Masterclass: Learning, Teaching

MASTERCLASS Learning Teaching and Curriculum

in Taught Master's Degrees

Edited by

Peter T. Knight

CASSELL

Cassell Wellington House 125 Strand London WC2R OBB

PO Box 605 Herndon VA 20172

© Peter T. Knight and Contributors 1997 First published 1997 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN

0-304-33983-0 (hardback) 0-304-33984-9 (paperback)

Typeset by The Bill Gregory Partnership, Polegate, East Sussex Printed and bound in Great Britain by Redwood Books, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

Contents

Contributors

v

1

Learning, Teaching and Curriculum in Taught Master's Courses Peter T. Knight

1

2

Standards and Quality in Taught Master's Programmes Pauline Thorne

16

3

Adult Learning: The Place of Experience Mike Davis

28

4

Teaching and Learning at Master's Level: An Australian Perspective on Adult Education James A. Athanasou

39

5

Supporting Master's Degree Students Mark Garner and Catherina Wallace

53

6

The Use of Formative Evaluation: A North American Experience Susan Wesley

63

7

A Master's Programme that Matters to the New South Africa Duncan Reavey

73

8

Mastering the Niche: The Experience of Taught Master's Courses in British Geography Departments John R. Gold, Margaret M. Gold and George Revill

85

9

Master of Business Administration: A North American View Bob Hurt

96

10

Learning from the Experience of the Essex MBA Ian W. King

105

11

A Women's Studies MA Gina Wisher

115

12

Mathematical Studies in Northern Ireland S. K. Houston

125

13

Building Interdisciplinary Teams On-line in Rural Health Care Joann Kovacich, Cristanna Cook, Vincent Pelletier and Shirley Weaver

137

Contents

14

Conclusion: Diversity, Markets, Regulation and Equity Peter T. Knight

149

References

161

Index

168

Contributors

James Athanasou is Associate Professor in the School of Adult Education at the University of Technology, Sydney and co-ordinates the Master of Education in Adult Education. He lectures mainly in the areas of educational evaluation, learner assessment and the theory and practice of teaching. His research has focused on the role of interests in learning, as well as on aspects of career development. The purpose of this programme is to highlight the need for freedom in learning, as well as to reinforce those issues associated with personal relevance or meaningfulness in both education and work contexts. Cristanna Cook is the Research Director of Medical Care Development, Inc. and Associate Professor of Marketing at Husson College, Bangor, Maine. Her research activities have focused on multivariate analysis for several health related areas: cancer epidemiology, substance abuse, analysis of state injury data for the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration; and social marketing. She has been project director for the development of a Physician Training Curriculum on special needs children, project director for the evaluation of the public school system Student Assistance Team Program, and undertaken a variety of work related to a number of state and federal projects. Mike Davis is a Lecturer in Adult Education in the Centre for Adult and Higher Education in the University of Manchester. He is co-ordinator of the master's programme in Training and Development and also contributes modules to MEd. programmes in Adult and Continuing Education, and in Education and the Mass Media. His research interests include: group dynamics, experiential education, computer-mediated communication, autobiography and biography. Formerly, he was a head of English and Drama Department in a comprehensive school. Mark Garner's background is in language and communication. He began as a foreign languages teacher at Melbourne University and later taught English at a teachers' college He spent eight years in communication research at Cambridge, working on projects for the police, emergency services, and the Channel Tunnel. Since 1994 he has been Head of the Educational Services Unit at La Trobe University, Bendigo. The unit is responsible for student learning support, English as a Second Language and staff development. He also co-ordinates communication and learning skills courses for faculty. John R. Gold is Professor of Geography at Oxford Brookes University. He was formerly editor of Research into Higher Education Abstracts and The Journal of Geography in Higher Education and guest editor of The New Academic. His eight published books include joint authorship of Teaching Geography in Higher Education: a manual of good practice (Blackwell, 1993). In other guises, he writes about architectural history and environmental representations, subjects explored in his two forthcoming books The Experience of Modernism: modern architects and the future city, 1930-56 (E. and F.N. Spon, 1997) and Representing the Environment (Routledge, 1997, with George Revill). v

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Margaret M. Gold is Principal Lecturer in European Studies at Thames Valley University, London. She is co-ordinator of the Centre for European Research at TVU, and has written on historical and cultural themes, most recently Imagining Scotland: tradition, representation and promotion in Scottish tourism since 1750 (Scolar Press, 1995, with John Gold). Ken Houston was educated at Queen's University, Belfast, where he gained BSc. (Rons) and PhD degrees. He is Professor of Mathematical Studies in the School of Computing and Mathematics at the University of Ulster. He is interested in the teaching, learning and assessment of Mathematical Modelling and all else pertaining to introducing students to 'the way of life of an applied mathematician'. This includes the development of'enterprise'competencies, the use of Information Technology and innovative teaching strategies such as peer tutoring. Recent publications include the edited book Innovations in Mathematics Teaching (Birmingham: Staff and Educational Development Association, 1994); Enhancing Student Learning Through Peer Tutoring in Higher Education (with S. Griffiths and A. Lazenbatt, Coleraine: University of Ulster, 1995); and, with J. S. Berry, Mathematical Modelling (London: Arnold, 1995). Robert L. Hurt is an associate professor of accounting at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (one of the 22 campuses of the California State University system). His areas of specialization are accounting systems, cost/management accounting, and behavioural accounting. His primary research area is accounting education. He spearheaded the complete overhaul of introductory accounting courses at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona starting in Fall 1992. He holds degrees in accounting, business training and education, and management. Ian W. King is a lecturer in the Department of Accounting, Finance and Management at the University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, England. He has published in a variety of journals and texts. His research interests extend further than the content of his chapter and, in addition to a general interest in management education, he is presently embracing two research projects: the first examines the effects of culture on learning and the second, through the sponsorship of British Telecom [for whom he is also a research fellow], is concerned with examining the scope and characteristics of expertise in organizations, both at individual and collective levels. Peter T. Knight works in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University. His main research interests are in teaching, learning and assessment in higher education, and in the nature of school teaching. Jo Tait and he edited The Management of Independent Learning in Higher Education (Kogan Page, 1996); with Lee Harvey he wrote Transforming Higher Education (Open University Press, 1996); and he worked with Anne Edwards to write Effective Early Years Education (Open University Press, 1995). Joann Kovacich is Director of the ITHCRA Project and a Nursing and Anthropology Faculty Associate at the University of Maine, Orono, Maine. She designed and implemented the current interdisciplinary team training and health infomatics project and co-ordinated recruitment, training and maintenance of vi

Contributors

interdisciplinary teams of health care providers. She teaches leadership skills and interdisciplinary team building and management, and has developed innovative computer-mediated interdisciplinary didactic and field education for health professions students. She has created model materials for state and national dissemination and collaborated in the establishment of a state-wide organization, linked by an electronic communication system, that is devoted to the promotion of rural health care. Vincent Pelletier is Division Chair, Administrator for Division of Nursing, Faculty for Community Health, Health Assessment and Pharmacology, University of Maine at Fort Kent, Maine He has responsibility for both student and faculty interdisciplinary training in the field of nursing. He is an advisory board member of the ITHCRA Project. Previously, he was an instructor of nursing at the University of Guam; Director of Health Services at the Covenant House of Alaska; and Community Health Services Co-ordinator/ Instructor for the North Pacific Rim Native Corporation. Duncan Reavey heads the School of Environment and Development at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. His publications in international journals and academic texts are on subjects ranging from animal ecology to innovation in university teaching. His first book, Global Environmental Change: plants, animals and communities, was published by Longman in 1996. George Revill is Senior Lecturer in Geography at Oxford Brookes University. He previously taught in the School of Education at the University of Derby. He is course tutor for an environmental master's course run by the School of Social Sciences. He is co-editor of The Place of Music: economy, culture and the making of place (Guilford/Longman, 1997) and joint author of Representing the Environment (Routledge, 1997, with John Gold) - an introductory textbook on the study of environmental imagery in the arts and media. Pauline Thome is Associate Head: Curriculum Development at Sheffield Hallam University, where she is based in the Learning and Teaching Institute. She has lectured in Business Studies for over twenty years. More recently, she has been actively involved in the development of accreditation of prior learning and in workbased learning. It was this that prompted her interest in issues around academic levels. Catherine Wallace is a member of the Australian Institute of Training and Development and is currently working for the award of Master of Education (Training and Development). Her main area of interest and expertise is in staff development and she is employed in such a position at La Trobe University, Bendigo, where she has concentrated on developing programmes for general and academic staff. She is both a member of and liaison officer for the Victorian Staff Development Consortium, which is offering a non-formal training to senior managers in Higher Education. She has previously worked on curriculum development in Technical, Advanced Further Education.

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Shirley Weaver is Director of the Area Health Education Centre Program and Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Practice, University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine, Biddeford, Maine. She established the AHEC Program, co-ordinates state-wide resources for participation in AHEC, participates in state-wide boards, councils and committees related to health professions education; and serves as institutional liaison person with the national AHEC Directors' Council. She has developed an interdisciplinary team training project for rural geriatrics providers. She is an advisory board member on the ITHCRA Project. Susan Bray Wesley received her Ph.D. from The University of Akron in 1984. She has spent twenty-eight years in the field of education and is also a registered counsellor with a speciality in adult mid-life issues. She serves as faculty with the College of Education of the University of Maine, teaching the graduate concentration in the Adult and Continuing Education Area. She serves also as a consultant to several schools, businesses and industries for staff development, and training on adult issues and typology. Gina Wisker is a Principal Lecturer who works as Staff Development Adviser at Anglia Polytechnic University. In addition to her staff development work, she teaches undergraduate and postgraduate students in Women's Studies and English and supervises research students. She is co-editor of the Staff and Educational Development Association's journal Innovations in Education and Technology International and is active within the Association. Her most recent publications are Enabling Student Learning (edited with Sally Brown, published by Kogan Page in 1996) and Empowering Women in Higher Education (Kogan Page, 1996).

viii

Chapter 1 Learning, Teaching and Curriculum in Taught

Master's Courses Peter T. Knight

INTRODUCTION The terms 'coursework master's' and 'taught master's* cannot be defined with surgical precision. There can be a lot of teaching on degrees awarded on the basis of dissertation or project and there can be a lot of research in degrees such as the taught master's programme on which I work (at least 50 per cent of the assessment is based on student research studies). Besides, as curriculum planners increasingly come to see teaching as a set of activities that brings about learning (see pages 9-12 and Chapter 5, below), it is sometimes not clear what is to count as teaching or as a taught' programme. Yet, the notion of a taught or coursework degree has a rough and ready meaning, and on that basis, the book proceeds. Such programmes are indisputably booming. In the USA: • in 1940 there were only 27,000 master's degrees awarded in the USA, rising to 75,000 in I960; • there was a 43 per cent increase in the number of master's degrees awarded between 1970-1 and 1990-1, during which time the number of high school graduates dropped by some 15 per cent (Borchert, 1994).

In Canada: • there were 46,311 enrolments for master's degrees in 1981 and 68,452 in 1994 (CASG, 1991, 1995.) In Australia: there were 14,536 enrolments on coursework master's • programmes in 1988: 37, 198 in 1994, an increase of 149 per cent; • undergraduate enrolments grew in the same period by just 56.2 per cent to 442,910 (Mclnnis et a/., 1995).

1

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In Thailand: • public universities awarded 4,864 master's degrees in 1990 and 8,133 in 1994. Private universities awarded 1,005, a five-fold increase since 1990. UK statistics do not give figures for graduation from taught master's courses but do show the number of non-PhD higher degrees awarded (University Grants Committee, 1969; 1981; Universities Statistical Record, 1994). • • •

1966: 3,507 PhD degrees were awarded and 3,053 other higher degrees. Women received 11 per cent of these other degrees; 1978: 5,601 PhD awards and 12,871 other higher degrees, of which 23 per cent went to women; 1994: 8,945 PhDs and 33,677 other higher degrees (no figures available on sex of the recipients).

The twin conclusion is that coursework master's programmes are burgeoning and that they still cater for only a minority of graduates. They are elite programmes, showing signs of mimicking the massification that has marked baccalaureate programmes. This growth has been accompanied by a shift away from traditional academic and liberal arts subjects to professional studies, with 27 per cent of all master's degrees in the USA in 1990-1 being in education, 24 per cent in business, 8 per cent in engineering, 6 per cent in health sciences and 6 per cent in public affairs. In Australia, 32 per cent of coursework master's enrolments were in business and economics programmes; 19 per cent in education; 11 per cent in health; 6 per cent in engineering and surveying; and 5 per cent in law, which means that 73 per cent of these enrolments were for courses relating to major professions (Mclnnis et ol., 1995). It is not possible to make an accurate estimate of the balance between professional and other programmes of sub-PhD postgraduate study in the UK in 1994 but some informed judgements can be made from the official statistics (Universities Statistical Record, 1994). The largest group of awards, 20 per cent, was in business and financial studies, closely followed by social science (19 per cent, two thirds of which appear to have some vocational orientation), engineering and technology (11 per cent) and education (9 per cent). A conservative analysis of the data suggests that 58 per cent of such degrees had a professional orientation. This growth was accompanied by a virtual doubling between 1961 and 1985 in the number of American universities and colleges offering master's programmes, reaching 1,192 in 1985. That trend is also marked in the UK, Canada and Australia and continues in the USA. Despite continuing concerns that there are barriers to women students at postgraduate level (Moses, 1989; Epp, 1994), coursework master's degrees are becoming more attractive to women, perhaps reflecting the nature of the workforce in those professions that make the most use of these programmes. Of the 328,645 master's degrees awarded in the USA 1990-1, some 55 per cent were gained by women, a marked contrast to their 40 per cent share in 1970-1. In Australia the proportion of female enrolments for 1994 is 46 per cent (Mclnnis et al, 1995), a rise from 42 per cent in 1987 (Moses, 1989). Unfortunately, UK statistics for 1994 do not show the sex of recipients of non-PhD higher degrees.

2

Learning, Teaching and Curriculum in Taught Master's Courses

Lastly, there is a marked rise in the popularity of part-time study. In Australia 78 per cent of internal master's students were on part-time courses in 1994 (Mclnnis et al., 1995). In England, taking research and coursework students together and including those doing postgraduate teacher training courses, 52 per cent of students were part-timers in 1994-5. For the USA, the figure was 62 per cent in 1990. In Canada, however, only 39 per cent of 1994 enrolments were on part-time courses, a substantial drop since 1981, when the percentage was 48 (CASG, 1991,1995). As higher education institutions (HEIs) look for fresh opportunities to gain funds and, in some cases, prestige by developing master's programmes, so diversity has proliferated. In Chapter 8 Gold, Gold and Revill show how geography departments in English HEIs have keenly developed master's programmes, often in ways that are reminiscent of'niche marketing'. In Chapter 2, Thome shows how complex the range of provision can be in just one university and considers implications for academic standards. These themes are further explored in Chapter 14. In this introductory chapter the focus is upon learning, teaching and curriculum. It might be thought that the international proliferation of research into higher education left little room for a further treatment of such concerns. However, that research has dwelt on undergraduates and, to a lesser extent, upon research students. But coursework master's students are neither. They are older than undergraduates and often have family commitments and jobs. Their study is often part-time, increasingly by distance learning and can be likened to 'juggling for a degree' as Athanasou puts it in Chapter 4. Their motivation may be intrinsic but, as many of the writers in this collection show, it also comes, in many cases, from the drive for professional advancement. Coursework master's students, then, tend to have professional concerns, which some undergraduates may have, but master's students have active and specific professional concerns and professional experience. They bring to their work professional and life experience that are quite different from most undergraduates, and those experiences and concerns have the power to make them discerning and frequently demanding students. Moreover, they have often experienced success: these people are headed places. That too makes them rather different from the undergraduate for whom 'career' is in the future. Master's students are often living careers, and successful ones at that. Their work-related concerns also set them somewhat apart from research students and this distance is extended by the difference between full-time research and master's study that is increasingly done on a part-time basis. Clearly, master's students are not a breed apart. Plainly, there is much to be learned from research into undergraduate teaching and learning. However, there are sufficient differences to make it unwise to assume that good practice for taught master's students can simply be read off from research with undergraduates or PhD students, as if we were using the academic equivalent of a miles to kilometres conversion table. LEARNING A strategic view of learning leads to the conclusion that different learning methods are more or less suited to different learning goals. If the aim is to become better as a practitioner, which is often the case with master's programmes, then the range of learning methods is likely to be different than when the aim is to 3

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become more knowledgeable about Louis XIVs foreign policy. So, what is good learning in master's degrees that have professional concerns? There are many models of the nature of professional practice, many of them drawing explicitly upon the work of Donald Schon (1983, 1987), work that has influenced a number of the writers in this collection. Consider, for example, the model advanced by Richard Winter (1995). Professional competence, he said, includes: • • •

a commitment to professional values; continuous professional learning; affective awareness, that is awareness of the emotional complexity of situations; effective communication; effectiveness in acting; effective grasp of a wide range of professional knowledge; intellectual flexibility.

• • • •

Among the strengths of this account, two things might be highlighted. One is the way that professional development is not seen as something done to the individual but, as with transformative learning, is a process that depends very much upon the individual's own self-awareness. Secondly, questions about values are brought into a relationship with the practitioner's perceptions of the environment in which he or she works, which are in turn related to the practitioner's knowledge, understanding and development. To these learning goals might be added a list of the qualities that employers value. For illustrative purposes, the top ten in a list of qualities employers look for in new graduates in the UK is cited: Table 1:

Ten qualities highly valued by employers.

Attribute/quality

Mean rating (max. • 100)

Willingness to learn

92.77

Commitment

88.29

Dependability/reliability

88.10

Self-motivation

87.81

'Ream work

87.40

Communication skills (oral)

86.89

Co-operation

85.83

Communication skills (written)

85.66

Drive/energy

84.52

Self-management

84.50 (Harvey with Green, 1994).

4

Learning, Teaching and Curriculum in Taught Master's Courses

Clearly, there is room for argument about the qualities that employers seek in master's graduates and about the nature of professional work. Whatever the differences, it can be said that a range of learning (and hence of assessment) situations will be necessary if such diverse goals are to be promoted. The intention here is not to prescribe pedagogies that lead to such learning. To do so would fail to recognize the various disciplinary and situational forces at work, as well as failing to pay heed to the nature of the learners and to their stage of development within a master's programme. However, some general principles may be ventured. Conceptions of Learning These chapters report a concern to foster life-long, flexible learning; and to encourage reflection that not only envisages how to resolve problems but that also leads the learner to re-frame the situation itself. (This has been termed 'double loop learning*.) Repeatedly, it is said that knowledge is gained through mental activities such as applying information, evaluating, synthesizing, analysing and communicating it. As King observes in Chapter 10, knowledge is not banked, nor is it merely transmitted (Chapter 5): it is actively created. Overseas students, perhaps graduating in different academic cultures, may not share this view of learning. Moreover, as Wisker and Kovacich et al. show in Chapters 11 and 13, indigenous graduates may also have a tacit transmission or banking view of learning. So, if learning of the sort that is valued by the writers of the following chapters is valued, then there is a continued first-order learning goal of trying to unfreeze transmission or banking views of the nature of learning. Approaches to Learning The general view in these chapters is that andragogy (Knowles, 1988) is an appropriate model. In Chapter 6 Wesley gives an account of what she sees as the fundamental precepts of this approach to learning, illustrating it with examples from her own practice. The objection might be made that andragogy, while developed as an approach to adult learning, is no more than a re-statement of the nature of good learning, pure and simple. Certainly, the consonance of andragogy with experiential learning (a notion that is prominent in Chapters 3 and 13) and with reflection (which is discussed in the majority of chapters) is consistent with such a view. Different phrases, similar approaches. Whatever the label, there is agreement that learning-by-doing should be prominent in professional programmes, a position endorsed in many of the following chapters, where examples of learning by doing are provided. That does not exclude other modes of learning but it does acknowledge that if master's graduates are to be valued as creative forces, as problem-solvers and managers, then teaching, learning and the curriculum should give opportunities for such powers to be developed. An implication of these approaches is that students will come to take individual responsibility for their own learning. Many, especially graduates from didactic departments where surface learning is commonplace, will need to be helped to become independent learners (Knight, 1996a). However, a quality master's program should contribute to learner, practitioner and professional autonomy. Davis shows in Chapter 3 that this can be a difficult, even scaring, process for students 5

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and for their tutors. He argues that it is important to provide some scaffolding that enables people to become independent learners without making it possible for them to avoid taking on this responsibility for their own learning: a difficult trick. Balancing Theory and Practice An implication of these approaches could be that master's courses ought to be practice centred. Contributors, though, insist on the importance of bringing practice into symbiosis with theory. Yet, in Chapter 10 King shows how difficult it can be to get students to internalize the theoretical side. He shows that double loop learning, which he sees as an important goal in thinking about management, may be promoted within a course, albeit with difficulty, but can then be washed out when the student returns to the work context. Other writers in this collection show how they have tackled this theory-practice interplay in the context of rural health care (Chapter 13), business administration (Chapter 10) and in environment and development (Chapter 7). However, consensus that symbiosis is both desirable and difficult conceals some differences of emphasis about the nature of that symbiosis which emerge in this book. For some, engagement with theory - or 'academic' knowledge - has a priority, while others give that place to practical situations. In some measure, approaches to learning will vary according to the learners' own beliefs about the point of balance between the two, as well as according to the course team's beliefs. This is a potent source of diversity, as can be seen in Chapter 2. Some Learning Methods The range of learning methods that might be encouraged by master's courses is considerable. Here six of the most common, excluding traditional' lectures and seminars,1 are noted. •

•

6

Group and team work is attractive on at least two grounds. First, there is a growing body of research (for example, Slavin, 1990) that shows how effective co-operative working can be as a learning method. Secondly, professionals, even those in notoriously individualist jobs such as teaching, frequently work collaboratively. Chapters 3, 7, 9 and 13 all contain accounts of the ways in which co-operative working has been used within master's programmes, along with an indication of the thinking behind this approach and of the possible benefits. There are difficulties. As with becoming autonomous, this too is an area where departments need to have plans to help students learn ways of working that might be quite shocking to them. Davis vividly illustrates some of these difficulties in Chapter 3. 'Real-life' tasks are commonly set, both for assessment and for learning purposes. (The difference between assessment and learning is often assumed to be great but is not: see page 9, below). Accounts of such activities pervade this book. However, King (Chapter 10) raises an interesting point about the nature of'real-life' activities. He reports criticism of the classic MBA case study approach. Certainly, the cases deal with problems that might be encountered in the workplace. However, the format makes them quite artificial. An implication of this is that 'real-life'

Learning, Teaching and Curriculum in Taught Master's Courses

.

.

.

tasks can be more artificial (high tutor structuring, as in King's example) or less artificial (student chosen and student structured). This sequence would run through classic case studies to service learning, which is defined by Kovacich and colleagues as 'a set of structured learning experiences developed in collaboration with communities' (page 148, below) to workplace-based master's programmes. Again, it would seem as though there is a case for saying that people on master's courses may need to have an enabling structure that helps them to move from working on given, tutor-framed situations to themselves identifying, defining and working on situations. It should also be appreciated that the more the learning is based in the daily workplace, the more learners may become wrapped up in the specifics of the situation to the detriment of double loop learning. Davis (Chapter 3) describes the use of learning journals, a learning device that is becoming increasingly popular as an aid to reflection. It will shortly be argued that good, useful assessment feedback is important in learning. Related to that is a point that emerges in several chapters - 3 and 4, for example - namely that considerable personal contact between learners and tutors is important. The warmth of the interpersonal relationships on many master's courses can be felt in many of the following chapters. However, important though these relationships are for motivation, reassurance and to encourage a sense of equality that is itself helpful to effective learning dialogues, it is also important to see that an element of challenge is necessary. A major learning problem is to help students to see that challenge is not hostility, and to accept that good relationships with tutors involve trust and challenge. The capstone academic thesis will often be a poor way of establishing whether the master's student has reflected upon academic research, knowledge and analysis in order to improve the quality of her or his logic-in-action. A project, increasingly an option in North American programmes, has more to offer here, although it is likely not to make the same demands on the student as the traditional thesis. That is not to say that the learning demands will be any the less. They will be different, and ought to be more appropriate to the development of professional practitioners. Allied to this is the notion that the forms of research and evaluation in which such master's students will engage are likely to be different from those of traditional academic life. Practitioners are more likely to think about the best evaluation that can be done in the circumstances and within the time, and to bear in mind that evaluations ought to be of use to someone (Patton 1980; Cronbach et al. 1980). Similarly, notions of case study, practical enquiry and action research are likely to have an appeal to practitioners despite their lapse' from the formal canons of good research practice. This tension between different evaluation and research approaches is a further manifestation of the academic/professional tension. It is suggested that where programmes serve practitioners, then the curriculum, learning and teaching, while not being ignorant of other conceptions of master's level activity, are likely to reflect practitioner-focused approaches through projects, action research and situationally-sensitive evaluation studies. 7

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•

The final facet of learning to be mentioned is in some ways the most obvious nowadays. IT (Information Technology) should be as fully used as is appropriate to the goals of the programme. Whether professional development demands face-to-face contact is in some dispute and the demise of universities as we know them has been forecast (Chodorow, 1995). Master's programmes may be the first to go in that direction, since some two-thirds of North American master's students are parttime, many of whom will be engaged in professional work and have ready access to the Internet. A good example of the way that IT can transform learning possibilities is provided by Chapter 13, which also previews the potential of hypermedia - in this case based on the CDROM, although developments on the World Wide Web may supersede that technology.

Study and Language Skills Chapter 2 discusses the diversity of entry qualifications that master's students have. While some shortfalls of desirable knowledge and understanding are easily predicted from this diversity, what surprises some tutors is the range of study and language skills in the population of master's students (see Chapter 8, for example). Clearly, support is needed. However, in their discussion of learning support for master's students, Garner and Wallace (Chapter 5) urge that a broader view might be taken of the issue. Good learning support, they argue means working with course teams to devise programmes that are, from the first, cast on educationallysound principles, embodying notions of effective learning. Assessment Talking of the assessment of student learning, Reavey (Chapter 7) says 'assess what matters'. If the assessment of student learning does not attend to the range of knowledge, skills and other qualities that the department claims to be fostering through a master's programme, it is almost certain that the department is not delivering what it claims - that the pedagogy is faulty. Furthermore, it is likely that learners will treat the assessment requirements as the 'real' curriculum, ignoring course purposes that are not prominent in the assessment procedures. Moreover, there are fears that where such practical concerns and learning-bydoing predominate, students may be assessed primarily through coursework. Not only is the scope for collusion and unacceptable practice increased by this approach to assessment, but students may also choose to concentrate on areas of immediate practical concern, with the result that the master's degree attests to the quality of their thinking in familiar situations but may provide little evidence of their ability to apply their learning to new, unfamiliar situations. Yet, it is that evidence that is the best evidence of mastery. Some writers (see Chapters 4, 6 and 10, for example) give prominence to the importance of formative assessment, where judgements about the quality of work are used to shape a conversation with the learner with a view to identifying ways of improving their performance or the course itself (Wesley, Chapter 6). Selfassessment, mentioned in Chapter 10, is an important adjunct of formative assessment, although suspicion of it and of peer-assessment mean that neither is as

8

Learning, Teaching and Curriculum in Taught Master's Courses

widely used as it ought to be. Ironically, most of the criticisms levelled at self- and peer-assessment have force only when the purpose is summative. Summative assessment, which produces grades that publicly mark the learner's achievements, is also necessary. It is also likely to be taken more seriously than formative assessment, since it counts. So, if formative assessment recognizes the breadth of programme goals but summative assessment does not, there is again a danger of learning being skewed by assessment. In this collection there is evidence of the variety of assessment forms that has been used to allow students to demonstrate their insights (Chapter 11). This, it is acknowledged, compounds the existing problem of setting and operationalizing appropriate standards for master's level work. The use of portfolios in the assessment process is mentioned in Chapter 10 and clearly has a number of attractions, not least as a potential bridge between formative and summative assessment purposes. A general point of concern is that this approach, formative assessment in general and certain summative assessment approaches can be very demanding in terms of tutor time. There develops a trade-off between assessment for learning and assessment as a chore for faculty (academic staff). It is easy to see why easy to mark multiple choice tests are commonly used on popular programmes with a high information content. Yet it is hard to see how these tests can do much2 to assess the learning goals that characterize the master's programmes in this book. In other words, there is a tension between good assessment, good learning and what faculty might reasonably expected to do within the conditions of work that are developing in many countries. The assessment of student learning is a highly problematic topic, yet a highly important one. There are few solutions and the best advice is to think hard about the ways in which the assessment of learning shapes that learning - and how it could be used to shape good learning. Yet, change can make considerable demands on faculty. It is to teaching, then, that we now turn. TEACHING As was apparent in the previous section, learning and teaching are intertwined. Teaching might be defined as the sum of the arrangements that make that learning possible, so good teaching would be judged by the degree to which students learn, not by the tutor's skill as a performer. Technical Skill, Orientation and Goal-consciousness

Plainly, it is necessary for teachers to be enthusiastic, knowledgeable, empathic and approachable. Student evaluations repeatedly show how much learners value these qualities. Moreover, skilled teaching technique involves, for example, encouraging interaction, the teacher moving around the classroom, using an expressive voice and speaking well, although male and female students rate the importance of these factors somewhat differently (Smith et al, 1994). However, necessary though they may be, they are not sufficient for transformative learning of the sort described in the previous section. Teachers need to have a view of their work that gives priority to the transformation of learners' understanding as opposed to increasing the amount of information they know.

9

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Consider the experience of Boyatzis and colleagues, which shows that 'student improvement is seen in areas where faculty intent [to develop a skill] is high . . . in areas where faculty intent is low, little change occurs in students' (1995, p. 129). This evidence that teachers need not just a transformative orientation but also clarity about their goals may be unremarkable but it allows the corollary that if academic staff do not intend for certain types of learning to be a possible outcome of their teaching, then there is little reason to expect it to happen. Given that 'training and socialization into the professional, academic culture creates strong commitments to pedagogical methods that sustain the expert-teacher model of teacher behaviour* (p. 221), then for their new MBA programme to work, staff had to move from a view of themselves as researchers to one of teachers - teachers of a special, non-traditional sort. Their view of themselves as teachers had to move to one of teachers as people with expertise working within a /earnm^-centred institution, focusing upon the whole person of the learner, not just upon the transmission of knowledge to her or him. If the model of learning that has been described is to be more than a rhetorical model, faculty need an orientation towards it, commitment to routinely promoting goals that derive from it, as well as technical skill. Dealing with Contradictions Faculty face a contradiction, one reinforced by some professional and validating bodies, between the drive for a banking approach to learning and the transformative orientation. Good teaching, within the transformative paradigm, is continually threatened. A certain resilience is needed. Contradictions have to be faced. An implication is that academic staff who are more successful in handling these contradictions will have higher confidence or academic self-esteem. A parallel with playing poker illustrates the point. The player who has a pile of chips (equivalent to high self confidence) is more likely to take risks than the player with few. Where faculty believe themselves to be effective, there may be more potential for getting them to risk dealing with these contradictions in ways that break from the traditional practices that do not well support transformative learning. Learners and Knowledge

The goal of mastering information can overshadow other aims and even where a curriculum claims to promote a far wider range of skills, qualities and insights, the curriculum that is created can be limited to information mastery. In Chapter 9, Hurt described how his department has tried to avoid this situation where didactic pedagogies intended to ensure that the ground is covered can cancerously dominate. Learning becomes cramming and instruction is to be judged by how skilled the instructor is at keeping the class engaged with the task of learning information. In high school and in undergraduate classes such teaching may have been greatly valued, so that, as master's students, they equate good teaching with the person who is a good performer and a friendly soul to whom learners can turn when they have problems. At master's level, the characteristics of the students mean that there should be less room for such teaching, yet their experience of academic discourses may lead them to expect, even to require, transmission models of learning, thereby going against their own best interests. Nothing is clearer than that good professional practice is only loosely connected with the practitioner's store of knowledge. 10

Learning, Teaching and Curriculum in Taught Master's Courses

A clutch of additional qualities, skills and abilities distinguishes the skilled professional who may actually have less technical information to hand than the new graduate (Eraut, 1994, Winter, 1995). Dall'alba (1991) has shown how science tutors with different views of the subject take up different stances on science teaching. Since such views are, unfortunately, not normally made explicit to learners, the consequence is that they do not get a developing grasp of the nature of the subject or area but a series of accounts of parts of it, based on differing epistemologies. Consequently, teaching, so far from helping learners to understand the nature of the subject or area, has actually contributed to misunderstandings. Good teachers have and share a view of the subject area and help learners to connect what they are doing in a module to that structure, so as to get a sense of the game. Many of the problems noted in the following chapters of connecting master's work with the workplace, can be traced to differing, largely tacit, understandings of the purpose of master's level study and of the relationship between theory and practice. Modes of Delivery There are many things to commend workplace-based learning, company MBAs and distance learning as modes of delivering master's programmes. Yet, as Houston recounts in Chapter 12, there are practical difficulties in making such schemes work. To update his story, it is worth considering IT-based distance learning, of which Chapter 13 provides an example. With good resources, skilled staff and provision for learners to meet face-to-face, there is no doubt that powerful, flexible learning can take place. Leaving aside access issues, so that those without a computer connection and the money to pay for on-line time are excluded from online distance learning programmes, other problems might be adduced. Despite advances in software, using IT can still be fraught with maddening glitches. Producing good distance learning materials is also hard, partly because of the difficulty of making them look good but also because, in the absence of much information about how people really do learn from such materials (Hedge, 1996), it is hard to structure them appropriately, and it is expensive, especially since they demand a lot of learning by faculty, learning that can be quite uncomfortable. Lastly, staff and students have to learn ways of communicating electronically when the important language of body and face is lacking. Faculties face the contradiction that, in principle, there is a powerful case for delivery by distance learning techniques - and for doing this with on-site as well as off-site learners. Yet there are strong forces that militate against that. Likewise, there are critiques of other delivery modes, although the specifics of the critiques differ.3 Delivery modes that ought to compel academic staff to put questions about effective learning at the heart of their 'teaching* bring difficulties with them, so more traditional, more 'teacherly* delivery modes continue. Becoming a Master's Teacher Chapters 3 and 6 tell something of how their writers became master's teachers. Interestingly, this professional learning seems to have been informal, not the product of any institutional provision for learning about master's level teaching and learning. This is similar to findings about professional learning in English high schools: there is a do-it-yourself quality about it (Helsby and Knight, 1997). 11

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If there is something distinctive about master's level work, then there ought, logically, to be dedicated provision for master's programme faculty. The absence of examples of such programmes is striking. If it is accepted that there ought to be planned professional development for master's faculty then, where funds allow, the model of learning support described in Chapter 5 has a great deal to commend it. Institutional Responsibility Good teaching ought not to be reduced to questions about individuals' skill and confidence. Institutions bear responsibility for the environment that supports or discourages good teaching; individuals bear responsibility for the creativity that they bring to making good learning happen in less-than-perfect environments; and, as a consequence, teaching quality is nobody's fault and everybody's. A number of chapters in this book - for example, 4, 8, 9 and 12 - say that master's teaching makes big demands on academic staff, who sometimes, perhaps frequently, do master's teaching out of goodwill, for little or no extrinsic rewards - as may be seen in Chapters 7, 8 and 11. Conrad and colleagues (1993; Table 14.1, in the last chapter of this book) have also noted the range of institutional and departmental support for master's level work, making it clear that it can be seen as a marginal activity, attracting few resources. Hurt's account in Chapter 9 gives an example of the opposite. Where master's level teaching appears less than satisfactory, it may have little to do with the teachers and much more to do with the institutional environment. This re-focusing of the discussion leads into consideration of the curriculum as a product of the interplay between academic staffs vision and the institutional matrix. CURRICULUM While there is broad agreement amongst contributors about the teaching and learning processes that ought to distinguish master's curricula there is little on content and the hope (Burns et a/., 1993) that as disciplinary paradigms become clarified, greater curriculum consistency will become possible within any given area of master's level study seems to be vain. In addition, there are profound differences about audience and purposes (Chapter 2) and about the meaning of'master's level standards' (Chapters 2 and 14). In the face of such disagreement, it is not wise to try and build a grand curriculum theory. Indeed, the growth of what are, in the UK, called 'unitized' programmes, where students can combine modules (or units or subjects) from a range drawn from different degree schemes and programmes (including, sometimes, undergraduate programmes) calls into question the very idea that faculty can plan coherent curricula. This is not to say that it is hopeless to try and make judgements about the quality of a curriculum, although confusion about appropriate standards causes massive problems. Curriculum might be appraised through what Eisner (1983) referred to as 'connoisseurship', which is the informed appreciation or judgement of the programme made by academic peers and, perhaps, employers and taking into account valid performance indicators, such as student evaluations.

12

Learning, Teaching and Curriculum in Taught Master's Courses

However, there is more power in these circumstances in concentrating on the making of curriculum. Four themes may be seen in the following chapters. •

•

•

•

'Have a vision for all to see', advises Reavey (page 88, below). He adds the advice to 'go for gold', to think big. Whether or not ambitious visions dominate curriculum planning, the heart of the advice, that a curriculum is enhanced by a strong and extensive sense of purpose, is important. Consult. Programmes described in this book have been developed in consultation with an external advisory committee (Chapter 4), with the professional community (Chapter 13) and with employers (Chapter 7). However, it needs to be appreciated that conflict can be endemic in consultation. Sufficient attention has already been paid to the extent to which there are different understandings of learning and teaching at master's level, as well as of programmes' purposes, audiences and standards. Good consultation should also expose different understandings of the discipline (Chapter 8) and, in interdisciplinary programmes (Chapters 11 and 13) of the nature of the area of study; of the relationship of contributing disciplines to it; and of how learners are to integrate the various disciplinary perspectives. This is an important process through which meanings are created. Without the emergence of a common language, at least, the quality of the curriculum will be jeopardized. On this view, good planning will take time. This is not wasted time but necessary time. There needs to be a considerable up-front investment in the programme. However, the marginal status of some programmes, scrambling for a niche to clutch on to, means that this investment will not always be made. Implicit in this collection and explicit in work on educational change in general (Fullan, 1991), is the message that implementation takes time and attention. In addition, changes, as well as growth caused by developments in the area, will be necessary throughout the programme's life. (See Chapters 8, 10, 11 and 12 for examples on continuing change and growth in master's programmes.) Like cars, master's programmes need maintenance, which is costly. But, if maintenance is skimped, they may not stay abreast of fast-changing professional practice.

The salience of these points can be illustrated by considering the revision of the MBA in the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University (Boyatzis et al., 1995). Six features of the development process are identified: • •

•

First, the period of development was protracted, entailing 33 meetings spread over two years; Secondly, much attention was put into examining the literature and talking with academic colleagues and with other stakeholders in order to clarify the goals of the programme. That led to the specification of 22 skill abilities, which included areas of knowledge, that were to be systematically promoted and assessed through the MBA; Thirdly, the programme was conceived as a whole, that is as something more than a collection of elective courses. Each core and elective course 13

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•

• •

had a clearly-specified role to play in the development of the 22 skill abilities; Fourthly, there was a clear pedagogical philosophy, leading to the principle that the programme should be designed to promote student mastery of these skill abilities in the most appropriate ways possible. In other words, the traditional, producer-centred concern with teaching was subordinated to a concern for bringing about learning by whatever methods that could be portrayed as fit for the purpose; Fifthly, it was recognized that the implementation of the new course would require as much leadership and care as its planning; Sixthly, student performance was carefully monitored, allowing the programme team to identify areas in which their teaching was successful and indicating skill abilities that needed further attention. Implicit in this is the principle that the assessment of student learning should support the curriculum goals, rather than, as is so often the case, subvert them (Erwin and Knight, 1995). The programme was, then, continuously reviewed with an eye to continuous quality improvement.

The line taken here is that judgements about the quality of curriculum may, in part, be based on an analysis of the ways in which it was created and is maintained. In the Weatherhead case, quality signals are: .

. . . . .

the amount of time spent on programme development; clear goals arrived at through consultation and research; programme coherence; a philosophy of learning; attention to implementation issues; well-informed continuous quality improvement.

The impressive (and quite rare) evidence of a transformative effect on the providers and students confirms that a quality curriculum development process has led to a high quality of learning outcomes A word of caution is needed. It is possible to envisage a programme developed according to these six principles, or to similar ones, but which connoisseurs find deficient. The reasons might be that faculty lack experience of master's level work, or that their careers have not left them sufficiently well-prepared academically. Equally, they might lack the pedagogical skills for which it calls. The point is that curriculum trails into teaching, which is defined by reference to concepts of learning. It has been convenient to separate out the three in order to lay out themes that run through the book. But it is artificial. The chapters that follow show something of the real life interpenetration of these issues.

1. Innovators tend to treat lectures and seminars with some disdain. Harvey and Knight (1996) argue that the question is not whether certain approaches are inherently good or bad. It is about the fitness of any method for any given purpose. lYaditional' lectures and seminars can be excellent for some purposes. Lectures and seminars that have been modified to take account of research into effective learning have more power: even for coursework master's students.

14

Learning, Teaching and Curriculum in Taught Master's Courses 2. Multiple choice tests can be written to tap higher order skills and problem-working ability. Often they are not. Even where they are, the format itself limits the degree to which the ability to work with hazy, contested real life problems may be assessed. 3. There are awkward questions to ask about part-time learning. There is some evidence that these students get second-class treatment from HEIs and there is little doubt that their experiences are quite different from those on full-time programmes. These questions need more data before answers and suggestions can sensibly be ventured.

