generous support of my School, my research group, Governance, Participation and Inclusion, hosted a seminar on coproduction. The seminar was a short full-day and, recognising that coproduction is very much the "buzzword" of the moment in public service reform, it aimed to take a critical stance towards exploring coproduction. I hoped to record the presentations and make them available online, but the tech didn't work on the day, so I've pulled together this, and Stuart Muirhead of IRISS has also done this excellent summary for their blog.

The day started off with an excellent presentation by Catherine Needham of the University of Birmingham, who discussed how we might evaluate coproduction (slides here [pdf]), recognising that traditional "gold standard" methods of evaluation (RCTs etc.) might be beyond the reach of small coproduced activities and do not fit into the ethos of coproduction. Tony Bovaird then followed with his thoughts on coproduction from extensive experience of public service transformation (slides here). We then had three short presentations on the theory of coproduction (Richard Simmons, University of Stirling), the policy of coproduction (Julie Christie, University of Stirling) and lastly Julia Fitzpatrick from Horizon Housing Association discussing the practice of coproduction.

After lunch we took our coffee into a Conversation cafe. Stuart put his notes on his blog post above, three other scribes also kindly sent me their notes after the event - available as pdfs here, here and here.

After this we broke into different activities. I joined a fascinating session on coproducing professional learning led by Unity, the group that the School of Applied Social Science at Stirling leads to bring in service-user experience to improve learning in social work. Other people played with Lego (see the photo on Stuart's blog post). Katherine Phipps, University of Stirling, also led a group coproducing some knitting (including teaching a few people how to knit) in response to Brooks Newmark's comment when he was Minister for Civil Society  "the important thing charities should be doing is sticking to their knitting and doing the best they can to promote their agenda, which should be about helping others". This was the end result:

I got in a bit of trouble for a foul-mouthed rant in the middle of the seminar when I decried the poor engagement of professionals in coproduction and the lack of realisation of what it really means to renegotiate one's professional role when coproducing something. Picking up on this, the theme of the event was to move the seminar itself towards coproduction, and away from the broadcast-receive model of academic practice as the day went out. Interestingly, in the feedback I got back after the event this is the bit of the day that the participants felt was least useful. And with that thought I shall leave you. 

And there's a few more photos taken by my colleague Vikki McCall in this Flickr album.