Teaching Groups as a bedrock of higher education innovation

I have been looking at teaching groups in relation to a broader project on enhancing institutional resilience in teaching and learning. As noted previously, resilience is about adaptability to thrive in fluidly changing contexts while maintaining the core purposes of the university – in this case, teaching. Strong teaching groups appear to be a particularly … Read more

Learning to thrive in uncertainty: resilience and higher education – notes for a Friday [8]

In the current pandemic, there is obvious interest in the resilience of higher education institutions. This is regularly framed in terms of financial robustness and the ability to bounce-back to a state of normalcy. But as I’ve argued before, resilience is about being able to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. Resilience is a … Read more

Notes for a Friday

Avatars in second life sitting around a campfire

This is a short collection of things that have caught my eye this week. This is an interesting article from Inside Higher Ed on how Covid 19 threatens the diversity of institutions in the higher education system of the USA. It is, as expected, the smaller institutions most at risk of closure. So diversity in … Read more

Institutional resilience

Sketchnote snippet

This is an initial #sketchnote drafted as I re-engage with the conceptualisation of this project. The project aims to develop approaches to enhancing education institutions (rather than individual) resilience in teaching & learning. Like much else, the project stalled as priorities changed to respond to the pandemic. The project draws on concepts of institutional resilience, … Read more

Resilience & pedagogy

Resilience sketchnote

This sketch note maps some initial ideas linking earlier reading on resilience in higher education with Ian Kinchin’s ideas of pedagogical health and frailty. I am also working through his book that covers the same topic although I *think* we’re taking diverging views of resilience. [I’ll be updating this post later with some initial thoughts … Read more

Resilience and higher education

social network

Weller’s notion of resilience is proposed as an alternative perspective on change in education systems and institutions that provides a generative alternative to the ‘education is broken’ narrative. For this, he draws on resilience in terms of the stability of ecological systems and the ability of systems to absorb change.  Resilience is, therefore, not simply … Read more