Negotiation with Strangers: developing a different curriculum, for a Foundation Degree in Community Development
Rennie Johnston, Freelance/University of Sussex
Paper presented at the 35th Annual SCUTREA Conference July 5-July 7 2005, University of Sussex, England, UK
Introduction
The idea of negotiating the curriculum is central to both the liberal and radical traditions in adult education. At its best, the former stresses a commitment to a dialectical form of teaching, a negotiated curriculum and critical thinking (Taylor 1996), while the latter embraces a problem-posing approach to education (Freire 1972), an engagement with ‘really useful knowledge’, which is essentially political knowledge, (Johnson 1988) and a commitment to listen actively to the ‘voices’ of a range of different, excluded groups. On the face of it, these processes and these traditions have little in common with the recent vocational turn in Higher Education where provision is increasingly geared to the needs of industry and knowledge is often defined in terms of specific vocational competences and linked to key (vocational) skills. Yet, at the same time, the Foundation Degree, the new UK vocational flagship within HE, is committed to promoting Widening Participation by engaging with non-traditional students in non-traditional settings, trying to accommodate their differing needs and aspirations, developing innovation in teaching and learning and negotiating the curriculum (QAA 2004).
This paper develops a case study of the development and negotiation of the curriculum of one particular Foundation Degree in Community Development. It covers a period starting with an initial feasibility study and culminating in university validation of the Foundation Degree award, more than two years later. It will identify the parties to the negotiation, both direct and indirect; trace the processes of negotiation and the issues, problems and constraints associated with it; and note and comment on the changes in content and approach, both quantitative and qualitative, resulting from the different negotiation processes. It will try to assess the value and impact of the negotiation process, to what extent the validated course was able to identify and respond to the needs of a diverse range of community development practitioners and/or prospective students, and what real similarities and synergies, if any, it had with the liberal and radical traditions of adult education. It will conclude by reviewing the scope that Foundation Degrees offer for engaging non-traditional adult students and for a social purpose approach to adult education.
The Negotiation Process: getting going
The negotiation process went through different phases and involved different parties. The first phase took place in early 2003, more than two years before validation. The main parties then were community development practitioners across the South East of England, in this case the coastal strip from Bournemouth to Kent. I was approached by the Community Development Training Partnership, South East in late 2002 about the possibility of carrying out a short (20 day) exploration of the demand for and possibilities of running Foundation Degrees in community development across the region. I was initially rather sceptical about the possibilities, partly because of my own experience of running certificates and degrees in similar territory (never hugely popular in terms of recruitment), partly because of my experience of the very practical, often anti-theory approach of many community development practitioners I knew and their suspicion of higher education and academic study, and partly out of a mixture of personal ignorance about Foundation Degrees and prejudice about what appeared to be the very functionalist, non reflexive, non critical approach of vocational Higher Education. I had always seen myself as a ‘social purpose’ adult educator with a commitment to social justice, greater social and economic equality, the promotion of a critical democracy and the vision of a better, fairer world where education has a key role to play. I was not at all sure if there would be much of a ‘fit’ between this broad working philosophy of mine and the investigation/promotion of this new degree. Here I was particularly conscious of Fairclough’s analysis that the New Labour government, the sponsors of Foundation Degrees, ‘tends to act like a corporation treating the public as consumers rather than its citizens’ where the language of government is promotional not dialogical. (Fairclough 2000:12). An allied danger was that the focus of the proposed Foundation degree would be on generating and endorsing ‘merely useful knowledge’ that is essentially reproductive and utilitarian, rather than the more critical and political approach of ‘really useful knowledge’ (Johnson 1988)
However, my gradual experience of working on the feasibility study began to change my view. I found out, to my surprise, first, some of the possibilities within Foundation degrees, particularly the commitment to negotiate the curriculum, and, second, a groundswell of interest amongst practitioners in undertaking a course of study that I set out to be both practical and critical. While this commitment to negotiate was set out to be primarily with employers, in the specific context of community development, employers tended to be small, diverse and often non corporate, not very hierarchical organizations so the effect was that the distinction between employer and practitioner was relatively small. Furthermore, the potential linking of the practical and the critical was exemplified in the reference point of National Occupational Standards (which are central to any Foundation Degree). As someone who had a longstanding suspicion of the top-down imposition of ‘standards’ in HE and the numbing, conformist effect of the processes of standardization in HE, I found, on the one hand, that the National Occupational Standards in Community Development do tend to be over-functionalist and over-prescriptive, particularly in the excessive detail provided/required on key roles and skills. Yet, on the other hand, at a broader level, they specifically embrace the values of social justice, self-determination, working and learning together, sustainable communities, participation and reflective practice (Federation for Community Development Learning, 2002). Even if these turned out to be ‘weasel words’ that were open to a range of interpretations, they seemed to provide an officially-endorsed baseline and rationale for developing social purpose adult education, something I’d never previously encountered in 18 years within Higher Education. These new possibilities were further supported by my contacts and negotiations with different community development practitioners across the region, who were largely enthusiastic, if sometimes a little suspicious, about the possible benefits for them and for their work of being involved in a Foundation Degree. This was complemented by a teaching visit I made to the very first developed Foundation Degree in Community Development in the country (University of Warwick). Here students were enthusiastic about the Foundation degree and engaged readily with a critical, reflective approach to community development and to contested notions of citizenship which I introduced. As a result of all this, the feasibility report I wrote was more positive than I had originally expected and was in turn received positively by its commissioners.
