Reflections on work - from the past
I originally authored this post in April 2020 not too long after the COVID-19 pandemic caused cities and nations to lockdown. I found this as a draft post that I hadn’t published perhaps due to all that was going on at the time.
What I wrote here in April 2020, still holds in September 2023.
An image of a person standing on still water, which causes a reflection of the mountains and sky. Source: Unsplash
“If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth. To know the truth is to prepare for it; for it is not mainly reflection and theory. Truth is divine action entering our lives and creating the human action of liberation.”
Reflections on work
I've worked as a 'digital education facilitator / senior teaching associate' for almost 3.5 years at the Lancaster University Management School. I arrived hopeful, looking ahead to entering a new phase of my career within higher education where I would be explicitly working with a range of colleagues - academics, administrators, subject librarians and students - to develop both blended and online learning experiences. My time in my current role is coming to an end as I plan to move on to a new challenge and to both undertake a doctorate. In many ways, it makes sense to do these in the same place. In this post, I share some thoughts, reflections and hopes.
Synergy is key, when enacted
My current role is based in a large management school - a business school - where you have a range of business subjects divided into departments ranging from Accounting and Finance; Economics; Organization, Work and Technology; Management Science; and Marketing. There is also the Undergraduate Office where consortial programmes are situated.
One of the best part of working in such a large school was getting to meet a range of people from all walks of life and experiences. There are a lot of colleagues who care about their students. Indeed, the Dean at the time of this writing has had a project that sought to develop a cross-departmental community for students which takes the form of a module called MNGT160: Future Global Leaders: Sustainability Across Business.
This module has often been a source of contention as it sought to create a community that cuts across departmental boundaries, and thus, requires both contribution from each department and some hours to be workloaded from each department. Since it is not 'owned' by any one department, this module has, at times, not received a welcoming view. However, the aim and ethos of the module are fairly sound: to create a community while developing some graduate attributes within students through getting them to work together across their subject silos. Idealistic? Perhaps. Doable? Definitely.
With the amount of expertise and experience across the management school, such a module has great potential to create a very collaborative, cross-departmental community of learning and teaching that could strengthen the identity of the school itself while creating networks of students (and staff) who could work closely together in order to grow, develop as students, people and future professionals and subject experts.
Synergy is key for such a module to happen. Working together and drawing upon the expertise of such a large school to create good curricula, well-structured systems and a positive, welcoming environment for learning can only be a good thing surely.
The pandemic and the move to digital
Covid19 has upended a lot of systems, processes and practices. Initially, there was a lot of uncertainty that allowed some leaders to emerge in order to mitigate some for the panic and anxiety that the sudden shift or pivot to digital education that the pandemic caused.
During these first weeks and months, a lot of educational technologists were doing their utmost to help staff however and wherever possible. In fact, this is still continuing. What has been at the back of our minds - some of us - has been those little fleeting thoughts of ah, if we only had more blended learning before, we'd be more prepared for this!
Of course, learning/educational technologists have been trying for years to get academic and teaching staff to integrate in the digital into learning and teaching. We do this because we understand that, on the whole, students require a full range of digital literacies in order to live and work within the 21st Century to the full. People can live without collaborative and smart technologies, sure, but the world is generally progressing in the direction of closer collaboration and working together through digital means. Sustainability, efficiency and richness of opportunities are just a few reasons that digital literacies and their development are so key for the future. We could not have predicted the pandemic, nor used this as part of a rationale for integrating digital education practices for sounding, at best, alarmist.
That all said, what the pandemic has caused for digital education is a few points:
a sudden, renewed interest in digital education, whether blended or fully online;
a deeper understanding of working and studying at home, and how this can work;
a better appreciation for educational technologists and those who have integrated digital education practices into their teaching;
the development of a range of solutions to address issues arising around learning and teaching both remotely and at a distance;
and many others.
The fourth point is particularly interesting for me within my current role because I have been able to observe developments locally, nationally and internationally through a mixture of professional networks sustained by email lists, social networks on Microsoft Teams and Facebook and looser networks on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Working in silos: missed opportunities
Initially, I observed the same questions arising from the different places. I frequently saw the same or very similar questions coming from a range of staff that mostly where 'how to?' questions. I helped wherever I could by providing advice, solution and consultations where appropriate.
I began observing with a bit of annoyance and sense of powerlessness a pattern that slowly began to develop: colleagues were working in their departmental silos to create solutions. These solutions were not always shared across the departments at a macro level. As far as I was concerned, given my role and position that allowed somewhat of an overseeing eye, if I did not hear about it, I believed that a potentially valuable idea was not being shared to colleagues whom might need or find value in such solutions.
To my mind, this type of working did not make sense for a few reasons:
the problems themselves are common across the faculties - the 'how to?' questions;
solutions/ideas created in silos and thus not shared is, in effect, a replication of effort;
those with the most experience within digital education were not always consulted first despite their expertise, and in effect, time and attention was misused;