So this is it, the end of this year in the Future of Our University course. I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to participate in this course from its idea to its realisation and to have shared this experience with all these great people.

I would have liked to put much more energy into this course but taking it as extra-credits in third year did not leave me the space and time. However, I still overall really enjoyed being part of it. For this same reason, and as I have all my deadlines and exams early, I need this precious time to work on my core courses and will only do a quick start of a reflection for now. I am sorry about this. After the 7th, I will be done and will be up to elaborate more and maybe meet with others to compile something for next year’s course based on our reflections, who is up?

I will try to reflect on the implications for next year’s course as a main approach and I have grouped the questions in themes to gather my thoughts.

Alternative education
How did your experience of the course fit into what you have read about alternative education?
Why was this course perceived as different to our other academic work?
How does this course fit into your larger university experience?
Compare the course to other courses
What activities did you learn/value most from and why?
I had my first experience of alternative education in Edinburgh during the student occupation of the Gordon Aikman lecture theatre in 2018. I am easily curious and interested in things and suited well in the current academic system, so did not really question it. But, at the occupation, I realised that I was even more suited to alternative ways of teaching and learning!!
I had no specific expectations on this course, and I really took it as an experiment. As it was the first year it was running and the first time most of us were doing such a thing, issues and challenges were coming up as we were going. In this course, we had to work out the administration, the logistics, the structure, the topics… So many things that I never even had to think about in other courses. This semester I also had another alternative learning course (NGH: Nature Greenspace and Health), but in this one we had to write a report on a specific topic which was commissioned by the SRS department; so the only freedom was how we were going to go about it. We were then able to ‘produce’ much more than in the FoOU. However, going out of NGH, I wouldn’t be able to reproduce such a course and try to implement elsewhere. With FoOU, I feel that I have now some experience from which I could base myself on if I wanted to start a cooperative course some day.

Readings and Academic learning
Did you use the course resource list?
How could more reading have facilitated the course activities?
How do we learn without reading? Can we?
Explore theory vs research
For me, FoOU was about learning by trial and error, it was about doing: making and running a course. I think that lived experienced is often undervalued, even if reading about others’ experience to learn from their challenges and how they overcame them can be helpful. I have enough readings in my other courses, I wanted to DO in FoOU. Not having to write a report or a paper and instead deciding to make a zine with our group, being free and creative in what I produced was such a great part of this course to me.
I recognise that there is quite a divide in the class about readings. And if some people wish to do some readings, it would be good to find a way to accommodate different interests.

Structure and organisation
Did we hold ourselves accountable to our commitments – why, why not? What are the implications of having commitments?
Explore our structure of decision making – how do you feel about it now that you have seen consensus decision making in action?
Reflect on the group dynamics – how does community-formation fit into this?
Reflect on the course in relation to horizontal structures, such as relationships between students and tutors
Reflect on structure and autonomy within the course
My previous point leads me to a main thing about this course: we are an heterogenous group with different preferences in the way we learn, teach, interact with people, produce a reflection…. The current system doesn’t allow for diversity in those, and FoOU could be an opportunity for people to do education in the way that is exciting for them. We don’t all have the same vision of ‘alternative’ education. Drawing on the idea of ‘groups as gardens’ that I worked on with the Permaculture group, you can create ‘guilds’ of plants that benefit each other and work well together. If a group of people is more interested in doing readings and producing a report, they could group together and do it. If others are more interested in learning how to run a course, decision-making and structure, they could focus on that. If people want to do both it could work as well. I still liked the fact that we had a vision as a group and a sense of being part of something altogether. So the sub-groups autonomy could be addressed.
A core role in decision making is the one of facilitator and we all lacked experience in it. I think that facilitation training would help have quicker, smoother more inclusive and efficient meetings.
I think that being intentional about building a group culture and addressing conflicts (seeing them as a growth opportunity) is essential. The round-ups we had in the first weeks at the end of the meetings were a nice way to get direct feedback and create a space for free expression, it is a shame that we didn’t take time to keep doing them all year long. Better facilitation could help with timing and keeping this space free at the end of the session.

My take-home thoughts
Explain your understanding of the topics of the course
Reflection on the future of our university
With the permaculture group, we ended up creating a zine. We did not even sure about what we wanted to do or focus on until we ran our allocated workshop for the rest of the class. After it we just thought that we could create a zine out of it to base future workshops on. And then we just did it within the space of three meetings. We all wanted to produce something, and we ended up doing so naturally, taking the opportunity that opened to us. That was quite unexpected to me, but I think that it worked out because we were all genuinely interested in the subject and trusted ourselves and each other that we will end up doing what would be the best for our group.

Thank you for reading me and for having been part of this journey!
Gabrielle

PS: I attach my creative reflection on the course thinking through permaculture

.

Gabrielle’s final reflection / The future of our university by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0