15

Chapter 2 Standards and Quality in Taught Master's Programmes Pauline Thorne

Even within one university, taught master's programmes serve many different clients, embody a diversity of purposes and reflect different notions of the 'masterness' of postgraduate study. In this chapter, Pauline Thorne describes ways in which Sheffield Hallam University has tried to develop a framework for its taught master's programmes. She shows that defining standards and establishing what is meant by master's level work and by progression in university learning were contested and problematic. The outcome, at a time when uncertainty and diversity were giving cause for concern in the UK, was a typology that accepted diversity in the interests of maintaining flexible, useful provision. She concludes that 'the dilemma is how we can retain the concept of a "fixed" and comparable standard of attainment . . . whilst providing the very flexibility of provision that is going to be necessary to support the changing needs of the labour force'. It is a dilemma facing other higher education institutions in other countries. Given the strength of new right ideas of accountability and managerialism, a post-welfarist emphasis on value for money, and the rapid growth ofcoursework master's programmes, it is a dilemma that will become increasingly pressing. INTRODUCTION At the heart of the current standards debate in higher education (HE) is the belief that standards of student achievement should be comparable across programmes in the same institution and across similar programmes in different institutions. This chapter explores this concept of standard and what it means in the rapidly expanding postgraduate sector in England. In particular, it considers whether we can, or should, attach some generic, hierarchical definition of academic level to standards at master's level, or whether a different model should be developed where courses are judged in the context of the purpose of the education they are attempting to provide. This discussion has to be placed in the context of a continuing and growing concern about the quality of education from which postgraduate education has not been exempt. There have always been tensions between the dual aims of widening access to HE and maintaining its quality. In England, the expansion in student numbers over the past ten years has raised questions about whether an appropriate balance is being achieved. These concerns have been compounded by the 16

Standards and Quality in Taught Master's Programmes

impression that the market is being given more and more prominence in determining both the shape and character of provision. Significantly, state funding bodies have also begun to suggest that the assumption of comparability is not one that can be taken for granted. Recently, there have been discussions of what it means to have achieved graduate status, with an early conclusion being that the possession of a bachelor's degree can signify many, different attainments (HEQC, 1995). In 1996, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), together with other august national bodies, published the result of a review of postgraduate education chaired by Professor Martin Harris (Harris, 1996). Although the original brief had centred on how postgraduate provision should be funded, it had soon become obvious that the need to assure the quality and standards of postgraduate education was one of the major issues currently facing HE. The Harris Report found 'widespread confusion, at home and overseas, about what the hugely diverse postgraduate sector is offering* (Harris, 1996, p. 7). Some providers have argued that this huge diversity merely reflects the response to a market-led demand for vocational and educational 'relevance'. In reality, as funding for undergraduate courses has been squeezed, many universities have actively engaged in competitive strategies which have both expanded and fragmented the market for postgraduate courses. These have included maximizing the potential of modularization, credit accumulation and transfer (CATs), using different methods of delivery such as distance and work-based learning, and by experimenting with new combinations of disciplines. Each of these, by itself, represents a significant challenge to those concerned with assuring quality and standards. MASTER'S DEGREES, DIPLOMAS AND CERTIFICATES Although much of the discussion on the quality of postgraduate education has naturally concentrated on master's degrees, there are at least two other awards in common use in England and Wales. Most universities who have adopted a CATs scheme offer the intermediate awards of Postgraduate Certificate and Diploma for students who either do not wish to study for a full master's degree or, for some reason, are unable to complete. These titles, however, are also associated with awards that are postgraduate in time which are not meant to imply a postgraduate level of achievement. They provide postgraduate experience but do not necessarily demand work at a postgraduate level. The best known of these is the Postgraduate Certificate in Education, which is a professional teaching qualification with a strong emphasis on mastering the craft of classroom practice. To add to the confusion there is now an increasing number of undergraduate courses that lead to the award of a degree with the title of 'master', of which the MEng. (Master of Engineering) is an example. The Harris Report urged HE to move as rapidly as possible towards a coherent and consistent nomenclature for qualification titles. It described this recommendation as ambitious. In practice it is likely that the confusion will remain for some time. RESPONSIBILITY FOR QUALITY ASSURANCE In the United Kingdom the responsibility for quality assurance processes and the maintenance of academic standards lies with each individual HE establishment. 17

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For those institutions, such as the former polytechnics, that had been previously associated with the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA), this is a relatively new responsibility. It follows the implementation of the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act which gave them degree awarding powers, thereby making them into universities. The CNAA had been established in 1964 with the brief to promote and maintain high academic standards in education, learning, knowledge and the arts through the granting of academic awards and distinctions. Over the years of its existence, a key instrument for this principle had been its Handbook of Principles and Regulations - the Academic Registrar's Bible. Shortly before it was dissolved, CNAA offered the following advice to all HE institutions on what they believed was of critical importance in promoting and maintaining standards. All institutions should: a) develop a framework of principles and regulations with which all courses in an institution should comply; b) establish common procedures within an institution which require all courses leading to academic awards to undergo a formal process of validation leading to approval and to be subject to regular review. What follows in this chapter is a case study outlining the thinking in one institution, Sheffield Hallam University (SHU), as it attempted to develop an academic framework for postgraduate programmes in response to the CNAA's recommendation. Most of the work was done by members of the Academic Awards Committee (AAC) of the Academic Board in consultation with colleagues across the university. The issues that this chapter raises, however, are not unique to a single university or even to the new university sector. SHEFFIELD HALLAM UNIVERSITY Sheffield Hallam University is one of the new universities created by the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act. Throughout its history as a polytechnic it had been characterized by a vocational mission and strong links with the professional bodies, business and industry. It saw the purpose of its courses as, the preparation of learners for, or development within, employment in general and the professions in particular, providing an educational experience of intrinsic worth to the individual learner' (SHU, 1995, p. 54). This particular purpose was set within the context of broader educational aims established by the CNAA. These were: the development of the students' intellectual and imaginative powers, their understanding and judgement, their problem-solving skills, their ability to communicate, their ability to see relationships within what they have learned and to perceive their field of study in a broader perspective. The programme should aim to stimulate an enquiring, analytical and creative approach, encouraging independent judgement and critical self-awareness (CNAA, 1992, p. 48). Quality assurance procedures were already well developed within Sheffield Hallam University before the award of a Charter and there were established 18

Standards and Quality in Taught Master's Programmes

mechanisms for course validation, review and for the appointment of research supervisors and external examiners. The new independence did, however, offer the university the opportunity to re-examine the awards framework that it had inherited from the CNAA. The Academic Board had already declared that any framework had to ensure that: • • • •

the learning outcomes of a course were consistent with national standards and the specified level of the award; the student had been through a process that accorded with the general educational aims of that award; the student was equipped with the necessary skills for continued learning; the title of any award was meaningful.

The first step for the AAC in developing a framework for postgraduate awards therefore was to establish what the 'national standards' were for the different awards. ACADEMIC STANDARDS What do we mean by 'academic standards'? Pring, writing about academic standards in 1992 declared: there is a dominant academic tradition which sees the quality of intellectual endeavour . . . to lie within specific traditions of disciplined enquiry . . . Thus there are standards but these, though acknowledged in one's intellectual effort, are more often than not unspoken . . . And the application of the standards does not entail explicit formulation of them. Hence the importance of the 'judgement* of those who are authorities within the subject (Pring, 1992, p. 12). He contrasted this with vocational standards which he saw as quite explicit. Clearly, not everyone is in agreement with Pring. The Higher Education Quality Council (HEQC), which inherited the mantle of the CNAA, defines academic standards as 'explicit levels of academic attainment which are used to describe and measure academic requirements and achievements of individual students and groups of students' (HEQC, 1996, p. 9). CNAA Definitions of Standards According to its Handbook, CNAA claimed to have what it described as a benchmark standard against which course proposals were to be judged. These were defined in terms of the minimum study time, in academic years, spent by a student who had the appropriate knowledge and skills to enter a programme of study. The CNAA approach is exemplified in the following, very wordy, definition of the standard of the taught master's degree. It was: 19

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that expected of an Honours graduate who has successfully completed a programme study in a field for which prior knowledge and skills have provided an appropriate foundation, at a level demanding more advanced and intensive study than a first degree which is suitable for the fulfilment of the general educational aims and which includes a compulsory element of advanced independent work; the normal length of the programme will be 48 weeks or its equivalent (CNAA, 1992, p. 59). Earlier versions of the standard had referred to the 'recent honours graduate'. Entry Qualifications as a Standards Benchmark As entry qualifications seemed so critical to the definition of standard, the AAC decided that it should investigate whether the CNAA requirements for honours degree awards were being met in practice. At that time Sheffield Hallam University advertised in its prospectus over 100 taught programmes leading to master's degrees. An examination of the entry requirements for these programmes showed that whilst the majority stated a preference for graduate entry some did suggest a lesser qualification and/or experience would be acceptable. Approximately a third of programmes required a 'relevant or appropriate' first degree (or diploma). The remainder did not specify a particular degree requirement, although they often insisted on appropriate work experience. A further analysis was undertaken of prospectus entries in a sample of both old and new (post 1992) universities in the United Kingdom. The areas covered were arts and humanities, science and engineering, management, and computing. Whereas entry onto a research degree seemed inevitably to require a 'good honours degree', the situation with taught master's was less clear cut. Overall, the older universities were more likely to demand a good honours degree but there were wide variations between subjects. The greatest difference in requirements between the two groups was in arts and humanities courses where the older universities were much more likely to demand a good honours degree in a cognate area. Further analysis however revealed courses from new universities included a much higher proportion of multi-disciplinary, Vocational preparation' courses rather than pure, single discipline courses and so, in practice, very different courses were being compared. In the management area, which accounts for a very substantial proportion of students on taught postgraduate programmes, there were fewer differences between the two types of university, with only just over a third of courses in each group requiring a good honours degree and most accepting alternative qualifications. Approximately the same proportion accepted an alternative qualification plus experience. However, old universities were significantly less likely to take people on experience alone. Given the lack of unanimity on the importance of a good academic record as an entry requirement for certain management awards, it is hardly surprising that the expansion of 'M' (that is to say master's) level work in this field has fuelled the debate as to whether there is an adequate distinction between programmes that are postgraduate in time and those that are postgraduate in level. This concern has been exacerbated by the development of competence-based awards in 20

Standards and Quality in Taught Master's Programmes

management, where there have been clear market pressures to label all post experience work in the management areas as 'M' level, even where it is being undertaken by non-graduates. Although the AAC recognized that this research was limited both in scale and by its concentration on advertised entry requirements, it believed that it was sufficient to confirm that entry requirements by themselves would not provide an adequate benchmark by which to define the character of postgraduate level awards. There were clear differences in entry requirements across subjects and between institutions. AAC considered that it might be more fruitful to specify clearly defined and measurable outcomes for master's level work. This required the group to look more closely at the idea of academic level. Generic Descriptions of Academic Level CNAA had proposed a single Level, 'M', within its CATs framework which did not discriminate between: • • •

the post-experience and postgraduate aspects of a programme; subject continuous study and study in a new subject area; the three stages of a programme (Certificate, Diploma and Master's degree).

There was no attempt to provide a generic descriptor of Level 'M'. It was argued that course units containing undergraduate material could attract an 'M' rating if they formed an integral part of a postgraduate programme. This suggested that there was not, in practice, some independent and absolute concept of standard which determined the level of the unit; rather, level was more like a label which was attached to the unit and that label was determined by the award on which the student happened to be enrolled. The idea of'academic level' has a number of dimensions. This has led on occasions to some confusing and even contradictory statements. The CNAA states that levels relate to standards of work and not necessarily to the year in which the assessed course unit is taken during a programme of studies' (CNAA, 1992, p. 130) but a few sentences further on declares that 'the level defines the position which the course unit occupies in the curriculum ... a course unit might be recognized for specific credit at different levels for different students' programme of study* (CNAA, 1992, p. 131). The concept of a level at the very least incorporates both the notions of a standard (related to what is expected nationally and professionally of someone at a particular stage in the educational process) and of individual and personal development through undergoing specified learning experiences. As the CNAA account had not proved useful, the AAC looked at other attempts, both in the UK and overseas, to provide generic descriptors of level. This included two projects funded by the Department for Education and Employment, based in the Welsh Access Unit and the South East England Consortium (SEEC), which between them covered 50 institutions. They were working on providing generic descriptors of level. The SEEC consultation document actually came out too late for full consideration but early indications suggested that the approach being adopted would not resolve the critical issues attaching to the practice of people following master's courses on subjects or areas that they had never previously studied, nor would it resolve the differences between master's courses that were at 21

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postgraduate level as compared to those that might better be characterized as post-experience. According to SEEC characteristics of 'M' Level work include: • •

The context of learning: complex, unpredictable and normally specialized demanding innovative work which may involve exploring the current limits of knowledge; The learner has depth of knowledge/mastery of skills in a specialized area and/or across applied areas of discipline(s). Confidently can apply full range of appropriate knowledge/skills to create response to any situation. May need to define/expand existing knowledge or techniques. Is autonomous in a professional context and may be responsible for the guidance/motivation of others (Quoted in HEFCE, 1996, p. 36).

When Sheffield Hallam had developed its undergraduate framework, the concept of a hierarchical notion of level had been widely accepted. A scheme had been developed, largely through pragmatic consultation with groups of staff across disciplines, although some attempt had been made to accommodate theories and research into adult learning. Higher Education was generally perceived as a broadly linear process in which the student progressively developed learning through the acquisition of basic skills at Level 1 through to quite sophisticated analysis and evaluation of ideas at Level 3. But should a master's programme be seen as fourth level in this hierarchy, implying new or greater intellectual skills and possibly even greater specialization in subject material? PROGRESSION

Progression Through Curriculum Content For many academics the notion of progression, moving from one level to the next, is associated with increased depth or narrower curriculum specialization. This is achieved by carefully designed degree courses which enable students progressively to acquire, develop and use specialist knowledge, skills and ways of thinking, usually within a ever-narrowing curriculum. Traditionally, master's courses have built on this undergraduate experience in a discipline or professional area. Progression through depth is being challenged by those that argue that education could and should be a broadening experience. They cite evidence that both students and employers have reacted against early specialization, which has affected the scope and structure of undergraduate, as well as master's, programmes. This has had an impact upon the traditional notion of the master's degree in two distinct ways: •

•

22

First, students now entering postgraduate education are more likely to have had substantially lower levels of specialized education at undergraduate level and so the staff teaching them on postgraduate courses are faced with students with widely different attainments; Secondly, master's courses are increasingly being offered that seek to broaden students' knowledge and skills by encouraging them to study

Standards and Quality in Taught Master's Programmes

discipline and/or professional areas that are unrelated to their first degrees. What is being assumed is either that graduates have some general intellectual capabilities and/or work-based experience that equips them to study a new area 'in depth', or that there is an acceptable alternative concept of progression. The concept of progression through depth represents a natural prejudice among academics, since for most of them it mirrors their own educational history. It is not surprising, therefore, that a majority of the AAC rejected a proposal that postgraduate awards required students confirm their graduate level qualities in a context that deepened their understanding of a previously studied discipline or professional area. It was simply said in a paper to the Academic Board, that students 'must develop further their graduate level skills' although what was meant by this was never fully explained.

Progression and Learning Processes Depth applies not only to curriculum content but also to the learning process, and it may be that this latter area provides a more appropriate way of defining 'postgraduate'. On this view, the personal maturity of the students is reflected in their increasing autonomy, which for some students may involve choosing to increase their breadth of knowledge rather than narrow specialization. Certainly, all master's programmes at Sheffield Hallam require the student to engage in some form of independent learning. This can take a number of forms including: • • •

traditional academic research; an original, critical and extensive synthesis of existing academic knowledge; critical appraisal of their own professional practice and/or that of others placed within the broader context of the area of study;

DEVELOPING A TYPOLOGY TO DEFINE STANDARDS It became clear that the AAC was not going to resolve the issue of academic standards in the context of the balance between breadth and depth, and between content and processes, without giving more thought to the particular purpose or purposes for which education at master's level was being provided. This idea developed into an attempt to build a typology of courses into which any particular postgraduate programme could be located. This work pre-dated the Harris Report but came up with very similar conclusions. The typology was based on a number of dimensions: • • • •

the balance between the extent to which the course was based on formal teaching or independent student research; the balance between elements designed to broaden the student knowledge and skill base and those aiming at depth; the type' of knowledge, for example, whether it was primarily theoretical or professional (practice-based); the requirement for prior knowledge and skills - both academic and experiential. 23

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Research Degrees The first critical distinction made by the AAC was between awards which were essentially research-based and those that were based on taught programmes. No attempt was made to incorporate research-based master's within the credit framework, although it was recognized that research students might undertake creditbearing taught units, particularly to provide a training in research methods, as part of their preparation for a dissertation. These units were seen as largely facilitative rather than an end in themselves. The Harris Report argues that the distinction between research and taught higher degrees, although apparently fairly well established, is not as clear cut as might be supposed. The increasing inclusion of taught elements within research degrees together with variations in disciplinary and institutional practices, have made current distinctions inadequate. It suggests that a more precise boundary between the two needs to be drawn, for example, through setting a percentage of time that must be devoted to the thesis for a research degree. Taught Master's The AAC initially identified three distinct types of taught master's programme: Specialist Master's Programmes that are designed to build upon specific undergraduate knowledge and skills and seek to extend these through a combination of taught units and independent research and/or scholarship. Such courses most closely fit the traditional notion of academic progression. Conversion Master's Programmes that are designed to build on those general academic capabilities developed by HE and that introduce the student to a new discipline and/or professional area, possibly providing an accelerated route to professional recognition. Broadening Professional Programmes Post-experience programmes that are designed to build on both general academic ability and the knowledge and skills acquired through relevant work experience but that assume no prior formal study of the area. Testing the Typology This typology was tested within the University by conducting a survey among all course leaders of postgraduate courses in which they were asked to comment on various features of the proposed awards framework. Significantly, although very few respondents said the typology was inaccurate or unhelpful, only half the respondents felt able to locate their programme in a single category. Students were a more diverse and unpredictable group than the AAC had anticipated. Staff were quick to point out that it was the student who determined the purpose of the education not the university and that different students may have very different motivations for undertaking similar course of study. They also pointed out that most students studied part-time and that over the three or four 24

Standards and Quality in Taught Master's Programmes

years that it took to obtain a master's degree they could mature both personally and intellectually and that their employment circumstances could radically alter. Specialist Master's These had been originally conceived as natural extensions of existing undergraduate study and it had been assumed that such degrees would be particularly attractive to recent graduates. In practice, even where students entered such courses with apparently similar entry qualifications, they often had quite a diverse range of knowledge and skills and many had work experience. As a consequence, the initial stages of such courses often included various balancing or bridging elements which, by themselves, might not be considered to be at postgraduate level. Furthermore, most courses had a distinct vocational emphasis and, for some students, could be seen as a having a similar role as a 'conversion' course. A significant gap in the original typology was revealed by a number of course leaders who saw their programmes as having a 'specialist professional' orientation, offering continuing specialist professional development for those already professionally qualified and with some years of experience of working in the field. These prior professional qualifications could have included an undergraduate degree, a conversion course, or professional training and/or professional examinations that had often left some gaps in the knowledge and/or skill base of the student which had to be filled before the student could fully engage in work at postgraduate level. Although such courses were designed to take their students further in a specialist area, a number of course leaders believed that their students might also benefit from broadening their studies and that this opportunity should be open to them. This was particularly true of students who had come up through a narrow professional route - for example a student who was specializing in medical ultrasound might be encouraged to take some units from the social sciences. Conversion Courses There were fewer courses considering themselves in this category than had been assumed. The key issue in such courses is the overlap with undergraduate study. The Harris report suggested a limit of 25 per cent of 'undergraduate material'. It is unclear what is meant by 'undergraduate material' in this context, since apparently similar material can be treated differently and with different degrees of depth. The content of many conversion courses is governed by the requirements of professional bodies, many of which do not discriminate between the different levels in HE. The challenge for planners of conversion courses is how they can offer personal development and intellectual challenge on such programmes when there is such a clear overlap between them and what is taught at undergraduate level. The HEQC report on modular frameworks (HEQC, 1996, p. 21) states that the sharing of modules between undergraduate Level 3 and postgraduate courses is common in many universities, so it is not just the content which overlaps but the learning process as well. In such cases, although the students may be assessed differently, there are clearly question marks over whether the students are being given the opportunity really to engage in a process which is postgraduate in any sense other than time. This was clearly an issue of concern to many of the tutors in our survey who argued that joint teaching was undesirable and that the students should be required to be more critical in their analysis and show greater intellectual depth than those doing similar material on an undergraduate programme. 25

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Some courses which were offered as a conversion course on a full-time basis were adapted for part-time students to form a programme of continuing professional development that could either be seen as broadening or specialist depending on the students' prior experience and their choice of dissertation. Broadening Professional Programmes There were fewer issues raised by this category of course because diversity of intake was usually assumed and planned for in the design of the course, and in the teaching and learning strategies. This being said, the issue of assuring standards, given the diversity of intake, was raised spontaneously by a number of respondents. There were clear concerns that either entry requirements should be sufficiently rigorous to ensure that the students would be able to cope with the demands of such a course or the developmental and diagnostic role of earlier units be explicitly recognized. Developing the Typology Further Table 2.1: The diversity of M'level awards: a typology Professional

Academic Postgraduate level

Study in new discipline

Subject continuous study

Research, creative outputs, independent study and scholarship

Foundation

General academic capabilities demonstrated at HE level

Specialist knowledge and skills acquired through undergraduate 'level' study.

Reflection Multidisciplinary on practice and/or experientially based professional studies

Professional qualification

Structured practice, work based projects or artefacts

Post qualifying and post experience

Knowledge and skills gained through relevant experience

The most significant purpose of postgraduate provision at Sheffield Hallam is for continuous professional development and updating but this covers a wide spectrum as illustrated in Table 2.1. For any individual student it might take the form of aspiring to a change of career direction (for example, from a clinician to a manager), or of developing a specialism further. In developing the typology further, it is necessary to accommodate the different possible foundations for further study for the individual student and the different forms that that study may take. By foundation, we mean either formal study or work experience that historically might have been seen as an essential prerequisite for someone wishing to study a particular subject and which may be either demanded before enrolment or, increasingly, forming a significant part of the award itself. It would appear that there may be a number of acceptable combinations of'sets' of learning even within the same award. However we are likely to want to limit (for the purposes of awarding credit) the proportion drawn from the bottom half of the chart and insist on some element of independent study for an award to carry the title 'masters'. 26

Standards and Quality in Taught Master's Programmes

Many course leaders had stressed that the diversity of intake made it more important that there should be a clear and suitably demanding standard of outcome. In the end the AAC failed, except in the most general terms, to define that for programmes across the institution but it did begin to establish the basis for categorizing master's courses. Standards will almost certainly have to be contextualized, either within a discipline area or type of course. In single discipline areas with strong academic traditions the process for judging standards, if not of making them explicit, is well established. It is much less certain in 'emerging disciplines' and multi-disciplinary, modular courses and courses with a strong element of experiential learning. Yet, it is these areas which are experiencing the greatest growth. Developing a notion of standards in these programmes will involve continuous review and consultation involving external academics and professionals. The unitization of programme structures (whereby students construct a programme through choosing from a roster of modules) in order to provide the flexibility need by the adult learner, together with the increasing practice of describing these units in terms of their learning outcomes, has exposed HE to some difficult questions. Level is ascribed to both the unit and the award. Does this mean that each element of a programme has to meet some generic criteria of 'postgraduateness' before it can be counted for credit? Is it enough for an award to be described merely in terms of the quantity and level of credit? I would argue the answer to both questions is no. However, the consequence of this is that we are going to have a means of defining an acceptable balance between the personal and/or professional development needs of the individual student and the type and quality of work which is expected, nationally and professionally, of someone on a master's programme. A typology may be one way of achieving this. THE DILEMMA All the evidence we have suggests that the labour force of the future will be required to be more flexible and that individuals will be required to 'train' and 'retrain' throughout their life. Lateral moves and more dramatic changes in career direction will be much more common. We still, however, retain the notional pyramid structure in post sixteen educational qualifications that assumes increasing selectivity both in those who study and what is studied. The need for genuine lifelong learning in order to prepare for real changes in employment is clear and obvious. However, the uncertainty in the employment market will increase the need for credentials as well as for the provision of learning opportunities. The attractiveness of established qualifications is their respectability and the assumption that they embody known and appropriate standards. The dilemma is how can we retain the concept of a 'fixed' and comparable standard of attainment, particularly one rooted in some historical view of academic progression, whilst providing the very flexibility of provision that is going to be necessary to support the changing needs of the labour force? The title of this chapter was 'standards and quality* and the two notions are inextricably linked in the literature. Ironically, an obsession with standards and maintaining the notion of comparability across programmes may have an adverse affect on the quality of the student experience and mean that our programmes fail to meet the real needs of the learner.

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Chapter 3 Adult Learning: The Place of Experience Mike Davis

There is a case for saying that the diversity of students' approaches to learning, combined with the variety of their learning needs, implies that there should be flexible and diverse provision at all stages of higher education. In this chapter, Mike Davis describes how educational considerations have led him to work with master's students in ways that support independent, self-directed learning. Desirable though that principle may be, he notes that learners are not necessarily at ease with this pedagogy, and he pays particular attention to their reactions to group learning. On the one hand, we might infer from this account that the application of such approaches to learning will lead to a measure of diversity in the curriculum, although it might be said that all students following the programme should have mastered the principles of independent study. On the other, we might note the difficulty - for teachers as well as students - of having these educational principles at the heart of a programme. Yet, the goals of self-directed learning, goals valued at undergraduate level (Tait and Knight, 1996), are of great intrinsic value in postgraduate programmes, as other writers in this book avow. The issue, then, is how to embed these goals in programmes taken by students who may have gained their first degree through work within very different educational cultures. This chapter describes approaches to the problem that have been associated with high quality student work. SOME BACKGROUND For the past three years I have been teaching modules which are component parts of the master's programmes in Adult and Continuing Education and Training and Training and Development. I also contribute to a module called Interpersonal Communication in Education which is part of the core in the master's programme Education and the Mass Media. The students, almost all graduates in a wide variety of disciplines, are drawn substantially from overseas and work in a variety of public and private organizations. Most are in their thirties and have significant responsibilities in their organizations. The overseas students are supplemented by a small number of part-time local students and the much more rare full-time UK student. The British Army has, for a number of years, seconded middle-ranking officers who are due to take on training responsibilities, to Training and Development. Some students go on to further study but the majority return to their original places of work. This, to some extent, determines their thinking about what they might want from the courses. 28

Adult Learning: The Place of Experience

Opportunities exist for students to claim academic credit through the Assessment of Prior Learning or through the Assessment of Prior Experiential Learning, up to a maximum of three modules - that is 50 per cent of the taught component of the course. Similarly, students from other universities can bring accumulated CAT (credit point) scores from courses in other universities, up to a maximum of 45 master's level points out of the course loading of 120 points. Each Manchester module is worth 15 'M' (master's) level points and there are six taught modules, each assessed by a 4,000 word essay (or equivalent). The dissertation is worth 30 'M' level points, even though it continues to be the equivalent to four modules in length, being between 12,000 and 20,000 words long. A student completing a Manchester MEd. will normally write between 40,000 and 50,000 words during the course. UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES Among the taken-for-granted assumptions about the student body is that students want to learn, otherwise they would not be in the university. The competition for places, certainly among full-time, overseas students, is often hidden from our own admissions procedures, as they have to vie for limited funds from employers, aid agencies and sponsors. The fees for overseas students are generally beyond the capacity for students to be self-financing (currently (1997) £6,090 compared to £2,490 for home and European Union students). By the time they have been admitted, therefore, many of them have already been sifted and filtered on a number of occasions and by a number of selection procedures. In some ways, this makes our selection easier, knowing that the students will be among the most able and well regarded in their respective work-based situations. In other ways, however, this can combine to be a source of tension. The students bring firm expectations about the course and a degree of self-confidence and a strong self-image, and it is highly appropriate that they do so. They are knowledgeable and may be expert in their fields of practice. They have untested theories-in-use, some uncertainties, which may benefit from some critical examination within a collegial community. As Schon (1983) puts it, rather than constituting deficiencies, uncertainties may be a source of enhanced effectiveness. This chapter is going to examine some of the experiences of exploring such uncertainties and will draw from accounts describing some of the modules I have taught over the past three years. Central to the chapter is the experience of what Angela Brew calls 'unlearning* (Brew, 1993, p. 86) and what Lewin called, in the context of groups 'unfreezing' (Lewin, 1947, p 35), both experiences that I see as essential if advantage is to be taken from postgraduate study. EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING CYCLE This is a well known model of how people learn. It is central to the approach adopted in the courses that I teach and is specifically mentioned in the course literature. The prevailing assumption behind this model is that the experience component is in the 'here and now'. Figure 3.1 shows Kolb's formulation of the model.

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Figure 3.1: The Lewinian Experiential Learning Model (in Kolb, 1984, p. 21)

concrete experience

testing implications of concepts in new

observations and

formation of abstract concepts and

Immediate personal experience is the focal point for learning, giving life, texture, and subjective personal meaning to abstract concepts and at the same time, providing a concrete, publicly shared reference point for testing the implications and validity of ideas created during the learning process.

This is not to deny the significance of knowledge and understanding gained in other contexts, whether academic or experiential, but to underline the importance of the shared collegial experience of student life. The other points of the learning cycle have significance, but none more so than the reflection part of 'observations and reflections'. This has been extensively written about (see, for example Kolb, 1984; Schon, 1987: Boud et al, 1993). Reflection is seen as that process by which sense is made of the prior concrete experience by attending in detail to the varied characteristics that can be identified and, more importantly, to their significance. It is this stage in the experiential learning cycle that is essential if learning is to go beyond 'knowing that', to the infinitely more complex Tcnowing how'. Conceptualization is the stage at which experience and reflection are integrated with knowledge from other places: from the literature; from previous experience; from the synergy that can arise from shared explorations. It is at this point in the cycle that the emphasis switches from independence to interdependence as emerging theories are tested against the experience of others. Experimentation is the point at which emerging understanding is tested against new situations. Once more, this is a shared exploration, rather than an individual one. These elements are central to my teaching in Manchester. In providing experiences of varied kinds, students are invited to reflect, using a variety of strategies in order to provide themselves with data for the more collective efforts at theorizing and setting up experimental conditions related to their work-based situations. GROUP EXPERIENCES OF LEARNING

Approaches to teaching that involve small group work are increasingly commonplace. The rationale can come from a number of sources: managerial (a way of 30

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dealing with large groups, for example); pragmatic (sponsored innovation via projects like UK Enterprise in Higher Education project); theoretical (the notion of 'comrades in adversity* which is built in to action learning - see, for example, Revans, 1982); or based on more general principles of adult learning, where there is an expectation that students will not tolerate being seen as passive receivers of knowledge (see, for example, Knowles, 1990, p. 31). My rationale was primarily a desire to create conditions within which a transformation of students' perspectives on learning could arise: a move from the dependent state, which is a consequence of most models of educational provision up to graduate level; through independence - that state within which students can take responsibility for patterns of their own work; and thence to interdependence, in which independent learners can gain from exposure to one another. On Groups Crucial to this, however, is an understanding of the nature of the group and how people can manage their experience and understanding of it. There are, of course, all kinds of taken-for-granted assumptions about groups. Freud had some views about the group as it began to be the subject of early speculation. In paraphrasing Le Bon, he wrote of some contemporary thinking that the group is: Extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has not critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it. It thinks in images, which call one another up by association (just as they arise with individuals in states of free imagination), and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable function. The feelings of the group are always very simple and very exaggerated. So that a group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty (Freud, 1922, p. 15). While Freud had reservations about this description, his and other contemporary thinking about the group was often conflated with thinking about the crowd, the mob, or in Freud's mind, the primal horde. More sophisticated, less prejudicial models of the group emerged contemporaneously in the years after the second world war from two competing intellectual traditions: one from a medical model, through the psychoanalytical perspectives of what became the Tavistock Institute and the Institute of Group Analysis (both UK-based); and the more sociological insights drawing on the work of Kurt Lewin and his colleagues working in cultural awareness training in the US. Regardless of differences between these two perspectives, there are some common characteristics that groups exhibit at various times in their existence. These are summarized in Table 3.1, which was first published in 1956 by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.

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Table 3.1: Phases of Group Life (adapted from Bennis and Shepard, 1956)

Phase 1 - Dependence: power relations

Phase II - Interdependence: personal relations

Sub-phase 1 dependence/submission

Sub-phase 4

enchantment

Sub-phase 2

Sub-phase 5

disenchantment

Sub-phase 6

consensual validation

counterdependence

Sub-phase 3 resolution

Group Themes Central to an understanding of group life is an appreciation of the themes that recur in group life. In formal learning situations the expected pattern of group behaviour is to invest the teacher with all of the available authority, even if, at some time, the teacher shares it out to other members of the group. Thus the teacher can allow student contributions, invite commentary and evaluation, even encourage the students to have responsibility for delivering some of the curriculum, through seminars, presentation of papers, etc. In that way, leadership is often said to be shared. Power, in these settings, can be taken by students. Authority, however, is inevitably invested in the teacher as examiner. This is often a source of tension in groups and creates an almost inevitable conflict that is often commented on. The apparently democratic structure of group work disguises considerable structural inequalities. Boundaries are invariably set by the institution and in the case of the master's programme in Manchester they were defined by membership of certain degree programmes and the associated attendance at core modules, supplemented by the choice of optional modules. In addition, however, groups within programmes define additional boundaries and maintenance of these is often a primary task in the early days of their existence. If groups fail to manage this task because of their inability to manage their anxieties, they will fail to achieve interdependence, although they may 'succeed' at the individual level. A case in point is those students who, because they lack confidence in their levels of spoken English competence, do not take an active part in discussion but may do well with individual, written tasks. TEACHING GROUPS IN MANCHESTER Regardless of whatever else students bring with them when they begin postgraduate study, they have an expectation that the university teacher is knowledgeable in the subject area and that this knowledge will somehow transmit itself directly and painlessly from the mind of the teacher to that of the student. This has its origins in students' past experiences, as the predominant form of educational experience is widely based on 'chalk and talk' methods, up to and including undergraduate education. And even when this is not the case, there is a sense of security that can emerge from the conventional model, because it is one that enables students to absolve themselves from responsibility for learning and growth. This is in 32

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apparent contradiction with what authoritative writers on adult learning have written. For example, Knowles (1990, p.. 31), building on the work of Lindeman, drew attention to the following key assumptions about the adult learner: 1. Adults are motivated to learn as they experience needs and interests that learning will satisfy: therefore, these are the appropriate starting points for organizing adult learning activities; 2. Adults' orientation to learning is life-centred: therefore the appropriate units for organizing adults learning are life situations, not subjects; 3. Experience is the richest source of adults' learning: therefore, the core methodology of adult education is the analysis of experience; 4. Adults have a deep need to be self-directing: therefore, the role of the teacher is to engage in a process of mutual inquiry with them, rather than to transmit his or her knowledge to them and then evaluate their conformity to it. Yet, experience convinces me that what students bring in the first instance is an expectation that the teacher will provide. Consider this from Helena Boschi, a student on the course: 'If too much is tried too quickly, learners will revert to the pedagogical tendencies of past experience and divest themselves of the onus being placed on them. Often adults within a group will experience frustration and anger'. The implication here is that students often have a desire for the safety of a known pedagogy and a craving for someone who will order experience and diminish threat. Helena was describing the potential consequences of inappropriate, or poorly-timed facilitation. I am more inclined to the view that uncertainty is the consequence of any intervention that leads students towards systematic reflection and conceptual exploration of shared experiences. As described by another student in 1994, it is as if: 'Discomfort and unease are key components in the process . . . the intensity of feelings and thoughts during this stage (of reflection) can be almost too much to bear and the learner may find himself/herself retreating from the method towards former, more familiar ground where at least a sense of security can be found.' These learning experiences on the MEd. programme ranged from moderately conventional models of reading-based seminars; to more structured events (for example The Drawbridge [Katz, 1978]; The Saboteur [Bond, 1985]: and Winter Survival [Johnson and Johnson, 1987]); and thence to student-negotiated 'contracts' to explore and present information to the wider group. In this sense, there is nothing particularly new or challenging. At the root of the approach, however, was an orientation that I took that deliberately removed me from any 'judicial' position. I was doing this in acknowledgement of the way in which Brookfield (1993, p. 24) characterizes discussion groups in adult education settings as, 'emotional battlegrounds with members vying for recognition and affirmation from each other and from the discussion leader. My purpose in doing this was twofold: to encourage the students to access their own individual resources in creating and understanding theories and practices of adult education, and to throw the group into a state of mutual interdependence. Thus, while aspects of the boundary of the activity were in my 'control', the actual events themselves emerged from the co-location of the students facing a number of tasks, which may or may not have been determined by themselves, in addition to the main, but covert task of transforming themselves into a group. My 33

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intuition was that groups would follow the 'phases' of group life identified in Table 3.1, with change, growth and learning being facilitated by my abnegation of the traditional role of structuring the situation by setting up rules of fair play and regulating participation. This felt very risky, and clearly it caused considerable anxiety as students struggled to come to terms with the situation they had been 'forced' into. As Anthony commented in his 1996 modular assignment: Then I got back to my room. I knew I had to reflect on what I had learned. I tried to record what I had learned but I could not really remember learning anything, for after all, the teacher had just sat there and he did not say whether our opinions in the discussion were correct or wrong. Journal Writing Journal writing was introduced as a weekly record of experiences that was intended to capture elements related to the following questions: • • •

what did you do? what did it feel like? what does it mean?

