Wednesday, October 3th, 2018
Week 3
Presence of: Oli, Gabrielle, Sophia, Niamh, Laerke, Nathan, Annapurna, Caroline, Sean, Snijdga, Rufus, Dante, Vijay, **
Apologies from: Gray, Cara, Fanny, Sofia, Rory, Paula, Licorice, Shayn (I am not sure I got all the names)
- Niamh, Sophia, Lucie and ** to talk about the agenda. The first 15min of the discussion started to put in the agenda the points we need to talk about during the two hours. Lucie proposed herself as the note taker, Nathan facilitated the discussion.
Points brought up by the group to be discussed:
- Assessment
- IT support (Alison came at 3.30pm to talk about the possibilities, check down)
- Planning of future session
- Discussions on the readings
- Who want to go to present the course at the “Teaching and Learning event of the SPS” at 5pm
- Contributions of other people within the university (workshops for example on Critical pedagogy by people from Murray House Education school.
In the format of a world café, we created 3 groups. The idea is that there was an anchor for each group, and people were going from one table (point) to another so we had the chance to discuss what we wanted in a more intimidate atmosphere. The 3 groups were:
- Planning the course (content of the course)
- Communication/IT (operation of the course)
- Discussion on the readings (general discussion)
After 40 min of discussion, we create a circle and feedbacked the discussions. We had 10min to share our ideas in big group and Alison from the IT support came to propose us some interesting ressources.
Communication group (check with Dante)
Plan the course
- We all wanted to have a clear goal and aim in this course and thought that what we are doing during the year should follow this line.
- We would like to create projects along the course. This would an opportunity to “explore” the different facets/sides of the university (ex: a group project looking at the perspectives of students, staffs, non-academic staffs, managing board of the university; another group looking at the governance of the university; other way to see education; excavate the administration and all the work behind the creation/organisation of a course…). From that, we could create a report/doc/policy for the broader public as well as event/exhibition.
WEEK 4:
We came up with the idea of creating a workshop (for the session of the 10th of October) based on the reading “The Circle of Vision” to find the vision, intention, goals, values and statement of our project. We thought that, once we have melted our different vision into one common vision it would be easier to tackle the organisational parts.
- People interested in organising this workshop have to fill the doodle BEFORE FRIDAY MIDDAY and we will find a time to meet on Monday or Tuesday to prepare the session. Here is the link to the doodle : https://doodle.com/poll/c3npn98f4mh6fp3p
- In a long-term, we thought that every week we could create a doodle to have a preparatory session for everyone who would like to prepare the class on Wednesday (would be the opportunity to gain time and be efficient).
WEEK 5:
- People come prepared to the session with an idea of a project they would like to do.
We would bring this together to have an idea of the different groups.
See the preparation of the session for the week too.
NOTES:
- Many people within the university are keen on being part of the project. Workshops, talks, guests could be organised for a wider reflexion.
- Question of how much work do we want to do outside the course?
Discussion regarding the readings (check with Sophia)
Discussion with Alison about IT support
Alison started saying that she was really supportive to our project. She explained how the non-academic staffs were feeling being part of the community too but were marginalised most of the time and weren’t feeling having a voice in the university. She explained how she was keen on helping us.
Our questions:
- How can we keep up the conversation outside the course and communicate with each other “constantly”?
- How can we archive our work/ share with the public?
- There is the possibility of creating with the help of Alison an academic blog with wordpress that could have a public facing part and an internal facing part for our communication. It would be a flexible website for the more interactive/social part as well as for the academic part. It could also be the main space where we share readings and links.
We talked about the possibilities of linking slack or yammer to learn to be able to chat and share resources more efficiently. Alison will contact Christine to talk about how we the resources list could be integrated into that, if it would be interesting for us.
- Omeka is an online space for archive and make it public. It is a website that allows us to share knowledge as a “curated exhibition”, in a well-designed way.
Niamh said she used it and was really well-done.
Ideas of Omeka website: https://omeka.org/classic/themes/
We finished the session with a recap of how we felt during the session. The words that came up were:
- Going forward (Sophia, Vijay)
- Like taking the roles of the lecturers and really building the course from scratch (Nathan)
- Like to see how much people are involved (Gabrielle)
- Exciting to have contact with broader community from the university
- Need to find a balance between discussing about the matters and the contents of the course.
- Feeling of movement/trajectory/grounded (Snidjha)
- Exciting about the course (nice mix of reflexions and conversations in one room) (Annapurna)
- Worried about how much work we want to put outside the course (Laerke)
- Feel that by creating our own learning we are already much more engaged and passionate (Caroline)
- Like having smaller group discussions
- Like hearing and realising that there is a broader community interested (Sean)
- Some people, worldwide, are interested in the course we are creating. It is an innovation!!!! (Niamh)
Thank you very much for this nice discussion!
