In this post, we share with you the Collegiate Commentary from our latest Teaching Matters newsletter: Five pillars of the Edinburgh Futures Institute. In this commentary, Tim Fawns, Associate Professor (Education Focused) at Monash Education Academy, Melbourne, reflects on EFI and Monash’s opportunities and challenges for teaching and empowering students to navigate an increasingly uncertain yet interconnected world.
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading about some of my former colleagues’ experiences of teaching for the EFI, as described in this series’ blog posts. I was part of the EFI educational experiment, designing and running one of the first pilot courses as part of the MSc Education Futures (brilliantly led by Jen Ross and James Lamb). The pilot run of our Postdigital Society course has been one of the highlights of my teaching career. In large part, this was due to an amazing group of students, some of whom are co-authors on a paper with Jen and me about insights drawn from our experience (see Fawns et al., 2023).
With my family, I moved away from Edinburgh at the end of 2022, and started at Monash University in January 2023. The 5 Pillars of EFI, mentioned in this newsletter, resonate in some ways with initiatives here. In particular, Monash’s new Flagship Rich Educational Experiences (FREEs) echo some of the EFI’s experiential and interdisciplinary initiatives. Outlined within Monash’s Impact 2030 strategic plan, the FREEs are part of a focus on experimental and creative solutions to global challenges. The “real world”, challenge-led approach mentioned in Vlada Kravtsova and Sarah Harvey’s post about Students as Change Agents (SACHA) sounds like it has been driven by similar aspirations.
As soon as I arrived at Monash, I became embroiled in our institutional response to widely available generative artificial intelligence technologies (check out this series of 10 minute chats on GenAI that will soon feature The University of Edinburgh’s Sian Bayne). The perceived threat of GenAI to education centres largely around assessment, and each Australian Higher Education institution has been asked by regulator TEQSA to provide a strategic plan that outlines how it will assure the credibility of its qualifications (see the TEQSA assessment reform principles in this Assessment reform for the age of artificial intelligence). Thinking about Jane McKie, Stuart King and Lynda Clark’s experimental yet ethical take on using AI within the remixing of text, in the context of fusion intensive approaches, sent me on a rollercoaster of excitement, anxiety, creative and conceptual overload (no wonder reflexivity is an important pillar of the EFI). This reflexive balance of experimental yet ethical sounds, to me, like a necessary ingredient of future-focused education. This is an ingredient that is not so much “baked in” – since that would imply it no longer requires work and has become invisible – but carefully woven (sorry, I am a careless mixer of metaphors) throughout so much of what is done in the name of the EFI.
At Monash, our Education Plan asks us to consider the whole student and their place in a complex and challenging world. To do this, we need to think beyond tried and tested methods and ideas of education (e.g. focusing all of our energies towards disciplinary learning outcomes) to values and to the generation of new knowledge. If you write on a whiteboard with permanent marker, the best way to clean it off is to first write over the top with a non-permanent marker. Similarly, with entrenched educational practices, new challenges can help us deal with old ones. Covid-19, the emergence of widely-available generative artificial intelligence technologies, and various other challenges, push us to make changes to educational policy and practice that we seemed previously unable to make. However, such change must be done thoughtfully, and a future-facing ethos, mixed with aspirations of openness and honesty, can help with this by proactively promoting important discussions.
One of the challenges in my new role is to try to foster reflexive and outward-looking perspectives on education through academic development initiatives. These initiatives are, often, aimed at teachers new to Monash and, sometimes, new to the profession. They are almost always for educators and education-related staff with heavy workloads and life pressures. I suspect that fostering this outward-looking, future facing thinking cannot be done effectively without motivating the beliefs and energy of teachers to engage in the wider world as it is, and is becoming. If our goal is to help students to creatively and ethically navigate uncertain futures, with hope, kindness, and a strong sense of their own values, then I think we as educators need to cultivate those same aspirations in ourselves.
As we can see in the experiences and reflections in these posts, the strength of our aspirations is clearest when we are confronted by challenge. Kate Orton-Johnson and Alex Penland both discuss the practical challenges of fusion teaching in their posts, alongside the potential benefits of having to engage in such challenges. Hybrid education is important at Monash because of our international and distributed campuses. EFI’s fusion approach is, I think, a model that Monash and others can learn from. The EFI fusion model was designed before the Covid-19 pandemic, as a way of generating innovative combinations of online and offline learning activity, and extending the sense of reach of the physical campus.
