Design for Learning: a case for detangling education?

Academics, eh? We may be great teachers. We may be great researchers. We may even be great managers and administrators. But that does not make us great educational designers….and I write this as someone who trained and worked as a designer before I stumbled into teaching design and some other subjects in higher education. Once inside academia I was immediately struck by the fact that a great number of things just didn’t seem to work very well. I was surrounded by talented, skilful, intelligent, committed and passionate colleagues who appeared to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy just getting things to work for them and their students.

It didn’t take me long to work out that one of the primary causes of all this inefficiency and waste and the bang-head-on-desk frustration that resulted, was frequently and simply a tangle of poor design. The plethora of complex systems, labyrinthine processes and perplexing protocols that extend to every corner of our educational endeavours all too often have been created by individuals and groups who – with the best will in the world – are not well acquainted, if at all, with the basic principles of good design.

An awareness and appreciation of concepts such as ‘good design enhances the users’ experience’, or ‘good design is logical e.g. form follows function’, or ‘good design is minimal design e.g. as little as possible and only as much as absolutely necessary’, or ‘good design is consistent right down to the fine details’ was and is often entirely lacking.

There is also an aesthetic quality to good design, but I’ve yet to hear or read that word, or anything similar, when it comes to discussing the crucially important task of designing the educational experiences of students.

If we are to be architects of educational experiences, then we must accept that not only do we need to embrace the principles and practices of good design, but – crucially – we either need to become skilled educational architects and designers ourselves or ensure that at least some of us have or develop those skills so that we can help our colleagues and institutions not only detangle the knots that bind us but also, and more importantly, to create and support the wonderful educational experiences that our students truly deserve.

Paul Kleiman Design for Learning

Image by Kier in Sight Archives on Unsplash

^{About me:}

^{I am an independent higher education consultant and co-founder of the educational consultancy Ciel Associates specialising in organisational and transformational change and enhancing learning, teaching and assessment. I have over thirty years experience in a wide range of higher education providers both as a consultant and, before that, in a number of management, leadership and strategic roles. My work is informed by my belief in the transformational power of education and a commitment to enabling institutions to create meaningful and sustainable change. Contact me at Ciel Associates} .

‘See me. Feel me. Touch me.’

From virtual to visceral learning

After I wrote a piece on inspiring learning through objects and artefacts, I began to think a bit more about what makes that form of learning so powerful. I was walking the dog (I use it as a form of idea-generation therapy) wondering what might be the opposite or complementary term to ‘virtual learning’. I am familiar with the notion of ’embodied learning’ in which the instructional focus shifts from strictly abstract, mental processes to using the body as an affordance for learning and students’ knowledge and skills are enhanced through physical movement, sensory perception and attention to the spatial environment. But the term ’embodied’ felt too mild. Suddenly, as I walked past the butcher’s shop in the shopping precinct, the word ‘visceral’ fell into my head. Passers-by must have wondered at this figure muttering to himself and repeating the phrase ‘virtual learning, visceral learning’.

I began to like the idea of visceral learning, with its connotations of strong emotions and physical experiences (not to mention unmentionable bodily functions). I suspect, however, that we won’t be seeing the phrase ‘ visceral learning’ in our institutional mission statements and learning and teaching strategy documents. ‘Immersive’ ir ’embodied’ are much safer, but don’t have the visceral heft.

Why visceral?

There is a phenomenon that has been occurring in the last few decades, particular in the arts and popular culture. Essentially it consists of a reaction to a world that, increasingly, is viewed and experienced via gazing at a screen – whether a TV screen or a computer monitor or laptop/tablet/phone screen or a virtual headset. Once, audiences used to flock to the theatre to watch the ‘well-made play’. They would sit in the dark, in silence, watching the action on stage. Then TV came along. Similarly people used to flock to Working Men’s Clubs for a ‘good night out’. Then TV came along. Then computers came along, and now we’ve reached the point where a virtually infinite universe of entertainment and information can be accessed at the click of a mouse or, more recently, by tapping the screen or simply by asking Siri or Alexa or your favourite AI ‘friend’.

