Stranger in a strange land, or notes from a dispersed university
Jo Tait, The Open University, UK
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 31st Annual Conference, 3-5 July 2001, University of East London
A three-year participative research project explored the development 'from competence to excellence' of groups of part-time tutors in the UK Open University (OU), providing the research background to this paper (Coats and Tait, forthcoming). Unusually privileged by internal funding, and not driven by measured and specific outcomes for identified clients, the research used conversational narratives and emergent processes to illuminate practices of teaching and learning in the OU.
This paper focuses on the 'production' of adult learning in a distance learning institution. The bigger story that underpins six story-systems from different perspectives tells how the activities of course production can tend to lose touch with concerns about the student. You are invited to notice this and to wonder, as you read, how a learner might connect with each sub-story. But the story is about more than geographical distance between production and learning. The learner's need to participate in making sense of their course is increasingly central to measures of quality in universities so the story directs itself towards resolution by briefly describing an activity that aims to re-locate the power to improve the student learning experience more equally across the institution.
Organising theories
Soft systems thinking (Checkland 1999) and appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider 1990; Ludema, Cooperrider et al 2001) and their underpinning philosophies easily allow for more than one view to be held, appreciated and maintained at the same time. Similarly, in story-telling, the tale can change according to the story-teller, the listener and the locale. This paper celebrates diverse perspectives and reflects on the dynamic relationships between different stories or activity groups.
Any story or system imposes a purposeful and responsive organisation on a situation, constructing some fixed points and some directional activities. Bruner (1990) suggests that a story is constructed by elements of Action, Scene, Actor, Instrument and Goal, interrupted by Trouble which gives rise to subsequent actions, events and resolutions. I am drawing together stories and systems, by suggesting that the points of the triangles in Figure 1 map the context and dynamics of each 'story' basing the framework on activity systems theory (Engestrom 1990; Trowler and Knight 2000).
In Figure 1, the outer triangle sets the organisational scene, while the inner triangle represents a more personal activity dynamic. The subject roughly equates with Bruner's Actor; the object is the Goal and the community of practice provides the Site for Action in this story of learning and teaching. Seeing these points within a system takes into account the preference of the action researcher to explore ways to change both subjective and objective in practice and in the organisation (Carr and Kemmis 1986, p.183). In Tait 2002 (forthcoming), I apply this activity systems model as a heuristic, to suggest that closed and distributed activity systems can limit the learning and development of individual actors and organisations. In similar vein, this paper argues that a closed system inhibits learning and in this story (or system), Bruner's 'Trouble' is represented by the experiences of an adult learner.
Background and context
Before beginning to tell the stories, I need to map the broad territory, particularly for those not familiar with the OU or the UK context.
Established as a distance learning university by a socialist government in the early 1970s, the OU is grounded in the highest principles of access, supported learning and equal opportunity. Visionary, post-Fordist ideals promote an open, flexible agenda centred on meeting the diverse needs of students. There are no prior entrance requirements or selection hurdles for any course. Until recently1, each module was freestanding and students can select and combine modules to construct their own degree.
These ideals of accessibility are counter-balanced by a Fordist quest for the 'perfect' system and the benefits of economy of scale. In the early days, the OU aimed to deliver teaching materials to vast numbers of students in their homes. Production and policy-making activities are located at the centre and dissemination (known as presentation) is relegated to the periphery, where casual day labourers (part time tutors) mediate the materials. The OU divides academic labour (geographically and organisationally) into three activity systems, summarised below: these three locations become the sites for the stories that will follow.
1. Course Production Walton Hall, a central conglomerate of faculties and departments, organises course teams of academic writers and production technicians to create and validate courses or modules2.
2. Thirteen regional centres, located around the UK, perform a bridging role between central production and peripheral presentation. Regional staff recruit tutors and students; organise the sites and timetables for tutorials and exams; manage guidance, quality and support systems in their local area.
3. Course Presentation Around 7,500 part-time tutors provide face-to-face tuition, telephone and Internet support in the 13 regions; correspondence tuition is managed via assessment and feedback for students.