Getting serious
The next phase of negotiation started about 6-9 months later, in late 2003, when the Centre for Continuing Education at Sussex University, having secured funding for the development of a Foundation Degree in community development, to a great extent on the back of my original feasibility study, were looking to employ someone to develop the degree. The attraction of this opportunity for me was that the funding bid had specifically built in a long development period prior to the commencement of the degree, that it was based in Brighton, by all accounts one of the more radical parts of the South East, and that the project was to be managed by key people at the University of Sussex who were adult educators and had worked with me on previous work on citizenship. Here the parties were more diverse: employers, trainers and practitioners in community development, the funders of the project (the Learning and Skills Council) and the University itself. In practice, this largely broke down into two partly overlapping processes: a period of about 9 -11 months working predominantly with practitioners, practitioner/employers and university colleagues and one of about 3-5 months when the parties and negotiations became more formal, encompassing the university authorities and their concerns with viability, resources, procedures, quality assurance and adherence to national norms.
The first part of this second phase developed through an open meeting/launch, a series of group meetings and many informal contacts and culminated in a large consultation event. The main focus of the collective negotiation and work was carried out by the project’s curriculum subgroup which was chaired by myself and consisted of a mixture of people who were practitioners, small scale employers and trainers (sometimes all three roles in one person) and university colleagues from Sussex and Brighton universities. This curriculum group met 6 times over about 6 months and provided for me an extended opportunity to negotiate the curriculum that was unique in my experience of Higher Education. With this sort of timescale and with a group of experienced and committed participants, we were able to discuss at length: how we were to work as a group, key curricular principles and issues (for example the link between practice and theory), the title, breadth and prospective audience for the proposed Foundation Degree, how to develop a wider consultation/ participation process, how to cater for both paid and unpaid practitioners, different modes of delivery, different models for work-based learning, draft in-depth course outlines, the most appropriate forms of pedagogy and assessment. Further reference points for this were regular and detailed reports by local colleagues on mapping the interests and needs of both practitioners (paid and unpaid) and employers, an analysis of existing, complementary or competing provision in the region, examples of Foundation Degrees in community development in other parts of the country, as well as national QAA (the Quality Assurance Agency) guidelines and the requirements of National Occupational Standards.
In briefly reflecting back on this part of the negotiation process, it was perhaps the most creative and most productive part of the whole negotiation, engaging with and trying to accommodate the views of a wide range of practitioners and employers, working to achieve a common agreement about the relationship of practice to theory and having in-depth discussions about the curriculum. Participating practitioner/employers were particularly aware of and anxious to relate to the starting points and needs of prospective students entering HE – in fact the main qualitative changes were in the need they identified for a more in-depth analysis of broad issues like social and economic exclusion linked to more active, practice-oriented approach to equal opportunities, a more rigorous understanding of organisational development and management issues than I had anticipated and an up-front and critical engagement with the values, practice principles and different roles within National Occupational Standards, in fact a particular, practitioners’ approach to the practice/theory inter-relationship.