But there was a reaction to this sitting in front of a screen; and that reaction was to make performances more visceral. No longer was it sufficient to sit passively and watch. The relationship between the performer, the ‘text’, the audience and the environment became blurred, mutable, transactional. The veritable explosion of site-specific, immersive, interactive performances and performance experiences can be seen, in part, as a reaction to the relative passivity of just watching a screen. Audiences were engaged and involved: physically as well as emotionally. And that pattern can be seen in many fields beyond theatre.

Higher education has, perhaps, been a bit late to the visceral learning party. Perhaps it’s got something to do with the innate distrust of anything that is not focused on that part of our body above the shoulders. If you want to put this to the test, try doing a simple, short physical warm-up exercise with a group of colleagues or students from non-performance based disciplines. The looks and expressions tell you that you might as well be asking them to stick needles in their eyes!

But there’s clearly a shift happening, though currently it tends to occur predominantly amongst the creative, educational ‘outliers’. The virtual and the visceral are the ying and yang of learning and teaching. It’s not either/or, but both/and. The more institutions focus on enhancing (and investing) in digital and virtual learning experiences, the more that needs to be complemented by enhancing (and investing in) visceral learning experiences. No longer should students be required to sit passively in the (lecture) theatre, listening to and watching the action on the stage. They can usually get that via clicking a mouse or tapping the screen and watching the video of the lecture on YouTube. Visceral learning goes beyond ‘engaged’ or ’embodied’ learning. It involves immersing oneself intellectually, emotionally, physically and kinaesthetically in the learning experience. That learning experience needs to be designed skilfully to enable that immersion to occur, and it needs skill and confidence on the part of the teacher, who acts not as a transmitter of knowledge but as a guide, mentor and partner through the visceral learning journey.

Tell me and I forget.
Teach me and I remember.
Involve me and I learn.
(Benjamin Franklin)

Separate grading from learning!

One of our engrooved or deep-seated beliefs in higher education is that grades are important because they motivate students to do the work. Take them away, and students won’t do anything.

But oddly, for a discipline that says it relies on evidence-based research, there is little to no evidence or research that demonstrates that grades make students learn more or work harder. In fact, there is ample evidence that grades actually do the opposite: They hurt academic motivation and inhibit learning.

We’ve known for a long time, well before Covid, that the way we do assessment is damaged and creaking at the seams. But over what is now several decades of well-researched, evidence-based critiques of assessment, insitutions and academics are still assessing the same old way….with a few enhancing tweaks. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Covid started to point the way, and now GenerativeAI is providing the catalst and impetus we need to let go of outdated, obsolete practices that are well past their sell-by date, and embrace those that are genuuinely fit for purpose to meet the challenges we and our students face.

What we do know is that students – and we are all students, lifelong learners – work harder, learn more and are much more likely to thrive and achieve when we are intrinsically motivated. When we have some real autonomy, real choices. When we feel we are in control of our learning. It means being given meaningful choices and engaging, authentic tasks to choose from. It means feeling empowered to choose, as students, where to invest our time and energy. It also means feeling encouraged and supported even if that means, receiving feedback that is uncomfortable but honest and that comes from a good place.

Autonomy also means that our own autonomy, our own academic identity has to shift, from the keepers and transmitters of knowledge to facilitators of learning.

Also, we all like to feel we are continually growing, improving, developing new skills and understandings. Our own students are no different, so the question for us as teachers and assessors is how best can we focus both our and our students’ skills, time and energy on helping them build the skills they are genuinely motivated to learn and practise?

A sense of relatedness, a sense of genuine belonging is also critical. We desperately need to find ways of enabling our students to understand they are not just a number, not just cogs in a vast machine but valued as individuals and as part of a larger community… that they matter far more than their grades. If we can do that, they will respond and realise they don’t need the carrot and stick of grades, warning and penalties to care about their learning.

So…let’s leave grading to recede in the rear-view mirror, and focus on the road ahead and where that might lead.

Lessons from the Garden

There’s a corner of our garden where I keep a number of pots and containers that have nothing in them except some earth or compost and the occasional weed. It’s a sort of limbo (perhaps graveyard) for plants that once bloomed but have now have departed this horticultural coil. Some have been there since we moved into our new home a couple of years ago. Others have been emptied, cleaned, re-potted and moved to another area of the garden.