These simple prompts were intended to invite personal reflection on some of the experiences of working in the groups. Journals were not to be seen by me, nor were they part of the assessment procedure. They were, however, expected to become data relevant to the students' learning that would have a place when they came to write their assignments. The value of journal writing is that: Keeping a journal may help adults break habitual modes of thinking and change life direction through reflective withdrawal and re-entry. I refer to ultimate, long range purposes but also being able to step back from an incident, a conversation, a reading, from something heard or seen, and to reflect upon it and return to it with understanding. The deeper levels of life may not be changed through decisions in media res [in the thick of it] or by means of amorphous meditation. Life's particularities go on, and we may stumble upon insights - but it is hard to put insight and action together. We need to find another way to connect reflection and action. Journal writing is a promising aid to the ongoing effort to bring together the inner and outer parts of our lives (Lukinsky, 1990: 213). The systematic exploration through journal writing of a wide range of academic activities was beyond the scope and duration of my courses and some student cohorts were quite resistant to some of the self-disclosure that they saw in Lukinsky's approach. Nevertheless, the more straightforward approach that was adopted seemed to have helped students to explore their experiences in more systematic ways than simply 'thinking' about them, a process that Mezirow and associates call 'non-reflective action' (Mezirow et al., 1990, p. 7). In making the familiar strange, the process of writing thoughts quite impressionistically reveals some 34

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of the 'distortions ... in reasoning and attitudes' (ibid.) that can characterize more everyday processes. Nevertheless, it is sometimes difficult to persuade students to adopt the approach because it is revealing: to the self, even if no-one else. Critical Incident Writing Journals were supplemented by the use of critical incident writing (see Brookfield, 1990, p. 177). In this activity, students are invited to explore past experiences, incidents that have some significance for them as learners. They are asked to recount time and place and to recall the participants involved. These writings rarely extend to much more than 200 words. Paradoxically, they have the potential to reveal more about present concerns than about the past. My own experiences of writing about my seven-year-old self in hesitant dispute with my school teacher about the value of zero had more to say about my concerns now about the oppressiveness of teacherly authority than it does about being seven. OUTCOMES AND DISCUSSION The primary outcome of a master's programme in a university is that the students learn. However, learning may be a conservative process that sustains existing structures of belief - beliefs about what counts as valid knowledge and beliefs about how that valid knowledge can be gained. If a programme is to challenge this conservatism, conflict is likely. Among the most vivid outcomes have been those cases when we had to confront apparently mutual incomprehension, as in this case described in my journal: When I arrived (in the classroom) they clearly had a totally different expectation of my role - that I was expected to provide some input into their session on curriculum development. Apart from my realization that I definitely wouldn't have agreed to make this input, I can only assume that Shahid and I had completely different understandings of the conversation we had the week previously (journal, 19 February, 1994). The class at the time were working in action learning sets (see Revans, 1982) and this group, highly articulate and capable, had chosen a fairly rigid structure (chair, secretary, minutes) to help their process along. On this occasion, my recollection was that I had been invited to comment on their process: to assist in the resolution of some of the difficulties that had in part, I believed, arisen from the limitations that their structure imposed on them. Gerry wrote the following Email following another session during which I had spent time commenting on process issues, particularly the role of the tutor: After you left our group, we continued to discuss your role. I continued to [argue that] we should 'empower ourselves' and rely less on you. However, it seemed that I was outnumbered. Almost all of them were fixated with what a tutor like you should do. They have their expectations what a tutor should be a font of knowledge, and this is one reason why they left their countries, to seek other experts. From 35

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my own judgement, it is difficult for them to shake off the traditional educator's role, that is, to spoon-feed their students. Arguments such as the reason why they pay high tuition fees is to make other people work (teach) for them. The alternative I proposed entails hard work e.g. library work and lots of readings. Besides, they have no confidence in their abilities or [that of] other members. In Bennis and Shephard's model, the group is at Subphase 5 - Disenchantment, characterized by, among other things, 'frequent statements concerning worthlessness of group, denial of importance of group. Occasional member asking for individual help finally rejected by the group' (Bennis and Shephard, 1956, p. 434). Tyson's Email sums up some of the central issues of the approach: that of the extent to which the role of the tutor is to create conditions in which students will become self-motivated and powerful. Put against this, however, is the potential that the experience can lead to a person becoming disillusioned. This is the dilemma for me. If I am convinced (and I am) that there is not a dependency route to independence, what conditions need to exist to act as a safety net for those who feel nervous of falling, or for those who actually do fall? If there is a safety net, does it make people reckless, careless or care-less? Can there be dummy runs for this kind of experiential education? From another discipline, the Russian stage director Stanislavsky describes the power of bringing real world consequences into the artful world of the trainee actor, with a focus on truth and the notion of the life of the human spirit (Stanislavsky, 1950). Without these, he argued, there is no risk, no commitment, no emotional engagement and consequently, no resources for the actor to draw on. Similarly, I would argue that without the 'real' experience of the group - with all its potential for conflict and failure (whatever that might mean) these master's students will find it difficult to move towards independence and interdependence. This, however, is not to say that I was at ease with the situation, either then or, for that matter, now. I wrote of the evaluation session with this particular group: The evaluation session was very mixed: some of the students (oddly enough, mainly women) had enjoyed the task enormously and are fully committed to it as a procedure. There was then a middle group of men who had a more critical position, but who still recognized the value. The final group, the one I have written about the most, maintained their position - with the possible exception of Charles who spoke at some length about the recognition of the value he found in reflection - something which had come to him during this module (journal, 15 March, 1994). In responding to the challenges set by this first group, I have striven in the intervening two years to provide more of a superstructure (both in terms of activity in the classroom and through the dialogue with students) but without providing a safety net. Groups, therefore, talk of their anxieties and uncertainties about the absence of a conventional teacherly role and are as vociferous as ever (particularly in the midpoint of semester one) in saying that things are not as they should be'. This 'counterdependence' phase, characterized by hostility and/or 36

Adult Learning: The Place of Experience

indifference to the teacher, is an unnerving time and one in which there is a struggle to hold still. Luft described it as follows: participants are apt to show counterdependent behaviour as a reaction to the ambiguous role of the leader. He [sic] seems to violate their expectations and they quickly become disenthralled by his leadership. Members then tend to see him as ineffectual and obstructive (Luft, 1970, p. 24). Described by Bennis (Bennis, 1964, p. 256) as being 'ignored and bullied at the same time', this amply describes the situation I found myself in during the first semester in 1995-6 when I offered to be available as a member of a work group. 'Come if you like,' was the brusque reply. The temptation to rush in, to fill the silence with explanation and reassurance, in the hope that a conventional reputation can be 'regained' is as powerful is it would be counter-productive. Students have a variety of deeply held opinions at the conclusion of these courses. The negative feelings I regard as a product of anxiety, evoked by Bernard Lisewski as 'existential angst' (in conversation, 1996). Bernard is an experienced HE teacher and staff developer and he attended one of the modules because it was part of the core for his MEd. Education and the Mass Media. He is also very familiar with experiential education and looked forward to being on the receiving end of the approach. He did, however, comment that he became caught up in the anxiety of some of the other students as they struggled to come to grips with their experiences of the course. He felt that there was a need to prepare students for the experience that they are going to have, and to provide opportunities to give and receive feedback on a regular basis. This, of course, was built in to the programme but it is always predicated on a number of complex and competing perspectives, compounded by my responsibility for assessment at the end of the module. I acknowledge this cautious position but ultimately reject it in favour of the power that can emerge from a more unmediated experience, as students move towards interdependence. Part of this journey was described by another student as follows: Don't say taking this course is a waste of time. In fact you begin to learn when you are puzzled, worried and confused. It means that there is conflict between your past experience, your ideas and current experiences. What you need is not to complain but to fight with yourself. Don't be afraid to lose. When you prove that you lose, you win, you grow. When you give up your old ideas you liberate yourself. However, I learned consciously to free myself from my old me. I understand that my new me will get old, therefore I need to keep ME new and fresh in the continuous learning process (Qinychao Fang, journal entry quoted in modular assignment). This student, writing at the end of the first semester in 1994, was, I believe, at the enchantment stage. He and his colleagues had been through a process in which many of their assumptions about student and teacher roles had been challenged, where traditional leadership was abrogated in order to create a power vacuum which students struggled to fill in a variety of ways. The challenge of this approach is to maintain and to share confidence that the students will achieve. 37

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Conflict — a mismatch between self and the environment — is a condition of learning. The courses that I have described here are predicated on an attempt to make that conflict explicit through an approach that challenges the students to become first independent of the teacher, and then mutually dependent on one another for a major part of their learning. While many students meet this with a degree of resistance, and for some, quite high levels of anxiety, it does seem to create a climate in which good work can emerge. The evidence of this is in the consistently high quality work that the students produce for their modular assignments and the high praise from the external examiners. The apparent cost is in the uncertainly that arises at frequent intervals during the course. There would, however, be a greater cost if I had retreated to more conventional models of delivery because of my own high levels of anxiety. This anxiety has two distinct sources: one about the subject matter of the teaching; the other about 'self. In respect of the former, there is the decision either to view it as a well-formed field of enquiry within which problems are well-formed and capable of technical solution or to acknowledge the uncertain, ill-formed nature of the field wherein the solutions to problems create new problems in turn. In the case of the latter, there is the nagging worry that what is being offered lacks rigour and the 'expertness' that is expected to characterize the university educator. Schon expresses these linked dilemmas as follows: In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground overlooking a swamp. On the high ground, manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the use of researchbased theory and technique. In the swampy lowlands, problems are messy and confusing and incapable of technical solutions (Schon, 1995, p. 28). In opting for the latter, there is an inevitable challenge to students' perceptions of knowledge and how it is created. This, for me, is the source of the conflict that drives the learning. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Without the energy, good humour, willingness and engagement of students on my courses over the last few years, there would have been nothing to write about here in this chapter. They could have walked out, or at least disengaged in other ways. One interpretation is that they had too much to lose and therefore they had to go along with whatever was on offer in order to complete work towards their degree. I prefer to think that they stuck it out because they were caught up in the web of human intrigue that characterizes some human interaction. I quoted Thomas Gray in another paper describing (my own) experience of being in a group as 'a fearful joy*. That seems a very powerful description of what goes on. Whatever their motivations, however, my thanks go out to them, especially to those who were happy for me to use their words and ideas. Thanks must also go to colleagues from CAHE, particularly Drs. Nod Miller, Brian Nichol and Sue Ralph for the one year when we worked together with a class and talked through the experience at some length. Needless to say, any inadequacies belong to me. 38

Chapter 4 Teaching and Learning at Master's Level: An Australian Perspective on Adult Education James A. Athanasou

Like Mike Davis, James Athanasou works in the field of Adult Continuing Education, While his work takes place within a different educational system, his programme goals (pages 46-48) have a lot in common with Davis's. This chapter shows a different but essentially complementary approach to the problem of promoting those goals and involves discussion of academic standards in master's work; of pedagogy; and of the nature of student learning. By looking at a complete programme (where Davis described components of a programme) he shows how far curriculum and course design, assessment and teaching arrangements have diverged from those of the traditional undergraduate programme. In doing so, he not only presages a theme of subsequent chapters, but also recalls earlier discussions of the need for flexible programmes that meet learners' needs and of the problem of defining appropriate standards for what tends to be non-traditional work. An implication of this, and of other chapters, is that such programmes make substantial demands on academics, both at the design and at the implementation stages. This anticipates later and fuller discussions of the professional learning in which academic staff need to engage if they are to develop appropriate programmes, as well as of the incentives that encourage them to do so. Recent years have seen a proliferation in the number of coursework master's degrees in Australia with an increase in enrolments of 149 per cent from 1988-1994 has been reported by the Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET). This can be contrasted with a comparable growth of around 56 per cent in undergraduate bachelor's degree students over the same period (see Mclnnis et al.t 1995 for a summary of higher education statistics). In part, this growth represents a response by autonomous universities competing to retain a share of the educational marketplace by offering courses that will attract students and which are geared to occupational specializations. Coursework master's degrees now represent some 6.3 per cent of university enrolments and 32.5 per cent of postgraduate numbers in Australia (DEET, 1995). Indeed, many former postgraduate diplomas have been replaced by analogous master's degrees, many of which attract full fees while others are subsidized through reduced fees and the Higher Education Contribution Scheme. Moreover, whereas the traditional, generic and research master's degrees such as the Master 39

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of Arts, Master of Economics, or Master of Science etc. were once the norm, they have been replaced by the ubiquitous coursework master's degree which tends to serve vocational rather than scholastic goals. Table 4.1: Growth in master's degrees by coursework (source: Mclnnis et al., 1995, p. 15).

1988

1994

% change

6,545

12,073

84.46%

Master's degrees by coursework

14,936

37,198

149.00%

Total master's degrees

21,481

49,271

129.30%

Master's degrees by research

Allied with this development of the coursework master's degrees is a set of new teaching and learning issues for higher education: • • • • •

Firstly, there is the change in the content and focus of the master's degree from an academic apprenticeship to advanced vocational preparation; Secondly, the emphasis on coursework has established new curriculum demands which contrast greatly with the research focus of the traditional master's thesis; Thirdly, there is a significant change in teaching from academic supervision to teaching advanced coursework in a specialized vocational area; Fourthly, the entry standards of the student population have altered dramatically from exclusively honours students to pass graduates; Fifthly, the continual growth of new coursework master's degrees has continued while still maintaining an existing but lesser role for the master's degree by thesis and research. As such, the coursework degree has adopted the minor independent project as a necessary part of most but not all coursework degrees.

Any study of coursework master's programmes also needs to take into account the context and locations in which such growth has taken place. For instance, the largest increases (>250 per cent) in the number of coursework master's students appear to have occurred at the large technology universities in Australia, such as the University of Technology, Sydney; Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the Queensland University of Technology. The growth in coursework master's degrees at these newer universities is more than double that of the national average. In terms of the faculty areas within which the growth has occurred, the fields of study with the highest proportions of coursework students in Australia have been Business and Management where coursework represents 93 per cent of all master's degree students; Law where 88 per cent of all master's degree students undertake coursework; and Education, where 83 per cent of all master's students are taking coursework. The focus of this paper is on coursework master's study in education and the next section concentrates on a relatively specialized area within education, namely adult education and uses this field as the basis for a discussion of some key issues in teaching and learning at master's level. 40

Teaching and Learning at Master's Level: An Australian Perspective on Adult Education

MASTER'S LEVEL STUDY IN ADULT EDUCATION With an overwhelming proportion of adult educators having degrees and postgraduate diplomas, the master's degree is seen as a way of differentiating people for promotion or hiring. Study for the master's degree, however, occurs in a different personal and social time framework than earlier studies, for example, undergraduate work. Almost all master's students are undertaking their degree parttime and do so in conjunction with a range of work and personal commitments. In a study of adults' reasons for participating in adult education programmes at Marshall University, professional advancement and cognitive interest were rated by the 38 students as the highest motivators (Howard, 1992). Secondly, most of our master's students in Australia are electing for coursework-based rather than research-based master's degrees. Few, if any, have honours degrees or research background. Furthermore, coursework is seen as more relevant to their everyday needs: a move towards programmes that are not graded and which involve flexible assessments is indicative of changes in the nature of postgraduate master's courses. The purpose of this chapter is to consider specific issues of theory and practice in master's degree courses using as an example a new degree course, the Master of Education in Adult Education programme at the University of Technology, Sydney. Three aspects are emphasized: • • •

the different and complex nature of teaching and learning at the master's level; the importance of providing courses to match student interests; guidelines on the operation and management of master's programmes.

The next section provides some background on the Master of Education in Adult Education (MEdAdEd) at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). By way of background information, UTS is a multi-campus university operating at three locations in the Sydney metropolitan area. It is the fourth largest university in the State with an enrolment of 21,399 students about half of whom (48 per cent) attend on a part-time basis. It offers some 80 undergraduate and about 200 postgraduate courses in business, design, architecture and building, education, engineering, management, humanities. Coursework master's degree programmes constitute about one-fifth of all postgraduate programmes. The Master of Education in Adult Education programme at UTS is a one-year full-time or two-year part-time course of eight, semester-long subjects, or modules, with a total value of 48 credit points. (Note that in Australia, this level of 48 credit points is the national equivalent of a full-time student load.) In 1996, it enrolled 229 students for a coursework degree with choices from 36 subject areas in major concentrations such as community education, computer-based learning, research or applied behavioural science. Annual intakes from 1991 to 1996 are shown in Figure 4.1.

41

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Figure 4.1: Intakes to the MEdAdEd programme, 1991-1996. Annual Intakes

A search of all the UTS Faculty handbooks identified over 40 separate coursework master's degree programmes and it may be instructive to compare the adult education master's degree with other faculty courses. In contrast to the Master of Education in Adult Education, the majority of coursework master's degrees at UTS require three years' part-time study, include 72 credit points of study, involve a necessary individual project and approximately one-fifth specify an honours degree for entry. Such variations in the nature and scope of master's degrees may appear to be conflicting at first sight but they really reflect the vastly different traditions for coursework master's degree programmes that have arisen in Australia. In education there is a tradition and an expectation that a master's degree by coursework is of two years' duration and does not necessarily involve an independent project. It must be remembered that most education students with a teaching background already have a Postgraduate Diploma of Education.

BACKGROUND TO THE MASDTER OF EDUCATION IN ADULT EDUCATION The MEdAdEd was designed for experienced adult educators who wish to reflect critically and systematically on their practice and to enlarge their professional knowledge. Adult education is defined broadly as community education, vocational education and training, technical and further education, higher education, human resource development, training, nursing education, religious education, adult basic education, teaching English as a second language or careers education. It is geared towards education at the post-compulsory level. The main requirement for entry is that students have a first degree and are active in adult education. Goals of the Master of Education in Adult Education There are a number of adult education principles underlying the course, namely, relevance, knowledge, coherence, specialization, flexibility and student autonomy. These are embodied in the aims of the course, which are for students to:

42

Teaching and Learning at Master's Level: An Australian Perspective on Adult Education

• • • • • •

develop competence in understanding and managing adult learning; refine and further develop adult teaching techniques; acquire new and more advanced skills in designing, implementing and evaluating educational programmes for adults; enhance the ability to organize, manage, promote and provide advice in the delivery of adult education; expand and evaluate the personal capacity to be self-directed in learning; develop an understanding of the social, political and economic context of adult education formulate a personal stance on the nature and purposes of adult education.

Figure 4.2: Principles of the MEdAdEd programme

Student characteristics

Teaching

Expertise

Interest

Ideology

Ability Experience

Learning in the Master of Education in Adult Education Programme

Course design

Curriculum

Flexibility

Social relevance

Two modes of attendance Specialist degree Diversity of students

Applied and theoretical perspectives Ungraded Emphasis on personal growth 43

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The goal of the MEdAdEd is to produce graduates who can contribute to the discipline of adult education, to the community, to further education, to technical and vocational education, as well as to commerce and industry. The focus of the course has been, and is, the development of practitioner skills for the field of Adult Education which is defined as a larger and more diversified area of activity than in many other nations. Specific details of the programme are summarized in Table 4.2. Table 4.2: Summary of the Master of Education in Adult Education Programme Feature

As it relates to the MEdAdEd

Students

Mature age

Programme orientation

Vocational development

Graduate entry?

Undergraduate degree required

Recognition of prior learning

Credit for prior, certificated learning

Recognition of prior, relevant experience

In some cases, relevant prior experience can be used for entry

Fees

Australian Higher Education Contributions Scheme (loan)

Number of taught modules

8

Words of assessed work

7,000 approx, per module

Credit rating

6 per module

Contact hours

26 per module

Modules on rosta

36, maximum

Dissertation or thesis

None

Examinations

None

Course Structure Students undertake eight subjects for the degree, comprising two integrative or core subjects - or modules - of 13 weeks' duration: Understanding Adult Education and Training, and Issues for Adult Education Researchers. Students are free to choose the remaining subjects for their degree from groupings of subjects, or to take a wide variety of subjects. Further details of the curriculum, its teaching and learning are outlined in the following sections. 44

Teaching and Learning at Master's Level: An Australian Perspective on Adult Education

Attendance The degree can be completed on a full-time or part-time basis with students allowed to take one or as many as four subjects per semester. Only a few subjects have entry pre-requisites, so students normally have a wide range of choice within the timetable constraints. Two patterns of attendance have evolved for this. The first is a weekly attendance of one or two nights per week with classes from 4.30 to 6.30pm and 7.00 to 9.00pm. Most students arrange their classes so that they attend only one night per week, so that subject choices do not necessarily reflect interests but convenience. The second mode of attendance that has recently been introduced builds upon prior faculty experience with block attendance programmes and has proven successful. Students attend the university twice per semester for four day blocks. This latter mode of attendance is favoured by many students as it allows fewer interruptions to work and family life than the semester-long regular weekly attendances. It also offers students the opportunity to plan their work schedule around their block attendance and many find the blocks a relaxing break in which they can be full-time students for a brief period of time. It also allows them to obtain the essential input on the blocks and then work on a self-paced basis between attendances. Access and Equity Issues Selection and admission is based on meeting the university's criteria for entry to postgraduate coursework, namely a prior degree, as well as an indication of involvement in the adult education field or how one might benefit by completing the degree. The MEdAdEd is unique among master's degrees in providing access and equity. Firstly, there is special provision for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island students involved in adult education. Secondly, with the exception of Nursing it has a greater proportion of female students than master's programmes in other faculties at UTS. Thirdly, there is special provision within the Faculty for study assistance and services for persons with disabilities. Fourthly, there is the opportunity to admit students who may not have degree qualifications but whose prior achievements are such as to be equivalent to degree status. This provision is important as an expression of equality of opportunity and was defined from the inception of the degree to accommodate special instances in adult and community education. It is especially useful in the case of people who have valuable experience and are in a position to benefit from the course as well as influence the development of adult education in Australia. While entry and access are available, continued performance and progress is then up to the individual. Curriculum A distinctive feature of the coursework master's is the flexibility that exists within the programme for students to select eight out of the 36 subjects available. A second aspect of the curriculum is that subjects have always reflected the teaching interests of staff and are designed to expose students to learning in areas of applied and theoretical interest. The MEdAdEd seeks to develop key competencies, such as:

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Table 4.3: Competence, curriculum and learning processes in the MEdAdEd

Key competency

Typical master's degrees module

Example of learning process

Collecting, analysing and Contemporary Issues in organizing information Adult Education

Individual assignment relating to labour market programmes

Communicating ideas and information

Seminar presentation of an organizational analysis of communication processes

Adult Communication Management

Planning and organizing Issues in Adult Educational Evaluation activities

Development of an evaluation strategy for a programme, policy or educational initiative

Working with others and in teams

Adult Learning and Programme Development

Team teaching of the subject and group tasks in classes

Using mathematical ideas and techniques

Research Methodologies for Adult Educators

Using statistical packages

Solving problems

Psychology of Adult Development

Learning contract applying findings on memory to adult learning

Using technology

Computer-based Adult Education and Training

Using authoring software

Using cultural diversity

Cultural Diversity in the Workplace

Developing language and literacy programmes in industry

Curriculum has been developed with reference to an external advisory committee and comprises the two core subjects, Understanding Adult Education and Training and Issues for Adult Education Researchers, plus six electives. The eight members of the external advisory committee comprised representatives from the Australian Association for Adult and Community Education, two human resources executives from commerce and industry, two representatives from the state government's Technical and Further Education Commission, and two external university representatives at professorial and deputy vice-chancellor level. In addition, the course has to be reviewed on a regular basis every five years and there are on-going internal committees of review. Moreover, graduates of the programme were surveyed independently by the Graduate Careers Council and results 46

Teaching and Learning at Master's Level: An Australian Perspective on Adult Education

indicated that the overall level of satisfaction was at the median level for graduate studies at Australian universities. A recent review of the course provided for specialist majors within this generalist degree. This obviates the need to develop new master's courses for small groups of students with selected interests. New specialisms are being developed for international and comparative adult education, popular education, vocational education and social policy. The first of the specialisms that was developed was in adult career guidance and counselling as a response to a request by the Australian Association of Career Counsellors for a specialist degree. The existing master's degree was offered a vehicle within which three career education subjects together with two independent study projects could be undertaken and supplemented by the two core subjects mentioned earlier and an additional existing and generic subject, Psychology of Adult Development. Similar majors will be developed for other professional associations seeking to establish postgraduate qualifications for their occupational specialities. This framework of core subjects, majors and generic subjects provides a template for a viable and flexible coursework degree and also ensures that all students receive at least a common core orientation to adult education ideology and principles. Standards Although there is a temptation to set standards for subject uniformity this can also serve as a bureaucratic straitjacket for the further development of the course. The variation in standards across subjects has always been noted and is part of the price paid for lecturer autonomy. This is valued higher than administrative equality and subject standardization. In any event it is impossible to impose uniform standards on such a diverse subject offering. Subject outlines, assessment schedules, duplicate marking in subjects such as Independent Study Projects, together with distribution of assessment criteria at course meetings, help to develop informal standards within the degree by a process of consensus. This is not meant to imply that all subjects are of equal difficulty and some students are quick to realize and exploit variations, especially in workload. In addition, there are problems in the ability of some students to think abstractly especially in terms of theories and issues. In their undergraduate programmes it sufficed to reflect existing ideas to summarize viewpoints or follow procedures and some find it extremely difficult to make the transition to a programme which requires high levels of critical thinking. Many also assume that undergraduate standards are adequate for master's level work and express surprise at their initial grades. To resolve these issues and set overall standards, there is now an emphasis on using the introductory core subjects as the postgraduate training ground for increased critical thinking ability and fundamental postgraduate skills. The two core subjects Understanding Adult Education and Training and Issues for Adult Education Researchers encompass a number of assignments for developing writing skills, and assignments to enhance the ability to analyse issues, synthesize ideas and evaluate theoretical approaches. Without this initial training, lecturers in later subjects were burdened previously with students who did not have the capacity to cope, who required considerable assistance. Such lecturers were also in awkward position of having to indicate to some students that the standard of work was not adequate when such students never had any prior indication that their standard of work was not adequate for second year postgraduate study. 47

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Teaching and Learning In most faculties there is a clear gulf between master's study and undergraduate study in terms a number of features, such as full-time versus part-time study, younger versus older students; direct school entry versus prior work experience; and little opportunity for work-based learning versus field practice. In contrast to undergraduate programmes, the coursework master's degree offers an orientation towards greater specialization in a subject, has expectations for increased rigour of thinking, and involves much closer contact with academic staff and/or smaller seminar groups. In the area of Adult Education, however, there may already be a close link between undergraduate and postgraduate study because of the nature of undergraduate adult education. Students in undergraduate adult education programmes come to education after specializing in some prior field of learning; they are mature age students; almost all are working at the same time as studying; much of their undergraduate programme already has field-based exercises and a specified workplace learning emphasis; and there is an emphasis on experiencebased learning. The master's programme extends this philosophy and orientation, notably by adding the criterion of increased theoretical and critical thinking capacity. Unlike the undergraduate programmes, however, the master's degree has a greater academic emphasis and is difficult for those who have not taken prior undergraduate adult education courses, who are from disciplines other than education and/or for those who are out of the habit of academic study. Accordingly, assistance is provided through a specialized study skills unit on the preparation of assignments. Throughout the course, teaching is personal and directed to small groups of up to 25 students. Formal lectures to large groups have given way to discussions and seminars of two hours' duration. The term 'modified lecture' is a term used to describe these classes. Some lecturers use innovative experiential approaches to learning. Almost all subjects offer scope for students to present formally a seminar or colloquium. Additionally, there is a noticeable development in students throughout the programme. Students undergo significant intellectual change, so much so that their ideas about education and learning change over the duration of the course. Many enter the course with the assumption that lecturers will 'download' ideas and that teaching is merely the transmission of information and skills. Over the duration of the programme, more sophisticated ideas of the nature and scope of the educational process emerge. In a sense there is a spiral development of ideas and ideologies: each subject contributes to a personal mosaic of social and educational thinking.

Course Evaluations Student feedback on the master's programme is co-ordinated anonymously and independently by the university's Centre for Learning and Teaching. Results from an initial survey in 1995 are summarized in Table 4.4. Students marked their responses on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

48

Teaching and Learning at Master's Level: An Australian Perspective on Adult Education Table 4.4: Summary of course evaluation data

Student Feedback (N«76)

Mean (SD)

This course was pitched at an appropriate level

4.0 (0.6)

This course enhanced and maintained my interest in the field of study

4.3 (0.4)

Studying in this course is having a positive impact on my careers

4.1 (0.7)

There is a coherent development of theoretical concepts throughout this course

3.4 (1.0)

The demands of this course place excessive pressure on students

2.9 (1.2)

Teaching staff are very accessible Administrative support is of high quality

3.7 (0.9)

The course was too difficult

2.0 (0.7)

The course was too long

2.1 (0.8)

The teaching staff on this course motivated me to do my best work

3.7 (0.7)

The course developed my problem solving skill

3.6 (0.9)

The course sharpened my analytic skills The course helped me to develop my ability to work as a team member

4.0 (0.6)

The course improved my skills in written communication

4.0 (1.0)

The course was overly theoretical and abstract The course helped me to develop the ability to plan my own work Overall, I was satisfied with the quality of this course The course has lived up to my expectations The course is consistent with information I received prior to commencing the course The physical facilities available in this course are adequate

2.3 (0.9)

3.1 (0.9)

3.3 (1.0)

3.4 (1.1) 4.0 (0.7) 3.8 (0.9) 3.5 (1.1) 2.7 (1.3)

I could see the relationship between different subjects within the course

3.6 (0.8)

I would recommend this course to other people

4.1 (0.6)

Teaching staff are very approachable

4.1 (0.5)

The subjects in this course relate well to one another

3.6 (0.8) 4.4 (0.4)

I found the course interesting

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Educational Assessments and Grading It would have been easy to implement traditional forms of assessment such as formal examinations within the master's programme but this would not have always enhanced the quality of learning. Assessment is not seen merely as a formal process and/or as a milestone to mark achievements for administrative purposes but rather as the basis for a formative evaluation of a student's learning. This is much more consistent with an adult education emphasis. The typical forms and methods of assessment that are used rely upon learning contracts, assignments, class presentations and reports. The aim has been to use performance-based assessments and students are encouraged to link assessments to workplace contexts and issues. The content load for a semester length subject (or module) is around 7,000 words or equivalent. While various systems of grading exist in higher education they are not always consistent with adult educational ideology or serve to promote learning. Sometimes they serve to promote unnecessary competition amongst learners or promote shallow approaches to learning or promote study that is extrinsically motivated. At the same time the university demands a system of grading for administrative purposes. A grading system that is useful to educational administrators and one that appears most consistent with the ideology of adult educators appears to be a pass-fail system of grading. This is in keeping with a criterion referenced approach to assessment. Lecturers are free to provide grades for individual assignments especially where students have produced work of an exceptionally high standard. In many cases there are specific criteria for the grading of work. The absence of formal examinations is designed to encourage a deeper learning approach. Although few students fail, some have difficulty meeting the requirements by the due date and others withdraw early in the semester. Withdrawals are usually related to a sense of inability to keep up with the subject requirements and especially the assignment loads. In many ways this acts as a self-filter, with those able to meet all the requirements eventually graduating. Typical assessment criteria are stated formally to students. Student work is assessed according to: • • • • • •

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Depth of analysis: is there evidence that the writer has understood key concepts, defined them carefully and appropriately to the level of their course of study? Integration of theory and practice: does the writer demonstrate the ability to relate theory to practice and practice to theory? Evidence of wide and critical thinking. Organization of paper or learning contract: does the student's work have a clear and logical schematic structure appropriate to the task? Presentation: is it proof-read for spelling, typos etc.? Are sources acknowledged? Task specific assessment criteria.

Teaching and Learning at Master's Level: An Australian Perspective on Adult Education

GUIDELINES ON THE OPERATION AND MANAGEMENT OF MASTER'S PROGRAMMES It was not the purpose of this chapter merely to support this course or to catalogue evidence in its favour but rather to learn from it as a case study of a coursework master's degree in operation. It is useful because it provided an archetype, worthy of theoretical study, of both a generalist and specialist qualification. Nevertheless, it may be necessary to state that the author was not involved in the development of this programme but has been involved in teaching on the programme since 1993 and as programme co-ordinator since 1995. This was the first course of its kind in Australia and it remains as the largest. Total student enrolment in 1996 was 239, having grown sixfold from an initial enrolment of 38 in 1991. There could be many reasons for this rapid growth, including the facts that: •

•

•

the course was nurtured by dedicated staff members within a School of Adult Education who valued adult educational ideology and approaches to learning and as such students sense that it provides a social educational framework for understanding key issues; students sense the School's commitment to the course. For instance, the course has been staffed almost entirely by full-time tenured and senior academics, many of whom have international reputations in adult education, such as Mark Tennant (adult development), David Boud (experience-based learning), Andrew Gonczi (competency-based training), Michael Kaye (adult communication management), Paul Hager (philosophy of education), Laurie Field (workplace learning) and includes two international Cyril Houle adult education award winners - Mark Tennant and Mike Newman. The Faculty has the largest concentration of staff in adult and post-compulsory education in Australia; the course addressed a latent need within adult and vocational education for a specialist degree which went beyond the general Master of Education programmes on regular offer at most universities.

Other factors which have had an impact upon the success of the course are thought to be the provision for dual modes of attendance, the scope for subject choices within the degree, and the increased range of subject offerings. An important by-product of this programme is that for some students a return to studying at graduate level develops in them a liking for further study and research. Some realize that they have the potential for study and have a capacity which was often masked by the anonymity of their undergraduate education with its very large classes. Students have the freedom to select a programme which matches their interests and some take up what are called research pathways. This involves two dedicated research subjects and two Independent Study Projects under the supervision of an academic adviser. Such independent research in a field of interest provides further opportunity to explore issues in greater depth and to prepare for research degrees. The School of Adult Education has expressed a commitment to developing the research potential of students and has established a pathway to the Master of Education (Honours) by thesis that is based on a student completing the foundation work of the thesis during the coursework phase. 51

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The coursework degree provides the research training and opportunity for the development of the research topic through the selection of suitable subjects. One lesson from this experience has been the need for continual co-ordination and monitoring of the course. Adult students in key positions in commerce and industry expect a high standard of course organization, competent administration and expert delivery. There is also a need for co-ordination to provide advice and support to students in order to minimize withdrawals. Course withdrawals have fallen from a maximum of just over 21 per cent of enrolments in 1994 to 12 per cent in 1995 and around 10 per cent in 1996. Where students face the greatest difficulty is in the ability to juggle the demands of work, personal and family commitments as well as study requirements. The demands of the work situation, in particular, take so much priority that they limit the benefit of learning. A clear message from this case study is that a master's programme that was developed initially to serve the specific needs of a small number adult and community educators can grow significantly when it offers subjects and specializations that are both general to adult education as well as concentrated on relevant areas of education and training. The flexible framework of a degree which does not specify rigidly the typical programme of subjects can be used accommodate new developments in the community, commerce and industry. This means that new subjects can be inserted into the degree as the need arises and yet there remains a continuity of identity in the master's qualification. A further lesson from this case study is the value of a master's qualification as a social instrument of change and that a commitment by academics to an ideology is necessary to sustain any course at postgraduate level. Lastly, the following points are noted with reference to a number of general principles which can be transferred to other coursework master's degrees. Firstly, that the coursework master's degree is increasing in popularity and deserves further educational research and specialized administrative attention. It seems likely that with the passage of time, a postgraduate qualification will be the entry level to a wide range of occupations or the basis for promotion beyond entry level positions for graduates. Secondly, the curriculum for master's students needs to take into account the effect of their personal, social and occupational backgrounds on postgraduate study and the demands that they are able to make on the basis of their occupational and academic maturity on universities. Thirdly, assessments, grading and content need to be sensitive to the needs of those returning to study and who have to complete their degrees over such short time-spans of 2-3 years. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The co-operation and assistance of Carole Kirk in the preparation of this chapter is gratefully acknowledged.

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Chapter 5 Supporting Master's Degree Students Mark Garner and Catherine Wallace

Master's level learning can be scary for students, especially where they follow programmes that break from traditional undergraduate pedagogies by encouraging self-management, self-reliance and the creation of personal meanings. This is compounded where students have not mastered effective study practices and where they are not fluent in English. A common response to these problems is to provide learning support in the form of institution-wide study skills and language classes. Such provision may be seen as supplemental to subject programmes, to have a 'bolt-on' character and, perhaps, to be a marginal activity. In this chapter, Mark Garner and Catherina Wallace recognize the importance of learning support and argue for its reconceptualization. Such a reconceptualization should begin, they say, with an analysis of the characteristics and learning needs of master's students and be attentive to the importance of inducting them into the appropriate academic discourse. However, learning support should not be characterized as thereby remedying lacunae in course provision: rather, they suggest, it should entail working with academic staff to design learning support into courses. 'Successful learning support', they say, 'requires from those providing it an understanding of two fundamental processes: learning and teaching; and acculturation into the university as a learning environment'. INTRODUCTION In recent years universities have begun to take more seriously their role as teaching institutions. It is probably true that research and knowledge continue to be privileged over teaching and learning, but in a number of ways the latter are being recognized as an integral part of the academy's function. Institutional interest in students' learning probably stems more from budgetary than from scholarly concerns (if students drop out, enrolments and funding are reduced), but it is not the less real for that. One way in which it is being shown is in the growth of specialized learning support programmes. In Australia, for example, the numbers of staff employed in learning support have increased from a handful to probably several hundred. Many universities also now provide regular short courses or credit-bearing units in literacy, communication, and learning skills. Most learning support is directed to undergraduate, especially first-year, students, for obvious reasons. Postgraduate students sometimes seek help when confronted by their inability to 53

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write appropriately for a research thesis. Professional master's courses, however, offer a new challenge to the universities' claims to be excellent in teaching. University students are a much more varied group these days than they were twenty years ago, when they overwhelmingly comprised young adults in full-time, on-campus undergraduate study. In many ways universities are still trying to catch up with the newly heterogeneous student population and it might be claimed that the character of adult experience and the character of the educational institutions are out of synchrony. Some research, usually of a self-report kind, has been undertaken into the demands of studying in non-traditional modes and the problems of students who study in such ways. Useful though such information is, we need to go beyond merely recognizing the problems and trying to compensate for them by being more flexible in the way we teach. We need to explore whether learning in these modes is different from learning in more traditional modes, and, if so, what the implications may be for the academic support we provide. Adult education is now recognized as a specialized field within the discipline of education. Research in the field is vigorous, and there is a growing literature of books and journals. Some writers argue that the teaching of adults should be regarded as a profession: requiring as much specialized training and expertise as, say, the teaching of young children. A similar case could be made for the education and training of professionals. The challenge of professional postgraduate coursework is therefore doubly great. Learning support, too, is developing as a specialized field within tertiary education. Our paper is a small step towards adding to knowledge about learning support, specifically in postgraduate education. We are very conscious of working in a vacuum. Very little research has been done into learning support in universities, for several reasons. The field is very new. Despite its recent rapid growth, it is still a small part of university education; appointments are sometimes not academic positions and are often part-time or casual. Advisers frequently work in isolation. There is virtually no research literature in the field, and the practical experience that has developed among practitioners is hardly articulated. There is even little systematic information about what advisers actually do. The larger questions of learning support theory and pedagogical practice have as yet hardly been posed, let alone answered. Our problem as authors is compounded by the fact that the educational context we are discussing, namely, coursework master's programmes, is almost as new and as little informed by educational research as is learning support. We both have had experience of learning support over a number of years. We currently work as academic advisers and staff developers in a major regional university in Australia, and have also been involved both as students and as teachers in professional postgraduate courses. Our aim in this chapter is to do more than simply describe ways in which students may need assistance. If learning support is to make a useful contribution to the success of master's courses, it is essential to analyse these students' needs, set them in a theoretical context, and point to ways in which they may be appropriately met. In a single chapter like this we cannot provide all the answers, but we can outline some of the important questions, and suggest some guidelines for answering them.

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Supporting Master's Degree Students WHAT IS LEARNING SUPPORT?

The traditional 'study skills' approach provided students with a lot of handy hints about how to develop more effective study methods, write better essays, and so on. The adviser was a dispenser of remedies to those students who, for whatever reasons, were not well prepared for the demands of university study. The adviser typically relied on his or her own personal experience as a student for clues about what was likely to be useful. The focus of the work was on increasing students' efficiency, with the aim of improving marks. More recently, interest has shifted to the students' learning, and in particular to its relationship to language and thinking. The adviser is a teacher alongside academics in the disciplines and is increasingly asked to advise them on ways to make their teaching more accessible to students. The aim is to assist the student to develop as an independent learner and to enhance the quality of their learning experiences. Higher marks are not, in themselves, the primary consideration. We develop this latter view of learning support later in this chapter, where we focus on learning support for coursework master's students. However, we first need to examine the characteristics of these learners and the demands they make of their courses, as well as the demands that faculty (academic staff) make of them. Learning Support for Non-Traditional Students What sorts of academic difficulties do master's students face? There are, of course, the usual challenges of university study, such as developing intellectual discipline, grappling with strange and challenging material, and understanding and remembering a constant flow of new ideas. In addition, there are difficulties arising from the fact that master's students are, typically mature-age, part-time and professionals. These characteristics must be taken into account by the teaching staff if the students' learning is to be successful. Let us look at them in turn. The Needs of Mature-age Students Mature-age students are a diverse group, and their academic performance is equally varied. Experienced lecturers will feel that they do, nonetheless, tend to show a number of common features, and these impressions are borne out by recent research. Various studies have found adult students to be responsive, highly motivated, and disciplined students, who expect a lot from their studies, appreciate what they do acquire, and tend to apply critical thinking to their learning more than do younger students. It is no wonder that many lecturers would, if given the choice, fill their classes with mature-age students. There are also, however, particular difficulties associated with being a matureage student. Most are undertaking tertiary study for the first time, or returning after many years' absence. They have forgotten - or never knew - how to study and engage in academic learning. Essays are frequently daunting, as they are ubiquitous in most master's courses, yet people outside educational institutions virtually never read or write this distinctive form of discourse. It is a frequent plea of mature-age students: I've no idea what an essay looks like'. Most adults, by the time they reach twenty-five or thirty, tend to undertake only those things which they can do competently and confidently. It is a new and 55

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often painful experience to be cast in the role of beginner again when they go to university. (Their lecturers, who themselves have probably not ventured outside their own areas of expertise since undergraduate days, will also have long forgotten what it feels like to be a novice.) Despite their frequent social confidence outside of class, mature-age students may be loath to contribute to tutorial discussions for fear of appearing stupid. A lack of confidence in their academic skills often leads them to overwork, which in turn leads to exhaustion, frustration, and a further reduction in their capacity to learn. Perhaps the most common advice learning advisers give to mature-age students is to do less work and to become more selective about what they attempt. The Needs of Part-time Students Students of all ages come under this category, but surveys show that the decision to enrol in part-time study is usually determined by family and work commitments and so the majority of part-time students are also mature-age students. There are learning problems specifically associated with part-time study, arising from the nature of a part-time programme and the personal demands on the students. Part-time study tends to make learning a lot more demanding. Classes may be held at less than ideal times, such as evenings, weekends, or holidays. Attending mainstream, daytime classes may be even less desirable for those who have to rush away to work or domestic responsibilities. There are gaps of days, weeks, or even months between classes, during which students may have to study in isolation from their colleagues and lecturers. Opportunities to discuss ideas and raise questions — essential aspects of learning which traditional students take for granted - are limited. Access to facilities such as libraries and computer centres may be hard to arrange. Most part-time students at some time or other suffer feelings of isolation; difficulties appear to become insurmountable, and their motivation, and capacity to learn, decline. The other cause of learning problems for part-time students is the relationship between their academic work and the rest of their lives. Studies indicate that the average part-time student spends fifteen hours per week in class or studying, and up to ten hours travelling. As with many mature-age students, the part-timer is usually trying to fit study around other activities, and these twenty to twenty-five hours each week can exact a heavy toll. Apart from the personal wear and tear, the part-time student has little leisure to reflect and concentrate. Research has found that even very able students, under pressure of time constraints, tend to resort to techniques such as rote-learning, which may hinder learning. They also tend to become narrowly task-oriented, and concentrate on 'doing the reading1 or 'getting the essay written', regardless of whether they understand it. As one student expressed it: My mindset was totally oriented towards the end result - completing the assignment on time . . . I was more motivated to complete a 2000 word essay than learning about the subject matter. Part-time students often ask academic advisers how they can become more 'efficient': for example, they say they need advice on speed reading (which can be inappropriate for dealing with academic texts) or time management (which they are actually very good at) so as to fit even more into their crowded lives. Time and 56

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mental space, although they are increasingly devalued in higher education, will always be absolutely essential for serious learning. The Needs of Professionals The third characteristic of these students is that they are professionals, often with positions of responsibility. This fact gives rise to the most serious difficulty, yet the one on which learning support has least focused: the problem of relevance. A common complaint is that formal studies are irrelevant to their professional practice. In response to a questionnaire we administered to students in our university, we received the following types of comments: Tertiary [technical] colleges offer a more practical approach, and use practical applications and lecturers who have practised in the real world, rather than some universities who tend to be more theoretical and academic in their approach, particularly in the business studies area. It is evident that some lecturers have never practised in industry/public service. Research methodology is not related to the real world. It is not entirely clear why such complaints are so frequent, but the students commonly blame the lecturers. The academics, they claim, have no practical experience, or have been out of the profession so long that they have lost touch and can feel threatened by the students' practical knowledge, so they retreat to the safer ground of theory. As one respondent to our survey commented: Some subjects are too theoretical, or the syllabus has been used repeatedly for a number of years and does not reflect the realities of current business management practice. For their part, academics may blame students who, unused to having their authority challenged or to examining their own practice, lack the intellectual flexibility that is essential to good learning. Another respondent, reflecting on her earlier postgraduate studies, admitted that, Having to compare, contrast and critically analyse statements was a new way of thinking. I was very restricted in calling on personal experiences to back up comments made in essays ... One of the most difficult learning skills was how to question and link answers to build on knowledge. Often this mismatch of aims is not discussed openly, or if it is, it remains unresolved. At best it may be accepted as inevitable, and each side lowers its expectations of the course. The lecturers content themselves with the belief that, at some future time, the students will realize the significance of what they have been studying. The students remind themselves that even a 'meaningless piece of paper' will improve their professional prospects, and go through the motions of learning. As one student expressed it: 57

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I am grateful for the opportunity to do the master's course ... I have enjoyed the company and the efforts of the lecturers . . . However, I am disillusioned . . . The course is far too academic [and] . . . really appears to have little of interest remaining to me. At worst, the conflict of expectations leads some students to withdraw from courses. Reconciling conflicting demands on the part of teachers and students requires a shift of perspective from both. Bringing this about is the aspect of learning support which is most demanding and, at the same time, the most rewarding. LEARNING AND TEACHING Learning and teaching at university level have been extensively studied in recent years, and our understanding of them has become considerably more complex. There is no space here to survey the rich literature of higher education research, but two orientations to learning and teaching are important for learning support: • •

The first is that good teaching is defined in terms of good learning; The second is that good learning relates to both understanding of concepts, and also - and more importantly - to understanding of ourselves as agents in the world.

