The occupation of March 2018 was very eye opening to me, not only as a period of development as an activist, but it also exposed me to conversations about the problems in our current education system. Whilst I already had strong objections to the commodification of education and the state of the UK’s higher education, I had never really considered whether the education we were receiving had any inherent issues. My experience of education has been nothing but formal and mainstream; stifling, regimented, and with very little opportunity for self exploration or deviance from the syllabus. But as I never had any significant problems with content and achieved decent grades, to me the system worked relatively well and I hadn’t thought about ways it could have worked better. During the occupation I heard about other people’s experiences, and learnt about a way of education that I’d never considered, and this was part of what motivated me to sign up for this course, to see how I’d fare with an alternative way of learning.
One of the primary aims of this course was to experiment with a new type of education, one in which a student can navigate their learning journey in a way which fits their needs and interests. A huge part of this was reducing pressure on students; less pressure to attend, less pressure on assessment, through less regulations and restrictions on what constitutes participation in the course. This notion of academic freedom is sort of new to me, and at first seemed slightly oxymoronic. This reflective piece will center around how I grappled with this new academic freedom, and whether I think it works for me.
We decided early on in the course that attendance to the sessions would not be compulsory, and apologies were to be given if you couldn’t attend for whatever reason. As someone who struggles with attendance in all of my courses at the best of times, this freedom took a lot of pressure off of me, but I also feel negatively affected my attendance to these sessions. Because there were no ramifications of not attending a session, I occasionally chose to not attend the sessions of this course so that I could catch up on work I had missed from my other courses during a difficult period in the middle of the semester. And although I always read the minutes to keep on top of what was discussed, I do think that in terms of active participation in the course, the lack of compulsory attendance allowed me to fall behind a bit.
However, I do not think of this as a failing of the course, but rather a result of having only one course in which I had this academic freedom among other more regimented modules. When contrasted with my other modules, in which I had set work that I needed to complete in order to achieve a grade that I wanted, I felt much more inclined to dedicate my time and efforts to working towards them and as a result our course may have taken a back seat at times. So whilst a laxer attitude meant that I felt less pressure from this course, which undoubtedly benefited my mental health as opposed to if I was taking a mainstream course as my elective, but when combined with my other courses that had pressure and deadlines and compulsory attendance, I found it easy to fall behind and not participate as fully as I could in our course. Once again, I don’t think this is a failing of the course, nor a failing of mine (maybe), but is rather that I am so used to having more structure that when given the opportunity to have more control over my education, I’m not really sure what to do with it.
Even when approaching this reflection I came across the same issues. After committing to higher attendance towards the end of the semester, I finished the first half of the course feeling much more engaged and confident in my own participation and contribution to the group. I am excited for the group projects in second semester, find my chosen topic group of critical pedagogy fascinating and look forward to researching and learning more. However this simple task of “reflection”, with no set format or word count or even deadline, meant that I had absolutely no idea where to start. It took me long enough to decide that this idea of freedom in contrast with what I’m used to was what I wanted to focus on and even once I’d managed that, the lack of prescribed format/length/structure threw me off. So whilst other members of the group have been able to experiment with art, music, and different formats in their incredible creative reflections, here I am writing an essay. At risk of self deprecation, I find it interesting that mainstream education appears to have stamped out all creativity in me to the extent that the first time I have been given the freedom to present something in any form I want, I have fallen back on what I’m comfortable with.
And I think that is my main personal takeaway from this first half of our course: this style of learning and assessment is very different from what I’m used to, and that I really have to work to participate fully. Academic freedom has huge potential to benefit both students and lecturers, and although experimenting with it in conjunction with taking mainstream courses is not ideal, it is undeniable that the lack of pressure coming from this course helped me a lot during this semester. My own personal goal for the coming semester is to not allow the freedom to result in complacency on my part, but to relish it as an opportunity to experiment with how to apply myself to a course through my own desire to learn rather than the pressure of achieving a grade.
I really appreciate the honesty and self-examination that you put into this piece. Although you say you’ve ‘fallen back’ on writing an essay, something this personal is presumably not what you would submit for other courses? Isn’t examining your own learning and thinking through how you go about it a starting point for something rather different?
Prior to beginning systematic attendance monitoring for the purposes of keeping records of international students’ ‘engagement’ for Home Office purposes, it is my understanding that most UK universities (including Edinburgh) did not really record who went to what classes. So it is interesting to reflect on how that change has created the particular way you are thinking about ‘academic freedom’.
I liked how you conclude with ‘desire’—perhaps when we read ‘The Ignorant Schoolmaster’ you will appreciate what Ranciere says about the will being the starting point of learning—prior to intelligence. That discussion is particularly in Chapter 3, Reason between equals. The question is: in what conditions does this will or desire arise and flourish? And what conditions suppress or quell it?