While still at Edinburgh, based in the amazing clinical education team led by Prof Gill Aitken, we designed and ran some courses aimed at helping our medical education colleagues negotiate their own emergency online and hybrid experiences. As challenging as this was, the benefits of Edinburgh’s historical investment (financially and in terms of the recruitment and development of expertise) in digital education were clear. This includes the work done through the EFI on establishing its intentional and intensive fusion model as more than a “Plan B” for when on campus education is not feasible: it was a strategic and pedagogical move towards new creative possibilities of blending on campus and online practices (Bayne et al., 2020; Fawns et al., 2022).
There are many lessons that can be learned from the intentionality of the EFI’s approach to a hybrid modality. James Lamb’s point that every student is an online student, and, with it, the erosion of a conceptual border between online and offline is crucial to opening up new avenues of design thinking. This ties into postdigital and related scholarship around education (e.g. Bayne et al., 2020; Fawns, 2019; Goodyear et al., 2021; Jandric et al., 2018), in which all learning activity is seen as a complex and emergent combination of entangled elements. As James points out, blurring the borders between online and offline does not remove the planning and practical challenges of good hybrid education, but it gives us a powerful lens with which to approach those challenges.
Here, Jen Ross’s discussion of asynchronous approaches aligns with my own thinking that asynchronous design is a crucial, complementary element to the intensity of synchronous hybrid approaches. Asynchronous design can make the overall learning experiences of students more inclusive by lowering the stakes of what needs to be achieved within a given hybrid session, and by building continuity before and after an intensive hybrid session. This was something I built into the design of the Postdigital Society course, and have incorporated into the guidance I give colleagues at Monash about designing hybrid and, indeed, online and on campus approaches.
As useful as such practical learning from the fusion model is, a greater lesson for me is the value of holding an aspiration to be reflexive and ethical in my work, both responding to immediate needs and trying to shape future education such that it is relevant, effective, and empowering for students who must navigate an increasingly uncertain yet interconnected world.
References
• Bayne, S., Evans, P., Ewins, R., Knox, J., Lamb, J., Macleod, H., & Sinclair, C. (2020). The manifesto for teaching online. MIT Press.
• Fawns, T. (2019). Postdigital education in design and practice. Postdigital Science and Education, 1, 132–145. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-018-0021-8.
• Fawns, T., Ross, J., Carbonel, H., Noteboom, J., Finnegan-Dehn, S., & Raver, M. (2023). Mapping and tracing the postdigital: Approaches and parameters of postdigital research. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00391-y.
• Fawns, T., Markauskaite, L., Carvalho, L., & Goodyear, P. (2022). H2m pedagogy: Designing for hybrid learning in medical education. In E. Gil, Y. Mor, Y. Dimitriadis, & C. Köppe (Eds.), Hybrid Learning Spaces. Berlin: Springer.
• Goodyear, P., Carvalho, L., & Yeoman, P. (2021). Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD): core purposes, distinctive qualities and current developments. Educational Technology Research and Development, 69(2), 445-464. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09926-7.
• Jandrić, P., Knox, J., Besley, T., Ryberg, T., Suoranta, J., & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital science and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 893–899. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1454000.
Tim fawns
Tim Fawns is Associate Professor (Education Focused) at the Monash Education Academy, Monash Univeristy, Melbourne. Tim’s research interests are at the intersection between digital, professional (particularly medical and healthcare professions) and higher education, with a particular focus on the relationship between technology and educational practice. Before moving to Australia, Tim was a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Education, Edinburgh Medical School. Recent publications:
• Fawns, T., & Nieminem, J. (2023). The only way is ethics: A dialogue of assessment and social good. In L. Czerniewicz & C. Cronin (Eds.), Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures (pp. 533-553). Open Book Publishers.
• Fawns, T., Ross, J., Carbonel, H., Noteboom, J., Finnegan-Dehn, S., & Raver, M. (2023). Mapping and tracing the postdigital: Approaches and parameters of postdigital research. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00391-y.