Good Teaching Defined in Terms of Good Learning Teaching is a form of interpersonal communication, and like all communication it depends crucially on the listener for meaning. Regardless of what the speaker intends the message to mean, what is communicated is ultimately decided by the listener. The 'message' is what the listener has constructed for himself or herself, and is never precisely the same as the speaker's original intention. The most that a speaker can do is to make meanings available as clearly and unambiguously as possible, and to negotiate the interpretation with the listener. Successful communication depends on an agreement between the two that, for all relevant purposes, their understanding is shared. This is the process by which learners and teachers make sense of what is communicated in class. A simplistic view of learning is all too common, among the students, among their superiors who decide promotions and thus give them the incentive to undertake these courses, and among the academic staff who teach them. This view is that postgraduate courses are concerned with increasing one's knowledge: teachers transmit what they know to students, whose job is to acquire that knowledge; and somehow the knowledge will be automatically relevant to professional action and so make the students better professionals. Good Learning Defined in Terms of Understanding However, contemporary research in higher education sees learning as much more than acquiring information, and emphasizes the development of understanding. Learning does, of course, involve adding to our stock of knowledge (by discovering facts, acquiring skills, etc.), but in higher education we see it as essentially a process of modifying and developing attitudes, beliefs, and understandings. It aims to increase our understanding of ourselves, our agency in the world: 58

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For our purposes, 'world' can refer to the contexts within which the students work in their professions. And yet there is a common complaint that professional courses fail to develop this sense of agency in the professional world. Comments by one of our respondents are typical of many: All of this research [we read in the course] isn't related to the world. The theories can't be applied - it becomes a paper chase, no practical and realistic applications to the real world. Why do students so often fail to develop an understanding relevant to their own professional world? One answer is provided by Argyris and Schon (1978), who describe the process of organizational learning as it progresses from haphazard learning to goal-based learning and thence to 'double-loop learning'. 'Haphazard learning' lacks a frame of reference: it has hazy goals and feedback is intermittent. Things learned are not related to one another. 'Goal-based' learning occurs when goals are defined, strategies to meet them are developed, and feedback is focused and consistent. 'Double-loop learning* occurs alongside goal-based learning when employees begin to question everything critically, including the goals themselves. Here we see the simultaneous activities of goal-based activity and critical questioning, hence the 'double loop'. Although not specifically designed for describing individual learning, this simple model can be validly applied to the experiences of postgraduate students. Haphazard learning occurs continually within students' professional lives. Professionals continually learn on the job, because their work involves engagement in a succession of cases, problems or projects which they have to learn about. Their case-specific learning, however, may not contribute a great deal to their general professional knowledge base. Their actions may be routine and unreflective, often being goal-based at best. The decision to undertake postgraduate professional studies may be motivated by instrumental goals (such as obtaining a qualification for promotion) or intrinsic goals (such as keeping abreast of developments in the field). Most likely, the student will have a variety of explicit or implicit goals. Whatever the motivation, formal study represents a move from haphazard professional learning towards goal-based learning. Unfortunately, the university is not oriented towards meeting those goals in the form in which they may have been formulated. The setting in which courses are usually conducted is far removed, physically and in ethos, from the workplace. The university is not primarily focused on the specific professional needs of any particular group, and the material presented does not arise consistently from daily professional activities. Moreover, the practitioner's experience and knowledge may be (or may seem to be) downgraded, which further inhibits the development of the sort of understanding defined above. Conflicting Views of Teaching, Learning and Understanding There is a conflict between the university view of learning and that of the workplace. The university has traditionally been associated with learning through research, scholarly enquiry and critical questioning. Teaching staff are required to engage in research and scholarly activities, with the result that there is a constant tendency towards theorizing and abstracting. By contrast, professionals coming into postgraduate courses, especially those who have not undertaken previous 59

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university studies, frequently think of education as a simple transaction. They (the customers) pay a supplier (the teacher) to give them a product (knowledge). This view puts the onus squarely on the supplier to provide the goods ordered. If the course does not appear to be meeting the students' goals, the teacher is at fault. In the words of one student, 'if I buy something and it's no good, I take it back -1 want restitution. It's the same with education/ Almost all university educators claim (whatever their actual practice may be) to value the process of learning as an end in itself. To concentrate on marks as an indication of success is to undervalue the many important but uncountable aspects of education. Increased curiosity; a wider, more pluralistic view of themselves and their world; the ability to formulate and challenge theories; such are the outcomes the teachers desire from their students. This view places the responsibility for learning mainly on the student. But it is not as easy as taking what you want and applying it'. The academic approach can seem merely abstract to people whose daily practice requires specific and situated decisions. The goal-oriented learner and the teacher tend to follow separate parts of the 'double loop', without bringing them together. The gap may be even wider if the course is segmented into highly focused modules, with none of the specialist academic staff able to provide a synthesis or an applied perspective. These are some of the learning difficulties confronting postgraduate coursework students. Overcoming them requires specialized and properly focused learning support. HOW SHOULD LEARNING SUPPORT BE PROVIDED FOR MASTER'S STUDENTS? Experience suggests that learning support, especially at postgraduate levels, should be a collaborative effort. The best possible teaching arises from a high level of expertise in the subject and an equally high level of understanding of pedagogical principles and the processes of learning. It is very rare to find an individual who combines these qualities. If the subject lecturer and the specialist learning adviser collaborate, their complementary skills can greatly enhance students' learning and hence the effectiveness of master's courses. But collaboration requires that learning support be built into the way in which the course is designed and taught: it cannot be simply added on afterwards. How can this be achieved, and what are the consequences? We will briefly consider three points. They are: subject specialists must be aware of a need; teaching must be centred on the learner; and academic advisers must develop a relevant focus. Awareness of a Need for Learning Support It is wrong to assume that students will automatically be good at university learning simply because they are adults and professionals. They are almost certain to be experiencing one or another of the learning problems we touched on earlier in the chapter. Most lecturers in postgraduate courses are aware of the personal and practical difficulties of the students, and are flexible about the nature and pacing of the content, the deadlines of assignments, attendance requirements, and so on. Some are willing to negotiate the content of the course and the nature of the 60

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assessments. These attitudes are an essential part of overcoming some of the problems which beset coursework programmes. It is much less common, although at least as important, for academics to understand the sorts of academic difficulties confronting master's students, and to discuss openly with the class the purposes, processes and challenges of learning within this context. The specialist academic adviser has a valuable role to play here. Learner-centred Teaching We discussed above how the learning process is at the centre of education. The constructivist view of communication and learning we outlined has many implications for teaching. For example, students' misconceptions about learning need to be addressed. Such conceptions are usually implicit and only partly recognized. Students (and their lecturers) need to be made aware of beliefs about learning. It is very helpful early in the course to have a classroom discussion, giving the students a chance to articulate their own conceptions of what they are doing, and to see that others, including the lecturers, may hold different views. They need to recognize where their assumptions are inappropriate, and where they fall short of the academic ideal of critical questioning leading to personally significant interpretations. This sort of session is an invaluable teaching exercise in a number of ways, and the subject lecturers should all participate. Academic advisers will need to provide assistance in developing the essential interpretative learning skills, such as listening, understanding, critical questioning, and exploratory academic writing. Another result of this conception of learning is that the students' own wealth of knowledge and experience - much of it unarticulated - will be seen as central to the course. Wherever possible, academics need to build on these enormous resources. By valuing professional knowledge and experience, the lecturer provides affirmation and motivation for students, and encourages them to participate fully and actively in learning. What is taught will be relevant to the workplace, because the students will be making their interpretation according to their own requirements. A Postgraduate Focus for Academic Advisers Building learning support into all aspects of a course has implications for academic skills advisers as well. Learning support has traditionally been provided mainly for undergraduate students, especially first years, who are struggling to cope with their studies for some reason. Most of the small amount of research in the field has been directed at essentially remedial aspects of the work, such as basic writing skills, study habits, and making the transition from school to university. Postgraduate, professional students generally require a very different style of assistance. Typically, they are intelligent, experienced, and motivated; their requirements are not 'remedial' in the normal sense. Advisers must become expert adult educators, well versed in relevant theories of learning. They cannot be experts at everything, but need to be sufficiently familiar with a variety of disciplines so that they can enable students to reflect on their own learning processes, within their own fields of study. Advisers who assist postgraduate students will have to be able to help them to make the connections between what they are studying in the course and what they need to learn from a professional or 61

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personal perspective. Advisers also have a significant part to play in the professional development of academic staff of postgraduate courses, by working alongside them, providing advice on the students'learning needs, and assisting them to develop creative ways of fulfilling those needs. If the present trend towards ever greater numbers of coursework master's programmes continues, the role of the postgraduate academic adviser will become almost as central as those of the subject specialists. CONCLUSION

Professionally oriented master's courses present a number of new challenges to universities. The students who typically enrol in them are in many ways a paradox. Very different from undergraduates, they are also far removed from the traditional postgraduate who works up through the undergraduate degree. They bring to their studies a vast wealth of life experience and professional expertise, yet are often naive in their approach to learning. They should be ideal students, yet their record in completing courses is not particularly good. Life circumstances - demands of job, family, and society -often interfere with their studies, but at the same time make them the more determined to succeed. This very determination may cause them to engage in inappropriate learning behaviours. They are more likely to expect good service from their teachers, whilst their expectations may be quite at odds with those of academia. All of these difficulties, nonetheless, can be seen, from another perspective, as equally great opportunities. If universities can adapt to their specific educational demands by, amongst other things, providing appropriate learning support, it is almost inevitable that the large majority of postgraduate courses will be successful. A thoughtful approach to learning support is essential to the success of any coursework master's programme. Providing Learning Support for Master's Students

Adult education is now recognized as a specialized field within the discipline of education. Research in the field is vigorous, and there is a burgeoning literature of books and journals. Some argue that the teaching of adults should be regarded as a profession, requiring as much specialized training and expertise as, say, the teaching of young children. Learning support, as we have said, is becoming increasingly accepted as part of mainstream university education, and has an important contribution to make to the success of such courses. Successful learning support requires from those providing it an understanding of two fundamental processes: learning and teaching; and acculturation into the university as a learning environment.

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Chapter 6 The Use of Formative

Evaluation: A North American

Experience Susan Wesley

Susan Wesley begins by discussing the learning needs of people taking coursework master's degrees. While her conclusions are similar to those of other writers, such as Garner and Wallace, Athanasou and Davis, she deploys Knowles' concept of andragogy to underpin her analysis, illustrating the concept with examples from her own practice. There is a problem for teachers who wish to follow this approach, for they need to know what students are learning, what they are not learning and what they find difficult. In the second part of this chapter, paying attention to practical, as well as theoretical issues, she describes a classroom assessment technique, the SWAD cards, that has allowed her to monitor students' learning. She argues that this technique has enabled her to tune her teaching in response to learners' expressed needs, providing a better match between their needs and andragogic pedagogy. Again, the importance of flexibility in master's level teaching is emphasized and diversity is seen as a corollary This chapter focuses on five propositions related to master's level studies and discusses the principles of andragogy in order to examine a technique of formative evaluation. The five propositions are: 1 master's students have life and work experiences distinct from those of undergraduate students which impact upon their desire and ability to maintain an academic schedule; 2 when different instructional settings and deliveries are proposed for master's courses, the component of assessment should also be examined; 3 master's students will be more practically oriented to course work, which may create difficulties in their seeing the relevance of some courses; 4 a variety of access and equity issues involving the admission to and performance in master's level programs exists; 5 professional development for faculty (or academic staff) will be needed to effect changes in both design and implementation of master's level courses.

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FORMATIVE EVALUATION AND THE ASSESSMENT OF STUDENT LEARNING Evaluation (as it is called in North America), or assessment (as the British call it), is often considered to be an uncomfortable experience for both student and instructor, typically meaning that a person is being tested or observed in order to detect a lack of expertise, rather than as a means to validate competence. Evaluation most often has a summative purpose, typically focusing upon the student's comprehension of content at the conclusion of a unit or course - are the formulae comprehended, the problems solved, the theories memorized, the terms applied? Summative evaluation also applies at the end of the course as a means for students to comment on the quality of the instructional process. These course evaluations are usually provided to the instructor well after the course is completed. Formative evaluation of the instruction, on the other hand, is based on the practice of periodic feedback. The intent of formative evaluation is to find out, in a timely fashion, what information has been learned or understood and what has been missed. The instructor may then choose to revise, review or reshape content and/or instructional delivery. This behaviour demonstrates a commitment to an instructional process in which both parties participate. Students benefit greatly when this process occurs, because it allows them another opportunity to work with the material which, as a result, may be presented in a different manner. ADULT LEARNERS The adult comes to the educational setting with a number of defining characteristics, four of which are: 1 the physical I biological — ability to reproduce; 2 the chronological - age at which one may vote, marry without consent and so on; 3 the social!economic — fulfilling certain roles such as full-time employment; 4 the psychological/emotional — taking responsibility for one's own life or becoming self-directed. It is important to acknowledge that aspects of the first three characteristics may impact on the adult learning environment in varying degrees, but for the purpose of this paper it is most appropriate to examine closely the psychological characteristic when discussing the educational setting. By the time a student has completed an average of 17 years of schooling, he or she recognizes certain expectations exist for both the instructor as well as the learner, and assumptions about attendance, grading, participation, deadlines or due dates permeate most courses. Adults, however, have new self-driven directions as learners that may include a need for increased or new skill acquisition and a wish to take new career education. Given the need for the adult learner to be allowed self-direction, instructional routines which once were considered essential to good learning may need to be examined. Some years ago Malcolm Knowles (1990) suggested that the traditional pedagogic routine, namely the teacher-knows-all presentation model, was not sufficient for the adult learner. He offered, instead, an approach that expanded awareness of several critical factors which impact on the learning environment for adults. 64

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Knowles' six principles and assumptions are often collectively referred to as the andragogical model of learning. (The development of the term andragogy can be traced back as far as 1833 and was coined as the term for instructional practices appropriate for an adult population.) He alluded to the possibility that perhaps all good teaching and good learning rested upon these assumptions. However, he described these principles with a particular age group in mind, and these assumptions and principles most influenced his thinking about instructional design for adult learners. My understanding of these assumptions and principles includes: •

•

•

•

•

•

The learner's need to know. When the experience of learning is personally owned by the adult, the principle of'need to know' is addressed. The people who calculate statistics for various sports events, do crossword puzzles and pursue genealogical information are but a few of those who demonstrate this principle in action; The learner's self-concept. This principle rests upon a universal belief that one ought to assume responsibility for one's own decisions. For adults to be considered otherwise is demeaning to their personal view of self and is likely to generate a variety of defensive reactions. Lack of control of learning environments and tasks is an issue for adults, especially when they are being tested and graded; Role of the learner's experience. The learner's life experience contributes greatly to self-concept. When instruction includes a recognition of the value of the knowledge and skills possessed due to age, social, cultural and physical experience, the adult's feeling of being valued encourages him or her to participate in, and therefore become a contributor to, the teaching/learning process; Readiness to learn. When the opportunity .to continue one's education arrives, the adult looks around at his or her life and makes decisions about adding an academic component to what is often a very full schedule. Presumably, a master's level student by choosing such a programme is acknowledging that the time is right, that he or she is ready to learn. But, having made a commitment to such a programme does not mean the adult will find all courses as valuable: in other words, the learner may be ready for the programme but not for individual components of it. This perception of value may also be related to the next principle, orientation; Orientation to learning. Some courses may be initially presented only as information for information's sake. The instructor, therefore, needs to provide opportunities for transfer of learning and concrete application so that the learner may become oriented to the interplay of experience and academic insights. Readiness and orientation are not fixed attributes of the learner, but are ones that can be affected by the actions of the instructor and by programme design; Learner's motivation. The most obvious yet elusive of all the principles is motivation. Extrinsic motivators can be easily recognized. They come packaged as wage increases, benefit gains, and service awards, yet motivation may be inhibited simply because the learner is an adult. Factors such as the student's location, schedule, transportation and financial resources; time constraints; and instructional delivery that is 65

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inappropriate for the learner's orientation (Tbugh, 1979) all impinge. Intrinsic motivators for continued education are often described as those perceived as important to a quality of life, and readiness to gain insights and new learnings. Using examples from my own courses, the discussion which follows relates the six principles of the andragogical model to a master's level setting. The 'need to know' principle suggests that students have a desire to understand how their thinking and performance, as professionals, will be influenced by the course content. The students may also be concerned about the relevance of their previous educational experience as they work to comprehend and make meaning of the material. For example, a trainer who had worked with a local electric company for over 20 years and who was enrolled in my Teaching Process with Adults course, was introduced to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. This instrument is based upon C. G. Jung's theories related to conscious and unconscious human behavioural preferences. The trainer questioned the relevance of the examination of a behavioural preferences instrument in the study of adult development issues. She wanted to understand how it related to her work setting. I suggested that she observe the interpersonal skills among her trainees, since many behaviours are often unconscious. A short time later, the trainer reported her observations and proposed that perhaps there were unconscious behaviours exhibited when certain interpersonal encounters worked well or clashed. Therefore, she might make use of information which the Myers Briggs Type Indicator could provide. She then saw the study of this instrument as important. The second principle, learner's self-concept, provides the opportunity for instructors to acknowledge students as adults with both professional and personal lives. This honouring of one adult by another can be very empowering, students' resistance to new material or ways of thinking can decrease and receptivity can increase. Such growth occurs best when the self-concept is intact and healthy. For example, in my Adult Development and Learning course, the students are assigned selected text sections in order to write integration papers, based solely on their personal experience with the theme or concept, that include a brief summary of the central theme and a discussion of the material. This exercise reinforces the understanding that their personal lives hold rich material which may be pertinent to the topic. The third principle is that of the role of learner experience. Adult learners have a reservoir of life experience. Their resources, including years of work in particular settings, with particular populations, using specific equipment and/or techniques, provide the instructor with opportunities to include new, different and multiple perspectives in each class by inviting input. When the instructor calls upon even one of these resources, not only may that learner be validated, empowered and encouraged to feel like a colleague in the instructional process, but such a demonstration provides other participants with the vicarious experience of being valued for their own experiences. For example, many work-related settings from which my master's students come require varying levels of skill with audio-visual equipment, including photographic and computer expertise. I have encouraged audio-visual projects, presentations or demonstrations in lieu of traditional term or research papers in all seven of my courses. Such an invitation has often been received very happily because it provides the possibility of a more useful application of the assignment to the learner's working life than does a formal term 66

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paper. I have also found that audio-visual alternatives to papers are most powerful in allowing the instructor to step out of the role of expert and cede the stage to the student. The fourth principle, readiness to learn involves tuning the course, teaching, learning and assessment strategies so as to engage with the learners' purposes in enrolling on it. I have found it essential to provide flexibility in topic application, project selection, and modes of inquiry. Learning contracts, individualized instruction plans, and self-directed investigations are just a few approaches to learnerdriven instruction. Several years ago I worked with a woman who was teaching, in a hospital setting and largely by lecture, short courses in new laboratory techniques. She was eager to try a non-lecture approach to the material because it seemed to her that the students were usually disengaged and very irritated as the date drew closer for a qualifying exam. They claimed boredom and felt insufficiently prepared because of their frustration with understanding the material. She came to the decision that much of the material should be initially presented by lecture but in shorter segments, punctuated with small group processing by students choosing from among many activities using the lecture information. Some of the options involved participating in small group investigations, producing scenario writing or designing flow charts, poster models or transparencies for overhead projectors. She reported a few weeks later that the active participation by the students not only kept them more involved but produced additional materials to make her future presentations more interesting. Those materials also reinforced the students' knowledge and confidence in their preparation for the qualifying exams. It appears that she was ready to break the cycle of 'teacher knows all and delivers all' when she included self-directed models, thereby capitalizing on the readiness to learn that had brought the students in to the programme. I associate the fifth principle, orientation to learning, with readiness. For example, within my course History of Adult Education is a component which includes investigation of the design of instructional practice in this country, beginning with the formal education experience for the youngest learners. During this part of the course, additional consideration is given to the students' immediate instructional experiences. Those individuals who have children of public school age are often surprised to find how relevant the comparison of instructional practice is in understanding both their experience in graduate school and their children's comments about a day at school. Conversations among the master's students often provide insight related to peer receptivity to past instruction. In this way, the students may become better oriented to the purposes and discourse of this class. Motivation, the sixth point of consideration, may begin as extrinsic motivation and become intrinsic. For example, a young woman who took the Adult Development course years ago, was newly divorced and the single parent of three children. She was provided with the financial support to earn a master's degree as part of the divorce settlement. She presumed that the degree would make her skills more marketable in the world of work and better able to support her family. As she worked on her program and through her life events over the next four years, she better understood what the degree would provide and what it would not. During her last year of study her motivation became intrinsic. She worked with adults who were non-readers and usually had dropped out of school. In this work she discovered not only a talent for teaching but a commitment to make educational experience for adults rewarding, empowering, and a means to gain a 67

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greater sense of self-worth. The degree not only provided greater opportunity for employment, but now the employment also offered greater purpose for her. These examples illustrate some of the ways in which an awareness of adult learning principles can provide opportunities for designing effective instruction in master's level programmes. The section which follows describes a process for assessing instructional effectiveness that it also provides the student with opportunity for self-direction and expression of his or her personal voice. SWAD CARD Seven master's level courses constitute the concentration - or pathway - in Adult and Continuing Education which I teach. The men and women who enrol have spanned ages 22-68 and are in the business of teaching and/or administrating learning opportunities for adults. Master's level students have included nurses, counsellors, machinists, police officers, military personnel, secretaries, administrative assistants, college deans, grammar and high school teachers, education administrators, industry managers, clergy, dental hygienists, forestry service personnel, hospital administrators and, of course, adult education teachers. The concentration, or pathway, courses include: •

•

•

professional development focus — three courses, each one semester in length - Introduction to Adult I Continuing Education; Adult Development and Continuing Education; and The Teaching I Learning Process with Adults; institutional I organizational development focus — three courses, each one semester in length — Community Processes and Leadership in Adult I Continuing Education; Program Development and Evaluation in Adult I Continuing Education; and Management of Adult t Continuing Education Organizations; Self-development focus — a one semester course - Workshop in Adult I Continuing Education (a topics course).

I came to teaching these courses in 1986, having received, in 1984, a Ph.D. in the Arts in Human Development. I was already employed as full-time faculty in a baccalaureate programme, but I had concerns about my effectiveness with master's level students. Many of my colleagues were older males and because I was younger and female, I was particularly concerned about how attitudes towards gender and age might influence the instructional environment. But I believed that if the students could personally relate to the material and activities, there would be relatively little challenge or confrontation to me or the instruction. I also decided that, if any burning issues or questions arose, they could become opportunities for learning rather than confrontation. It may appear that master's students are a captive audience to any instructional style and often they are not aware of the power they have accrued as seasoned adults. In the concentration I teach, many students take one of the courses as their first in a return to academic study, usually after many years. Some of the master's students are required to enrol because, as a new assignment, their job will require them to train employees. Others come into the courses knowing that they want to teach adults but believe that they need some documentation to prove 68

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they are capable. Still others attend because they have colleagues who have referred them to my courses. In 1986 my concern was to succeed in modelling good instructional practice, as well as teaching about models of effective instructional practice. But what would happen if a student were not vocal (ready or with a positive self-concept) or assertive (oriented to or motivated by content)? Could the problems go unnoticed and later cause frustration? How could I be informed, in a timely and consistent way, what the students' experiences were? I needed some mechanism for feedback other than casual conversation which, at best, could be patronizing; at worst, compromising. For a possible model, I began to think back through my own experiences as a student and remembered that one of my high school instructors used an unannounced short form quiz at least twice a week to determine who had completed the reading assignments. As I considered his model, I realized that it wasn't a quiz which attracted me but the form and format that he used. The three-by-five inch index card with a five-item format which he used could be adapted to provide me with feedback to make sure information was clear, or needed review, or needed expanding. Thus was created the idea of a formative evaluation technique to be used at the close of each class. The five items would include information about the strengths of the class presentation or activity; the weaknesses or what didn't work; what content or which activities could be added or deleted; and how each particular class fitted within the entire course sequence. For the first four items, Strengths, Weaknesses, Additions and Deletions, the student would write short responses. For item five, the students would assign a number between one and five (least to best) to rate the class as to the appropriateness of its positioning within the course sequence. The cards would also be anonymous, no signatures were to be used. The SWAD title came about several years later when students began to refer to it by its categories of solicited information: • • • •

S-trengths; W-eaknesses; A-dditions; and D-eletions;

The fall semester of 1986 was the first time teaching these courses and also for the first use of the card. As wonderful as it sounded, I was surprised that the students' initial reception to the idea was relatively unenthusiastic. They felt that there was a catch. If their input were being solicited, it must be because of some sort of ulterior motive of mine. Another concern was that their handwriting would be analysed to discern who wrote which comments. They assumed their grade would be influenced (or determined) if they were critical of my teaching or the material. With gentle persuasion that we should try using the cards and trust the process, it was only a matter of two or three classes before the value of the cards was evident. I used student input from one class immediately in the next class. This wasn't difficult, because the original intent was to fix what needed fixing. For example, in one of the courses I first taught, a student believed that the text description of young adults was not the perception that fitted for young adults in Maine. It was also suggested that there might be cultural differences because of 69

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geography, economics and social issues which are peculiar to Maine and not other regions. I used this comment at the opening of the next class and invited students to work in small groups in order to gain clarification about the perceptions of local young adults and then compare the profiles to the text. Not only did the exercise maximize instruction, it also let the students know that they could trust the card process, which quickly became a valid instructional piece and demonstrated that their voices mattered. Cards are completed at the end of the class and placed in a pile as the students exit the classroom. I read the comments in preparation for the class to follow. The cards are a component of the grading expectations - points are given on a per class basis and they provide a part of the student's final grade. The use of SWAD card continues into its eleventh year. The benefits of immediate evaluation are many. The instructor can determine if intended objectives were met, and the need for correcting, expanding, or defining will be clarified. Such information can also identify areas of expertise among the students as well as among those who find the material unfamiliar. Often the feedback provides insight as to new directions in thinking on the part of the student and may generate ideas for the instructor. When a topic appears to raise many different responses among the students, it may indicate important prior experience with the material. The instructor may then choose to add a discussion or panel experience to increase student ownership focused on specific points of view. Polarized responses may indicate, for example, either the potential for a lively debate or else a need to investigate the topic with additional outside sources. The cards work very well also as feedback to the students. In many instances, students are not aware of their peers' attitudes towards or experiences with course material. The cards can provide a mechanism for reporting such points of view when topics need expanding, or new insights have been offered. An instructor can also approach the students with material to bolster or clarify the topic, particularly when students request it, without drawing negative attention to anyone. The cards themselves can become a topic as a tool or activity to provide a safe means of providing and receiving information. It should be emphasized that when the instructor models a positive behaviour based upon the information received, the students are shown that their voices and perceptions are valued. This often leads to a broadened receptivity by students to differing opinions and to greater patience with or acceptance of others whose backgrounds may not be as rich in experience. In many of the evaluation design courses which I have taken, little time has been given to formative evaluation as a tool to shape instruction. Most of the focus was on designing evaluation to assess course results (summative evaluation). Although the SWAD card is not a distinctively scientific method, it is a mechanism to encourage student involvement in the shaping of an instructional process. The use of this technique has been praised by several former students who also employ it in such settings as hospital in-service and training work, school secretarial workshops, faculty development events, and personnel safety training. Some students have suggested that after their first course using the SWAD process, it becomes something more than a tool for evaluation. It has familiarity as a procedure. It reinforces the instructor's stated value of student perceptions. The card demonstrates the instructor's belief in continuous improvement and continuity. It also provides a technique with which former students are familiar and new students can observe their level of trust in the instructor. Particularly in the concentration of courses which I teach, the SWAD card has become a tool for curricular review and revision. 70

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A brief word about the use of the SWAD card with baccalaureate level students is in order. I did try this technique with undergraduates, thinking that they too would be empowered if their feedback was used to shape instruction. The result was not as powerful. Cards did provide a voice for them although it tended to become either blatantly complimentary or whiney. My sense was that without more life experience, the card questions which presumed personal/professional experience were mostly unfamiliar to the traditional age undergraduate. There were some adult learners on baccalaureate courses who had some useful input and had positive reactions to being encouraged to provide it. SYNTHESIS

The following discussion brings together the principles of adult learning, the SWAD card technique and the five propositions for master's level education set out at the beginning of this chapter. •

•

•

Proposition 1: considers a student's distinct life and work responsibilities and raises a concern that relates to the learners' self-concept. The SWAD card provides a direct and individual link to the instructor. As adults, the master's students need a certain sense of control if they are to be held responsible for their decisions. The card process makes available the opportunity to self-direct their learning by posing questions and by making comments and presenting observations about the instruction, class contents or interactions; Proposition 2: the need to examine assessment techniques for master's level courses, is addressed by the SWAD card because it is an assessment tool that embodies the adult learning principles as outlined by Knowles and previously described; Proposition 3: states that master's level students are practically oriented to course content. The SWAD technique can provide opportunities for students to demonstrate expertise as they raise their questions, voice their comments, and provide their additional perceptions. The card can also provide a means to voice frustrations safely, particularly when relevance of course material is the issue.

The propositions of differing backgrounds 1, levels of expertise and perceptions of relevance 3, and access 4, are acknowledged through the cards. The instructor can receive valuable information as students respond to the strength and weakness categories of the card process revealing exceptional levels of understanding and/or deficits. The addition and deletion comments also, provide feedback that increases the possibilities for expanding the topic, enhancing material already presented, and developing alternative instructional deliveries. Both instructor and student model readiness to learn by receptivity to different perceptions followed by inquiry, as opposed to judgement as to right or wrong answers or remark. Propositions 1, distinct life experiences, and 3, practical orientation, are also addressed when related to the principle of motivation. The SWAD model provides the opportunity for the personal/professional voice in raising questions, particularly when the comments suggest enhancements or expansions to the topic. The student shares, either directly or indirectly, interest in and knowledge of a topic by 71

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suggesting additions or deletions and can provide the instructor with a springboard for spiral learning or expanding information. Their information may challenge the instructor to think in different ways and come to new perceptions. For adult learners, instructional behaviours such as modelling of commitment, non-blaming language, openness to hearing confusion or frustration, and receptivity to suggestions for further explanations can maximize learning potential. Formative evaluation has these possibilities built in. As an assessment technique, the SWAB card can be more than just a tool. It can empower the student because it can be viewed as co-operative participation in course development and later as input for curriculum design. The SWAD card alone will not provide the appropriate atmosphere for master's level students. The adult learning principles as a book-learned approach will not suffice. No one method, set of principles or recipe will be the best fit for all teaching situations. However, when adult learners are the students, they deserve the genuine sense of passion which the instructor has for the content; they also require the authentic sense of self awareness modelled and provided by the instructor. Ultimately, the learner will choose if the time is right for the material to be learned. The learner will choose either consciously or unconsciously, and he or she can be encouraged or inhibited by the behaviours modelled by the instructor.

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Chapter 7 A Master's Programme that

Matters to the New South Africa Duncan Reavy

This chapter is the first in a series of case studies from anglophone countries, examining issues in curriculum, learning and teaching as they have become manifest in a range of programmes. Duncan Reavey addresses a substantial set of them, highlighting assessment matters and the demands of planning and operating a transdisciplinary master's programme. He echoes a number of themes raised in earlier chapters - the diversity of student experience, student reactions to new pedagogies and group-based work. He also attends to the important and under-researched consequences of an increasing presence of part-time students and notes that ways are needed to stop students working too hard. What struck me about this chapter is the sense of vision and the insistence on creating a world-class programme from the start: his account of the learner centred, problem-focused pedaogogies and working with the students match the run of reports in this book. INTRODUCTION All kinds of new coursework master's degrees are appearing. Their fashionable new names bring in the students. But a new name doesn't mean a new degree and many of the same old traits find their way into the newest programmes. Are there golden rules for creating a new master's programme that delivers the goods? Here I present some of the lessons learned from a success story of vision and nerve in one of the most conservative of university environments. First, I describe a new master's programme in Environment and Development and show how an innovative transdisciplinary programme was successfully launched against all the odds. Then I highlight some of the principles that have led to the success of the programme. I believe that these principles can be applied to just about any master's programme, new or established, and to other kinds of university teaching too. Of course, some of those involved in establishing the programme were aware of aspects of educational theory underlying university teaching and learning, but the truth is that most of us who run master's courses don't have time to be education experts. Just about all that I describe in this chapter was based on either previous hands-on experiences, or intuition, common sense and the feeling that it 'just seemed right'. Though it is possible to cite research studies that justify our 73

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approaches, I deliberately avoid a reference list. I do not want to give the false impression that our programme was based primarily on the 'right* ways to do things according to the literature. The academic world works in a pragmatic way: this is the way we approached our new master's programme and the way I approach this chapter. LAUNCHING A NEW TRANSDISCIPLINARY MASTER'S PROGRAMME What's So New About 'Environment and Development'? Every environmental problem has a human dimension. Many human problems have an environmental dimension. Only by bringing together the biophysical and human systems - too often treated as separate disciplines - can we create a meaningful context to explore current and anticipated environmental problems and search for solutions. The University of Natal offers a master's programme by coursework and dissertation that addresses these problems head-on. We believe our master's programme takes the lead in developing a new paradigm of truly transdisciplinary environmental research that addresses the needs of government, businesses and ordinary people. A truly transdisciplinary approach has meant bringing together the best of researchers and practitioners from as many as 32 departments in six faculties of the University and recognized national and international figures from research, government and industry. In doing so, we give students the opportunity to develop research skills but also to gain a professional training that employers say they will value. Today's innovations become tomorrow's cliches. To makes it worth the investment of time, energy and money, we needed a programme that would remain relevant for at least ten years. After that time, different approaches might be more sensible. When that time comes, we will be only too happy to move in new directions rather than push our current product beyond its ten-year shelf life. The transdisciplinary approach is sorely needed everywhere, not least in the new South Africa, but it presents all kinds of challenges. Getting Individuals and Departments to Play for the Same Team

Transdisciplinary programmes are a great idea but often don't get beyond that stage. All too often we work within the confines of our traditional disciplines. Physical barriers like separate buildings (and separate tea rooms) don't help. Administrative procedures, including formulae for the allocation of funds, force departments to defend their territory to the death. Loyalty to discipline is often strongest among individuals like heads of department who have most to lose. In this sort of environment, how can we get the different departments playing for the same team? The critical thing is to get everyone working together from the start. From the time we first mooted a transdisciplinary master's programme in Natal, an open invitation to get involved was extended to all corners of the university. A steering committee was established from volunteers from six faculties - agriculture, commerce, humanities, law, science and social science. Membership included a fair 74

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sprinkling of Deans and other senior academics, not just young upstarts. Colleagues from botany, history, economics, law, geography, maths, agricultural engineering realized they had a lot in common and knew it was a step forward, but turning goodwill into an end product was more difficult. During two years of discussions, proposals and counter-proposals frustrated all concerned. The vision came when four or five of the group decided it was time to start again from scratch and build a course from very first principles. We needed a vision that all of us understood and shared and one that would be just as powerful ten years into the future. The result was a framework that the Steering Committee adopted wholeheartedly and with a corporate sigh of relief. The presence of various deans on our Steering Committee meant that we had strong supporters in the university's formal approval process. A new School of Environment and Development was formally constituted to provide a home for the new master's programme and to extend the transdisciplinary vision into other activities once the master's programme was established. At Pietermaritzburg, a 'school' crosses faculty boundaries so choice of name and confirmation of status was important. A Board of Management comprising leaders from the university and the wider community provides vision and oomph for the school. A Board of Studies comprising co-ordinators of different parts of the master's programme is responsible for academic activities including admissions, teaching and learning, assessment and examination. Independence from the faculties is something we guard jealously. It keeps us distant from vested interests and old rivalries. The co-ordinator of the master's programme is a relative newcomer to the University, so is a safe distance from internal politicking and can get on with the job of building a single team. Except for the co-ordinator, seconded from his department, the university contributors to the programme remain members of their own departments and we rely on their enthusiasm (and their department's) to get involved. If the goodwill of the faculties and the many departments were ever lost, the transdisciplinary experiment would fail. Partnership with the wider community is just as important and all manner of external organizations were involved from the start. After all, these are the employers of our graduates. They are represented formally on the Board of Management and Board of Studies and have a part to play in developing the content of the master's programme - and paying for it. What Does the Market Want? What do employers want from master's graduates? Early in our planning we asked a range of a hundred or so employers from multinationals, industries and commerce, national, provincial and local government, non-governmental organizations and community-based organizations. Some were already friends, others were new contacts. We used open-ended questionnaires followed up by discussions with some. This led to an employers' wish list of the kinds of people they need. We also asked how many of this new kind of graduate they would employ. We knew many of the answers already, but the exercise was worthwhile. There were a few surprises which we could address, and the formal survey gave good data that helped us sell the new programme to the University and to potential students. After all, students want to be employable.

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What do the students want? We asked students from a wide range of our own academic departments using open-ended questionnaires. Again, there were a few surprises. It demonstrated sufficient demand for this new kind of programme to make it viable - though showing that students at other universities would transfer to us would have been more powerful still. More cynically, it provided a checklist of points that matter to potential students. These had to be addressed head-on when flirting with potential students in recruitment material and at interview. Students wanted a job at the end and saleable skills, so we feature these prominently. What does the University want? We didn't need to ask. Mission statements, five-year plans, press releases, a vice-chancellor's review and so on gave a good impression of what the University was thinking and dove-tailed with statements on national education policy. Careful use of extracts from these documents helped us sell the programme in a way that brought the executive on board. It was time well spent. But What Does the Market Really Need? Of course there are skills and abilities that employers and students don't realize they need. This is where the foresight and intuition of academics comes in. In our roles as university researchers who know more about the 'outside world' than people realize, we must provide a medium- and long-term perspective. This complements the views of employers who have urgent problems to solve here and now. In other words, universities must have a vision of what's needed ten years from now, and their programmes must address that vision. If universities don't have that vision in their courses, they're failing. And we can't expect students or employers to tell us what that vision should be. The Highest Standards - Excellence from the Start From the start we aimed to be the best at what we do - running a master's programme of international standard. And we aimed to produce graduates who, for this stage in their career, are the best in what they do. This sounds laudable (and saleable) but is it the right strategy? After all, it means a hefty injection of resources at the start for students to have access to the latest computer hardware and software, a professional working environment, budgets for project work, and contact time with the best people. The alternative is to start with far fewer resources and build up slowly. A slow, plodding start has three main problems. First, an average course attracts average students. Second, an average course attracts an average contribution from average academics. Third, an average course secures few new resources. Compare this to a higher profile launch. The best students recognize the vision and energy (and investment) of the university. The best academics want to be part of the excitement. And a fresh, contemporary approach generates resources that no one knew existed. We aimed to be the best, and attracting the best students and the best contributors has set up a momentum that will now sustain itself.

