Creating a Constantly Evolving Curriculum In Education
When I first started teaching as a postgraduate student completing my research in the early 1990s, I was given the chance to deliver a few lectures and lead seminar groups. I would spend days preparing classes in the University library with vast amounts of content and thorough plans for subject coverage undertaking detailed reading and research to prepare my material. As I was working on a PhD at the time I was very conscientious about trying to show my expertise to the students in the areas I was researching.
Needless to say, for the new first year students my approach didn’t really work. While I might have impressed them with my knowledge, for these students who were embarking on the start of their studies what I presented was going over their heads. They didn’t yet have the developed understanding to contextualise these complex ideas and so whilst they would engage with the work they couldn’t really benefit from the scale and depth of the content being covered.
I had to learn how to pitch my teaching to the audience and understand the level they were working at, which took some time but was a valuable learning curve not only in developing my skills as a lecturer but also in my understanding of how to create environments where the students were more in control of their learning approaches.
As time went on, I moved away from what would be identified as content delivery to the development of the critical engagement skills I myself had learned as an English undergraduate. Most of my seminars as an undergraduate were characterised by vigorous and energetic debate amongst the students, with tutors acting more like referees than having a lead role, and it was through this style of critical engagement, challenging the ideas of others and having your ideas challenged in return, that I found the best approach to learning together.
Engaging together with others questioning what you think yourself and having to listen carefully to others and then construct meaningful responses yourself provided a positive experience in terms of both fine tuning my own critical thinking and keeping the passion for the educational journey alive.
I was also lucky enough to both study on and deliver courses in English and Drama, and then the Performing Arts which, despite being seen as courses that are expendable in the current academic climate, do in fact build all the skills that we are constantly told will hold the key to successful employment in the future — creativity, critical thinking, imagination, innovation, and collaboration.
I went to University in 1986, unexpectedly as I was the first from my family to go to higher education and it was before the push from the Blair government to expand university attendance. I remember a teacher writing that one of my O level essays read like a University essay and was surprised when I asked him what a University was. I also remember being asked if I was going to the Oxbridge meeting when I was in the sixth form — and not wanting to show my ignorance said yes without any knowledge of what an ‘Oxbridge’ was. In fact, I did not find out until years later — and suffice to say I also did not attend the sixth form meeting.
I have mixed feelings about the growth of student numbers in UK Higher Education over the last thirty years. On the one hand it gave me a career as an academic who worked in an institution where student numbers grew year on year but as fees came in and league tables led to increasing pressures to raise academic grades, I became concerned about the levels of debts students were accumulating and the long-term impact this was having on them. I could also see how league tables were creating grade inflation which ultimately devalues the whole system of grades itself and moved away from teaching and into HE management.
Some of the students I taught would not have gone to University in earlier generations, and they were intelligent, capable, and diligent students who excelled at their studies. I also met privately educated wealthy students who were only at University because it was the next step in an inevitable career ladder. But there were students on both sides who both received help from an expanded education system and others who didn’t really know why they were there other than it was where the school and their parents wanted them to be.
I think it is perhaps becoming harder for the educational system to manage this relationship with students and I also find that much of the academic curriculum that Universities deliver fails to provide the quality of experience I was lucky enough to have in an age before fees and HE expansion. Not that I am advocating a return to elitism, but rather I think we need to consider the whole approach we take to education and the pathways we offer to everyone, young, middle-aged, and old.
I think the skills that our young people need as they navigate their way into adulthood are poorly served by the current education systems we have in the UK — focusing as they do on a largely fixed curriculum and standardised testing approached. I’m not sure if they prepare people for very much at all in terms of what skills we need in our jobs and in our lives, but they persist and are very difficult to change, largely because they are designed to make it easy to decide who goes to University. I think that in the UK we have come to regard University as the only meaningful outcome for an 18-year-old coming out of their compulsory education and anything else as a failure to achieve. I think this is wrong and is damaging the future for many.
This is a shame, because countries such as Switzerland where I am living now, regard the vocational education route as being of equal value to the pathways into higher education. They have invested heavily in opportunities in practical and vocational programmes for years, working closely with business and industry, though some pupils have their route decided for them as early as 11 which seems a little premature. When I was 11 all I wanted to do was kick a football and I’m pretty sure that was never a career route for me!
We talk about apprenticeship routes for young people in the UK and new courses are being created, and we also now talk a great deal about lifelong learning. In practice, however, and despite the horror stories around student debt — the largest now around £225,000 in the UK — and the cost-of-living crisis, undergraduate student recruitment is still historically high.
Universities struggle for funds to manage these numbers, recruiting large cohorts of overseas students to plug what are seen as real terms cuts in education with a frozen fee rate; lecturers and courses are cut while current and likely future governments insist there is no more money and little prospect of the fee system changing anytime soon. Further to this, politicians respond to populist media reporting on immigration by telling Universities to stop recruiting overseas students — knowing this will put the finances of many HE institutions in peril.
Are there other solutions to how we do Higher Education in the UK? Do we need a more radical overhaul of how we address the challenges of student education, developing more creative and innovative approaches to both the school and the post school delivery of education, training and skills so that we can create a range of optional pathways for skills? Can we work to develop the maximum potential for any individual to take a succesful route through their education that is fulfilling and satisfying and also helps people to sustain their changing careers and lives.
The problem with people who make decisions about the education sectors, schools, colleges, universities, is that they have benefited most from the system that exists now and in the past. They have done relatively well out of it — despite the hard work, constant political interference, low esteem the education profession is held in and the threats to jobs and futures that are all around. I myself benefited greatly from working in the University sector for over thirty years and loved every role I had in University — even as I spent much of my time complaining about some aspect of the sector.
But change is slow if it exists at all. I can’t help thinking that even before the advent of radical technological developments like AI the system was not really fit for purpose. I tried to change it when I could in my own teaching, implementing numerous cross-discipline collaborative projects between practitioners who worked in different fields coming together, often with industry professionals, to create innovate pieces of work. I hope this helped the students who took part in it and gave them the skills of adaptability, creativity and innovative thinking that might help them through an increasingly uncertain world.
I think we need a curriculum that empowers people at all levels, because skills acquisition and the need to learn new things never really stops, and some of us think that is a good thing — it is one of the things that makes life interesting after all. But we still have narrowly constructed, straightjacketed and poorly conceived education systems that are letting more people down and are looking less and less fit for purpose in the current world.
Utilising the new tools we now have could enable us to create a dynamically changing and flexible approach to learning and teaching, where we can identify both the new skills and knowledge that people will need to survive the future changes. Moreover students themselves can determine what they are taught and how they are taught more than ever before if we give them the change to become creators in their own educational journey.
This future involves massive change in sectors which although dynamic in many respects are often inert in others, supporting false separations of siloed subjects and teaching and assessing groups of people in the same way for generations. The leadership on the future of education systems needs to come from a range of voices, some of them from those who have been disenfranchised by their experiences of the past, so we can create the most vibrant, diverse and innovative education system possible.