Changes to the global understanding of learning have highlighted fundamental flaws in the OU's 'economic' model of knowledge production and transmission. In a 'knowledge economy' (Leadbetter 2000) we can no longer pretend that knowledge is a mass-produced commodity that can be standardised and distributed, although efficient technologies seem to tempt universities to work in this way (Brown and Duguid 2000). And, in UK higher education, quality agendas are forcing us to measure learning success differently. The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA 2001) require learning outcomes and process standards to be written into course materials, driving universities to develop integrated systems of teaching and learning. For the OU, this may support the creation of an environment where it is essential to tell tales across boundaries.
Already, you are privileged as listeners. The new student is unlikely to make sense of the OU in even such a peremptory way, or to recognise that their learning is being evaluated in new ways.
Telling the stories, modelling activities
My role as story-teller and researcher allows me to tell tales across systems and between territories. Each of the following three stories emerges from my inevitably flawed ability to listen, remember and make sense. I draw on my field notes and conversations with actors in different activity systems and formal spoken and written OU material. Composite stories and fragments of conversation highlight commonality and diversity, making no claim to represent any 'true' voice.
The points of the activity system (Figure 1) provide the heuristic 'bones' for the three story-systems. Each will have a similar skeletal form, fleshed out by two fragments of narrative to show different worldviews from within the system. These illustrative snapshots show only two different perspectives but you should read them as points on a complex human continuum of relationship rather than binary polarities. In each story-system, I also begin to consider how just one aspect of power operates, as fragments suggest how a subject might perceive their own ability to enhance opportunities for student learning.
1. From the Centre
The hero or subject of this first story-system is an OU lecturer whose work involves writing sections of a course in collaboration with other colleagues. In terms of the activity system, modelled in Figure 1, the object of lecturer activity is the course material; the community of practice will focus on Production - researching, writing and negotiating what might be included in the course materials. The boundaries of this story (the outer triangle) are represented by: information technologies and library resources (tools and symbols); validation committees and exam boards (rules and regulations); and the labour is divided between roles such as administrator, editor, course manager, course team chair, writer/lecturer and technician (for example, computer or broadcasting).
But in the OU, face-to-face teaching and marking are almost exclusively part-time tutor work so OU lecturers are rarely informed in their discussions by experiences of classroom interactions or assessment activities. In this first fragment, a lecturer's ability to improve or benefit a student's learning is limited by the team's collective lack of experience of how students and tutors work with the material (although some course teams do invite AL readers to comment on draft materials). Without direct experience of student processes, a team's attention be drawn to content and structure. Our work with tutors concerning the formative assessment of essays (Coats and Tait, 2001) shows how tutors and students can be affected by such content-led assessment measures.
Where production is explicitly separated from presentation, it will be difficult to change practices.
Fragment Two
Mirabelle Walker (2000) tells how she manages course team members as the leader of a new course designed outwards from assessment and focusing on student learning. She started by exploring the successful learning experiences of course team members and drew on these experiences to design learning activities for students. The course is information-heavy, because assessment asks students to engage with what is relevant to their learning situation. Every student is prompted to reflect on their own learning process for each assignment and 'reflection' forms an assessed element in the course.
It was not easy to break with traditional views of what a technology course provides, or to change how courses are designed, delivered and assessed.
Here we see how a strong course team leader, grounded in principles of adult learning, can use their power to innovate, changing the student experience by considering student learning above content. However, the separation between production and presentation does, in practice, limit the power of the course team to change student learning.
In our research (Tait and Coats, 2001), tutors told us how some students (and they themselves) struggled with the unfamiliar activities of this course and its assessment. And, inevitably, there are administrative barriers to innovation - a story for another time.
2. In the Regions
The staff tutor is chosen as our subject for this story-system, but the object is more difficult to identify because of the under-defined nature of the staff tutor role. For this story, I shall draw the fragments first, to show how perceptions of a staff tutor's work can differ in at least two ways. The complexity of this role comes closest to mirroring recognised academic tensions between research, teaching and administration (for example, see Taylor 1999).
Fragment Three
I know that central academics look down on us as practitioners and as researchers, but I am committed to spending at least half my time on my own subject research. It's in my contract and I don't see how I can really contribute to course development if I neglect this aspect of my work. It's hard to put boundaries around research time, especially when I have responsibilities to my tutors and all the administration of the courses to oversee. There's absolutely no way to do every part of this job properly, so I'm constantly making decisions about what is most important - and, for me, my research has a higher priority than the organisational stuff.