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A NEW KIND OF STRUCTURE TO DELIVER THE GOODS Table 7.1: Structure of the Master's course in Environment and Development'

The melting pot Sue weeks Tools and skill*

Specialization

Solutions to contemporary issues

Students select five

Students select one

Core course

Environmental economics

Biodiversity conservation

Quantitative and computing techniques

Water resources management

Communication skills

Themes in African environmental history

Environmental law

Quantitative environmental management

Project planning and evaluation

Sustainable tourism

Integrated environment management

Socio-economic development and the environment Resource economics Spatial decision support systems and GIS for environment planning

Two days a week for 18 weeks

Two days a week for 18 weeks

One day a week for 18 weeks

Coursework examination One week Independent research project/work assignment Six to nine months 1. Only the five main elements are shown here. Assessment has three components: class marks for coursework (25 per cent), coursework examination (25 per cent) and dissertation (50 per cent). Students must pass on each component. The class marks are weighted so that the melting pot exercise has four credits; tools and skills has five; specialization, six and contemporary issues three. 77

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The structure of the programme is simple and gives the flexibility we need to make meaningful changes, not only from year-to-year but from week-to-week to serve student needs (Table 7.1). For full-time students, six months of intensive coursework is followed by a six month research project or work assignment. Up to nine months is allowed for the research if extensive data collection is required. Part-time (or rather half-time) students follow the same programme but take twice as long. Each of the five components of the programme has a distinct function, but each contributes to our aim of producing effective problem solvers who can identify new needs and new approaches as they arise. Figure 7.1: The Melting Pot

The Melting Pot They gazed and gasped at it in awe, wondering if it were a teapot, moneypot, honeypot or a newly developed pot. Whatever it was, the potter had done his work. With its satin lips that slithered into that long neck, this pot certainly welcomed the gazers. They decided to venture beyond its lips and discovered that it carried a massive belly without a horizon. And on its walls hung rainbows of menus that dwarfed the mosaic recipes they carried. They pondered if the pot would cook all their food and satisfy their hunger. 78

A Master's Programme That Matters to the New South Africa

Slowly, the pot thawed its food-pregnated belly and like a stirred wetland sieved their doubts as it gradually warmed into a melting pot. And the melt steamed into a potent boil of soup. Eventually, the gazers served themselves the soupy boil and all grasped the pot. John Obiri, Master's student. The Melting Pot metaphor (see Figure 7.1) for environmental and developmental issues, reflecting the transdisciplinary nature of the enterprise, introduces the programme. Students are thrown in at the deep end as they are presented with a real-life situation full of seemingly intractable environment and development conflicts and asked to recommend meaningful solutions. Not only do the students realize they need to make use of each other's experience and expertise but they very rapidly learn skills of effective group work, time management and networking. Group work is painful for South African students who have reached this stage by determined individualism, and nine days in the field with 30 fired-up students has its difficult moments for all of us. But the students take responsibility for the tasks they are set. Five weeks later, the students amaze themselves by achieving what none of them thought was possible - a highly professional team presentation to community and business leaders that led to their proposals being taken on board. Because they have done the impossible once, the students know they can do it again as they enter the next stages of the coursework. Tools and Skills courses introduce students to the power of important practical tools and skills that they require. There is no time for students to become experts in these areas, but at least they understand the language that the experts speak and the way that the experts think. Electives allow students to pursue particular interests in more detail. Some require a background in the discipline, but others don't. Originally we called these 'specializations' but this gives a false impression of the level of expertise to future employers. In Solutions to Contemporary Issues, students work in small groups to address controversial and high profile issues. The group work ensures a transdisciplinary approach, though students often choose to take on unfamiliar roles. Themes are introduced by local or national experts. The group then identifies an appropriate end product (a series of newspaper articles, a conference presentation, a recommendation report to government, etc.). How they reach this goal is a decision of the group, but it could involve interviewing, library research, teleconferencing or field visits. After the introduction, the expert is no more than a resource for the students to use as they see fit. Each project takes a day a week for six weeks. Students undertake an independent and original Research Project on a transdisciplinary theme of their own choice. It must reach the same academic level as a research master's dissertation, but is normally shorter because of the shorter time available. Students dream up their own projects - and in practice their projects are far more imaginative (and often more challenging) than ideas from we academics. Most projects have an internal and an external supervisor to provide complementary inputs. The project can take the form of a Work Assignment conducted within a commercial organization. A visiting speaker presents a research talk each week during the coursework. Courses in word processing, spreadsheets, scanning and other computer skills, and use of the Internet are offered early on. Effective group work, effective 79

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communication and research skills are threads that are introduced early on and developed throughout the coursework. Languages courses in Zulu and French for environment and development are optional. With so many different kinds of inputs, how is it possible to fit the different components together? We thought carefully about the most efficient length for chunks of teaching/learning time and decided to break the timetable into whole days which contributors fill in whatever ways they wish. This works well with the diversity of teaching and learning approaches that are used. Academics can fit their master's teaching around other commitments on these days and students are able to manage their time effectively. A Framework that Other Courses can Choose to Follow By spreading the word about the approach we take, others in the University have seen what we are doing and what works. Our simple course structure is a framework that can be used in other master's programmes. That benefits us, because it gives the opportunity to develop shared courses. We must take care that classes do not become too large or that the focus of any particular degree is not compromised, but for small numbers of students or for a few shared components it makes good sense. To get them on board, we need to invest time showing colleagues exactly how we structure the programme and why. BEING A PART-TIME STUDENT IS TOUGH Some students take the programme part-time over two years. This is a much tougher option than full-time study. An intensive programme taking 50 hours a week is fine for a dedicated full-time student, but 25 hours a week for a part-timer needs a lot of determination and a very sympathetic employer. We have to be completely honest with those enquiring about part-time study when we describe the work it entails. Too many people feel that part-time study is a soft option, with the odd essay to write every few weeks. Others ask about distance learning. Both approaches might be possible in some courses but not in ours. Here full-time and part-time students work side by side in all the courses they take, and our heavy emphases on group work, discussions, hands-on activities and real world products mean that students must spend a lot of time at the School if they are to learn. Short Courses: Outsiders Joining the Master's Programme For some of our courses, a few outsiders join our master's students as short course students. The short course students come from all kinds of employment backgrounds - conservation organizations, water authorities, agricultural bodies, local government. Some aren't sent by their employers but take time off work and come as interested individuals. They learn alongside the master's students in the same classes, are set the same tasks to the same deadlines, and are expected to meet the same standards. We can be a little more flexible in admission requirements because the full suite of skills aren't as necessary for a six day course as the whole master's programme, but we are still selective. We need to be sure that the course is at a suitable level and that outsiders won't hold back or dominate the class. Short course students receive a certificate of successful completion of the course. 80

A Master's Programme That Matters to the New South Africa

They can receive credit for the short course if they take the master's programme in the future. Short course students pay, and it is a useful source of income for little extra input. More important, however, are the other benefits: • • • • •

master's students benefit from working closely with outsiders who have a wide range of different experience; potential students see the master's programme in action and can decide whether to apply; course organizers see potential students in action and can better judge their suitability for the full master's programme; employees and employers benefit from relevant training close to work; employers improve links with the master's programme (and the University) from first-hand involvement - good for other kinds of collaboration and for job prospects for our graduates.

ADMITTING THE RIGHT STUDENTS Figure 7.2: Some of the class of 96. (Illustration by Simon Reavey).

Back row, left to right. Shomentree (BSc. in Chemistry and Biochemistry, Postgraduate Diploma in Human Resource Management), Matthew (former aid administrator with the Australian Aid Agency), Andrew (Director of a wilderness leadership school, no post-school education), Dave (recent honours graduate in Geography), Lindiwe (Swazi graduate in Languages and Human resource management). Front row. Jessica (Canadian with honours degree in Sociology), Nick (degree and then field research in Entomology), Thakadu (wildlife biologist with Botswana's Department of Wildlife and Nature Conservation, BSc. three years before), Stewart (head of horticulture at a technikon), Nadine (BA in History, then a teaching diploma). The admission stage is critical. Too many postgraduate courses look at past academic records and nothing else. In some universities, there's no space in the application process for students to show how they think or what matters to them, 81

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references are never requested and interviews are too much trouble. For our kind of master's programme to work, this isn't good enough. Our approach requires a diverse group with opinions, experiences and skills to share, and we strive to create this sort of group in our admissions process. Only a small proportion of applicants are offered places and, needless to say, academic record is only one of the criteria used to select students. A sketch of some of our 29 students of 1996 gives an idea of the diversity (see Figure 7.2). They came from all parts of South Africa and eight other countries, mostly in the region. Twenty-one brought previous work experience, often of three or four years and occasionally considerably longer. Seventeen registered in the Science Faculty, four in the Social Science Faculty and eight in the Humanities Faculty, reflecting their previous academic backgrounds spanning sociology, entomology, wildlife management, economics, agriculture, chemistry, education, human resource management and more besides. Twenty students had honours degrees, six ordinary degrees with postgraduate diplomas, two technikon diplomas, and one no university background but bags of practical experience. There was almost a 50/50 male/female balance. Key aspects of the admissions process are: • •

•

• •

a detailed but down-to-earth information pack for all enquirers giving honest answers to difficult questions; lengthy discussions with potential applicants before they decide to apply so that students know exactly what to expect of the programme - especially important for part-time students, students with families and so on; an application form that includes space for a personal profile (What makes you tick?'), a short task (for example, a piece for the South Africa Sunday Times on Why does poaching happen?'), and an invitation to include supporting materials like articles or reports that the applicant had written; consultation with referees; a 20 minute personal interview with three members of the course team or, if necessary, a telephone interview.

NINE GOLDEN RULES Every master's programme and every university is different, but there are some simple rules that are relevant everywhere. Here are those that mattered most to us. 1: Have a Vision for All to See and Share 'Demolishing the barriers between traditional disciplines once and for all* is how the University of Natal announced its new programme in Environment and Development. The vision was simple and from the very start was stated up-front to the University, outside collaborators and potential students. Plain English and a strong, new identity helped (see Figure 7.3). Collaborators saw the vision and jumped on board. No one was pushed.

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A Master's Programme That Matters to the New South Africa

Figure 7.3: Vision and visual impact. (Logo by Justin James Design, Pietermaritzburg).

'Bringing together the human and the biophysical systems to create a meaningful context for the exploration of current and anticipated problems and the search for solutions.'

2: Treat the Diversity of Students as an Asset How do you teach economics to a zoology major or sociology to hydrologist? Often we don't, at least not in a conventional way. Students working in transdisciplinary groups need to justify their viewpoints by drawing on understanding from their own academic training. Students teach each other. There is space for filling in gaps in understanding in a structured way, but to get every student to the same level in everything is impossible in a transdisciplinary course, so let's accept it. 3: Get Them Asking the Questions that Matter Forget about answers. The first aim is to get students to ask questions. The Melting Pot, filling the first weeks of the programme, gets students' eyes sparkling with challenge and anticipation, and gets them to realize that the perspectives of their colleagues matter too. 4: Set the Agenda Together Being transdisciplinary is hard work. New and challenging links must be created, justified and strengthened all the time. So let's tackle this head on. First thing every Monday morning comes 'Muffins and Mindmaps', a creative time reviewing the past week and contemplating the next. Together, students and staff build a picture that draws together the ideas we think matter and identify a way forward. 5: Ready for Work Students want a job afterwards. They must not only survive but also thrive in that cut'n'thrust we hear about. Business lunches, fax and phone budgets, hosting visitors, strict deadlines, state of the art computers, accountability and sessions that start on time all are part of the programme the students enter.

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6: Work with the Real World Outside organizations can provide lecturers, research projects and case studies. Their expertise complements the academics'. Their matter-of-fact approach appeals to students who dream of the real world, and it's good for them too. It also appeals to academics who dream of more time for research. More pragmatically, these organizations provide short course or part-time students (good income) and jobs for our graduates (good when advertizing for the next intake). Considerable time must be invested to develop these links. 7: Let Students Create Products People Want Group projects work best when they lead to products that matter a series of articles for the local paper, a piece for the South Africa Sunday Times glossy magazine, planning of a community radio phone-in, papers and posters at a national conference, a booklet for schools, a feasibility study for business. If the products matter to people outside, the pressure is on the students to get them absolutely perfect. And our graduates have real-world products they can hand over at job interviews to prove what they can do. 8: A s s e s s What Matters You have a problem to solve. You have five days. Anything goes. Solve it. This is the way the world works and it is also the format of our final coursework assessment. Students tease apart environment and development conflicts in a local situation. They use all manner of resources to complete the task: field work, networking with people, on-line literature searches, research in newspaper archives etc. We test creativity, understanding, clear thinking and ability to work to deadlines. Employers tell us these are the skills that they want, so that's what we test. Most South African students concentrate their learning on what is assessed, so we use this to our advantage and take care to assess the qualities which we think matter most. 9: Find a Way to Stop Students Working Too Hard Our biggest problem is the high motivation of our master's students. They are simply too motivated and work too hard. We do not have a simple solution. If we gave them half the work, students would still work beyond midnight striving for the best possible product. One partial solution is to synchronize the deadlines of tasks very carefully so that there are periods when students have no work outstanding. By telling them in advance about these free blocks of time, students can make plans to get away or spend more time with their families. Another approach is to set tasks first thing in the morning that must be completed and discussed or submitted by the end of the afternoon. By setting an open exam at the end of the coursework and strongly pushing the fact that swotting is pointless, a free week before the exam really becomes an opportunity for students to go walking in the hills.

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Chapter 8 Mastering the Niche:

The Experience of Taught Master's Courses in British

Geography Departments John and Margaret Gold and George Revill

This chapter is a set of succinct case studies of master's degree programmes in geography. The writers show that in Britain the number of programmes has multiplied, as it has done elsewhere, and that their foci have changed. The argument is that geography departments are entering new areas, mastering new niches for postgraduate study, thereby proliferating diversity. As with Garner and Wallace, they identify problems with students who, despite possession of a first degree, lack some of the skills necessary for master's level work. Two substantially new themes are introduced. The first is that institutions do not always give master's programmes the support that they need, a theme also present in the North American work of Conrad and colleagues (1993). Secondly, and partly as a consequence of that, academic staff may find themselves working on master's courses on a goodwill basis, doing the work because they value and enjoy it, not because it is recognized, let alone rewarded by their institution. Their concluding thought is that the development of flexible niche programmes is at the expense of more traditional but no less important views of geography. Were the liberal humanist approach, for example, to fade, 'it would indeed be serious for the long-term future of the subject'. The impact of market forces on the provision of master's degrees is revisited in Chapter 14. During the last decade there has been a widespread, yet almost unnoticed expansion in taught master's courses in departments of geography in British universities and colleges of higher education. The figures speak for themselves. In 1986, such courses were available at only 29 of the 89 departments that offered substantial undergraduate teaching in geography. By 1995, this had more than doubled to 62 departments. In 1986, 44 taught master's courses were available; by 1995, the comparable figure was 118. Behind these global figures lie three significant trends. One involves the institutional background. Typical provision in 1986 was found primarily in the olderestablished universities, with just six of the 45 polytechnic and college geography departments venturing into master's teaching. By the mid-1990s, 28 of the geography departments at the 'new universities' (former polytechnics) and colleges now included taught master's courses, with some offering as many as three separate courses in their portfolio. 85

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Table 8.1: Mode of study of taught master's courses available in British geography departments, 1986 and 1995. 1986

1995

Full-time only

22

47

Part-time only

12

14

Both

10

57

Total

44

118

Compiled from GeoBooks (1986), Hercod and Lenon (1994) and CRAC (1996). It should be noted throughout that these figures exclude Postgraduate Certificate of Education courses. Another underlying trend concerns the mode of study. In 1986, there was sharp differentiation between full- and part-time courses. As Table 8.1 shows, half were purely full-time courses, with another quarter designated as part-time courses. Only ten out of 44 courses were available by both modes. By 1995, two striking changes had occurred: the relative decline of the traditional, evening-based, parttime course; and greater flexibility with almost 50 per cent of courses now available for both full- and part-time study. Table 8.2: Subject material of taught master's courses available in British geography departments, 1986 and 1995. Subject material

1986

1995

'Generic*

6

8

Area studies

8

7

Resources and development

6

8

Science-based physical geography

6

13

Environmental assessment and management

3

31

Urban studies

3

5

Geographical information systems

2

12

Conservation and landscape

2

4

Research methodology

1

5

Photogrammetry/remote sensing

1

7

Cultural geography

0

4

Other

6

14

Total

44

118

Compiled from GeoBooks (1986), Hercod and Lenon (1994) and CRAC (1996). 86

Mastering the Niche: The Experience of Taught Master's Courses in British Geography Departments

The third trend arises from the type of courses on offer (see Table 8.2). Undergraduate geography degree courses are predominantly broad-based and non-vocational, offering students the chance to gain a synoptic overview of physical and human processes as well as the opportunity to specialize in specific areas of their choice. In 1986, these characteristics also applied to master's teaching. While there were some science-based physical geography courses that addressed a narrowly-focused technical subject matter with vocational significance, most taught master's courses offered wider coverage. Area studies, resources and development studies, and 'generic' geography courses commonly spanned both human and physical geography and involved specialists from across the discipline. The explosion of new courses over the next nine years altered this pattern. As Table 8.2 shows, 'environmental' courses, focusing on such issues as environmental impact analysis and environmental management, grew rapidly. Other notable areas of expansion were courses with a heavy laboratory or computing requirement for example, science-based physical geography courses, ones in geographical information systems and remote sensing, courses in research methods, and those centring on cultural geography. By contrast, former staples such as area studies or resources and development studies were in relative decline, with provision in absolute terms remaining at similar levels to 1986. Interestingly, too, there has been no increase in 'generic' courses, with one department advising that it was 'not currently recruiting* to its MSc. (Geography) degree (Hercod and Lenon, 1994). Consideration of these published statistics offers an initial insight into the quiet revolution. It shows the extensive quantitative and qualitative changes that have occurred in British geography departments in less than a decade, but cannot identify the underlying reasons for such changes. Little is publicly known, among other things, about the reasons for creating these courses, the objectives and values that they embrace or the extent to which change reflects the pressures imposed by the changing external environment of higher education. With this in mind, this paper turns to case-studies to supply further information. We report on the experience of five taught master's courses recently founded or proposed by geography departments in British higher education institutions. This was done by conducting tape-recorded depth interviews with staff responsible for developing these courses. In each case, the interview schedule covered general course history, the student profile, course content and organization, assessment, administration, and course outcomes. Selective extracts from this wealth of material are presented in the next section. The ensuing discussion section then draws attention to common issues that emerge from this weight of experience. These include the coincidence of interests that have prompted growth, the impact of that growth on staff time, problems arising from some students' lack of study skills, and repercussions for the character of geographical teaching. CASE-STUDIES

A brief anatomy of the five case-studies is shown in Table 8.3. They were chosen to reflect the diversity of experiences involved in establishing and running taught master's courses in geography. Study 1 is a social science-based MA with an environmental emphasis introduced by the geography department of a new university. Part of a wider School of Social Sciences, the geographers were required from the outset to fit their proposals into a cross-School framework. Study 2 involves an 87

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MSc. in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) run by a traditional, 'redbrick' university geography department. Offering vocationally-relevant skills that are in considerable demand, this course recruits students from an international clientele. Table 8.3: Details of case-studies Course title

1 MA in Environmentalism and Society

2

3

4

5

MSc. in Geographical Information System

MA in European Studies

MA/MSc. in Environmental Management

MA in Landscape, Culture and Society

Fees

Start date

Mode

1995

PT

795

FT

2,500

FC

(5,500)

PT

850

FT

2,500

FC

8,400

PT

800

FT

1,600

PT

825

FT

2,350

FC1

(6,144)

FC2

(8,118)

1992

1991

1995

1997

Intake

(£)

PT

1,000 (estimate)

15

20

20-25

25

not known

Guide to Abbreviations: PT = Part-time. FT = Full-time. FC = Full cost fee Note: In Study 4, the different levels of fees for full-cost students depend on whether a student is doing a social science-based MA (FC1) or a science-based MSc. (FC2). 88

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The next two case-studies look at multidisciplinary taught master's in which geographers make the leading contribution, namely, an MA in European Studies at a new university (Study 3) and an MA/MSc. in Environmental Management at an older-established university (Study 4). Finally, Study 5 is a proposed MA in Landscape, Culture and Society that would be run in partnership by the geography departments of two colleges of higher education and the university that accredits them. Study 1

This MA grew from discussions begun in 1992. An incoming Head of Department wanted to create a School-wide programme of related master's courses that shared a core unit in research methods. The geographers were the first group to respond to this initiative, proposing an MA in Environmentalism and Society. Although happy to endorse the idea that the proposal would be valuable for staff development, they also admit having other aims. In the first place, they reasoned that a successful course could yield additional resources from fee revenue, especially if full-cost students from overseas could be attracted. Secondly, they felt that a taught MA could draw in students who might later take research degrees and, in turn, assist long-term efforts to improve the geography team's research profile. The starting point for the proposal was the belief that master's courses should be custom-designed and separate from the undergraduate courses. Students could complete the MA by one year's full-time or two years' part-time study, but all would take three elements: the core, three units on environmentalism, and a dissertation. No optional units were offered. This was partly through limitations of staff time but also because it was preferred not to subdivide what would already be a small group (the maximum intake was 15 students). Assessment was entirely by completion of coursework with no written examinations. Successful completion leads to allocation of master's (M) level Credit Accumulation and Transfer (CATs) points, with a student requiring 180 M-level points for a master's degree. A student successfully attaining 120 M-level credits (that is to say doing everything except the 60-point dissertation) would gain a Diploma. Use of CATs points also made it more straightforward for students to transfer elsewhere before completing the credits needed for the degree. Establishing the course was an uphill struggle. Formal proposals first appeared in January 1993 but teaching only started in October 1995. Three problems contributed to the delay. The first involved the core. While based on guidelines from the Economic and Social Research Council, it was difficult to rationalize the widely-divergent needs of the various student groups, who would include students on other master's courses in the School, research students and MA students. While the notion of a common core remains understandable in light of resource constraints, much time was expended hammering out compromises that eventually satisfied no-one. The second problem arose from the university retaining the exhaustive, and exhausting, practices favoured by former Council for National Academic Awards, which previously validated its research degrees. This involved a two-part process. Stage 1 required completion of an initial proposal, including analysis of similar courses provided within a fifty-mile radius. This document then navigated five separate internal committees. Stage 2 required the deliberations of two further committees, followed by full day's validation event. With some committees 89

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meeting infrequently and the Validations Unit scarcely able to cope with the volume of work imposed by this and other proposals, a full fifteen months elapsed before final approval even though the proposal needed little substantive alteration. The third problem involved poor advertising. Looking back, the staff recognize that they made mistakes. Despite starting with the part-time mode, they wasted money on expensive advertisements in national newspapers while neglecting cheaper alternatives that offered a better coverage of the likely target audience. Both advertising in local newspapers and distributing information posters to libraries in the locality proved more effective in yielding applicants. Staff also failed to ensure that their own undergraduates were aware of the course's existence. The resulting recruitment was disappointing. The first intake was only eight part-time students, a figure that fell to six by the end of the year. This allowed the MA to break even on advertising and associated costs, but was not the bonanza forecast in less sanguine moments. Tensions also emerged with other, less committed members of staff who complained that teaching student groups of this size was a poor use of their time and likely to deflect them from research. Less resistance was encountered once individuals had actually taught on the course. Most relished teaching students who generally had wider experience than that found among the undergraduates. Although lacking professional accreditation, the course attracted mature students who felt it would enhance their careers. They included two teachers, the editor of an environmental journal, a petroleum engineer and an employee of the Department of Environment. In several cases, employers were meeting the course fees. While there is sober realization among the course team that it may still take time to recruit the desired numbers of students, existing applications bring optimism that this quality of recruitment is likely to persist. Study 2

The growing importance of GIS as an area of study with direct industrial application has generated ten new master's courses in the last nine years (see Table 8.2). This is partly because emphasis on GIS fits the mission statements of those geography departments that emphasize information technology, but is rather more because taught master's in GIS are reliable money-spinners. While they make demands on computing facilities and may require specialist staff, any costs arising from running taught master's in GIS are easily defrayed by the strong demand for such courses. GIS skills are scarce. Existing courses have annual intakes of up to 45 students, many coming from overseas and paying full-cost fees of more than £8,000 per annum. Not infrequently, those costs are borne by the student's home government. The one-year full-time MSc. course that comprises Study 2 fits this description admirably. Founded in 1992 by an individual with a considerable reputation in GIS, it is run by a core of four staff who are collectively responsible for administering, teaching and assessing the course. The course is one of a slate of master's offered by the department and is taught by a traditional mix of lectures, seminars and workshops. It includes a compulsory core and extensive project work, with the curriculum allowing students to encounter varying aspects of current practice 90

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through the options that they select. CATs points are used as a standard to calibrate the relative worth of course elements. The MSc. unquestionably makes an important contribution to departmental revenue. Demand, particularly from overseas, is such that the course tutors are contemplating raising the annual intake from 20-30 students. The surplus produced not only helps to maintain GIS teaching but also pays for general improvements in computing and other facilities. There is also pride that the MSc. course helps to retain the University's prominence in GIS teaching and research. Against these advantages, there are problems. The heavy recruitment of overseas students creates difficulties for staff and students alike. It is impossible to interview all students and, despite consulting charts of equivalencies, the standard of students joining the course varies considerably. Much of the first term is taken up with creating a common basis, which sometimes frustrates the more able. In addition, there is no special language tuition, despite some students clearly lacking full competence in English. Supervision can place considerable strain on the staff. All are aware that students may have made considerable sacrifices to take the course and that failure may have serious consequences. Matters are not helped by students having expectations of close contact with the eminent founder of the course. His extensive conference and consultation activities mean that he is frequently away from the University and has little input outside of the formal lectures. The quasi-independence of the MSc. also generates a certain ambivalence within the department. Some argue that the course is essentially for 'teenies', makes little contact with the geographical curriculum and draws in students who do not integrate with the rest of the student body. In addition, they are concerned at the extent that GIS students colonize the computing rooms. There is no separate provision of rooms for the GIS students, who must necessarily spend long hours using the computers. In particular, at times when project work is being prepared, they can monopolize machines and rooms in a way that other students can find discouraging. Study 3

The third case-study involves a comparative rarity: a new area studies course at a time when other institutions have withdrawn from this type of provision. This MA in European Studies, however, is unlike older courses in regional geography. Whereas they offered a broad synthesis, this MA is targeted at particular themes and issues. It does not lead to a vocational qualification as such, but the course is considered to have vocational relevance. It was first suggested in 1989 by the Head of School, who argued that businesses needed staff with practical knowledge of such issues as the rapidly changing situation in Eastern Europe and movement towards greater integration in Western Europe. Yet the staff emphasize that corporate policy did little to shape the MA. Until recently the university gave low priority to taught master's and exhibited studied indifference towards them. Staff were happy to consent to the commercial overtones of the MA because it implied a ready supply of students. Earning money, however, was secondary to the goals of enhancing the School's research culture and sharpening teaching through exposure to a more demanding audience. Perhaps in keeping with that sentiment, this MA is unusual in that all students are charged standard part-time or full-time fees irrespective of country of 91

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origin. There are no full-cost fees for students coming from outside the European Union. An 80 per cent reduction was also available for unemployed or low waged students, although this discount is now much reduced. Teaching began in October 1991. At the outset, the MA was established as a part-time course involving one evening's attendance a week for two years, plus one Saturday School per semester. With no separate research methods course that might require a second evening's study, it was easily the lightest weekly commitment of any of the master's programmes we studied. The corollary, however, was it was also the longest. With subsequent dissertation studies, the students often required three years or more to complete the degree. Student requests for an accelerated route, therefore, encouraged the introduction of a fast-track (full-time) option by which students complete coursework in one year by attending for two evenings per week. This option has proven popular, although the tutors recognize that it had serious implications for the progression built into the degree scheme (where four, semester-long, compulsory courses were intended to be taken in a fixed order). It also had consequences for assessment, because performance in second-year examinations and coursework was previously the guide as to whether a student was allowed to proceed to a dissertation. New regulations needed to be framed to accommodate the full-time option. After five years' experience, there remain areas of concern. The most notable is students' lack of study skills. Self-help booklets and workshops for preparing dissertations have helped, but problems remain. Another area of concern is the university's equivocal support for the course. Staff are aware that the course could be axed at any time if an intake drops below a critical level (something that has happened elsewhere in the university). They note, too, that the staff contract treats undergraduate and postgraduate teaching hours as identical. No contractual allowance is made for this type of MA requiring continual updating of teaching material. Equally no allowance is made for the heavy pastoral demand from a group of students who have decidedly more problems than their undergraduate counterparts. Moreover, the staff draw attention to the poor conditions offered to students. While fees for the course are now perceived to be high, the MA is taught in a rented office building with no study space, few open-access computers and no catering facilities other than basic vending machines. Study 4

This course is also an expression of the 'environmental turn' in geography, but takes a very different form than Study 1. Devised within a modular structure, it builds on institution-wide multidisciplinary interests in environmental studies. Led by a core group of geographers and a member of the department of biology, it 'buys in* support from specialists in agricultural science, the social sciences, economics and law. There are corresponding interdepartmental flows of funding. The first intake in 1995 was 25 students, but the volume of inquiries was sufficiently encouraging to allow a planned increase to 35-40 in 1996-7. The course offers foci on either physical or human processes leading, respectively, to MSc. or MA qualifications (with corresponding differences in fee levels). Its core element is also packaged so that it can be taken as a short course as well as part of the master's. The course itself was developed out of the interests of staff engaged in environmental consultancy, who believed that a niche existed for a course that emphasized the skills necessary for environmental management. The 92

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initial marketing proposal suggested two potential groups of applicants. One would comprise people who wanted to build on prior knowledge and consolidate existing skills; the other would consist of students who need to learn those skills from scratch. The needs of these two groups are recognized to be different, but the staff argued that two strategies would reduce problems. The first involved extensive choice within the degree. To some extent, this is produced by allowing overlap with advanced level undergraduate courses. This is not seen as problematic if the number of undergraduate credits is controlled. This, in turn, requires a complex set of regulations to ensure that sufficient CATs points are gained at M-level. The second strategy involves skills training. All students take a core that includes project management and data and modelling as well as research techniques. An 'advanced reading* element is also included in which students are required to present a bibliographic paper related to the subject of their dissertations. This has generated several problems of assessment, given that differing assessment criteria are applied by staff from different departments, but this is not seen as a long-term problem. As with previous case-studies, the amount of additional resources made available by the institution was relatively low. The core team of twelve is supplemented by two lecturers on short-term contracts, but the latter are aware that their continued employment depends on enrolments to the course. With regard to facilities, students essentially use existing accommodation. They have their own baseroom, but are expected to use undergraduate reading rooms for private study. As some taught master's students have already noted, this compares highly unfavourably with the treatment given to research students who have designated office space and facilities. Efforts are being made to gain extra space in new accommodation now under construction to prevent the dangers of master's students seeing themselves as poor relations. Study 5

Our final case-study examines a proposal for an MA in Landscape, Culture and Society that awaits validation before a scheduled start, preferably, in 1997. This part-time, two-year MA would have all students taking a research methods core (shared with at least one other MA course), a series of compulsory units looking at the cultural construction of the material world and a dissertation. Again, each element has an allocation of CATs points, with the dissertation worth 60 points out of the final total of 180. Assessment involves written and verbal presentations rather than formal examinations. The student clientele would contain a similar mix of the two distinct groups identified in Study 4. One would comprise recent geography graduates who want to take their interests in cultural geography further; the other would consist of students with no previous contact with cultural geography. Members of the course team recognize that these groups have different needs, but believe that differences will be quickly overcome as the students progress through two years of study. Indeed, they argue that the mixed background of students may help group learning in the long run. The feature that distinguishes this proposal from other master's discussed here is its suggested collaborative basis and the problems that this could bring. The proposal emerged from discussions between staff at a traditional university and 93

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colleges Y and Z that it accredits. The initiative came from staff at college Y, who first talked about running a taught MA in 1994. The aims were staff development through involving staff in teaching at a higher level and enhancing the research culture of a department that then lacked either postgraduate teaching or research students. The proposal was well received by staff, but foundered on competing commitments, the likely workload, and the feeling that additional skills were needed. After a hiatus, the staff searched for partners. The result was a potential tripartite arrangement, involving college Y as the leading institution, a social geographer at the university and several staff at College Z. Institutional self-interest soon became apparent. After initial indifference, management at College Y and the university suddenly started to take a keen interest. The relevant Dean at College Y, which would provide the teaching accommodation and would receive the lion's share of the fees, recognized a possible source of revenue. Meanwhile the Dean at the university became hostile to his staff-member taking a prominent role as he wanted the university to develop its own taught master's course in a related field. Ownership of the MA and distribution of its fee revenues is becoming crucial to management, much to the frustration of the staff, for whom this proposal is interest-led. These problems of self-interest will be compounded by the complexity of requiring separate validations at two or perhaps three institutions, which will add further delays to the process. At the time of writing, a first intake in 1997 looks increasingly doubtful. DISCUSSION Viewed together these case-studies give insight into a powerful movement that, independently of central directives, is generating taught master's courses in geography departments throughout Great Britain. The movement itself is essentially market-driven, exploiting niches in the market for applied knowledge and skills. In the interests of appealing to the widest possible audience, the word 'geography' - widely considered a disadvantage in promoting courses - is conspicuously absent from course titles. Instead, geography has been used as a vehicle for identifying and packaging narrowly-focused courses on 'applied' topics that can be 'sold' to particular groups of potential clients. The topics that constitute the foci of these courses vary widely, but they do share structural characteristics. As recently-devised courses, for example, they were consciously established to allow flexibility. This occurs through both widespread implementation of modularity (see also Hayden and Thompson, 1996) and common application of CATs formulae. Even if there are few signs that this degree of flexibility is yet being used, the structures for interchange and collaboration do at least exist. From the evidence, the process of devising and teaching master's courses is clearly occupying considerable amounts of staff time, even if there is little sign that commensurate resources are being expended. Course leaders in three of the case studies indicated that there was no additional direct expenditure apart from the costs of advertising, stationery, and lighting rooms where the lights might have been turned off in the evenings. The hidden costs of administration, teaching and assessment were being borne, cheerfully or otherwise, by existing staff. In the other two cases some extra staff were employed, but only on temporary contracts

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with continuity dependent on course-generated revenues. Expansion is primarily an exercise in wringing more out of existing resources. The fact that this situation has been readily accepted by all concerned reflects a coincidence of interests. Despite representing additional work that is seldom fully remunerated, staff can develop courses in line with their research interests. Heads of Department, especially in the new universities, see taught master's courses as broadening the teaching base and, in nebulous ways, of strengthening the research culture of their departments. Managers gain potentially lucrative new courses with low 'start-up' costs at a time when they are under pressure to raise revenue to counter the effects of cuts in state support. The full implications of expansion were not necessarily foreseen. Few staff, for instance, recognized that the presence of full-time master's students would lengthen the academic year by eroding the traditional summer break. The long vacation is an important time for master's students as they undertake research and write dissertations. They need supervisors to be on hand for consultation. Full-time students will need references written. Course administrators find that the months of July and August are the key times for processing applications and conducting interviews for the next year's intake. As one course tutor wearily noted: 'I used to have a summer'. Most would also admit that they completely underestimated the need for study skills training. While provision for training in research methods was ubiquitous, the same was not the case for study skills. As one tutor observed: 1 think that we probably spent more time worrying about APEL (Accreditation of Prior Experiential Learning) during the validation process than we ever did about lack of previous skills and knowledge.' Leaving aside linguistic competence, staff had not realized that even graduates may lack confidence in essay writing, or have very little grasp of scientific method, or of the philosophy of the social sciences. Students might also be accustomed to academic regimes where rules over plagiarism, or the notion of what constitutes plagiarism, are quite different. Moreover, remedial action is difficult to provide. Time is short and there are competing demands. Furthermore, students rarely enjoy such sessions and sometimes resent course credit being allocated for acquiring basic bibliographic or writing skills. There is no doubt that a continuing problem exists here. Finally, little attention has been paid to the impact of taught master's courses on the character of geographical teaching. Little of the eclecticism and synoptic overview of undergraduate teaching is now available at master's level. The old style 'generic' master's have faded, perhaps irrevocably, from the scene. The new niche-driven courses may be taught by geographers but they exploit rather than delight in the traditional breadth of academic geography. Yet geography has always been as influenced by liberal humanist as by instrumentalist goals (Gold, 1994). Its pedagogic contribution lies as much in promoting world knowledge and encouraging critical reflection on society-environment relations as in teaching applied knowledge and technical skills that meet the needs of the current social and political order. It would indeed be serious for the long-term future of the subject if the advent of taught master's courses unwittingly served to erode further these other, valued aspects of geography's heritage.

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Chapter 9 Master of Business Administration: A North American View Bob Hurt

In Chapter 1 it was said that most master's degrees are professional programmes, intended to make a difference to professional practice. They are also academic programmes, designed to engage learners with theories, generalizations and research evidence. The Master of Business Administration degree is a good example of these programmes. This double focus is a source of problems for course designers and teachers. In part, this is because the interplay of 'theory' and practice is conceptually problematic, as the works of Donald Schon (1983, 1987) and Michael Eraut (1994) show. The problem is also a practical one, a problem of devising course arrangements that respect the special, contexted demands of practice, while also giving space to the multiple perspectives that may be derived from formal, general academic knowledge. These problems, already mentioned in earlier chapters, are directly addressed in this chapter and the next. Bob Hurt's solution is what he calls a '3+1'model, whereby each four unit course is divided into a three unit lecture/discussion component and a one unit application or research component. An outline of this system is complemented by a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages, as identified by students and academic staff. His conclusion is that this model means that students 'experience pedagogies that capitalize upon their experience and expertise, rather than marginalising them'. Master of Business Administration (MBA) programmes are constantly looking for ways to deliver a curriculum that is pragmatic and relevant to learners who have a wide range of backgrounds and interests. California State Polytechnic University's graduate programme has adopted a model that strives to cover the principles and meet the needs of all students. This model for graduate management education incorporates a substantial directed study component, which allows students to apply knowledge through research, projects, simulations, and other active learning techniques. The paper begins by discussing the nature of management education at our institution and its relationship to the model. Then, we will give several specific examples of how our directed study model has been operationalized. Third, we will examine the logistics of the implementation. The paper's fourth section will focus on the advantages and disadvantages of the model from the perspectives of students and of academic staff (faculty). And, in conclusion, the paper outlines various issues to consider in implementing similar programmes at other institutions. 96

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BACKGROUND California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) is one of the member institutions of the California State University (CSU). Comprising twentytwo separate campuses, the CSlPs primary mission is education. The Cal Poly Pomona campus has approximately 17,000 students in its undergraduate and graduate programmes. The Master of Business Administration programme, which is the focus of this paper, currently has approximately 600 students, most of whom are part-time students while holding down full-time jobs. Cal Poly Pomona places primary emphasis on practical, relevant, hands-on education in all its programmes. This emphasis carries over strongly to the College of Business Administration, where the MBA is housed. Students receive a solid grounding in the theories and principles of management but classroom instruction and assignments constantly and consistently challenge them to apply what they have learned to real-world situations. Most of our MBA students are working professionals, so they have easily available organizational contexts for applying what they learn in coursework. The Cal Poly Pomona MBA is divided into three principal parts. Prerequisite courses provide students with a non-business undergraduate degree or weak academic backgrounds in business the opportunity to sharpen their basic skills before proceeding to more advanced courses. Some students have these courses waived because of prior management training and experience. Core courses are required of every student in the programme. Covering each of the functional areas of business, the core courses are the lieart' of the MBA. It is in the core courses that we developed and implemented the research-based management education model explained in this paper. Finally, each student has a few elective courses, some of which also employ the directed study, research-based model. Cal Poly Pomona's heavy emphasis on relevant, hands-on management education led to the development and implementation of the research-based model in all the core courses and many elective courses. Each core course in the programme is divided into two basic parts: a three-unit lecture/discussion component and a oneunit directed study component focusing on the application of the concepts and skills covered in the lecture/discussion component. The two parts must be taken concurrently (the 3+1 model). While the three-unit component is fairly traditional, the directed study, emphasizing research and application, is a unique element of Cal Poly Pomona's MBA programme. It allows students to take the concepts, techniques, and theories they master in the lecture/discussion and apply them to a real-world, practical situation. The output of this directed study may take many forms, but, in general, students are usually able to tailor the application element to meet a clear, specific need in their firms. Thus, they add value to their own educational experience as well as to their firm. EXAMPLES This section will outline five specific examples of how the directed study component has been operationalized in various areas of the curriculum.

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Marketing Seminar The objective of the required core course in marketing is to apply the learner's knowledge of the principles of marketing, as well as their skills in quantitative and financial analysis, to real-life marketing situations. The case study method is used and the learner acts as the marketing manager who must make the decisions. The learner identifies with the main character in each case and decides what action should be taken and why. The audience is top management. The directed study for the marketing seminar requires the development of a marketing plan. The marketing plan has each learner apply his or her knowledge and skill in case analysis and problem-solving to the writing of the marketing plan. The plan is a written document that objectifies the learner's thoughts and ideas about where a company stands now and where the company should be heading. It also is a sales tool with which one convinces top management to fund the plan. Students develop marketing plans for actual companies from around our university. At the end of the quarter the marketing plans are presented to the management of the actual company. And, in many cases, the student-developed marketing plans are implemented and utilized in running the firm. Managerial Accounting for Decision Making This is the third course in a three-course sequence which emphasizes the uses of accounting information in decision making. Set in the broader context of economic decision making, students must have a solid grounding in accounting to complete the course successfully: that grounding is provided by two prerequisite courses in accounting. Upon completing the course, the student should be able to handle management accounting information intelligently, addressing practical problems from a multidisciplinary perspective. The directed study component involves researching a specific applied problem in the student's workplace related to accounting. 'Related to accounting' is conceived very broadly in this context, and students have researched issues such as: the design and implementation of activity-based costing systems, the behavioural issues surrounding various performance evaluation systems, the implications of Total Quality Management and Just In Time principles for their organizations, and methods and procedures for developing financial self-sufficiency in nonprofits. Management Policies and Strategies Practicum The capstone course of our MBA programme focuses on the general area of strategic management. Attention is given to how strategic management affects the functional areas of business such as accounting, finance, information systems, marketing, personnel, and production/operations management. As the capstone, this course emphasizes the decision making activities that are typical at the upper levels of management in that such decisions determine the direction of the entire organization. The primary objective of this course is to improve the learners' decision making skills in the strategic management and policy areas. The seminar portion of this course accomplishes this through reading assignments in seminal 98

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and contemporary articles from leading journals, case analysis, and classroom discussion. The directed study portion of Management Policies and Strategies Practician utilizes a computer simulation. The simulation allows a form of'hands-on' experience in sharing responsibilities in operating a firm and co-ordinating the functions of manufacturing, finance, marketing, and personnel. Because the simulation has student teams compete against one another in an interactive environment, the learners become aware of the impact of strategic decisions over a broad spectrum of business activities including the interaction of strategic decisions with that of competing firms in terms of the response of the market for their products and the impact of strategic decisions on the routine operations of a firm. Over and over, students report that at last they can see the necessity of having a grasp of all the functional areas of business and of their interactions. Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management This high level finance elective course in our MBA programme assumes mastery of financial management, microeconomics and statistics. The course presents the institutional aspects of securities markets. Different types of securities and different types of markets are studied, as well as the difference between fundamental and technical analyses. Students learn how to determine the value of a financial asset such as a bond, a share of common stock, and a convertible bond and option. Efficient market hypotheses, random walk theory, and portfolio management techniques, such as security selection, asset allocation, portfolio revisions, and performance evaluation are investigated. The directed study portion of this finance elective has the students investigate current issues and recent developments in investment analysis and portfolio management. Each learner actually forms, evaluates, and analyses a portfolio of securities. By using Boyet or Invest software, each learner acts as the fund manager for $500,000 for the length of the course. The learner determines the fund's policies, objectives, and constraints. Professional Presentations Using Technology Professional Presentations Using Technology is the business communications course for our MBA programme. The lecture portion teaches group design, written presentations, and oral presentations. Presentations are necessary for effective communication in business and education. Technology can assist in creating dynamic, colourful, and exciting presentations. This course demonstrates how proven, effective techniques can blend with new the technology of computer-generated graphics to create powerful written and oral presentations. The directed study portion of this course has the students research a topic in depth, write a paper about the topic, and present the information to the class using the latest technology including multimedia. Often, this work is closely tied to current issues and problems in their workplace.

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LOGISTICS

In this section of the paper, I describe the procedures used to structure the courses and to compensate faculty for their participation in them. Course Structure A syllabus is required both for the lecture/discussion part of the course and for the directed study or application portion. In addition, separate grades are required for both parts of the course. The actual lecture time in the course moves from four hours to three hours which is more conducive to learning for people who work a full day and then attend school at night. The faculty member works individually with each student on the one unit application part of the course. Faculty Compensation The 3+1 design provides the equivalent of two, four-unit courses in a faculty member's teaching load. Therefore, the teaching load for most faculty teaching graduate core classes is one graduate core class and one undergraduate class instead of the normal three-class load. However, it has always been the expectation that the people teaching the 3+1 classes must spend more time in preparation for the class and supervising the one unit project. Faculty Selection In our College of Business Administration, we do not have a separate 'graduate faculty*. Rather, faculties are pulled from the undergraduate programme to teach graduate management courses. All faculties who teach in the graduate programme are more productive and are considered among our top performers both in research and in teaching. Then, from that group, the Tbest of the best' teach the 3+1 courses. In selecting those faculties, we consider several factors including research productivity; overall teaching style; rapport with students; and the strength of their non-academic business relationships and experience. While a few of these faculties see themselves as developing academics or developing practitioners, most of them see themselves as both. They are academically and professionally qualified to teach in the programme, and maintain both rigor and relevance. They should achieve substantial progress on their professional development plan each quarter, that progress could include: developing new courses, conducting research, participating in shared governance, and maintaining their intellectual capital in various other ways.