The culmination of the negotiation with the field was in the final consultation event attended by 61 people. This was a mixed group which included employers, trainers and practitioners from a range of working contexts, some university colleagues and 24 people who identified themselves as prospective students. Several of these prospective students came from two groups: one of predominantly working-class activists from Hastings and one from a women and work project in Brighton. The consultation took place over half a day and consisted of an introduction of the draft curriculum (also outlined on the project web-site), followed by small group work leading into verbal and written feed-back and a final short summing up. The main concern from the floor was with providing more opportunities for the development of practical, personal and group skills, reflecting possibly three factors: that the initial critical reflective, more macro dimension had been well covered by the curriculum group, the presence at the conference of a relatively high number of potential students and participants from a wide range of working contexts that did not appear to be in the mainstream of community development, for example, health and different kinds of volunteer/activists.
Getting formal
During the above phase, the requirements of the university, whilst always lurking in the background, were largely absent, partly because of my and the curriculum group’s desire to negotiate an appropriate curriculum from scratch or at least without initial university interference, partly due to our ‘protection’ from the university by the project manager and partly because the university colleagues involved were ex-practitioners in the community and relatively new to the university. However, it was always known that a more formal process of negotiation then validation would have to be undertaken (and indeed sporadic contacts and meetings were initiated and maintained with the relevant university authorities throughout the whole project period) and this began to develop in earnest 3-4 months before the projected time for the final validation event. Thus meetings were held with the CCE curriculum group (department level), the Sussex Institute Scrutiny Group (faculty-level), the University Academic Office, the University Teaching and Learning Development Unit and several senior university colleagues, all leading into the final validation event in March 2005.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the main university concern was with procedures, University regulations, resources, student support and quality assurance. In fact, the only challenge to the previously negotiated curriculum was very much resource-related, could existing university courses be included as options, how would AP(E)L work, how would work-based learning be organized and supervised, how students could progress to full honours degrees (another formal stipulatjon of a Foundation Degree). As Sussex was a ‘research-led’ university with a relatively traditional academic portfolio and little experience of vocational curricula in general and Foundation Degrees in particular, and as community development is very much inter-disciplinary territory, there was little direct intervention in terms of the course philosophy, curriculum aims, projected content or learning outcomes as long as the model satisfied national/university requirements and wasn’t too expensive.
Outcomes
So the Foundation Degree has now been validated and my main role has been completed. The next phase is to put it into practice, a process which will be led by Sussex colleagues. A central question at this stage of development is how the negotiation process worked, what were its outcomes, what level of real participation and negotiation was involved and what potential it offers for a social purpose approach to adult education.
A first reference point here is to what extent the curriculum changed as a result of the negotiation. With the outline curriculum originally identified in the feasibility study (April 2003) as a starting point, it is interesting to note that, up to the end of the Sussex curriculum group meetings (October 2004), I estimate that the curriculum content changed by 50% at level 1 and by 30% at level 2. As a result of the next consultation process, at the consultation event, further face to face and email responses and web-related consultations with a range of activists, checking back with some of the curriculum group and discussions with Sussex departmental and faculty curriculum groups (up to end 2004), I estimate that the curriculum content at level one changed by about 20% and that at level two by about 10%. As a result of the validation event (March 2005), the curriculum content did not change at all. These quantitative changes, of course, complemented the qualitative changes arising from the negotiation as identified earlier, most noticeably a more practical and critical elaboration of the practice/theory relationship, a more in-depth engagement with the issues and processes of management and a more up-front addressing of practitioner/students’ personal and group-related skills.
So, looking back, how effective was the negotiation process and how much did it respond to difference and diversity?. Here, if we use Arnstein’s ladder of participation as another reference point (cited in Hoggett, 1997), I am confident that it certainly avoided the bottom rungs of ‘non-participation’ ie manipulation and therapy. Equally clearly it did not really connect much with the top rungs of citizen control or delegated power – there was perhaps an element of the latter but it was not in any way formally delegated. However, somewhere in the middle there were clear elements, in ascending order, of informing, consultation, placation and even partnership with a range of different groups and individuals. Perhaps not a highly revolutionary process but still a longer-term and more participatory process of curriculum negotiation for a formal university award than the usual approach which could best be described as being based on normative, expertist ideas of need.