When out in the garden, especially in the spring, I wander over to this somewhat desolate corner to see if, by chance, there might be a sign of some growth that is not a weed (though I always bear in mind that weeds are simply plants in their natural environment!). I even water the barren earth if it’s dry, just in case. The particular pot I am thinking about was a relatively small terracotta pot, full of earth, that had shown no sign of life for nearly two years. The only reason I hadn’t repotted it is that it is a bit too small for the plants I have bought or acquired.

I had got to the point where I thought I’d just empty, clean it and repot it and plant something small that would fit. But when I went to pick it up, lo and behold, I saw a tiny shoot that had broken through the surface. I had no idea what it might be, so I left it. As is the way with plants, it grew slowly and eventually began to form leaves. It was then that I was able to identify that it was a begonia….so I left it to carry on and it graced our garden with beautiful yellow flowers.

And the lesson?

You know that student who you have sort of ‘written off’. They appear to be in educational limbo, they don’t seem engaged, they don’t contribute much, their work is just passable…or not even that. Well, don’t write them off too soon. They may well be, like my begonia, a very late developer with a lot going on under the surface, needing only the right conditions – and a bit of ‘watering’/nurturing to break through to the surface and bloom.

Only 280,000 Jews murdered in the Holocaust? Really?

Understanding Holocaust Denial: Debunking the 280,000 Victim Figure

With Holocaust Memorial Day approaching on the 27th January, the febrile atmosphere around Israel, Palestine and Gaza has been accompanied by both a worldwide increase in antisemitism and an increase in Holocaust scepticism and outright denial. In particular, across social media, the figure of (only) 270,000- 280,000 Jews killed in the Holocaust is being widely quoted. I hadn’t seen it before so I wondered where does this figure originate?

That figure – often also cited as 270,000, 271,000, 271,301, or around 280,000 – originates, unsurprisingly, from Holocaust denial and distortion circles where it is (mis)represented as the ‘true’ or ‘official’ total number of Jewish victims. This low figure has circulated in Holocaust denial literature since at least the 1980s (e.g., in pamphlets like ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’ and related neo-Nazi/revisionist materials) and is frequently and falsely attributed to the Red Cross to provide credibility. This number comes from the deliberate selection and malign misrepresentation of a genuine document held in German archives and the attribution to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been repeatedly dismissed by the ICRC who accept the 6 million figure.

The figure of c. 280,000 refers specifically to a document dated 16 January 1984 issued by the Special Registry Office in Bad Arolsen, Germany which was set up in 1949 as the International Tracing Service. The organisation is now known as the Arolsen Archives and contains c. 40 million documents regarding victims of Nazi persecution.

In regard to the document relating to the figure of 280,000, the Arolsen Archives state “The document is genuine and comes from the Special Registry Office in Bad Arolsen. It lists the numbers of death certificates issued upon application for prisoners from concentration camps, such as Dachau, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen. The figures do not include the millions of Jews murdered in extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau or those who died in mass shootings.”

What is clear is that the document the Holocaust deniers are using to produce that figure of c. 280,000 provides information on the number of Jewish prisoners murdered in a number of German concentration camps (not the main extermination camps) for whom death certificates were issued retrospectively by the Special Registry Office. The SRO is the only body authorized to issue death certificates for people who died under these circumstances and requires an application from victims’ next of kin….if they exist.

Underlined, at the bottom of the document is the following:

The registration figures from the special registry office do not allow for any conclusions to be drawn about the actual number of deaths in the concentration camps.

Arolsen, January 16, 1984

Crucially the records held at the Special Registry Office exclude the vast majority of murders in the main extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek, where most victims were killed immediately upon arrival, usually via the gas chambers, without registration or death certificates. They also exclude the 1.5-2 million Jews shot in mass executions by the Einsatzgruppen and other units across Western Russia and Eastern Europe (for example at sites like Babi Yar in the Ukraine where 33,000 Jews were shot over two days in September 1941), they exclude deaths in ghettos from starvation and disease, they exclude deaths in the many work camps, and they exclude deaths and killings during the forced marches and evacuations.

The scholarly consensus, based on decades of research, is that in the 1930s there were approximately 9.5 million Jews in all of Europe and by 1945 there were about 3.3-3.8 million Jews left. Do the maths.