A D V A N T A G E S A N D DISADVANTAGES In this section, I will examine the advantages and disadvantages of the 3+1 arrangement both from a student perspective and a faculty perspective.

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Student Perspectives Research with students in our MBA programme who have studied under both the traditional and the '3+1* model revealed the following disadvantages from their perspective: 1. When we developed the applied study concept, we decided to use the 3+1 weighting on grounds of cost (this is discussed in more detail later). However, the directed study component takes more than one quarter of the total effort for the course. Further, differential weighting of the directed study component produces differential effort. Although the directed study is one quarter of the total units, many instructors weight the directed study project more heavily in the course grade. For example, in the management accounting course discussed above, the directed study comprises half of the total course grade. 2. The directed study component is more complicated than a traditional course. Students are called upon to exercise more sophisticated cognitive skills in directed study than they would be in a traditional lecture format. 3. Concurrent enrolment requires doing Svell' in both classes. Since the lecture and the application elements must be taken concurrently, students who pass the lecture/discussion portion but fail the directed study portion, must find a creative way to resolve their academic dilemma. 4. The short time frame of the courses (ten weeks) makes topic selection difficult: students must choose a topic without much subject matter knowledge. Particularly if a student is enrolling in a course with unfamiliar subject matter, choosing a relevant topic in a timely manner can become a burden. 5. The directed study arrangement limits the number of students who can enrol. Because of the additional work involved, the faculty member frequently wants to keep the course size small relative to traditional courses. 6. The directed study component is not always well integrated with the rest of the course. Students often do not perceive a clear, direct connection between the lecture/discussion portion of the course (which may involve cases, experiential learning, simulations, discussion, group projects, or other pedagogies) and the directed study. 7. The directed study component requires self-discipline and good time management from the students. They have to be 'self-starters' and innovators in developing and executing their directed study. On balance, however, students view the directed study format in a positive light, as demonstrated by the advantages cited below: 1. The directed study provides greater focus and organization throughout the programme. Students can investigate a specific problem or issue from various functional perspectives throughout their MBA programme. In addition, it makes the course more relevant, providing a tangible 'return on investment' from the programme. 2. The directed study provides opportunity for application and reinforcement of course topics. The component allows each student to 'customize' the class to meet his or her needs. The project removes class topics from the theoretical realm and allows students to wrestle with the issues in an applied context. Thus, students are prepared better for the 'real world' of business and management. 101

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3. The project enhances communication and analytical thinking skills. Students must hone their people skills (since the project frequently requires interaction with other students or colleagues from work) and develop their persuasive skills (since they must justify the decisions they make in completing the project). 4. The course can cover more material, since each student brings to the table his/her directed study idea. Further, when the projects are shared, students learn from each other. 5. The directed study provides flexibility in scheduling for working students. Since approximately 90 per cent of our MBA students have full-time jobs outside the programme, flexibility is a major issue. 6. The directed study helps prepare students for their terminal project/thesis. Although many MBA programmes do not require a capstone research project, we have found that this feature adds value to our graduates in the workplace. The project/thesis can be either basic (theoretical) or applied, although most of them are applied in our case. Their content can range from traditional empirical research to business plans to feasibility studies or case studies. Many students investigate specific problems in their workplace for their terminal research. For example, one recent student developed and implemented an activity-based costing system for her firm. 7. The directed study moves students from mere consumers of knowledge to producers. In a traditional lecture-based course, the instructor 'dispenses' knowledge to the waiting students. Under this model, students produce their own knowledge, which benefits all members of the class. 8. The directed study encourages students to develop their own opinions about workplace issues. Since the directed study seldom involves simple, easy-toaddress problems, students must weigh the costs and benefits of alternative decisions. They come to appreciate the complexity of business decision making. 9. The directed study makes students more responsible for their own learning. They learn *how to learn' and how to address a variety of problems on their own. In other words, the students become much more active in their own learning process.

F a c u l t y Perspectives While the advantages do outweigh the disadvantages, faculties do encounter some common problems in implementing this model. 1. Not all faculties in the College of Business have the background and experience required to teach courses under this model. Because of the differential treatment in workload, the faculties who do not teach in the '3+1' courses sometimes believe that their colleagues who do teach on these courses have a lighter workload. 2. Teaching the directed study courses is more time intensive for the faculty member than traditional courses. Considering both preparation for the course and the grading involved, faculties in these courses spend at least twice as much time as in traditional courses. 3. Given the applied nature of the directed studies, they work much more effectively with students who have work experience. Although 90 per cent of the students in the programme have solid base of work experience, faculties frequently are challenged by the remaining 10 per cent. 102

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On the other hand, faculty experience the following advantages from these courses: 1. As discussed previously, faculty teaching the '3+1' courses are compensated in their teaching loads. 2. Many faculty prefer the active learning activities involved in the directed study model over the more traditional passive methods used in lecture-based courses. 3. The 'real-world' nature of the directed study engages faculties more clearly and directly. Rather than repeating the same lectures, case discussions, and other activities each quarter, faculties receive a fresh perspective and new challenges in directing student learning. 4. Finally, faculties can collaborate with students in publishing the results of directed study. IMPLEMENTATION AT OTHER UNIVERSITIES For faculties in other universities interested in implementing a model like the one described in this paper, here are some questions to consider: 1. What are your objectives in implementing a directed study component in your Master's level courses? Examples might include: enabling students to customize their programmes, giving faculties additional outlets for publications, helping students learn to learn', and preparing them for a terminal research project/thesis. 2. How will you select faculties to teach the courses involving directed study? The faculties could be those who are the most productive in the research area already. Or, faculties could be selected based on the breadth and depth of their own academic background and training. Additionally, the courses could be 'spread around' among several faculties, or concentrated within a given group of faculties. 3. What type(s) of projects will be accepted for the directed study component? Several examples have been discussed in this chapter, including: traditional research papers, simulations, business plans, and professional presentations. In most programmes, a variety of different types of projects would be optimal; however, faculties must take care that the directed study component is rigorous and consistent across instructors and across courses. 4. How will faculties be compensated for teaching courses involving directed study? Courses which integrate a rigorous, meaningful directed study component require more time and effort from the faculty member. Therefore, such courses may legitimately be weighted more heavily in a faculty member's teaching load. However, differential weighting of the courses can become quite costly, so faculties involved need to be prepared to justify the cost to deans and other administrators. 5. How will the directed study component be integrated into the curriculum? The directed study may be a co-requisite of another course (the model described in this chapter). Alternatively, directed study courses could be completed after the 'regular' course.

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CONCLUSION This paper has examined a specific educational innovation in graduate management education: the use of a directed study component in MBA courses. Despite the challenges experienced (from both students' and faculty perspectives), the '3+1' model has proven successful in our hands-on, pragmatic learning environment. It offers a way of combining the attention to theoretical and research perspectives that is a hallmark of master's programmes with a concern for their useful application in the professional world. In so doing, students experience pedagogies that capitalize upon their experience and expertise, rather than marginalizing them.

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Chapter 10 Learning from the Experience

of the Essex MBA Ian W. King

This MBA programme has now closed, a reminder of the marginal status that coursework master's programmes may have. As Ian King points out, it relied heavily on the commitment of a group of enthusiasts who were anxious to provide a practice-focused programme that also drew upon academic knowledge to problematize the core concept of management: to unravel it. The Essex team, like others described in this collection, worked around a view of learning and of the needs of the learner at master's level, which led them to break from traditional and often-criticized models of MBA programmes. One of the most interesting points that King makes relates to the long-term impact of the programme. Visiting a former MBA students, he saw that 'he was no longer employing practices introduced and discussed on the MBA, nor behaviours he had endorsed in his critical reflections. Upon further examination of other members of his learning set, it became clear that this behaviour was not restricted to this learner'. This raises important questions for professional master's courses in general: what evidence is there that they have an enduring impact on practice? Is it the case that learners on professional master's programmes adopt a compliance culture while on the programme, in order to get certification, but revert to the well-grooved pattern of craft knowledge after graduation? If that is the case, can master's programmes be more cunningly devised so as to subvert the pattern of compliance followed by relapse? King suggests that this might be done by developing organization-based MBAs or by making the award of the degree contingent on a continuing display of what he calls 'double loop learning' in the workplace. This chapter will share the experience of the MBA programme at the University of Essex in England. This MBA was designed and delivered by a group of committed staff seeking to develop *best practice' and to meet the needs of the MBA's customers'. This chapter will describe the rationale behind its design, its delivery, some of the issues and problems associated with this delivery and, finally, share the fate of the programme and appraise the learning that arose from this experience.

BACKGROUND Bickerstaffe described the MBA as 'an academic qualification which quite unashamedly sets out to offer a preparation for senior management while it also claims to increase effectiveness' (1992, p. 4). 105

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This quotation illustrates the general expectation of the MBA. The reports of Handy (1987), Constable and McCormick (1987) and Mangham and Silver (1987), amongst others, exposed the comparatively low levels of certification possessed by UK managers in comparison with other westernized countries and indicated that this might be related to the evolution of diverse and very loosely coupled provision and accreditation surrounding management education generally. Paramount in their recommendations to organizations and aspiring organizational personnel was the need for certification in order to be competitive and attractive - primarily, they envisaged that this would be achieved through the MBA. Experience of the MBA in the United States was used as their model for the future. As a result, a large number of higher education institutions (mainly in what was the then Polytechnic sector) responded to this call and the period between the late 1980s and mid-1990s saw an enormous number and variety of MBAs being offered (see also Chapter 1). Consequently, during this period prospective applicants seeking to join an MBA programme had a considerable variety of choice ranging from general to specialized MBAs (example of which include MBAs in Finance; Marketing or Human Resource Management; or an MBA with a foreign partner so that participants might additionally learn a foreign language). Alternatively, if they worked for certain organizations (for example, British Airways; Rover), prospective students might have considered an organization-specific MBA. Additionally, there was the choice of full-time, part-time or block release MBAs (where the student would be expected to attend for short periods and then return to work). In terms of design, the majority of the new breed MBAs replicated the traditional features of organizational life that had evolved in the post-war period - a template dominated by Fordist mass production techniques and large bureaucratic and functionality specialized organizations (Handy, 1987). Accordingly, the core elements of British MBAs correspond to these main business functions, namely accountancy, finance, human resource management, marketing, organization behaviour, economics, quantitative methods, and information management. However, the argument that a total duplication took place does not do justice to either the manifestations of MBAs described above, nor to the work of the Management Charter Initiative (MCI) which has promoted the development of a suitable unit for measuring job performance. MCI supported a competence approach, first developed by Boyatzis (1982) to assess job output. Boyatzis (1982, p. 21) defines competence as: 'an underlying characteristic of a person which results in effective and/or superior performance in the job'. After wide consultation the MCI elaborated a set of thirteen competencies and argued that these were transferable across organizations. Such claims were quickly met with a barrage of criticism (see, for example, Burgoyne, 1989) which resulted in some organizations (for example, BP; BT; Abbey National) developing their own sets of competencies that were organization-specific. Meanwhile, other critics argued more fundamentally that the whole competence concept was flawed (Brown, 1994; Wilmott, 1994). This reproach was not restricted to competencies alone. Indeed, the trite simplicities and positivistic homilies of the traditional MBA programme have come under increasing criticism for being simply too crude to deal with the complexities of the post-industrial, post-cold war world' said the Times Higher Education Supplement (26 November, 1992, p. 13). Grey and Mitev (1995) present a persuasive argument that the first generation of management education (Burgoyne, 1994), with its emphasis on training learners in the discrete functions of business administration, is often delivered as a set 106

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of value- and context-free techniques and practices - a naive and simplistic view, since any application of a tool or technique must be contextualized. lacocca (1984) illustrates this danger when he assesses the progress of full-time MBA students who seem to think that every business problem can be structured and reduced to a case study. Willmott (1994, p. 114) elaborated further along this line of criticism, echoing Mintzberg's castigation of the whole process - Tiere the student is expected to pronounce and prescribe on the basis of reading "twenty pages of verbalized and numerical abstractions",'(Debate, 1992, p. 129); and without any direct contact with, or intimate knowledge of, the company concerned, its products or its customers. Here, the student is dragooned into making judgements and recommendations upon the basis of what is deemed to be adequate information. The superficiality of this exercise is worrying and serves to reinforce a perceived gap between the needs of organizations and the relevance and effectiveness of management education. This line of criticism was not restricted to mediocre institutions. For example, a survey conducted in 1990 of the alumni of Cranfield's Executive MBA suggested that their education had failed to deliver a relevant preparation for, or an adequate understanding of, 'the need for people management skills, ethics, and political management' (Financial Times, 9 April 1991, p. 5). Willmott (1994, p. 114) argues that despite what he calls the force of criticism being directed at established approaches to management education in the UK, North America and elsewhere, it is notable how few management academics are willing to defend the status quo, and who continue to teach as if they were fully committed to it'. It was such concerns that led to the review of the University of Essex MBA in late 1990. This programme had originated several years previously when the University of Essex jointly designed and managed it with Anglia Polytechnic University along the traditional lines sketched above. We had a variety of doubts concerning the MBA, some of which are articulated above. However, our most serious concerns were deeper, concerns which were later elaborated by Grey (1996, p. 9) when he wrote of this failure as being 'a reflection of the intellectual inadequacy of the content of management education programmes'. We became most intrigued by approaches which would more deeply explore the underlying features of 'managing* and adopt a more learning-centred approach to MBA studies. DESIGN It was clear from the above discussion that if we were to continue to offer an MBA programme we would have to consider fully the latest thoughts regarding the quality and effectiveness of MBA programmes elsewhere. Our experiences suggested that there would be problems were we to try and perpetuate existing programme designs with the type of student now participating in our MBA programme. MBA programmes needed to be aimed at experienced, practising managers and students without the appropriate experience should pursue alternative routes. So, we decided that our MBA programme would continue to be a part-time course aimed at adult middle to senior managers and professionals. It was clear from our firstgeneration MBA that too much emphasis was on doing and too little on thinking and developing - which we believed was an equally important feature of an MBA. Nevertheless, and despite these ambitions, we felt that moving too far away from 107

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practicality would not be satisfactory as far as our customers were concerned. Anthony (1986, p. 139) had warned of management academic programmes moving too far in this direction, so that 'managers would find such (courses) impractical, unreal (and) "academic"/ Whilst some might view the desire to unravel management or the act of managing as suitable justification for severing links with practice (Grey and Mitev, 1995), our view, at the time, was less radical. We believed the rationale behind an MBA was its involvement with organizations and that without their central role we would not be offering a 'real' MBA. Traditionally, business and management related courses have adopted what Friere (1974) calls the 'banking approach' in which, 'instead of communicating the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat'(op cit. p. 58). Although a large number of MBA programmes follow this practice, there were at least three related reasons why we decided against this route. Firstly, adult education literature has argued that the characteristics of the learners on this type of programme require a relevant, individually-oriented, interactive approach to learning with a concern for understanding rather than the ability to recall isolated facts (Knowles, 1984). This is closely linked to the second reason, namely that we see learning as a social activity and believe that the resource of experiences from other learners on the programme enhances learning by providing both a range of business contexts and a bias towards relevance. Accordingly, techniques for imparting information will vary and are likely to be highly participative, requiring full and enduring commitment from learners and tutors alike. Consequently, the role of learning sets is important at all stages of the programme (Revans, 1982). Thirdly, whilst we wished to explore the concept of 'managing* along similar lines to critical theory (see Grey and Mitev, 1995 and Grey, 1996 for a fuller explanation) we did not wish to develop a programme that failed to meet the needs of organizations. We also felt that the dynamic context in which organizations and their personnel strive to exist makes the prescriptive use of theories and techniques obsolete or inappropriate in a large number of organizational situations. Nevertheless, we did feel some selective tutoring about management tools and techniques to be appropriate. Thus, in these circumstances and in conforming to our need to develop a more rigorous intellectual approach, we felt it would be more appropriate to equip learners with the ability to develop their own truths' rather than blindly accept ours (Scheffler, 1965). We saw organization knowledge not so much in terms of an accumulation of knowledge from textbooks - this is insufficient for the needs of organizations - as in terms of the learner seeking to evolve their own truths' and understandings when reconciling the interaction between practice, on the one hand, and the insights of selected theoretical models on the other. We saw the tutors as enablers who equipped learners with the ability to wrest meaning from these interactions so that they might form their own unique view of knowledge. Organization knowledge, then, acts as a lens' for each learner - a lens that helps its user to see issues more clearly (King, 1995). Our approach follows Bruner's lead: the purpose of education is to stimulate inquiry and skills in the process of knowledge getting, not to memorize a body of knowledge: knowing is a process, not a product' (Bruner, 1966, p. 72). Not everybody will agree with that approach. Certainly, amongst our own colleagues some disquiet was voiced. Nevertheless, we persevered and took the position that people on the MBA were not students but learners (Boyatzis et al., 1995). There were two reasons for adoption of the term learner'in preference to 'student'. 108

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First, it was an attempt to demonstrate to these persons that they did not hold the same subservient position which the term 'student* traditionally implies; their characteristics, maturity, position and experience are highly valued resources in the learning arena, and they should have no doubt that their role is as important as that of the tutor or enabler. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it was hoped that the use of the term 'learner' would reinforce the importance of a commitment by the learner to continue learning outside the classroom. ASSESSMENT Table 10.1: A synopsis of the MBA programme at the University of Essex, 1990-95 Autumn term

Spring term

Summer term

Siage_l Managing people

Managing strategy

Managing finance and information

Managing in the external environment

Dissertation (8,000 words)

Stage 2 Managing corporate finance

Managing decisionmaking

Managing information systems

Managing organization development

Dissertation (15,000 words)

The course adopted a thematic rather than a business-functional approach to the knowledge inputs. There was no scope for the learners to choose options - the programme was designed to represent the major themes of 'managing*, illustrated in Table 10.1. The assessment of the programme was through a 4,000 word written piece for each of the eight themes and an 8,000 and a 15,000 word dissertation at the end of stages one and two respectively. Each 4,000 word piece was to examine a work-based problem or issue that illustrated, refuted, or otherwise explored a topic from each of the themes, whilst the dissertations could address either a combination of topics from the themes or an area which lay outside the course content. We felt it was necessary that the learners submitted fully detailed proposals for such projects to their tutors before commencing writing. These were then discussed, perhaps revised, and finally agreed. We believed that a shared approach forms a vital and important feature of adult education, despite contrasting views that either the tutors or the learners alone should select the problems. Our view was that potentially high organizational performers should demonstrate ability to select and manage appropriate projects. The consultation process facilitated this. 109

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Projects were presented in the form of a written and/or equivalent piece of work. Often, they took the form of management reports which, unless restrained, normally concluded with a set of recommendations or adjustments that suggested changes which would hopefully lead to improvements in organizational performance. One could argue that this was surely the objective of the programme, yet there is clear evidence from organizational literature that these adjustments only offer some of the answers. Argyris and Schon (1978) indicate that such adjustments to actions are analogous to single loop learning (where the learner seeks to resolve problems or issues through corrective action) and whilst for the majority of occasions this level of learning is sufficient, Senge (1990), amongst others, argues that the more dynamic environment in which today's organizations are increasingly finding themselves requires its personnel to be able to utilize more advanced, higher levels of learning. Overwhelmingly, organizational literature is arguing for organizations which are able to transform themselves. The organizations that excel will be those that discover how to tap their people's commitment and capacity to learn' (Senge, 1990, p. 4). Argyris and Schon described this as 'double loop learning', where in addition to the corrective active mode of single loop learning the learner seeks to address the governing features which lie behind the problem or issue. In other words, organizational norms and policies will also be objects of reflection and may well be affected by proposed courses of action. Feedback took the form of descriptions rather than numerical figures or letter grades. Here, learners would submit their piece of work and receive within five weeks detailed feedback across the published criteria distributed at the beginning of each module. The feedback was developmental, for the purpose of guiding learners through future assessments. Nevertheless, as with similar professional courses, unless there was a correlation between the grading and the learner's perceptions of their level of performance within their work organization, learners might reject the quality and legitimacy of the content of the assessment. Assessment feedback had to be couched with this in mind, hence our use of descriptions, with full explanations, rather than reliance on grades or their equivalent. Allied to this process, and compulsory for each piece of work, was a separate reflective selfassessment of the learning attained through completing the piece of work. Alternatively, if the student felt it more appropriate, the whole piece of work could be written in a reflective style that would include some self-assessment of the learning attained. Schon (1983) has described the benefits of undertaking a reflective conversation, yet despite the obvious advantages that this has over traditional pedagogic processes, we realized from our early learners' reflective pieces that Schdn's approach was not encouraging the demonstration of adoption of higher levels of learning, or of double loop learning. Some of the learners had responded with discourses reinforcing their approaches or congratulating the tutor on an excellent module, sometimes regressing to meaningless axioms. We felt that the purpose of reflection had not been fully achieved, that we could predominantly discern single loop learning, although there was patchy evidence of double loop learning. Suggestions as to why this occurred ranged from lack of guidance and the need for models' to 'dangers of including reflection in the criteria for assessment'. Other views argued that the culture of organizations provides a powerful force for minimizing the importance of processes examining affective or feeling aspects of managing (Boud, Cohen and Walker, 1993). We responded by providing guide-lines for learners who were undertaking critical reflections, especially guidance on how to 110

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assess their (the learners') own assumptions regarding their piece of work. Additionally, we asked them to consider whether they had taken into account the range and importance of the context in which their work was set and to consider whether they could widen and demonstrate more creative stances in addressing their work. Lastly, but equally important, learners were required to assess their own performance with regard to the processes they had followed in undertaking the piece of work. Critical reflections were required for all pieces of work and ultimately provided an interesting profile for the learner to consider. The result is that their reflections certainly improved. However, a question must be raised as to whether the inclusion of guidelines may have generated models of 'appropriate' reflections and precluded the emergence of issues which were different or unique. Overall, we feel that the MBA at Essex responded to the criticisms generally laid at the door of MBAs and developed a programme which fulfilled many of the academic interests that we had developed. We also believe that we did not lose sight of the need to offer a programme that was appropriate for the needs of our expected user. We had designed the programme to maximize the performance of the learner and had sought to do this by borrowing extensively from adult education literature and by employing, either directly or through adaptation, key features of action learning (Revans, 1982); of problem-based learning (Boud and Feletti, 1985); and of critical reflection (Mezirow, 1991). Certainly, the completion of the eight pieces of work and two dissertations provided an impressive portfolio for the learners - a portfolio of achievement which for a large percentage of our graduates has been a sufficient indicator to others that they are entitled to promotion or other new career opportunities. In these circumstances many could argue that this surely indicates a successful programme. Certainly, growth is evident for all to see by making a brief review of students' reflections, for example: As I have mentioned in a previous reflection, the design of the Essex MBA, in that projects must be based on examples from the students' own organization, is of very real value, both to the student and the organization. I have found that the research and the writing of this paper have completely changed the way I look at my company, and the way I hope to influence its future (Second year learner). I have been astonished by how this programme has forced me to increase my knowledge without needing to memorize anything, or to accumulate hordes of recipes of procedures and techniques that quite honestly I might never use. Yet, to my surprise and pleasure, the projects, both this and others, have led me to new ways of making sense of my world, both professionally and personally. It has been an experience I shall never forget (Second year learner). The learning experiences have not been just restricted to the course content. Equally as valuable have been the interactions between other students on the course. Some of their ideas and views, I can say, shocked me, others I have found equally valuable without being shocked. The result was a realization that I have had a fairly narrow range of experience of working life (First year learner).

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RE-ASSESSMENT

Despite these fairly representative comments and the promise that they implied, King (1995) tells of a visit to a former MBA learner who had graduated two years previously. It was during this visit, through casual observation, that it became apparent he was no longer employing practices introduced and discussed on the MBA, nor behaviours he had endorsed in his critical reflections. Upon further examination of other members of his learning set it became clear that this behaviour was not restricted to this learner. Others provided evidence of their own slippage to pre-MBA behaviour. One student explained that whilst the MBA had helped her to frame issues and had given her greater understanding, it had had little effect on her day-to-day organizational behaviour. She argued that it was not possible at work to hold things up and take time out to contemplate - she said 'think how that would fit in with the rest of the organization'. Thus, whilst the aim of the programme sought to demonstrate the potential of learning for organizations and their personnel, this experience, which may not be fully representative, is sufficiently serious to lead to questions about the value of the integrated MBA. In terms of rationalization, this might reflect the desire by learners to gain academic credence by displaying academic truths in their critical reflections rather than by being true to what they actually might do in practice (Foucault, 1977; King, 1995, offer a fuller discussion of these points). There are many possible explanations of this. One is that, As Amabile (1988, p. 133) argues, 'no amount of skill in the domain . . . can compensate for a lack of motivation to perform an activity'. Perhaps the motivation to adopt a contemplative stance is not to be found in many workplaces, leading to this erosion of achievements seen on the MBA programme. Lack of appropriate motivation, both intrinsic and extrinsic, can make the difference between what an individual can do and what they will do. Learners on the Essex MBA are intrinsically motivated by forces compelling them towards the academic award. Intrinsic motivation is defined as the motivation to engage with work for its own sake, because the work itself is interesting, engaging or in some way satisfying; extrinsic motivation is in response to something apart from the work itself, such as reward, or recognition or the dictates of other people (Amabile, et aL, 1994). However, it is important to remember that MBA courses largely attract people who seek self-advancement and who see the MBA playing a major part in enabling this. In these circumstances, learners are likely to continue to be motivated by extrinsic levers, even after graduation. Their intrinsic motivators are likely to change over the period of the programme. Prior to graduating, learners, in order to satisfy their need for certification, seem to have given rein to a variety of intrinsic motivators on the MBA programme and balance these with their organizational job demands. However, post-graduation, with the degree assured and without the support or influence of other learners in similar positions, or of the tutors themselves, learners no longer needed to respond to the intrinsic motivators that had driven reflection during the MBA programme. This may explain why some learners reverted to single loop approaches to managing after graduation, because this is the predominant manner in which organizations are managed and they do not routinely sustain the higher levels of learning that were encouraged on the MBA programme. It is postulated that this breakdown in behaviour continues unless organizations actively support thinking and learning or unless learners can be encouraged to see MBA study and their daily work as comprising one continuum that can be 112

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well served by reflective, double loop thinking. One way of fostering this latter view might be if control of academic awards were shared by learning institutions and organizations, perhaps through the development of organization-based MB As. Alternatively, the degree could be developed around the idea of time-controlled certification, requiring learners to demonstrate that they continued to utilize higher levels of learning over, say a five-year period after completion of the programme. These thoughts and tentative conclusions bring the whole experience of five years of the MBA at Essex a complete circle. We certainly had reservations about the quality of the programme back in 1991 yet, despite our efforts to resolve those doubts, other faults have emerged. THE DECLINE OF THE ESSEX MBA During the summer of 1995 the department took the decision to close the MBA. There was a host of reasons. For example, its supporters from 1991 had either left the department or were now questioning its validity and no longer seemed to agree about its future direction. Moreover, this was the only part-time degree in the department. Now, and for the foreseeable future, the MBA is no longer available at the University of Essex. We hope that the experience of undertaking the MBA the Essex way was, at minimum, a fulfilling experience - at least, that is, for the learners whilst they were on the programme. The reflective accounts of the learners suggest this to be true. There is some doubt as to whether learners did develop their own sets of 'knowing' that continued to serve them after graduation - perhaps their on-course reflections were only utterances of academic truths and did not reveal their real 'being'. Nevertheless, despite these concerns, it is my contention that the learners, perhaps at a deeper level, did develop understandings of how to develop better, double loop ways of knowing in an organization - but, as was stated above, there is a need to provide sufficient motivation within the work organization to maintain and develop such reflective thinking. Probably, our experiences as staff and as academics had a major influence on separating practice from theory - Grey and Mitev (1995, p. 75) warned of the 'erroneous distinction of academia'from the 'real world', in which the former defers to the latter and is defined by it, with deleterious consequences for the quality of management education'. They continued by elaborating the 'self-defeating experience of delivering techniques and concepts, an approach which does little more than pander to students' prejudices', (p. 82). Students, and especially part-time learners may well 'demand that their teachers do not disrupt their world-views with complicated theories, but instead provide useful facts, models and techniques' (p. 86) that will assist their work organizations - not in the long term, but now. At the institution level, the experience of supporting this type of course is likely to be both positive and negative. It has been useful because we believe the experience and development of this MBA in an institution which is largely traditional in its course design has opened the door for other opportunities in innovative course design. Yet, such courses tend to be resource-hungry and should we decide to involve ourselves in such course designs in the future we will have to look more closely at reducing these costs, although not at the expense of quality. As a department, we have now moved towards a critical view of the concept of managing. With this level of examination and without inhibiting our ability to respond directly to 113

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organizational needs, we have realized our desire to explore and expose deeper understandings about the nature of managing. In this way we feel we might be able to contribute to understanding managing by another route, for as Grey, (1996, p. 9) argues 'critique, then, might offer a way in which management education could renew itself through an enhanced complexity and sophistication'. FINAL THOUGHTS The view of the MBA as a qualification varies between organizations, For some, unless a manager (or equivalent) holds this qualification their future promotion is limited. Here the MBA represents either an endorsement of current organizational performance or an indication of future potential. Other organizations, perhaps in light of the poor press that the MBA has sometimes received, view the MBA with some degree of scepticism. Some of these criticisms, we believe, are a little unfair. There has been a considerable amount of good practice on MBAs in the UK which has rarely been documented. We do believe that the MBA as a qualification has a future but only as long as it does not become devalued by poor programmes. As to what we believe is poor, I think this can be inferred from the above. This chapter has sought to share with the reader our experience of the MBA at the University of Essex; its aims, its rationale, its costs, our mistakes and hopefully our successes. At this stage perhaps the best test would be to ask ourselves two questions: First, do we regret the experience? Second, was it worth all the effort? Taking into consideration all of the above, together with other issues which space does not allow, we must answer a resounding yes' to both questions - we learned a lot!

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Chapter 11

A Women's Studies MA Gina Wisker

Accounts of professional master's programmes dominate this book, just as such programmes dominate international provision. However, people take master's degrees for a variety of reasons, not all of them vocational. In this chapter, Gina Wisker describes a non-vocational programme in the inter-disciplinary field of Women's Studies. She echoes and develops points made in Chapter 7 about the problems of devising and running interdisciplinary programmes and, like other writers, she too is concerned with pedagogical and assessment issues. The most distinctive feature of this chapter, though, is the account of a programme that has to be relevant to learners but which is not professionally oriented, has no issues of professional practice to confront, and that can therefore freely celebrate' the diversity of academic interests that comprise the field of Women's Studies. Wisker, like other contributors to this collection, also draws attention to the degree to which the master's programme depended on the goodwill and enthusiasm of academic staff, who themselves found it a powerful learning experience. At this point it is worth wondering whether higher education institutions provide sufficient and appropriate learning experiences for staff who are coming afresh to the design and operation of master's programmes. Given the hints elsewhere in this book that master's programmes can be viewed as marginal activities by academic managers, it may be that there is some cause for concern here. Women's studies shares neither the assumptions of the dominant cultures, nor do we find the present compartmentalization of knowledge adequate to pursue our questions. To introduce feminist insights means to challenge radically the generation and distribution of knowledge; it means changing the whole shape of the course, or the problem, or the discipline. Such a concept of Women's Studies demands more than having a course 'on women' (Bowles and Klein, 1983, p. 3). Women's Studies courses operate at all levels from short, adult consciousness-raising sessions, through undergraduate degrees, to an array of postgraduate courses. It is an interdisciplinary subject area and one which necessitates personal reflection because it looks broadly at being a woman in the world. Because of its basis in feminist theories and practices and its still somewhat marginal, politicized existence, it is almost inevitable that Women's Studies - and particularly master's courses in Women's Studies - will provide a challenge to the mainstream. It offers an opportunity to address directly issues of learner-centredness, work and worldrelatedness, negotiating practices, equal opportunities, and flexibility in teaching 115

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learning and assessment. Of course, those developing a Women's Studies master's course could actually work very hard to disguise the essentially radical and enabling nature of the subject in their desire to gain acceptance at master's level. And so could the students. This is just one of the tensions in a master's course in Women's Studies, and like all tensions it can be a source of creative and liberating response and change, or of excessive conservatism, as well as many mixtures of these two extremes. Transcending discipline boundaries, Women's Studies is underpinned by the diversity of feminist critical approaches. The central aim of the MA in Women's Studies at Anglia Polytechnic University is to enable students to concentrate on the study of women as a unifying factor amongst a diversity of individual experiences, practices and contexts. It encourages students to question boundaries, hierarchies, and the construction and articulation of knowledge. One of the central tensions in the master's degree since its inception has been that between the cross-disciplinary, diverse, person-centredness of the subject area with its challenge to curricula, modes of expression and the construction of knowledge, and the kind of academic solidity and respectability — conformity, indeed — which the master's level connotes in itself. Negotiating our own ways through this set of tensions as academics and as students continues to provide energy in the classroom and in our research. WOMEN'S STUDIES AS A SUBJECT Conventional courses can be seen to be men's studies, since women are frequently either accidentally or deliberately silenced and excluded. Knowledge creation and selection pass as value-free and objective. When studies of women are just modules within an undergraduate or master's framework, they can easily be marginalized. In Women's Studies courses there is an opportunity to challenge traditional selections, interpretations and expressions. It is possible, however, for those in charge of mainstream courses to insist that there is no need to include women's perspectives elsewhere because that is being done in Women's Studies. There is an argument too that because of its challenge, and its interdisciplinary nature, Women's Studies could become vulnerable in an age of cuts. Women, given the opportunity to study at master's level, might choose to study 'real' subjects, that is to say more conventional and familiar disciplines. Internalizing the questioning attitudes, the critical edge of Women's Studies can also be challenging. Interdisciplinarity is essential to Women's Studies courses, and in itself this undermines the traditional departmentalization and compartmentalization of knowledge, the established hierarchies of disciplines with their rigid boundaries. Victoria Robinson notes: The organization of knowledge into separate and distinct disciplines meant that the new questions and methods of feminist enquiry that emerged from putting women at the centre of theoretical discourses were not adequately answered or dealt with. The crossing of theoretical boundaries - multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary (going beyond the disciplines) - allows an issue or an area to be examined from a variety of intellectual standpoints and has been seen as most appropriate to Women's Studies (Robinson, 1993, p. 6). 1 16

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THE GENESIS OF THE MA IN WOMEN'S STUDIES: A PERSONAL RECORD The genesis of the MA in Women's Studies is an example of co-operative planning. As articulate academic women, we came together to survey our positions and the provision of women-oriented courses and then to move into the development of Women's Studies as an MA. We met initially to consider our marginalization and to carry out a survey of the existence - or non-existence - of women-centred topics and courses in the curriculum as a whole and of the extent to which Anglia actually recognized the needs of women students in its curriculum and facilities. From a discussion group we grew into something of a pressure group. It became obvious that developing a specific course would help focus the interest we had in feminist theory and pedagogy in relation to our discipline areas. Planning was a growing, sharing and often sparring experience, much aided by long discussions in the evenings and by an away-day with friends and advisers from other institutions who had experienced similar concerns and achievements. In order to challenge the traditional hierarchical power relations of the structure of courses and their management within the university we decided that there would be a triumvirate (but that is the wrong word!) taking it in turns to manage the programme. This caused amusing confusion internally. No-one was quite sure to whom to address the memos from other departments. It did mean that we all felt we owned decisions. It was a shared responsibility to write parts of course documents, and to contribute to the growth and development of the course through various validations, reviews, revalidations and so on. In seven years this energy has not dissipated, aided by the structure which encourages sharing and ownership. There is a clear vision underlying the MA which emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary study; and that has a focus on representations and cultural constructions of women, as well as on the constraints upon them. Feminist critical theories and practices lend cohesion to our approaches. Team teaching, group work, negotiated essays and dissertations, and the integration of the personal with the academic represent teaching and learning, pedagogical and andragogical (Knowles, 1988) approaches aimed at empowering the students. However, the downside of our management structures and team teaching practices are that our Women's Studies MA has no home base, and no full time members of staff. It is assisted by a half-time secretary, and by the commitment of the diverse women who teach on aspects of the MA and share responsibilities. It is only recently that most of us have had the hours we teach on the MA 'counted' in our workloads. For some the stress of this and the lack of recognition, plus the tension of demands from the home department have meant involvement has had to be less than we would ideologically like. For others it represents a commitment to which 'counting hours' is unrelated: Women's Studies often operates on staff's idealism and generosity. Some of the fundamental questions facing the course team when we were designing the Women's Studies MA involved balancing the tensions within Women's Studies with the expectations of master's level work. Fundamental questions included: •

how to combine the rigour of master's degree study with the personcentredness of Women's Studies; 117

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• •

•

•

• • •

how to enable women from a variety of learning, work and home backgrounds to come to grips with master's level study; how to work together as a course team and a staff and student team to question continually the basis of knowledge creation and what seem like established ways of expression and views about issues such as pornography, reproductive technologies, equality etc.; how to yoke emotion and rigour, individual and group approaches and understanding, the demands of semesterized timetables and word lengths with the need for exploration of ideas and issues, and the need to express feelings and understanding in different forms; how to ensure that the learning and teaching situation - timetabled, staff-led, in a classroom - actually does free up thinking, discussion and exploratory talk enough for students to question assumptions, create knowledge and understanding, make new connections, move forwards the boundaries of their understanding and of the subject area; how to encourage students and staff genuinely to break subject boundaries and use their interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches built up from feminist theory and practice bases; how to recognize, encourage and develop the range of skills needed for study at master's level - from essay writing and oral articulation to video work and to creative; how to enable our students to move through the various, often painful stages of the study of women which so relates to their own selves, to a position of recognizing that they must own it, and fuel, stimulate and action that change for themselves.

We wanted students to be able to: • • • •

reflect on their own experiences as women and use this reflection constructively in their work on the course; understand and develop abilities and strategies to work with feminist critical theories and practices; integrate the personal and the analytical with wisdom, critical reflection and deep learning; have a useful knowledge base founded in issues within Women's Studies areas in a variety of subjects.

