To whom it may concern:
On behalf of the participants of The Future of our University Course
We write to respond to the request that we record attendance as per usual school guidelines/procedures. As you will be aware, a primary goal of this course is to explore new methods of imagining, formulating, running, and facilitating education and learning. An essential feature of this is the ability to cooperatively decide, amongst the group, the ways in which this course will be run. As part of this, we are exploring how aspects such as attendance could and should be monitored, as well as the wider idea of what attendance and engagement with education actually means.
We are currently in the process of exploring this aspect and as we have not come to a conclusion we do not feel, as a group, able to provide weekly attendance details. We are, however, operating an ‘apologies’ model which are communicated via new online platforms that the university has developed. These are also recorded within the weekly minutes.
We are excited with the opportunity that this course affords to us to reimagine all facets of education and appreciate the support that the university is giving us to do this. We have received encouragement from many different sources within the university, including the head of SSPS Linda McKie, and look forward to seeing where these processes take us.
We have included some of the preliminary work we have done so far exploring our visions, goals, and values, and some ideas of the areas we would like our course to focus on.
Our Collective Vision
In this course, we wish to create a space in which we can simultaneously visualise our ideal education system and live the critique that we offer. In this space we shall prioritise creating the time to learn and reflect; embracing creative and playful approaches to learning, to ensure that the experiential element of pedagogy remains. We strive to be; Collaborative! Creative! Connected! We will break out of the silos of age, discipline, alienation, and unlearn our roles as teachers and students, to create an egalitarian alternative. Refusing bureaucracy, we will adopt fluid and transparent practices.
Our Goals
We shall take action! We will work on specific case studies in our context, drawing connections between the university, the community, and nature. Allowing ourselves to work in different forms, from theatre to games to skill sharing; as well as analysis and critique. The case studies we explore will be directed towards intervening to change things, with specific outcomes such as exhibitions, reports and direct action. These actions will offer resources of a process that might be adapted and replicated for future projects.
This looks great–really good to connect it clearly to the aims of the course. It could be sent to the course secretary, Siobhan Carroll, siobhan.carroll@ed.ac.uk. Someone let me know if you’d prefer if I pass it on to her.
With permission, I am posting the e-mail responses from Lawrence Dritsas, which for some reason were sent through me, rather than going direct to Dante, who sent in the message.
Message received 1 Nov.
Dear Sophia,
We received the following letter from the students on the Future of Our University course. College will be asking me about the small number of courses in SPS that have no attendance records for the semester. I will let them know about this letter, but I don’t know what the response will be; the policy was set by the College so it is not for us in the School to decide on exemptions. It sounds like your students are showing up or sending apologies and this is great. What will worry College is if students are not showing up and not sending apologies – they may be in need of support.
I am sure you are discussing this issue as part of the course and it is a discussion we want to support. It might be helpful to let the students know that recording of attendance is seen primarily as a welfare issue in our College and they have developed new systems that will more easily alert student support officers when students stop engaging so that we can reach out to them and offer support. Certainly there is also the monitoring of Tier 4 visa students that we are mandated to do and I am well aware that there are a variety of opinions about that, but recording attendance has been in place long before that. Back when I first started work here as a tutor in 2001, I was specifically told in my training that we recorded attendance so that we could check on students’ welfare if they stopped showing up to classes and that was long before the current immigration rules.
Otherwise, I hope the course is going well.
Cheers,
Lawrence
Dr Lawrence Dritsas
Acting Director of Undergraduate School
School of Social & Political Science
sps.dug@ed.ac.uk
Telephone: +44(0)131 651 5572
Message received 2 Nov. 2018
Dear Sophia,
You can certainly share my previous response and this one with the students.
To follow up with your student’s email about monitoring attendance on this course, we have had an interesting discussion with the Head of College, Vice-Principal Professor Dorothy Miell. Given the unique, experimental nature of this course and its goal to create a space for discussing and exploring new forms of learning, Prof Miell agrees to exempt this course from the usual attendance reporting system this semester. She also wants me to tell you that at College they are very interested in learning more about the processes of mutual support that your students wrote about. Prof Miell would be very interested to join your discussions about attendance monitoring and student welfare and talk about the College’s view on these issues if the class wants to extend an invitation.
I think this is a great development and I hope the students on the course will discuss this offer and extend the invitation. It’s a great opportunity! If they choose to, then the best way to set this up will be to email the College Registrar, Vicky Watters to arrange it: Vicky.Watters@ed.ac.uk. In the event Prof Miell’s schedule will delay the discussion then one of the other Deans will certainly be available.
If you can keep me looped in on this I would appreciate it, as I am quite interested in the development of this course.
Kind regards,
Lawrence
Dr Lawrence Dritsas
Lawrence’s initial response reminded me of the discussions around bureaucracy – ‘college’, as the embodiment of power and authority – seems to have taken on a life of its own!
Good to hear that those in charge have agreed to the exemption of attendance taking as we requested, I suppose that cooperation does put an extra onus on us to ensure that we devote time to exploring this issue of attendance taking.
Some UCU branches are raising concerns about attendance monitoring bringing the ‘hostile environment’ into universities, as for students on Tier 4 visas, attendance monitoring has consequences that it does not have for other students, and can thus be discriminatory. (A point we raised at Edinburgh when centralized collection of attendance monitoring data was instituted a few years ago.) See this discussion: https://ucubranchsolidaritynetwork.wordpress.com/2018/11/05/monitoring-tier-4-students-in-an-hostile-environment/