The staff tutor in this fragment experiences their activity system as engagement in the production of knowledge, closer to course team activities than to tutorial work. The following fragment shows another dimension of the staff tutor role, one in which teaching and learning are the key activities of engagement.
Fragment Four
If the OU is about anything, it's about supporting students. My job is to enable tutors to keep improving their teaching to help students learn more effectively.
I suppose I neglect my own reading and discipline research and I'm probably seen as a bit of a troublemaker at the Centre but my work helps students and their learning and I contribute a lot to the effectiveness of our Region.
These two snapshots of regional life risk polarising the different approaches of two (composite and fictional) staff tutors in order to illustrate the tensions of this role. Both are bounded by the same organisational triangle: Tools and symbols are the communication channels and papers of any university, reinforced by the regulations and structures of courses, student exams and performance indicators.
(Regions are most closely affected by measures of performance, since their primary focus is recruitment and retention in their own geographical area.) Division of labour is problematic in this system-story, since the staff tutor role is itself divided in its allegiance to different sorts of work - academic, managerial and pedagogic, and regions and disciplinary areas can differ in the same ways as departmental cultures develop from practice (Trowler and Knight 2000). Accepting these differences, the inner triangle of the activity system takes at least two dimensions, depending on whether a staff tutor (subject) sees their community of practice as committed to production (in which case the object is writing and research) or presentation (where student learning is the object). For the staff tutor in Fragment One
When the course team meets to review and finalise the course, each of us has an understandable attachment to the section we have written. I think that mine is particularly good because it doesn't only represent the core knowledge for students' progress, it also has activities that I've designed to engage students with this material. So when the course manager tells us that the course is content-heavy, I'm ready to fight for my territory.
Our last meeting had such a heated discussion about dropping the non-essential knowledge areas that the other item on the agenda - designing appropriate assessment questions - was left for another day.
Fragment Three, improvement would be located in the course materials and, the limits to their power and influence would be located in the power relations of the course team - for example, whether or not the voice of the staff tutor was valued. For the type of staff tutor represented by Fragment Four, learning is a central concern and their power and influence in their own region can be considerable. Some staff tutors get very involved in staff and student development activities to support learning both in their own discipline and across subject boundaries. In collaboration with part-time tutors and advice and guidance professionals, some exciting resources and activities for students have been developed in regions.
3. Part-time tutors
The story-system for part-time tutors (subject) is focused on supporting student learning, so this forms the object for most tutors. Their community of practice is about teaching, although there can be a range of understandings about what these activities might include. They have very little power over the boundaries of their world: course materials and technologies are the tools and systems; regulations and structures are imposed and the division of labour is set by the job description. Many of our research participants located themselves at the periphery of OU systems3.
Fragment Five
I think I do a good job for the OU. I do other part time teaching and the OU is my best employer - they pay me as well as anyone else, better than some, and in addition there's support - resource packs and training. The teaching materials are great - they contain all the information you need. Because I've been teaching this course for a few years, I know the easy parts and the bits where students always get stuck. This gives students confidence in my ability and it also makes marking a bit quicker.
Tutoring can eat up your time, so it's important to have good boundaries. This is why I'm not keen to use email for tutoring - students soon start to demand full-time access to their tutors.
This tutor voice represents the professional teacher who has other work and other concerns outside the OU. Many tutors feel that the OU takes advantage of their concern for students by offering unreasonably low pay and inequitable conditions. One response to this is to take defensive action and to work strictly within the contract. This tutor's power to improve student learning is clearly bounded by the course materials and the guidelines for tutors embedded in written materials. Recent institutional research (Retention Project - internal only) suggests that even this bounded power is significant since most students see their tutor as the lynch pin of their progress and their main source of knowledge about their course and the OU.
Another group of tutors told us that their satisfaction in working with adults compensates for the inequities described above, though it was generally recognised that spouses or other employers should not be expected to subsidise the OU. Those people who worked with us in the research project identified themselves as committed to 'excellence' by volunteering to participate and to help us identify the conditions that would favour improvement in their role. As might be expected, some of these improvements are located in the organisation and others in the perceptions and intentions of the tutor. Fragment Six illustrates the power of the student-centred tutor to work towards creating a positive influence in the student experience but also shows one way that even the most learning-centred tutor can be limited by the power of production.