We needed to consider when and where to introduce the kind of developmental work which would enable students to write essays comfortably and ably, work with video, integrate the personal and the analytical, develop creative work and develop research and information-handing skills. Course Outline This is a two year, part-time modular course. Each of the four modules that students take is worth 30 credits and involves one semester's worth of work. The dissertation, written or by video, is worth 60 credits. Students can leave the course with a diploma after a year. The content is focused on the issue of 'becoming female' and so takes a chronological approach insofar as it loosely unites the work each week around 118

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development of women from childhood through to adulthood. The subject areas of history, art history video practice, literature, sociology, politics, medicine, psychology, psychoanalysis, geography, economics, and music are, or have been, present in the course but are drawn in under topic areas each week - for example, 'motherhood and medicine' 'reproductive technologies', 'psychoanalysis and French feminism', 'Black and Asian women's creativity*, and so on. STUDENT DIVERSITY Women return to learning from a diversity of backgrounds. Some have relatively few formal qualifications but vast, relevant experience. Others have recently graduated from a variety of undergraduate disciplines. We made a determined decision at the outset to recognize and celebrate this diversity of learning backgrounds, and also the diversity of reasons for study. Prior certificated and experiential learning may be recognized towards entry requirements, although some applicants are also asked to produce an additional essay on a topic of women in society. Induction, spanning two evenings and a Saturday, explains and models Women's Studies theories and practices, and individual staff support those less familiar with formal study and essay writing at master's level. Diversity of cultural and learning styles is notable among our students. Equally notable is the range of attitudes to subject and to what constitute acceptable approaches to and articulations of response to it. A woman police officer is likely to have different approaches to the issues and different ways of articulating these from a woman whose job is working with paper and paint as an artist. A midwifery lecturer is likely to perceive things quite differently from a media producer. Students learn together, forming knowledge, integrating personal experience and academic research, putting theories into practice on examples in the seminars. Much of the innovative development on the Women's Studies MA has been spurred on by the diverse students who join the MA group. The police force paid for one student, who gained an Equal Opportunities award from the force during her time with us. She wrote her dissertation on representations of, and attitudes towards, women in the police force. Others pay for themselves. Hardship has been an issue for the younger students who take poorly paid jobs to enable them to study and they have, in some instances, had to suspend their studies. Hopes, Expectations and Experience

Students come to the course for a variety of reasons. Some believe that Women's Studies, because it has a personal focus, will change their lives; others choose it because it will help them to tackle sexism, and others see it as a course among other courses but do not want to become too involved in the feminism. For some students the notion of structured courses and assessment rules is anathema to their hopes of Women's Studies as a channel and form for their personal reflections and feelings and experiences as nascent, or developed feminists. How far these students will conform and shape their expressions to the developed norms differs from student to student, and negotiating with them is both a challenge and produces some sense of sadness and loss. Something is certainly being lost in the collusion. It also has to be said that the course can become a catalyst for change in people's lives, and not all partners are fully prepared for this. Some students have 119

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left the course, one suspects (I know) because the ways in which it enabled them to question behavioural 'norms' were too challenging for their domestic lives. However, I do not feel we are a highly confrontational radical group (although certainly some MA Women's Studies course teams would wish to be seen to be so), nor that we can be accused of fomenting revolt and leaving students to cope with the aftermath. Often, as with many adult courses of study, students choose to take this MA because they feel the need for a focus for change anyway. For students who find conflicts and difficulties problematic, there are personal tutors with whom they can talk, and the pairs who set individual essays are also available for private discussion about these essays and the issues they raise. We do not leave our students floundering. ISSUES ATTACHING TO AN INTERDISCIPLINARY COURSE There are clearly particular difficulties with interdisciplinary studies in themselves, even when they are not as challenging as Women's Studies. We do not expect all students to become subject experts in each of the disciplines represented on and integrated in the course. This would fragment Women's Studies, and be an intolerable burden on the students. We do encourage them all to develop interdisciplinary skills and approaches. We encourage and model research questions, analysis and synthesis of materials and fruitful class discussions. We encourage students to integrate the personal and the academic, the reflective and the analytical. This is partly managed by our own modelling of such mixed approaches in our teaching and the questions we ask them to consider in sessions. The course begins by concentrating on 'becoming female'. In the material and questions this provokes we encourage students to integrate their personal experience with their reading and focused, critical discussion. This provides a practical model for the integration of the personal and the academic. It also enables students to look in the first couple of sessions at the main area of study, women, from a variety of feminist critical perspectives, uniting the discipline areas of literature, media, art history, psychology and social studies. Students spend the first few weeks of the course trying out their new feminist critical approaches, recognizing the contribution diversity can make to discussion and study and learning to integrate the personal and the analytical in a productive unity and focus. They learn to ask questions of everything around them in relation to the representation and construction of women in the world. Inevitably, much of this spills over into life outside the classroom space on a Thursday evening. The first assignment is on defining Women's Studies, which enables both an offloading of a variety of opinions, threats and hopes, and a pulling together of some of the material, critiques and arguments. It acts too as an interdisciplinary jumping off point and practice. We model the breaking down of discipline boundaries in our own work, team teaching each session with staff from a combination of subjects who combine to approach issues from different and shared disciplinary perspectives. Currently there are (inevitably) many flaws in our curriculum - some of them dictated by (lack of) time, some by (lack of) expertise, others, no doubt, by the limitations we have as a team in terms of focusing on certain issues and keeping up to date. Reconsidering the curriculum yearly and during the year helps to keep it dynamic. The curriculum does not take enough notice of lesbian experience, black and Asian experience, or the experience of women with disabilities. It has been 120

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important not to marginalize and so mimic our own experience as women in academe. Consequently, we try to ensure there is a specific session, for example, on issues in black and Asian women's writing, but that black and Asian women's writing and experiences also appear as examples throughout. AUTHORITY OR EQUALITY IN THE CLASSROOM MASTER'S LEVEL WORK? Issues of power are crucial in any discussion of Women's Studies. As women academics we need to ensure that we can cope with the contradictory nature of our position. If the subject area and the pedagogy/andragogy in Women's Studies are meant to empower the students, how can we as staff genuinely cope with our implied disempowerment? How can we hand over the control from the classroom, the shaping of knowledge and understanding to the group, without letting the sessions run of their own accord, which is tantamount to insisting on no structure and no aims. The battles fought over these issues were many and the feminist classroom is still a site for such debates. Each time the team teaching the class makes decisions about what happens next or guides a set of responses, the sense of authority returns and somewhat affects the developing personal responses. Just letting the class deteriorate into personal conversation is a threat hovering round our dedicated time slot and one which we know would jeopardize our students' chances of making the intellectual leaps which they have come to make in sacrificing and committing so much to a master's course (the irony of the title never fails to cause a frissonl). CHALLENGES FOR WOMEN'S STUDIES MA STAFF ROLES AND CHANGES There is a problem of ambivalence for women staff who desire the rewards which accompany conformity to male-determined norms of articulation and behaviour but wish to develop their own and their students' women-centred practices. In our work we constantly deal with issues of tensions and ambivalence. Women might want to study and discuss in their discipline and also express themselves at a recognizable level, in this case master's level. They feel torn between the reflection, personal connectedness, and community-oriented approaches which they often wish to move towards and the demands of the academic nature of a higher degree which expects and rewards logic, analysis, and balanced decision-making. Bell hooks, speaking from an Afro-American perspective and experience of subordination in an education system which ignored whole swathes of history, literature and experience and silenced black people, sees the women-centred, feminist classroom as very much a site for struggle and construction. It is an active place where everybody is engaged: Feminist education - the feminist classroom - is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgement of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university (hooks, 1989, p. 51) 121

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Some of the concerns which have been expressed about the effectiveness of women-centred strategies and situations have been aired by some of our own students on the MA in Women's Studies at Anglia. They have argued that the work we do is too cerebral and does not provide opportunities for intervention in the world from which they come and from which others come. There is clearly a difficulty for academics who would wish to be involved in feminist political activism actually spreading out from the classroom. Teaching and learning might become subsumed in that activism and the projects which result, however useful, would be a different product. I think it is important to encourage women students to make the links themselves and for us all to transfer our theory to practice, where appropriate, to activism. However, we should not blur the classroom experience which integrates theory and experience - and the out of classroom experience which puts change into practice. Many students will be involved in both. ASSESSMENT: ARTICULATING AND ORGANIZING Assessment is the most politically difficult area, yet potentially a very creative and liberating area. Master's level work requires master's level, assessable products. This demand might seem to be at odds with the developmental elements of Women's Studies, but as a course team we feel it is our duty to the women (and men) students who choose the MA in Women's Studies to help them to move beyond challenge and change to articulate their responses coherently. Many women perceive academic subjects and their discourses as chosen and developed by men to reflect men's experiences and ways of commenting on and forming these. It can be argued that some women want to express themselves in ways which would not fit the rigour of a male-defined, established academic discourse, and our insisting on this mode of response seems at odds with the flexibility of content, of approach, of study modes, of group work. But we all have to learn to conform to the shape of academically-valid modes of expression for assessment. It is possible, though, that the shape need not be so permanently and rigidly defined, and that different forms and means of expression could be accepted. This is not to advocate inchoate expression. Adrienne Rich warns against embracing disorder in the name of feminine discourse, 'A romantic sloppiness, an inspired lack of rigour, a selfindulgent incoherence, are symptoms of female self deprecation' (Rich, 1985, p. 28). Analytical study, structured and grammatical writing are not, of themselves, antipathetic to the expression of women's perceptions and attitudes and understandings. It is important to set up working situations in which creative thinking and expression are released, and then work to incorporate into an organized, analytical answer, whether written or spoken. BUT IS IT MASTER'S LEVEL WORK? WHAT DO WE MEAN? These questions are surely asked of master's level work in all subject areas, but probably the more so in Women's Studies. Richard Winter, analysing assessors' reports on MA work on postgraduate courses, including our own MA in Women's Studies, noted that their vocabulary valued work which was 'relevant, interesting, balanced, insightful, imaginative, sensitive, well written, clear, concise, logical, and coherently structured' (1994, p. 101). Assessors looked to see whether the student had: 122

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selected and organized the material, successfully combined different approaches and developed conclusions from the analysis of data and whether the work was based on sound data, valid observation and critical analysis of issues, concepts and theories (ibid.). Master's students are expected to have a well-grounded understanding of issues, to offer a personal response based in awareness of the nature of the knowledge structures which determine their study, and to make ethical, philosophical and critical choices and argue their cases in relation to these. The critical reflectiveness expected at this level is encouraged in the MA as an integrative part of the learning experience. Some other phrases which define master's level and particularly suit work in an interdisciplinary, person-centred, analytical and critical subject are: • • • • • • •

a balance is maintained between original and secondary material; methodology and data analysis are clearly separated; different investigative paradigms and their methodologies are understood; critical/self critical appraisal of existing practice/beliefs; reaching a synthesis based on creative connections between different aspects of a problem/topic; commitment to/engagement with a project/a discipline/a body of reading. . . . . . set alongside theoretical and ethical grounding. (Winter, 1993)

An Innovative Creative Piece of Assessed Work Testing the Boundaries Some of our students come from backgrounds of practice rather than theory. One student who certainly tested our assessment beliefs and strategies was a practising local artist, dealing in photographic work and installations. For her first piece of work she reflected on the forms her and other women's shadows cast, producing cut-outs of them. The piece was about representation of ourselves. She built up some of what she wanted to say by bringing the pieces in and sharing them, asking us to comment. There was no analytical or contextual write-up accompanying the work. This caused immense problems. We were positioned as stuffy academics in a course which presented itself as avant garde and enabling. But perhaps that was not the case. A viva voce examination evinced analytical and critical responses which showed that feminist theories and practices informed the artwork. These could be articulated and communicated. From discussion, taped for the record and for the external examiner, emerged case history. We can now convey better why analysis, reflection, articulation and communication are necessary parts of a submitted piece of work. Another piece of work was similarly experiential and creative but, accompanied by analytical explanation, it engaged with theory in practice in its own way. It was an apron produced for the student/artist by her mother. She worked with it to show engagement with issues and explorations around motherhood, relations, mother as artist/artist as mother, women's communication and creativity. This 123

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grew out of personal reflection integrated with, and stimulated by, reading and thinking about the work of Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva, two French feminist theorists. The response to these theorists and the apron was written around the stitching. The whole was shared with the rest of the group who produced their own responses, building a co-operative group set of responses. It was accompanied by an analytical explanation of how the piece united and articulated theory, experience and the personal in practice. Staff development sessions and validations which debate assessment are likely to hear about the Women's Studies apron from me. It always provokes extreme responses! Our working together to understand and assess this piece of work has helped change practice elsewhere. It has been much easier for us to recognize what sort of shape an analytical but personal and reflective piece on issues to do with women in history, a portfolio or log response to literature and culture, or a sociological set of concerns might consist of, and how they might be expressed in our home base disciplines also. CONCLUSION - WHAT DOES THE MA WOMEN'S STUDIES ACHIEVE? Women's Studies classrooms are sites of change, not just critique, although certainly the critique comes first. Marcia Westkott argues: By engaging in 'negations that yield transcendence', our Women's Studies classes are 'educational strategies' for change. First, by articulating that which we oppose and by envisioning alternative futures, we identify the goals and strategies for action; that is we clarify what it is we want to move away from as well as what it is we want to move toward. Change is thus informed by purpose and goal (Westkott, 1983, p. 213). The Women's Studies MA work has transformed our practices in all spheres. The students have excitingly put into concrete form and articulated the responses enabled by our shared study group experiences. We have all benefited. Students in other discipline areas also now produce reflective and creative work accompanied by analytical response, exploring and making conscious the contributory debate and processes. The MA in Women's Studies raises issues about the politics of the production and management of knowledge. It is important for both staff and students to provide space and a repertoire of strategies to support students engaging in debates arising from and spanning the disciplines, and in linking these disciplines with our lives. Issues of production, ownership and use of knowledge are raised by questioning conventional pedagogy and by moving towards adopting andragogical approaches based on the adult learner, as a person, in the world, as well as in the classroom. Ultimately, what Women's Studies at MA level provides for the university and people within it is an informed and creative critique of established practices. It encourages ways of constructing and working with knowledge, of making sense of the world and of enabling others to make sense and articulate that changing sense. It provides a home base for theory and practice and for experimentation, which leads to change throughout the university. 124

Chapter 12

Mathematical Studies in Northern Ireland Ken Houston

The claim has repeatedly been made in this book that good master's programmes are flexible in that they are sensitive to the range of learners'needs. A corollary of this is that programmes should be ever-changing, as the demands of professional practice and the nature of academic research and conceptualizations themselves change. In this chapter, Ken Houston traces the development of one programme, primarily oriented to the niche market of schoolteachers, over some twenty years. By giving an insight into the small-scale and local factors that shape provision, this story helps us to see why master's programmes are so varied. He also points to the problem of setting appropriate standards, given that this might be regarded as a 'conversion' master's course, attracting people who might not have a first degree in mathematics. While there have been arguments about the standards to be set, he concludes that 'it is ... a demanding and stimulating course and some of the dissertations contain original research worthy of publication'. This takes us back to questions discussed in Chapter 2, raising the question of whether there is a sharp distinction between courses that are deemed to be at postgraduate level and those that are seen as postgraduate in time. It may be that students join courses with different levels of expertise but that there tends to be a convergence in the standards they manifest on graduation. This is an important and essentially unstudied question. INTRODUCTION The MSc. in Mathematical Studies currently on offer at the University of Ulster can trace its origins to the Bachelor of Education (BEd.) professional development course at the Ulster Polytechnic, which was on offer in the mid 'seventies. In those days a majority of serving teachers were the products of the colleges of education rather than the universities and so had certificates rather than degrees. (Teachers in grammar schools were the exception; they would have had degrees, but probably not a Post-graduate Certificate in Education.) There was a movement towards making teaching an all-graduate profession (as it is today, more or less) and so there was a market for an in-service part-time professional development course leading to the degree of Bachelor of Education (Donegan, 1976). In those days mathematics teachers were concerned about recent curriculum developments! (Well, what's new?) Then it was the 'new maths' - abstract set theory - which had replaced some algebra and much geometry in the curriculum. 125

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Computers were around, but not in schools, and calculators were not universally available. There was a hunger among teachers for knowledge and a hunger for help in teaching it. These two themes - the desire of teachers for an appropriate professional qualification and the changing face (the ever changing face?) of the school mathematics curriculum — have been the major influences on the development of the MSc. in Mathematical Studies over the last 20 years. This paper is a chronological account of the development of the course with the various sections below relating to the major developments of 1977, 1983, 1988 and 1993. Philosophy, aims and objectives, structure and content are all described and reflected upon. There is a brief evaluation of the course at each stage. Major developments in curriculum and technology and the changing needs and aspirations of teachers are discussed. The Social Context Northern Ireland consists of the six north-eastern counties of Ireland, is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and has a population of about 1.5 million. It has about 250 post-primary schools of which about 80 are grammar schools. It has selection at 11+ and about 25 per cent of each cohort transfers to a grammar school. School teaching in Northern Ireland is considered to be a prestigious career and many high achieving school leavers and graduates enter the profession. They stay at home in the province rather than seek their fortune in Great Britain or elsewhere overseas, although through this period up to 40 per cent of school leavers who entered higher education went to Great Britain. There are about 2,000 mathematics teachers in the post primary sector (many of whom teach other subjects as well) and in 1977 about 1,200 of these would have been non-graduates. This is a relatively small pool from which to fill a BEd. course and so classes were generally small. About half the population of Northern Ireland lives in the greater Belfast area and there are pockets of high population density in Londonderry and the provincial towns. 1 977

The BEd. was in operation with mathematics as a specialist subject. There were six mathematics modules, taken one per semester over six semesters. It was a part-time in-service course and the mathematics modules were presented on one evening per week, for three hours per week for the first two modules, and for two hours per week for the rest. The computing module had an additional 20 hour block. They were all standard undergraduate courses assessed by coursework (which then amounted to nothing more than 'homework') and by end of semester examination. We then discovered that there were some people who wanted to study mathematics at this level without having to take the education modules of the BEd. Perhaps they already had a degree and their hunger was for mathematics rather than how to teach it. It was decided to exploit this market and so we devised a three year (six semester) course leading to the award of the Polytechnic's Diploma in Mathematical Studies. We used the name 'Mathematical Studies' to indicate that it included topics like Computer Studies and Statistics which many people would not have included in a course with the title 'Mathematics'. The name we 126

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chose then has stuck and we still use it to indicate a breadth of coverage of topics within the wide spectrum of the mathematical sciences. This course was the progenitor of the current MSc. The First Diploma In the words of the course booklet for 1977, the aims of the course were: 'to enable graduates or other persons with recognized qualifications to become: (i) (ii) (iii)

acquainted with the concepts; familiar with the techniques; and coherent in the presentation of mathematics.'

On completion of the course, it was intended that students 'will have reached a level of competence which will promote, in any aspect of life, an inquiring attitude to the subject, and in particular will be of value to teachers' (ibid.). The course was open to, 'any graduate, or other person with a recognized teaching qualification, who can demonstrate to the satisfaction of the course committee a sufficient basic knowledge of mathematics, and has a desire to advance his/her numeric skill'. This first diploma course consisted of the six modules mentioned above together with two more (one-semester) modules ( 2 hours per week) and a dissertation which was researched and written over the final three semesters in parallel with the taught modules. The modules were chosen to give wide coverage of many things mathematical and to ensure that those who took the course would feel comfortable with the whole school curriculum. The course was also to appeal to others. These two modules were offered in alternate years only and were taken by two cohorts simultaneously. The other modules were shared with the BEd. students. Thus we had the only part-time evening course in Northern Ireland in high level mathematics. Evaluation There were six annual intakes to this course averaging 11.8 per year. The first four cohorts produced twenty-one awards at diploma level and two awards at certificate level. This was a success rate of about 45 per cent, perhaps not as successful as we would have liked. The course was open to 'any graduate' with 'basic knowledge'. Consequently we recruited some non-mathematics graduates whose basic knowledge was just that - very basic! It was for people like this, and for others, who for one reason or another did not want to stick the pace for three years, that the Certificate in Mathematical Studies was introduced. This was to be awarded to people who successfully completed any five modules of the diploma. We recognized belatedly that the strain on students on a three year part-time course was considerable and increased with time. The certificate was a useful half-way stopping off point. To some extent this Diploma in Mathematical Studies was modelled on the Diploma in Mathematics offered by the Mathematics Association in the UK at that time. We were in competition with this and with Open University courses for students. We believe that we recruited those students who preferred face-to-face teaching rather than distance learning. 127

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Graduate teachers in Northern Ireland were given an extra (merit) increment on their salaries by their paymasters, the Department of Education for Northern Ireland (DENI). At the suggestion of an external examiner, we approached DENI and asked them to consider giving the same reward to holders of our Diploma. They agreed to this proposal and this proved to be a very attractive feature of the course. Furthermore DENI agreed to pay the fees of tenured teachers who attended the course. They saw it as a very useful means of enhancing the mathematical expertize of those teachers who needed in-service training in this respect. 1 983

The polytechnic conducted periodic reviews of its courses, and the Diploma and Certificate in Mathematical Studies came up for review in 1983. The in-service BEd. itself had been reviewed and the size of modules was standardized. This had an impact on the first two modules of the Diploma which were each 50 per cent longer than the others. We had recognized this and we were of the opinion that the very intensive nature of these first year modules contributed to the year one wastage. We had been trying to cover too much in the time available, and I think we are still (1996) trying to do this. So the first year, at least, required major surgery, and this would have knock-on effects on subsequent modules. Revisions to the Modules Calculus

The Calculus I module was perceived to be trying to do two things. On the one hand it was providing a mathematical foundation and on the other hand it was teaching students the abstract concepts of calculus even though it was uncertain that they had the mathematical maturity to cope with these. Indeed for this reason many otherwise suitable candidates for the course had to be counselled in a different direction prior to entry, particularly primary school teachers who, although wanting to know much more about mathematics, felt that they could not cope with the onslaught of calculus (Course Booklet, 1983). Hence it was decided to have a first year module called Mathematical Foundations which was at a pre-calculus level (two hours per week for a semester) and to hold the calculus to the second year. The Calculus II module was re-named Calculus and was rewritten to concentrate more on concepts than on algorithms. Some applications of calculus were shifted to the new module on Mathematical Modelling described below. Computer Studies

The second over-sized module in year one was Computer Studies and this also attracted major surgery as a result of significant changes in the computing environment of schools and colleges. In the mid-'seventies, computer programmes were processed in batch mode, and they were submitted to computer services, processed overnight and returned later. It was exceedingly difficult to cope with 128

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this in a one-night per week evening class. It was necessary to introduce, in addition, Saturday morning sessions to provide more teaching time and, lately, access to direct computer terminals. By the early 'eighties, technological advances made it possible for every school to have at least one computer to which students on the diploma and BEd. courses could have access almost every day. The computer studies course in the 1977 diploma was a mini A-Z course for beginners in computing. Those with some mathematical maturity and an enthusiasm for computing could teach the subject at a low level. But by 1983 this was no longer the case. Computer science in schools had advanced to a state that required specialists. Furthermore, computing was moving away from mathematics towards data processing and the like. A general course in computing was no longer the best course for a mathematics teacher to take. Also it was important not to lose sight of the fact that the computer is a powerful tool for dealing with numerical problems. Consequently a new module - Computing for Mathematics - was designed to occupy two hours per week for a semester. Mathematical Modelling As mentioned above, in the 'seventies there was a movement towards teaching abstract mathematics in schools and that this was a reason for including the module on Modern Algebra. This module also served a useful purpose in providing answers to some of the classical problems of mathematical antiquity. But by 1983 it was no longer flavour of the month. In 1982 a significance report was published which is even today having an effect on curriculum design in mathematics. This was the Cockcroft report, Mathematics Counts (Cockcroft, 1982), which made recommendations for major changes in the way in which, mathematics was taught. Not only was there to be exposition by the teacher and consolidation and practice of fundamental skills and routines by pupils, but there was also to be: • • • •

discussion between teacher and pupils and between pupils themselves; appropriate practical work; problem solving, including the application of mathematics to everyday situations; investigational work (Cockcroft, 1982: paragraph 243).

To a considerable extent these were new things for most teachers: the doing of them, the teaching of them and the assessing of them. Help was needed. About the same time (1983), mathematics courses in higher education in (at least) the polytechnics were introducing the idea of mathematical modelling — the art of the applied mathematician, his or her way of life. This brought a methodology to problem solving, to applying mathematics, and it also brought a particular philosophy to the study of mathematics - the concept of a model, how one is created, how one is used, how mathematics is involved. A course on mathematical modelling just had to be included in the diploma and so it was, to the exclusion of Modern Algebra. The content focused on the '3 Ms of Mathematics - Methods, Models and Modelling* and it embraced the idea that teachers should themselves experience any new activities in which they were planning to engage their pupils. This course would attempt to develop investigational 129

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and communication skills through group-based problem solving. Groups would carry out an investigation, write a report and give a presentation. Evaluation There were five annual intakes during this period. An average of 11.5 new students enrolled each year. About 11 per cent dropped out soon after enrolling and about 4 per cent were referred (or failed) in an assessment and some students took longer than planned to complete all the modules. About 60 per cent of the awards were diplomas and the rest were certificates. But enrolments were falling and there was clearly a need for revision. A survey of former students indicated that all of the modules scored 3.1 or higher (on a scale from 1-5) when asked if the modules were relevant to their work. Mathematical Modelling scored the highest mark of 4.5. Many of these students indicated that they would return to complete a master's degree if one were to be made available. External examiners made some helpful suggestions, such as dispensing with a written examination for the Computing and Mathematics course and using coursework only for assessment, and they commented on the demanding nature of the course. 1 988

There was another momentous change in 1984. The Ulster Polytechnic (with campuses at Jordanstown and Belfast) was merged with the New University of Ulster (NUU), with campuses at Coleraine and Magee College, Londonderry, to form the four campus University of Ulster (UU). Mathematicians from both institutions were thrown together into a Department of Mathematics. It was a bit like mixing chalk and cheese. The NUU staff offered fairly traditional undergraduate mathematics courses, were strongly interested in research in mathematics and sought to attract PhD students. There was no MSc. course. The Polytechnic staff offered mathematics in combined studies degrees, were less interested in research in mathematics but were active in innovative curriculum design and student learning in higher education. There was the diploma course. I was from the Polytechnic and I was appointed Head of Department. On the whole, there was goodwill and an earnest seeking of the best way forward together. A Master's Course

We wanted an MSc: other departments had master's programmes; market research indicated that ambitious members of the now (nearly) all graduate teaching profession wanted an master's degree for reasons of personal satisfaction or career development or both. But what sort of an MSc.? Others, particularly our computing colleagues in the faculty, were offering 'conversion' type MSc. degrees to graduates in other disciplines, and 'advanced' type MSc. degrees to graduates in the same discipline. We had a lively debate in the department, about what was best for mathematics! Some colleagues proposed a conversion type within mathematics. Mathematics is a very broad subject area and no undergraduate course covers it all. So, it was agreed, there was scope within mathematics itself to offer a conversion course. The MSc. could be postgraduate in time, in that only graduates could enrol, but the content could be found in undergraduate courses 130

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somewhere. It was not an 'advanced' course but it still contained substantial advanced mathematics in topics like probability, statistics, numerical analysis, and pure mathematics that would be accessible to students but which they were unlikely to have encountered in their undergraduate studies at whatever institutions in Northern Ireland they graduated from. It was agreed that the attributes of the course which made it a master's course were to be found in the dissertation and in the attitude and approach of the students to their studies. Some colleagues found the idea of awarding an MSc. for such a course very hard to accept and did not play any further part in the teaching of the course. Structure The master's degree was seen as the final stage of a suite of linked courses: • • •

Postgraduate Certificate in Mathematical Studies (1 year) Postgraduate Diploma in Mathematical Studies (1 year) MSc in Mathematical Studies (2 years).

In keeping with our new status of a university, they were now called postgraduate courses. There were four taught modules in each of the first three years (two per semester) and a dissertation was undertaken during the final year. Depending on previous achievements students could enter at the beginning of year one or year two or year three. They could exit after year 1 with the certificate or after year two with a diploma (provided they completed a short project as well as the four modules). By now the BEd and MSc had diverged so much that the link with the BEd was broken. We did, however, include two modules on mathematics education - a core module in the certificate year and an optional module in the diploma year. Mathematical education topics could be chosen for the diploma project or the master's dissertation. Furthermore we now had opportunities to offer the course in parts of Northern Ireland distant from Jordanstown. Hence it was decided to recruit intakes at Jordanstown and Coleraine in alternate years. This was to have implications for staff and for the curriculum. Philosophy A professional development course such as this one for mathematicians or mathematics teachers should embrace the following components: • • •

a refreshing or updating component to bring students up to date within their own areas of interest in mathematics; an upgrading component to introduce students to new areas of study within mathematics; a broadening component to enable students to see the development of mathematics within the context of related disciplines. (Course Booklet, 1988)

This, so called, 'Wisconsin' model of professional development (Fordham, 1985) suggests that each module of the course should satisfy at least one of the above objectives for any particular student. Each student comes with different 131

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mathematical knowledge and with varied experiences, so that what for one student may be a refreshing or updating unit may for another be an upgrading experience and for a third a broadening one. School teachers, in particular, need to develop their insights into mathematics by updating their present knowledge, extending it into new areas and broadening their understanding. Even for students who are refreshing their knowledge, a novel method of presentation might provide fresh insights. The course was marketed as a professional development course and so, to benefit fully from the course, students needed to have sufficient experience of teaching mathematics and of using it in their profession. They are mature students with a different attitude to education from to the average undergraduate student. They come with a wealth of individual experiences that can be shared with others on the course - the students themselves are a major resource. On the other hand, they are concerned to learn things that are of immediate relevance to themselves and so there has to be room for some negotiation of content with students. Entry and Progression Graduates in any discipline, who were teaching mathematics or who were going to have to teach it, and who had studied mathematics themselves to GCE 'O' level or GCSE higher levels, could be admitted to the certificate year. (The GCSE examinations replace the former 16+ examinations known as GCE 'O' levels.) Those who successfully completed the certificate could progress to the diploma year where they could be joined by mathematics graduates entering directly. The content of the diploma year's curriculum was directed towards the study and teaching of GCE A-level mathematics. Those who successfully completed the diploma could proceed to the master's course where they could be joined by students who had obtained the diploma in a previous year and, exceptionally, by graduates who were granted direct entry to the taught year of the master's course. This idea of a linked suite of courses allowing progression through to a master's degree was very attractive to students. It had worked well in Computer Science Education, which was a similarly structured course also on offer at Jordanstown and various provincial out-centres. But it presented problems for some students. Even with directed reading during the long vacation after year one or after year two, the jump in mathematical sophistication required was just too high for some students to attain. They left with the lower qualification, but with a keen sense of disappointment at having their ambitions of a master's degree thwarted. Distance Learning As mentioned above, it had been decided to try to make these courses available in venues distant from the home location at Jordanstown, so some of us made the weekly journey to Coleraine to deliver our course. Now, most of the time mathematics is taught by demonstration. A question is worked through, line by line, on the blackboard. Mathematical notation is a very powerful shorthand, but it has to be unpacked; ideas which are connected in the mind of the lecturer need to have the connections carefully detailed. To do this we have traditionally used a large writing board and we have found chalk boards to be better than white boards because one tends to write more slowly with chalk than with a felt tip pen. We use lots of writing space on which to do our demonstrations. 132

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At this time the university was developing video conferencing facilities and I decided to try to deliver some of my lectures to students at Coleraine from my base at Jordanstown. We had problems right away trying to match the available video technology to the use of a large blackboard. We were using slow scan TV and had cameras which would transmit a picture of a talking head or a view of a page. It was not possible to use a large writing board because there wasn't one in the video conferencing room. There were no camera operators and the technicians were only available within normal working hours. I experimented with two schemes: •

•

First I prepared overhead projector transparencies (OHTs) of my lectures, to transmit one page at a time as I talked students through the mathematics. It was possible to write comments on an OHT in answer to queries, but the main disadvantage was that previous pages were 'gone* and could not readily be consulted alongside later pages, as would have been the case (at least for pages close to one another) on a writing board. To overcome this I copied the OHTs and mailed them to the students on the other campus; Secondly I tried to focus the talking head camera on a flip chart rather than my face, but again there was the problem of space - only one page at a time.

The Open University, of course, has tackled this problem very successfully, but I think I learned more about things not to try than anything else. There was only one intake ever (in 1990) on the Coleraine campus. After that the numbers wanting to enrol on campuses other than Jordanstown were too small to be viable. Some of these students made the long trek to Jordanstown to attend the course there. It would have been more satisfactory for these students if we had had suitable technology for distance teaching. We have given up on this idea for the time being but will return to it when the technology improves. Evaluation Table 12.1: Student entry and awards for cohorts entering in 1989, 1990 and 1991 Entry level

Total numbers

Cert.

47

Dip.

20

MSc.

1

Award Cert.

Dip.

MSc.

Withdrew

21

12

5

9

7

10

3

1

Over the period from 1988 to the next major review in 1993, an average of 16 students per year enrolled on the certificate course. Forty-five per cent gained the certificate, 25 per cent gained the diploma, 11 per cent gained a master's and 19 per cent fell by the wayside. Those students who progressed were joined in the diploma year by an average of seven students per year. Of these 35 per cent gained the 133

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diploma, 50 per cent gained a master's and 15 per cent withdrew. In addition one student entered the master's directly and succeeded. Generally withdrawals happened before examinations were completed (and so, in a sense, the students had not failed), and were generally because it was recognized by the students that they had gone as far as they could or that the course was not for them. 1 993

The Faculty of Education wanted to withdraw their input to the course and so we entered into a partnership with Stranmillis College, one of the colleges of Education in Belfast. Stranmillis was trying hard to earn money from whatever source and it seemed reasonable to strike a deal with us. The certificate year was restructured and called the Postgraduate Certificate in Mathematics for Teachers. It was believed that teachers needed and wanted help with National Curriculum mathematics more than anything else. Four modules were devised, dealing with, Number and Algebra; Shape, Space and Measure; Data Handling; and Communication and Computing in Mathematics. The link with the diploma was broken and a further bridging module was required before progressing students could be accepted into the diploma. The diploma course continued with a project for those not progressing to the master's and four further modules, namely, Mathematical Modelling; Introduction to Statistics; Calculus; and Introduction to Numerical Methods. Eight further modules were designed for those proceeding to the master's, of which four would be offered, depending on majority student choice and staff availability. In addition, master's students would do a 20,000 word dissertation in the final year of the course. Evaluation This suite of courses has not yet operated for a quinquennium, but things are changing very quickly and it is intended to make changes a year early. First of all, the Certificate in Mathematics for Teachers only attracted one cohort, in the first year, 1993. Perhaps the demand we anticipated was not there, or, more likely, it was being met by other providers in different ways. Moreover, in future teachers taking the Certificate will not automatically have their fees paid and in-service funds will be given directly to schools to purchase whatever they deem appropriate. The future for our courses is uncertain at the moment and may depend on teachers obtaining finance from their schools, or paying their own fees. Secondly, the master's modules were proving to be inaccessible to some students even though they had crossed the progression hurdles we had set. We are still trying to decide what are the causes of this and how best to deal with it. Thirdly we have developed our own expertise in mathematics education and, while it has always been possible to select an educational topic for the dissertation, we are planning to offer a master's module in this topic. Finally, other master's courses in the faculty are shorter than ours and there is pressure from within to bring all these postgraduate courses into a common structure. At the time of writing it is not clear just what this will be like.

134

Mathematical Studies in Northern Ireland CONCLUSION

This chapter has traced the development of the part-time master's course in Mathematical Studies at the University of Ulster. Major influences on the structure and content of the course have been the mathematics curriculum in schools and universities, and the needs of school teachers, their thirst for knowledge and their desire for a higher degree. The development and use of IT has also been a strong influence. Now graphics calculators are used extensively and numerical mathematics examinations are held in computing laboratories. The need for us, as providers, to develop a range of qualifications in keeping with learners' aspirations and needs has combined with these other factors to drive a story of continuous, and continuing, change. Our coursework postgraduate provision has been far from static. Unsurprisingly, in such circumstances, there have been internal conflicts about content and standards. Their resolution has largely been through the pragmatic interplay of the expertise and interests of those staff teaching on the programme with the opportunities and pressures in the educational setting of Northern Ireland. So, the course is currently a 'conversion-type MSc. within mathematics', postgraduate in time. Yet, it is nevertheless a demanding and stimulating course and some of the dissertations contain original research worthy of publication. Conversion courses, it can be inferred from this evidence, can lead learners to mastery at a level that is more advanced than the undergraduate level, even though they may enter the programme with competence that is not even at undergraduate level. The important thing is to plan the master's programme with progression very much in mind, so that it leads learners to progressively greater understandings. For those who are unable to complete the MSc. programme for academic or other reasons, Diploma and Certificate awards have been available. It is of the greatest importance that part time courses for adult learners are presented at a time and place when and where students can attend. We have experimented with a visual distance learning technology with some success, but the geographical spread of students sometimes inhibits satisfactory group work. In addition, it is of the utmost importance to design a course that is accessible and attainable in the mode and time available. These, at least, have been our experiences. In the past students who were tenured schoolteachers found it relatively easy to obtain funding from their employer to take the course, and they have benefited afterwards through a salary increment or a promotion. There is still a small but strong desire in Northern Ireland for a master's course in mathematics. It has been an interesting experience for us who delivered the course. We learnt about adult education 'on the job'. Some of us managed to imagine ourselves in our students' shoes, but some did not manage this and caused some problems through treating their class as if they were undergraduates. At the time of writing the future is somewhat uncertain in terms of funding for the course, but that is a problem for tomorrow. Today I am going to join this year's class at their graduation ceremony and at their barbecue afterwards.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I acknowledge with thanks the help of my colleagues, H.A. Donegan, I.R. Taylor and T.G. Webb, who have all served as Senior Course Tutor for these courses and who gave me access to original course documents.

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Chapter 13 Building Interdisciplinary

Teams On-line in Rural Health Care Joann Kovacich, Cristanna Cook, Vincent Pelletier and Shirley Weaver

A case could be made for saying that academics have not fully appreciated the ways in which information technology will revolutionize higher education. This book is the product of Internet communication, authors meeting only through Email contact. Contributors to a recent collection on higher education (Tait and Knight, 1996), speak of 'the virtual university' and discuss the world-wide web as a learning resource. Within twenty years there may be fewer universities, operating globally and marked more by their electronic sites than by their physical locations. Master's programmes are prime candidates for early transformation through the application of the new technologies. In this chapter, Joann Kovacich and colleagues describe a pioneering approach to the use of information technology to meet the needs of a geographically dispersed group of practitioners. What is striking is the extent to which this technology supports the pedagogies that have been repeatedly advocated by other contributors to this book. Perhaps here we can see hints of future developments, where the Internet not only supports formal master's programmes but also becomes the normal medium for continuing, largely informal, professional learning. That thought could give rise to far more radical speculations. If Internetbased learning communities emerge, predicated upon the concept of life-long professional learning, will there continue to be either a need or a demand for formal master's programmes? Does global electronic communication pave the way for needs-driven, just-in-time professional learning that has a direct impact on practice? Kovacich and colleagues make no such claims but it is possible to read this chapter and wonder whether the programme they describe presages the end of the university as most of us know it. Integration of knowledge is as critical to the understanding of our world as the discovery of new knowledge. In fact, the extension of specialization requires new forms of integration. We need scholars who can synthesize, look for new relationships between the parts and the whole, relate the past and the future to the present, and ferret out patterns of meaning that cannot be seen through traditional disciplinary lenses (Blaisdell, 1993, p. 57). 137

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INTRODUCTION Blaisdell's argument, written in response to growing discipline-specific graduate programmes preparing new generations of college and university faculty, is just as applicable to professional education in general. Not only do scholars need to integrate knowledge and skills from a variety of disciplines, so do career professionals hoping to compete and survive as individuals on the one hand, and to serve better public and private interests on the other, in an ever rapidly changing socio-cultural, economic, and political environment. Interdisciplinary perspectives and skills are needed to address the macro- and micro-complexities of everyday experiences. Interdisciplinary learning requires receptivity, flexibility and new thinking models. In addition, transformative learning (learning which leads to changes in attitudes, belief, values and behaviours) requires critical thinking, communicative learning (learning through communication with others in a social context to acquire bonds of mutual understanding), and self-reflection, leading to explanatory hypotheses or abduction (Josephson and Josephson, 1994; Cranton, 1996). The explanatory hypotheses can then be further reflected upon and transformed with the acquisition of new information and knowledge. Situated within a service learning model (service learning is a set of structured learning experiences developed in collaboration with communities), interdisciplinary and critical thinking training, and education itself become meaningful through the integration of theory and praxis. Service learning therefore requires direct community involvement in the identification of needs and types of service to meet those needs. Since learning is extended beyond the lecture hall, students apply knowledge in real-world situations in partnership with communities. This chapter is guided by the philosophical premise that interdisciplinary training of health care professionals is not only desirable but essential to quality rural health care practice (Lecca and McNeil, 1976; Gordon et al., 1992). It will describe the design, redesign and evaluation of an interdisciplinary, master's level training programmes for allied health professionals in rural Maine. Institutional and learning style barriers will be addressed throughout. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of future plans incorporating our own transformative learning. INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND TRADITIONAL MODES OF CONTENT DELIVERY Interdisciplinary health professions training allows for the expansion of health care expertise beyond the single provider. In addition, interdisciplinary teaming establishes a communication system to mediate against isolation. Interdisciplinary health care teams promote retention and lay the foundation for wellco-ordinated interventions from a group of specialized health professionals (Health Professions Reauthorization Act, 1988). The Maine Interdisciplinary Training for Health Care for Rural Areas (ITHCRA) Project is one of nineteen federally-funded programmes in the United States geared towards improving access, quality and delivery of rural health care through multi-level, innovative interdisciplinary team education and training activity. In general, courses developed to introduce health professions students to the discovery of multiple disciplines often rely on traditional lecture and recitation 138

Building Interdisciplinary Teams On-Line in Rural Health Care

models of teaching to present fundamental definitions of rural, interdisciplinary team concepts, and communication skills. Lecture presentation, discussions, fictitious case studies and use of role play in a traditional classroom setting where students gather in a teacher-centred learning environment are typical. Development of interpersonal communication skills to participate in a stereotypical team (direct face-to-face interaction around a table at a given place and time to 'discuss the client(s) needs') is usually emphasized. Examples of goal-oriented health care professionals within a particular organizational structure, such as a hospital-based interdisciplinary geriatric team or an interdisciplinary paediatric team, are portrayed as both standard and desired team models. Course evaluations in Maine on graduate training using the above model taught by either a team or a single faculty member demonstrated that students did, in fact, increase their understanding of the roles and functions of other practitioners, and that they did acquire some team communication skills. Unfortunately, the courses were divorced from 'real world' rural health care practice and settings. In reality, few, if any, graduates working in rural settings find themselves in organizations which have an interdisciplinary team, encourage interdisciplinary teams and consensus decision-making, and/or have the resources to develop a traditional face-to-face interdisciplinary team. Population density, local income structures and economies, and epidemiological community profiles do not justify concentrations of multiple health care specialities. In addition, semi-structured, open-ended interviews with rural health care providers revealed a wide range of interdisciplinary definitions and practices. Some health care settings defined interdisciplinary teaming as medical generalists/specialists consultation and/or physician/nurse practitioner interaction. Others incorporated the whole community, drawing upon geographically dispersed community health service organizations such as Visiting Nurse Services, the regional hospital, the Area Agency on Ageing, Community Action Programmes, etc., as well as the local police force to transport clients, schools for consumer education, and the community residents themselves. Decision-making within health care settings ranged from strict hierarchical ordering with defined chains of command and established sets of rules and procedures, to inter-institutional collaborative arrangements fostering consensus building. Clearly, the traditional classroom model did not address the real world of health care practice in rural Maine. Structure and content were often in direct opposition to experiential learning and clinical apprenticeships. In addition, the original interdisciplinary training could not overcome the limits imposed by the academic and health care accreditation organizations. Varying discipline-specific academic schedules of health professions education programmes within and among institutions further limit student participation in interdisciplinary education opportunities. In the struggle to meet discipline-specific requirements, interdisciplinary education is not highly valued. Interdisciplinary competence and mastery generally is not rewarded in higher education institutions, as is evident in the operation of the procedures whereby faculty (academic staff) seek tenured status. Faculty and, subsequently, their students are not rewarded for collaboration. Instead of equipping faculty and students with new tools for empowerment, interdisciplinary training left people vulnerable and frustrated by exposing professions to new possibilities outside of any potential for the realization or application of new found knowledge and skills. Interdisciplinary training was internalized as alternative to, rather than embedded in, present praxis. Last, but not least, the 139

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original interdisciplinary training sequence failed to contextualize content within current Federal and State health care reform initiatives, leaving students ignorant of the interrelationship of macro- and micro-policies. 'NEW WINE IN NEW SKINS': REDEFINITION, REDESIGN AND EMPOWERMENT In order to provide health care professions students with relevant rural practice skills (Brown et al., 1989; Cervero and Wilson, 1994), practical knowledge (Giddens, 1979), and to accommodate discipline-specific academic schedules and programme needs, the graduate interdisciplinary training was redesigned through the employment of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Current Federal, State, and University of Maine, system-wide initiatives include electronic health care coalitions; distance education; reform of health professions regulation so as to promote cross-training and interdisciplinary training; and the use of communication technology to address health care delivery in rural areas. To be consistent with these policy changes the present interdisciplinary programme offers a twosemester, six credit graduate training sequence using problem-based learning; real case scenarios; service learning; and the 'information superhighway* to discuss, analyse and disseminate content material. The first semester concentrates on developing computer literacy, a language of commonality, and interdisciplinary team skills. The second semester focuses on the collaborative development and execution of community-based student interdisciplinary team projects, and on fostering leadership skills. Students concentrating on communication disorders, human development, nursing, nutrition, occupational therapy, physical therapy, psychology, special education, and social work are invited to participate in a prerequisite two-day intensive session before the university semester officially begins. Because the University of Maine system has no medical school, there are no medical students participating at this time. However, future plans to enable other academic institutions to take part in the 'electronic classroom* will allow for the inclusion of medical students, faculty and providers. During the all-day sessions, students meet one another, as well as the faculty and professionals who serve as on-line resources. The dynamics of electronic communication, as opposed to verbal communication, are discussed and students get hands-on training in the use of: electronic mail, computer conferencing, bulletin boards and the World Wide Web; various computer based information programmes (Grateful Med, Medline, Expanded Academic Index, Carl Uncover, etc.); and a computer mapping programme (Arcview) that is used to explore the relationship between geographical information systems and health care planning. Instruction in problem-based learning is given, as well as criteria for team roles and functions. Students are also shown a computer generated presentation contextualizing the present training within the overall federal programme initiative; comparing and contrasting definitions of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary theory and practice; and, exploring definitions of team. Different team models are discussed after showing a video of three Maine rural health care settings. The stereotypical face-to-face team is presented as only one model with limited functionality in rural settings. Other definitions include geographically and discipline dispersed networks. Students are invited to begin to 140

Building Interdisciplinary Teams On-Line in Rural Health Care

think about the possibility of creating 'electronic teams'. Before students depart, they are introduced to a technical consultant who will travel to their homes by appointment to help them establish appropriate and efficient connectivity to the Internet. To help defray technology learning costs, students (ranging from firsttime users to advanced users) are given a modest stipend. 'Class meetings' proceed via electronic mail and computer conferencing. Faculty and technological consultation are provided in the same manner. Two Saturday morning informal discussion sessions are conducted to enhance group solidarity and collegiality by means of two-way audio and video interactive television. The newer CMC teaching/learning medium allows for increased participation from students living in remote rural areas, through the availability of personal computers with modems and/or computer access through the University of Maine System Education Network available throughout the State. Learning objectives are based on 'a constructivist theory of learning and instruction that emphasizes the real-world complexity and ill-structuredness of many knowledge domains' (Spiro et al., 1995, p. 85; Thompson, 1995) and the social construction of knowledge (Resnick, 1988; Brown et al., 1989; Henri and Kaye, 1993). A holistic approach, acknowledgement of diversity, critical thinking, decision-making, team collaboration and self-evaluation (Entwistle, 1991; Garrison, 1992) are features of this approach. The use of CMC allows for many-tomany communication, place and time independence, HyperText and hypermedia (Harasim, 1987,1990), and enables learner-content interaction, learner-facilitator interaction, and learner-learner interaction (Moore, 1993). Thus, through CMC flexible, creative and purposeful learning interactions are constructed that promote active self-directed learning, knowledge building, and collective problemsolving. Comprehension and meaning are most successfully developed where learners engage with the content material to process information at their own pace in conjunction with what they already know and have experienced (Bourdieu, 1977; Ruby, 1982). During the first on-line semester, students are given reading material on health informatics, paradigms, communication, and rurality (the social, cultural, economic, and political context of rural health care practice). Using a reading guide, students are required to post summaries of articles and pose stimulating questions and/or comments for discussion. Other students then respond online. The advantage of a '24-hour classroom' is the ability to digest and reflect on the material at leisure, consulting and incorporating outside resource material into their response (Gledhill and Dudley, 1988; Hiltz, 1990). For many health care professions students, knowledge of other disciplines and their potential contributions to interdisciplinary health care delivery is limited, as is their understanding of rural environments, macro- and micro-policies, and computer technology. Figure 13.1 shows the on-line course outline as it appears on personal computer screens. Students and teaching staff post messages and discussions under each of the topics. In this way, students can revisit summaries, information, and discussions at 'different times, in rearranged contexts, for different purposes' (Spiro et al., 1995, p. 94) to acquire a fuller understanding. As a result of intertextuality (the construction of messages that include parts of other posted messages or that refer to other posted messages) multi-stranded and/or parallel discussions can emerge (McCarthy et al., 1992), reflecting real-world complexity.

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Figure 13.1: The Electronic Classroom look jump print add find display expand_outline shrink_outline voyage restore topic create workarea users options mail quit help HELPdook): View topic, select with up/down arrows, ENTER to view, ESC returns INT528 - Interdisciplinary Rural Health Care Delivery 1(K #2184) Welcome #2199 (0) Neriquette #2200 (0) Intro, to Maine ACCESS #2201 (0) + Health #2202 (0) Disease #2203 (0) Illness #2204 (0) Primary Care #2205 (0) Team #2206 (0) Rural #2207 (0) Course Description #2208 (0) Syllabus #2209 (0) Resources #2210 (0) People #2211 (0) Electronic Resource List #2212 (0) Students #2213 (0) Bulletin Board #2214 (0) Tech Talk #2215 (0) HEALTH INFORMATICS #2216 (0) Summary/Discussion of Readings #2217 (0) Health Care Models #2218 (0) Roadmap #2219 (0) PARADIGMS #2220 (0) Summary/Discussion #2260 (0) The Allied Health Professions #2261 (0) Individual Paradigms #2262 (0) Roadmap #2263 (0) COMMUNICATION #2221 (0) Roadmap #2272 (0) Question/Discussion #2273 (0) RURALITY #2222 (0) Professional Roles #2265 (0) Question/Discussion #2274 (0) Roadmap #2275 (0) CASE 1 #2223 (0) Team Assignments #2285 (0) + Team 1 #2286 (0) Team 2 #2287 (0) Team 3 #2288 (0) Team 4 #2289 (0) Summary/Questions #2299 (0) Roadmap #2300 (0) CASE 2 #2224 (0) Confidential #2225 (0)

Asynchronous E-mail, computer conferencing and synchronous computer 'chatting' allow for communicative learning. The exchange of new ideas and perspectives breaks down stereotypes and encourages proactive and critical thinking. By sharing and constructing knowledge in the reassessment of information, noting commonalities and differences, interdisciplinary health care teams become empowered. By building and empowering 'electronic teams', learners come to see how inefficiencies in health care practice (as when several professionals independently take details of a client's case history) can be reduced as teams learn to draw upon and utilize each member's expertise to meet the needs of the patient/client. 142

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Engaged in collective problem-solving, the electronic interdisciplinary team develops collaborative, networking, information gathering and assessment skills. Synergistic insights and solutions are arrived at through confrontation and discussion of misconceptions and ineffective strategies (Brown et a/., 1989). In addition, an on-line community of inquiry or peer learning community is created addressing rural provider isolation and retention (Brookfield, 1993). BUILDING ELECTRONIC TEAMS Figure 13.2: Structure of Semester 1

Electronic Team Building - First Semester (Setting the Stage)

Tumi

Teams

1

1

2 3

2

3 4

4

Case 2

Casel

a) Establising common language through assigned readings, summaries, and discussions b) Learning the technology.

Group Discussion of: a) Casel

Final Group Discussion.

b) Effective use of technology c) Team building and team roles.

After students have engaged in discussion of reading materials and proactive assignments designed to generate personal and discipline-specific reflection, they are assigned to one of four teams (see Figure 13.2). Teams use problem-based learning in their discussions of Veal-life' rural Maine cases written by a team of interdisciplinary health professions faculty and one fiction writer. For instance, the first case focuses on an elderly male patient living in one of the most rural counties in the State and belonging to a State recognized ethnic group. The second reflects the needs of children with disabilities. Each team is composed of members representing different health care professions. Students within the four teams are assigned team roles: leader, process facilitator and feedback evaluator. The CMC technology is used for the closing team case study discussions. During this case study work, Team 1 participants can see only the sub-topic Team 1 on their screens; Team 2 can see only the sub-topic Team 2; and so on. Faculty and other resource persons are available to all teams as on-line consultants. Case related letters, reports, and dialogues that provide different information from a variety of 143

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health care professionals are available to each team on-line. Teams are required to reach a consensus after discussion noting their reasoning for choosing a particular letter, report and/or dialogue, which is then electronically released. Teams are ideally given four weeks per case. At the end of that time, all team conferences are unlocked so that every student has access to all the team discussions. This allows for comparisons of health care planning among the different teams and prompts a renewed discussion of possible case solutions, thereby giving opportunity to revisit dominant course themes in new contexts for an enriched understanding of the material. Teams that did not do as well as others must seek reasons for any communication failures but are discouraged from blaming the technology itself always an easy target. The message becomes clear: if communication has not taken place face-to-face, it will not take place on-line. Technology is simply a medium for communication but not communication itself. CMC offers a new way of thinking about networking, collaboration and the definition of interdisciplinary health care teams in rural areas. In this way the structured use of new communication media carries its own message about the meaning of'interdisciplinary'- to help change the way health professionals think about their own roles and to build a teamwork attitude for the future. SERVICE LEARNING Service learning combines community service with academic preparation and reflection allowing for greater understanding and more meaningful learning (Cohen, 1994; Buchen, 1995). During the second semester of the interdisciplinary on-line training, students engage in the electronic discussion of their regional projects based on community assessment and multidisciplinary health professions focus groups. Last year, the following regional projects were conducted: A Computer-based Delivery System for Parenting Information; On-line to Self-help: A Postpartum Depression Electronic Support Group; and Remote Hearing Diagnosis: Evaluation and Assessment in Remote Settings (EARS). This year's projects include: a World Wide Web-based searchable health professions and practice resource guide with interactive clickable map available to consumers and providers (Hancock Healthsource); a system design for computermediated transfer of nutrition information (Island Net-ting); an on-line confidential self-help group for first-year college students experiencing depression (Cyberhope); and a computer survey of chronic pain attitudes of multidisciplinary providers (C-Scamp). Each project explores the potential use of health informatics (information and communication technologies) to address community needs. A positive and unexpected outcome of the students' projects is the impact of these interactions on faculty and on-site providers. The technology itself re-enforces the need for interdisciplinary training in the broadest sense, since health care professionals, instructional designers, software and hardware technicians, and consumers must all work together as a team to achieve the desired outcomes. EVALUATION AND BARRIERS Students are given a battery of instruments to assess learning styles, computer literacy, content knowledge, and team skills. The last three instruments were all designed specifically for the course by the authors of this chapter. Students are 144

Building Interdisciplinary Teams On-Line in Rural Health Care

also assessed on their on-line performance as well as on a combination of papers, projects and personal electronic journals. Content and thematic analysis reveals an increased understanding and appreciation of the roles and functions of different health care providers. For example, in one case study, one team initially opted to neglect the Occupational Therapist's (OT) report before even viewing it, rationalizing that they had all the information they needed to provide a care plan for the particular patient under discussion. Subsequently, after reading the OTs report, they found it to be the most helpful. Clearly, their original stance was due to a lack of understanding of what an OT does and therefore a dismissal of that profession's contribution. For the second case study the team read the OTs report first. All students gained a greater understanding of the special nature of rural settings that was exhibited in their use of topographical and road maps, census data and health statistics data. Although students were given the opportunity to enact different team roles (leader, process facilitator, and feedback person) results indicate that students still have difficulty comprehending and taking on different roles. This could be due to their having insufficient time to explore each role. This will need to be addressed in the future design of the course. Whereas most students identified themselves as beginner or novice computer users at the beginning of the course, with little or no Internet experience, all students demonstrated an increase in computer proficiency and literacy. However, students who are able to integrate with the academic requirements of being a distance education student also fare better (Kember et al., 1991). Academic accommodation is defined by a positive impression of the course, active questioning in learning, interest in learning for learning's sake, and finding pleasure in reading. Incompatibility with distance education, the opposite of academic accommodation, is defined as negative impressions, interest in the course from extrinsic motivation only (for the qualification it provides), and a surface approach to learning (emphasis upon memorization). Students needed about four weeks to become comfortable with the electronic medium, the 'pace' of self-directed learning, and course background materials. Within each discussion topic or on-line activity, students exhibited different behaviours: asking questions, giving information, providing commentary, exhibiting emotion, and providing personal experiences (see Table 13.1). In any one discussion, several types of behaviours might be expressed. The high percentage of the entries devoted to comment and commentary, most of which were oriented to the assigned readings and Case 1, provide evidence that the course indeed encouraged problem-oriented communication. Table 13.1: Behaviour types in on-line communication Behaviour Comment/commentary Give information Exhibit emotion Ask question Personal experiences Test of upload Empty entries* Total

Number* of Communication* 359 177 166 148 20 13 6 889

Percentage 40 20 19 17 2 1 <1

* Students' attempts to upload data to the on-line system as well as abortive attempts at communication are recorded as empty entries. 145

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Figure 13.3: The Interaction of Different Ways of Knowing in Professional Learning

"Ways of Knowing" Relevant to Professions Training

Problem-

Based Learning

Lecture &

Apprenticeship

Recitation

Approximately 7 per cent of all entries questioned the clarity of course procedures. Students needed to be reminded of the process orientation of problembased learning and their self-confidence sometimes needed to be affirmed through private E-mail, phone calls and face-to-face office visits whenever they faced task oriented deadlines in their other courses. In the fifteen-week semester, midterm and final examinations in other academic courses had negative impacts on the interdisciplinary training sequence. At those times in particular, students subjectively experienced the interdisciplinary training course as 'poorly structured' and 'confusing*, in comparison to highly structured lecture and recitation classes with weekly assignments and/or highly structured clinical apprenticeships. Tensions arose when students found conflict between the learning approach inherent in this course, and other familiar approaches (Figure 13.3 portrays the different modes of knowledge acquisition in which students are involved). Whereas problem-based learning is process oriented and requires self-directed, self-reflective and collaborative learning, students are more familiar and comfortable with technical knowledge derived through empirical-analytical methodologies and delivered through lecture and recitation. For example, nursing programmes historically exclude any demonstration of how the students reason their way to an answer or what judgements they use to follow a pathway to assess, analyse and implement care. Instead students are expected to recall facts, figures, and numbers. For students engaged in clinical rotations, acquisition of knowledge is obtained through seeing and doing — experiential knowledge. As one nurse practitioner student commented on her clinical: 'You learn by touch .. . Your fingers have memory.' Given time to digest, process and reflect, students would see that different ways of knowing are 146

Building Interdisciplinary Teams On-Line in Rural Health Care

complementary. Antagonism is artificially created by academic and institutional organizations and structure that impose a restricted time-table (the fifteen-week semester with embedded holidays and vacation weeks), credits (hours needed to complete a graduate programme), and tools for assessment (the need to give grades). As challenging as students perceived the interdisciplinary training sequence to be, they also found it incredibly rewarding as they engaged in service learning experiences. Through presentation of their findings at a state-wide conference and articles submitted for publication, students felt that they had made, and have the potential to make, valuable contributions. 'TAKING THE VIRTUAL MOUNTAIN TO MOHAMMED': REDESIGN PLANS CMC is a tool for discussion, brainstorming, problem-solving, consensus-building, collaboration and delivery of continuing education. But more importantly, CMC enables learning methods that are embedded in authentic situations [which] are not merely useful;... [but] essential' (Brown, et a/., 1989). The true power of CMC is its ability to transcend time, place and information inequities to empower health care professionals to design and develop interdisciplinary teams to best meet patient and community needs. In order to address present institutional, structural and content barriers and to increase the complementarity of different modes of knowledge acquisition, the redesign of the primarily DOS/text-based interdisciplinary education delivery will focus on extended use of hypermedia technologies that allow for the creation of learning modules. Learning modules have the advantage of being self-contained and transportable for use in a variety of curricula. The standardized look and feel' of these new applications makes for ease of use for computer novices. Programs available in CD-ROM format as well as on the World Wide Web, will enhance the concentration on an interdisciplinary approach to patient care through the incorporation of video and audio material. Case study multi-media movies will be developed in the CD-ROM format. They will show how the interdisciplinary team-based approach is used to improve health care and prevention of disease in rural settings. Hitherto, shadowing and interdisciplinary clinical opportunities have been elusive, due to limited rural resources as well as to institutional accreditation practices. Hypermedia materials will 'take the mountain to Mohammed'. Users will be able to explore the roles of each health care professions team member, fostering an in-depth understanding and illustrating how different mid-level and allied health professions work together. The cases, developed and enacted by a team of clinical preceptors, supervisors, faculty members, and patient/clients will be *reaT rural Maine cases and contain elements of cultural and rural diversity. All cases will be structured to familiarize health care professions providers and students with local and regional resources. The advantage of creating hypermedia materials is that they can be linked together multiple ways at various times. Hypermedia designed cases can be incorporated in regular discipline-specific instruction. For example, a case featuring a patient/client with multiple disabilities can easily demonstrate the role and function of a speech therapist, audiologist, nurse practitioner, occupational therapist, etc. The case can be shown in discipline-specific classes as well as re-visited in the 147

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interdisciplinary training sequence. Multiple uses of material reinforce interdisciplinary perspectives, communicative learning, critical thinking, and self-reflection, leading to transformative learning and enhanced preparation for service learning. By developing hypermedia learning modules, interdisciplinary team training and content can be introduced throughout and among discipline-specific programme curricula thereby attenuating subjectively perceived knowledge acquisition contradictions, and structural barriers to understanding the complexity of interdisciplinary work. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This chapter was supported by Grant No. 2 D36 AH11000 from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Public Health Service (PHS), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), and Bureau of Health Professions (BHPr). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the DHHS, PHS, HRSA, or BHPr. The authors would like to acknowledge the support, critical assessment, comments and suggestions of Sue Ashley, Diana Bremer, Keryellen McCleod, Marianne Steinhacker, and Carol Wood. The authors would also like to thank the Lakehead University International Summer Institute for providing the setting and challenging atmosphere where many of our ideas and designs were created. Lastly, thanks to Marianne Steinhacker, Carol Wood and all the students who have participated in the interdisciplinary training project thus far. Any errors are the sole responsibility of the authors.

148

Chapter 14 Conclusion: Diversity, Markets, Regulation and Equity Peter T. Knight

This chapter returns to the theme of diversity, but where earlier chapters have assumed that diversity is inevitable and valuable, here that assumption is examined more critically. Is diversity a cloak for low standards? What of the quality of master's degrees - how is it monitored and how is it enhanced? It is argued that such questions need to be addressed, partly on grounds of national interest but also, and arguably more importantly, as a matter of consumer protection. Lastly, it is suggested that issues of equity in access to master's degrees also need to be investigated, for fear that this new passport to professional advancement is, in practice, being restricted to the better off in society. The underlying claim is that this book has raised a number of curriculum, teaching and learning issues that need to be researched but it would be unfortunate if research did not also examine key moral and policy issues that attach to the burgeoning of master's programmes. PRESSURES TO QUESTION QUALITY I came across a young undergraduate called Weltschmerz at breakfast in a cafe next to the University of Ottawa. She is a cartoon character in a student-type newspaper. This strip was entitled 'Mission Impossible'. Her mission, should she choose to accept it, is to find a job. But even at Tim Morton's, a fast food chain, competition from master's graduates meant that 'my degree in social work didn't put me top of the list'. One Canadian academic went further and told me that a master's 'is the first degree now'. In both cases there is exaggeration - the Harris Report (1996) suggest that postgraduates have lower unemployment rates in England than do graduates - but one significant point stands. Coursework master's courses have proliferated in the old industrialized countries and signs are that the same is happening in industrializing countries. It is as though the 'Diploma Disease', Dora's term for the increasing pursuit in developing countries of ever higher-status school certificates (1976), has spread to higher education in the western world. As the number of master's graduates grows, a cachet is being lost and unemployment is becoming a more common outcome of master's level study. Given the structural weaknesses of western economies, and notwithstanding the remarkable, recent improvement in the US economy, this is perhaps inevitable. Some areas - fine art, philosophy, and ancient languages - have long found that degrees, at whatever level, do not have the highest exchange and use 149

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value on the labour markets. However, the retreat from welfarism - that is to say from the idea that the state should take responsibility for making good deficiencies in the life circumstances of needy people - has also had the effect of reducing job opportunities for graduates in education, social work and public administration, to name but three. Moreover, the application of management techniques such as re-engineering and de-layering have cut the number of jobs at the middle management levels that are the obvious destinations of master's graduates. To compound matters, the demographic structure means that the "baby boomers' are cluttering up these levels and, unless they are forced out, will continue to do so for some years yet. So, although master's graduates have better employment chances than do bachelor's students (and that may simply be because they are more academically proficient in the first place) the proliferation of master's places in times when the terms of trade are moving against graduates means that questions that might formerly have been treated as peripheral become more important to those who do not follow a Victorian laissez faire approach to social and moral issues. Consequently, there is a powerful moral reason for asking whether all those students who pay to get a master's degree1 are getting good value for money. Moreover, since states do finance some of the costs of master's level work, albeit indirectly, there is also a question to be asked about the wisdom of governmental funding for any given master's programme. Lastly, the value for money issue might be approached from the point of view of employers. Some still support master's level study. How do they know that study for this master's course is a worthwhile expenditure? DIVERSITY

In the USA the most important recent study of master's degrees (Conrad, Haworth and Millar, 1993) proposed that these degrees could be described in terms of their resemblance to four ideal types. Table 14.1 summarizes them. Yet, these broad categories subsume considerable diversity, as Thorne, writing in Chapter 2 about one university, shows. In fact there is considerable evidence of diversity greater than that which might be inferred from summaries such as that in Table 14.1. The number of degree titles, which in the USA stood at 65 in 1945, has continued to multiply, so that in the USA there are over 800 types of programme leading to awards such as, Master of Social Work, and Master of Journalism and Mass Communication. (There are some 700 MBA programmes offered in the USA alone.) In Australia, Mclnnis, James and Morris (1995) referred to the proliferation of new, and often lengthy, titles for the [coursework] master's degree* (p. 81). In 1996 in the UK, there were some 7,000 taught master's degree programmes. The awards were typically Master of Arts, Master of Business Administration or Master of Science, although there are some variants, including Master of Social Science, Master of Public Health and Master of International Studies. A longestablished university such as Birmingham has some 150 master's programmes, while smaller, newer established ones have about half that number. Even English universities of just five years standing have significant numbers of programmes 26 at Bournemouth, 38 at Anglia Polytechnic University and nearly 50 at Brighton.

150

Programme description

Pedagogy

Orientation

Departmental support

Institutional support

Student culture

Ancillary to doctoral work - preparation for PhD work, consolation prize for those unable to progress to PhD, and terminal academic qualification for others

Academic staff are the experts, who convey their expertise to students.Considerable pressure on students to master this knowledge. Essentially didactic pedagogy.

Strong, traditional academic goals and standards.

Usually low priority operates on the margins of the doctoral programme.

Not a priority. Concern lest master's work distracts academic staff from research and doctoral programme.

Students relatively isolated. Plenty of competition. Little out-of-class community.

Career advancement programme — professional programme for people with experience in the field and looking for advancement.

Similar to ancillary programme. However, students have professional experience to bring to bear on the knowledge and theories conveyed by academic staff.

Strong academic commitment to the enhancement of professional practice, often within a framework laid down by a professional body. Deals in both theoretical and applied knowledge.

Typically strong priority - success of the programme and department's reputation ride on the career advancement of graduates.

Variable, although tends to be strong depends on institutional mission and finances.

Likely to resemble Ancillary programmes, but rather more variable.

Apprenticeship programmes — similar to career advancement but essentially for entrants to professions.

Facilitative pedagogy. The aim is to help students to understand the profession through hands-on exploration and engagement.

An academic orientation reflecting mainly theoretical, professional concerns.

Typically strong.

Similar to, if a little weaker than career advancement programmes.

Mixture of participative culture (co-operative and cordial) and synergistic (strong commitment to a holistic learning community).

Community centred programmes.

Academic staff and students form a community of learners. Transformation of students a goal of dialogical pedagogy.

An impact on the professional or the wider community is sought. Students becomepublic translators of academic insights and need to see the big picture*.

Strong commitment from teaching staff.

Variable - strong as often as not.

Mixed, tending to synergistic.

Table 14.1: A typology ofCoursework Master's Degrees (after Conrad et al., 1993)

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Even within a discipline, there is considerable diversity. New master's degrees have been formulated to respond to advances and developments in the field, as with nursing, library and information studies, business, and journalism and mass communication. While there may be structural similarities between master's programmes in some fields, such as economics in the United States (McCoy and Milkman, 1995), in other areas there is a diversity of teaching time, assessment requirements, learning experiences, and topics. In journalism and mass communication, a review concluded that 'master's programmes have become more diverse, meeting different interests and needs and preparing graduates for a wider range of post-graduate positions' (Briggs and Fleming, 1994, p. 17). There is little consensus about what journalism graduate education as a whole is or should be. At first glance, this [is] chaos in the curriculum' (Senat and Grusin, 1994, p. 27). Likewise, in nursing, 'multiple paradigms are evident in the majors and subspecialities across and within programs . . . Perhaps the plethora of clinical majors and subspecialities in master's programs is a direct effect of the continuing struggle of nursing science to discern, describe, and interpret its range of phenomena' (Burns et a/., 1993, p. 275). Osguthorpe and Wong (1991) make similar observations about the proliferation of education programmes, fearing that the stature of the field will suffer' (p. 14). Even with North American MBAs, which have to conform to guidelines laid down by the accrediting agency, there is a wide variety of programme types, of curriculum content and balance, of modes of delivery, and of pedagogy. These themes are illustrated by a summary of data gleaned from English prospectuses for specific master's courses in history, education, and for full-time MBA programmes. Tables 14.2-14.4 are based on a study of prospectuses and course leaflets and illustrate something of the heterogeneity of some English master's programmes. While diversity has its virtues, there is the possibility that the rhetoric of diversity may cloak low standards. Certainly, there has been a history of concern in the USA about taught master's degrees. Conrad, Haworth and Millar (1993) document concern in 1910 that the master's degree might become 'a sort of academic joke' (p. 9), repeated in 1960 in the charge that the prestige and quality of the master's degree had slipped since the Second World War. There is room for suspicion that not all departments that have introduced master's degrees have the academic or professional rigour, the depth of expertise, or the wealth of library, information technology and staff resources to provide for high quality learning. Simply put, where the unit of resource has been declining and where departments mount master's programmes to gain status or extra funds at the margin, more may mean worse.

152

Need to be graduate?

APL? APEL? Fee(whole

1 2

X X

V V

3

Equivalent

HEI

MA/MEd)

No. modulesNo. taught on rosta modules

CAT rating

Total module Other work contact hours hours

V V

1,250 2,430

20 32

4 6

30 14

144 120

V

V

2,100

60

6

20

216

1,600

1x1 day 10 3 modules 20

6 60

8

10

120

10

240

4

Equivalent

V

7

5

X

X

X

2,430

flexible provision perhaps 12 c. 100

6

X

V

V

1,320

49

8

7

X

V

V

900

26

3

8 9 10

X X

V

v

V

V V

V V

1,600 6

24 21 4

3 5 20

30 16 240

135 130

11 12 13 14 15 16

X X X X

V V V V

X X

2,430 747 2,500

160 96 80 112

X

V

X

1,400

6 4 8 12 8 7

N/A 20 10

X _

18

7240?

17

X

V

X

1,344

?12? 80 26 19 12 16M.17 level 3 18

18 19 20 21

V

V V V V

V

X X X

X

1,660 2,430

40 v. many 10 38

8 8 4 8

-

180

40/module (240) 164/module (984)

Dissertation length (and CAT) 15-20k (36) 15k (60) 15k (50)

60/module (480) 45/module (280) 200/module (600)

15 k (40)

15-20k

7(30) 15k (45) 15k (-40 CATs):

30k (« 80 CATs)

V

V V

1,100

3

60 level 3 points 10 8 20 10

+400 one weekend

15.20k 12-15k (40) 15-20K (40)

N/A 208 180 180 240

20(48) 300 1800 total for MA

Table 14.2: Comparison of structural features of some UK master's programmes in education, 1996

20k (40)s

HEI

APL? Need to be 1 graduate?

1 2 3 4 5

V X X X X

X X X X

6 7

X X

X

8

V

Dissertation / project length

Exams?4 Other work hours

10-15k 20k 10k V (no length given)

V V V V

15k 15k

X

12

12-18k

X

15

V (no length given) N/A

X

+ induction week

V

1750 study hours + three residential weekends

20k

V

Z.

715,000?

V V

Weekend + one week block Residential week + two resident, sessions

APEL?

Fee (whole MBA)

AMBA No. accred? modules on rosta

No. taught modules'

X X X X X

6,500 8,800

V 50 24 39 20

18 15 12 18 18

10 16+

10 12

'wide range' 34 Varies according to 'route' taken No details of electives 12 34

3-8

13,500 5,500

V

X X

X

>/

X

7,500 6,975 11,500 6,700

9

V

X

X

7,200

10

X

V

X

7,655

11

X

V

X

6,900

12 IS

X X

X X

X X

5,900 10,769

V

V

•Ibtal module contact hours

540 540 300

N/A

12 12 15

360 450

V

Intro, programme +720 study hours and two short residentials Ibtal a 950+ dissertation Total = 1200-1400

1. Some MBAs take more than one year full-time. Also note variety of core content between programmes. Distance Learning MBAs are a common option. 2. However, the GMAT test ia taken by virtually all applicants and is used as evidence of suitability to proceed to MBA study. In some cases, successful completion of a lower-level programme is an acceptable alternative. 3. CAIi ratings are not included on this table since they are seldom given in prospectuses for elements of MBA programmes. 4. Most modules do not appear to be examined. However, virtually all programmes retain some examination element.

Table 14.3: Comparison of structural features of some UK Master of Business Administration programmes, 1996'

HEI Need

to be graduate?

APL? APEL? Fee (whole MA)

1

V

X

X

2

X

X

3

V

4 5

No. modules on rosta

No. taught modules

words per module

Total module contact hours

Dissertation Total assessed length and CAT) words

3

3

8,000

40/module = 120

12k

36k

X

10

6

208

15-20k

7

X

X

N/A

N/Aintegrated options

25k

40k

V V

X

X

6

3

180

-

-

X

X

1,056

11

4x20 CATs or 2x40.

8,000

180

15k (40)

31k

6

V

X

X

2,430

23

6

5,000

25/module = 150

20k

50k

7

V

X

X

26 (Mod Hist

2

8k -i- 3k

2,430

3x 5,000 per option

12k + 2k, (40)

MA) X

X

2.430

9

V V

V

V

?

10

V

X

X

11

X

X

X

8

2,160

8 ?

4

18k (60/180)

-

16

15k

?

17

4

10,000 x 2 modules only

20k

40k

9

4

3,000 = seminar papers

15k + 5k project

32k

42/module = 168

Table 14.4: Comparison of structural features of some UK Master of Arts (history) programmes, 1996.

Other work hours

600

Two Saturday schools Additional 1000-1200 study hours for whole course.

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Notes on tables 14.2-14.4 HEI (Higher Education Institution) names have not been shown since it would be invidious to identify any from what is only a sample of English HEIs. APL Shows whether the HEI will give academic credit on the master's programme for prior, certificated study elsewhere. APEL Shows whether the HEI will give academic credit on the basis of relevant learning through prior experience. AMBA accred? shows where the programme has been accredited by the London Association of MBAs. No. modules on rosta contains an estimate of the scope for student choice. A module may be on the rosta but not taught in any given period. No. taught modules shows how many taught modules have to be completed for the degree. A dissertation or project is normally required as well. CAT rating shows the number of credit points attached to each taught module. It cannot be assumed that these are credit points at 'M1 level rather than at a lower level. Tbtal module contact hours = number of modules to be taken multiplied by contact hours per module. Other work hours are given where HEIs estimate the time students will have to spend on their work in addition to face-to-face tuition time. Dissertation length and CAT shows the length of capstone projects and dissertations and the credit points allocated to them by HEIs, where that information is available. Exams Shows whether there are formal examinations. Not shown for Education (where they've virtually extinct) or for history (present in two cases out of nine).

MARKETS

Does This Diversity Really Matter? One argument holds that this is not a good question to be asking, since diversity is inevitable. For one thing, there will continue to be demands for different types of postgraduate course, some being postgraduate in time, exploring new material with learners, and others being postgraduate in level, going into greater depth in a familiar subject. While there is some attraction to distinguishing between the two types by giving them different names, there are two problems. First, that is unlikely to happen on a voluntary basis, so some state action would be necessary. Whether states are likely to want to take action is a question that will be further explored later in this chapter. Secondly, the distinction between postgraduate in time and postgraduate in level is far from clear-cut. At the very least, it depends on some account of progression in learning in higher education. This is conceptually difficult, perhaps impossible. However, even were progress made in defining the 'postgraduateness' of master's degrees, there still remains the vexed issue of the interplay in professional programmes between 'theory* and 'practice'. A number of chapters have shown ways in which the interplay between the two has been worked out in master's courses. The safest conclusion is that there is no one, commanding account of the relationship of these two interpenetrating ways of knowing. Nor is there any common way of exploring that relationship in professional, postgraduate courses. And, there are non-professional courses (see Chapter 11), with a strong personal education function, which extend the range of legitimate diversity. But suppose that some national framework were to be laid down. How far would diversity be reduced? Consider a parallel case. In England the government has introduced a national curriculum for state-funded schools. It is prescriptive and detailed, specifying a ladder of performance in each school subject and setting norms for ages 7,11,14 and 16. Yet, the evidence of inspection reports is that there is still diversity of practice and that departments teaching the same subject vary considerably in their effectiveness. It has been claimed that at least some teachers 156

Conclusion: Diversity, Markets, Regulation and Equity

are now finding 'spaces'for themselves in this curriculum, domesticating it to their own circumstances (Knight, 1996b). This is, perhaps, no more than a fact of implementation: implementation changes curriculum as new meanings are worked out by people with their own assumptions and understandings in particular circumstances for children who are believed to have certain characteristics (Fullan, 1991). On this view, even a national curriculum is not 'delivered' as the misleading metaphor has it, but is rather created in each classroom. And those creations will be better or worse exemplifications of what was planned. Regulation cannot be seen as an effective way of bringing about uniformity in matters educational. Besides, there is an argument for saying that diversity is commendable. Universities are supposed to be working on the frontiers of knowledge in the age of the Ttnowledge explosion', which implies that curricula, especially at postgraduate level, should change rapidly, both to reflect advances in understanding and to meet the changing needs of professional clients. Chapter 8 has shown that this is happening in geography courses in England, with the rapid development of GIS courses being a striking example of universities' responses to developments in knowledge and to clients' needs. Inevitably, this sort of change will tend to diversity, not to convergence. Furthermore, in biological terms, diversity is a strength, the source of innovation and, literally, the gene pool for evolution. Not only does reducing the pool reduce the chances of successful adaptation to new circumstances but if coursework master's degrees were to be regulated by government, there would be the danger that this would fossilize the system, glue it down to thinking about good practice and standards at one point in time. So, What is the Relationship Between this Diversity and the Educational Markets? Diversity may not matter to consumers if they have the information to make rational choices between different products. However, education is an unusual commodity. Unlike buying convenience foods, the education consumer does not make many purchases. People tend not to buy several master's degrees, so they cannot rely on past purchases to guide them in their choice of course. They need information in much the same way as we look for lists of ingredients and other nutritional information on a pack of convenience food. Tables 14.2—14.4 show that in England it is hard to get even basic information about master's courses. The Australian database of master's programmes and the proposal in the English Harris Report (1996) are responses to this problem. They are not complete responses, since there is a hitherto unexplored issue about the utility of such databases. Consider school prospectuses by way of a parallel. In England, state-funded schools have to publish prospectuses that must provide a large amount of information laid down by the government, and sometimes in a form set by the government. They are free to add more information, they do add illustrations and photos and all try to present the school as an attractive, happy and successful place in order to induce parents to send qualified children to them. From schools' point of view, the prospectuses are important marketing tools. From government's point of view they are informative. A study published five years ago (Knight, 1992) found that most prospectuses did not fully comply with the law. While work in hand suggests that they are now much better, it is clear that schools spend a lot of time working on the data to present themselves in an appealing 157

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light. In other words, it is hard to see how any list of the attributes of master's programmes will contain unvarnished information. A related point is that it is not clear that such data will be informative. This point can also be developed by looking at an analogous case. North American students graduate with a record of the courses they have taken and of the grades for each course. However, a study of a large number of transcripts (Adelman, 1990) concluded that they were far less useful than is sometimes assumed. Leaving aside those that were incomplete, the major problem was that course titles could be remarkably uninformative. Not only was it unclear what some courses were about but also, even when the title was informative, there was no information about what the course contained, neither in terms of content, nor in terms of the competencies promoted. It cannot, then, be assumed that greater explicitness about the content of master's degrees will allow rational course choices to be made. Moreover, there is the awkward issue of standards. Two courses may, on the database, appear to be the same. But do students graduate with similar achievements? In the USA, where diversity is accepted, something of a solution is to be found in the peer-ranking league tables that are produced. They are not without their critics, not least because it is hard to see how quality can be judged when there is an absence of an agreed standard. Better, more standardized information can help consumers but too much reliance should not be placed on this strategy for attenuating the undesirable effects of diversity. An alternative approach is for employers and prospective students to choose on the basis of reputation. There is no doubt that this is a common approach. However, it has been noted that reputations may not be reliable. It should be added that they may not be known. In a local market a local producer will have a known reputation. But in a national market, even in the UK where the number of producers is many times fewer than in the USA, the reputations of only a fraction of the producers can be known. It is possible to imagine that, as a result of competition between institutions to get students, postgraduate prestige and income, legitimate diversity could become a cloak for illegitimately low standards. In Australia, Mclnnis, James and Morris recorded reports that 'students claimed that content [on coursework master's programmes] was either not advanced or not so sufficiently different from undergraduate studies' (1995, p. 4). Again, 'it is difficult for major stakeholders to be confident of the standards of master's courses' (op cit. p. 69). They also rehearse fears that institutions might maximize revenues by lowering standards, making admission and graduation easier. REGULATION Is this an area in which states ought to intervene? Four main arguments can be used to suggest that they should: •

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The first is financial: states, directly or indirectly still underwrite a greater or lesser proportion of the costs of master's level education. They therefore have a financial interest in seeing that they get the best value for money;

Conclusion: Diversity, Markets, Regulation and Equity

•

•

•

The second argument is economic and flows from the human capital theory of education. Proponents of this view notice that economically successful countries have better educated labour forces and infer that education is a cause of economic success. (The converse, that only successful economies can afford to pay for better education is seldom considered.) A variant says that knowledge is the key to economic success in the modern world, hence a highly educated, adaptable, risk-taking labour force is necessary. However it is couched, the economic argument links national wealth to high educational attainments. On this view, states ought to be concerned that master's degrees promote the highest possible standards. Low standards verge upon economic treason; Thirdly, there is a consumer protection argument. Just as states have increasingly made regulations to protect consumers of food, cars, pensions and insurance, condoms and so on, so too, the argument goes, they should stipulate minimum standards in educational products. The duty is to protect the public from academic hucksters and professorial snakeoil merchants; Fourthly, there is an economic argument. Countries such as the USA, UK, Australia and Canada attract overseas students to master's programmes. They comprise an important minority of master's students, amounting to 12.3 per cent of people on Australian programmes in 1994, for example (Mclnnis ex al., 1995). They are an important source of overseas earnings for those countries. However, sponsoring governments want to know that they are sending people on high quality, relevant and demanding programmes. Should it be thought that master's programmes in one country are shoddy, the governments will stop sponsoring students to take them. If the governments of Australia, Canada, the USA and Britain so not ensure that standards are high, then they will lose overseas students, foreign exchange and longer-term cultural influence.

Yet, it might be doubted whether states, in general, will do much to regulate the standards of coursework master's degrees. There are no votes in doing so, postgraduate unemployment is not an issue on par with graduate unemployment and, above all, post-welfarist thinking favours the operation of market forces. And, market forces are supposed to produce losers as well as winners. EQUITY Another lesson of market forces is that you don't interfere by affirmative action. To put it another way, if certain groups are effectively excluded from certain benefits, government's job is not to try and remedy the situation. This may be seen in the operation of parental choice of school in England. Legally, parents may nominate any school for their child. In practice, schools give priority to children in their catchment area. Schools that are seen to be good2 are, by and large, not in low-cost housing areas. The result is that the parents who can choose that school are those who can afford to live in the catchment area. Even if parents from outside the catchment area get a place for their child at such a school, they have to be able to pay the cost of travel to school. Choice exists in theory but in practice it is not an 159

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option for all. It may be suggested that trying to give parents of whatever social background access to the 'best' schools is not a consistent English government priority. Returning to master's programmes, the point to be made is that they are costly and that there are few opportunities for students to get state funding. In England, the middle classes are disproportionately represented on undergraduate programmes. Access to such programmes is easier in other countries but drop-out rates are high and successful completion is disproportionately related to higher socio-economic status. The lack of state funding for those wanting to do master's degrees magnifies higher education's role in reproducing hegemonies and social inequalities. Furthermore, more prestigious institutions can charge higher fees, with the result that less affluent students, assuming they have raised funds for master's study, are driven towards less prestigious institutions. It cannot be asserted that low fees go with low academic standards but it can be noted that low fees probably mean that the cheap institution is not providing something that the more expensive institution does provide. 'WE M U S T EDUCATE OUR MASTERS' In 1870 the English government introduced free elementary education. One reason was because many working class men had gained the right to vote. Political parties saw that this was an important electorate and that if it was to use the vote wisely then it, the new 'masters' of the politicians, needed to be educated. At the turn of the twentieth century, the phrase takes on a new meaning. The new professional classes are coming to hold master's degrees, the new passports to middle class privilege. A post-welfarist lack of concern for equal educational opportunities means that people without capital either tend to be excluded from master's courses or only have access, in practice, to cut-price, Woolworth's versions. These may look like the designer product but may turn out to have the cachet of Armani lookalikes. In both cases, the effect is towards excluding less affluent people from master's courses. Indeed, we must educate our master's students and there is reason to be concerned that the education they get embodies high, postgraduate-level standards. However, if educating our master's students comes to be a synonym for educating the better off, for recruiting the next generation of the privileged - our masters from one social group, then the pell-mell growth of master's degrees, in many ways commendable, is a cause for concern. In this scenario, the more affluent are the beneficiaries of the diploma disease, which will have effectively killed off their competitors. 1. Student finances at master's level have hardly been explored. However, there is agreement in Borchert (1994) and Mclnnis et al. (1995) that more support is needed. It is probably safe to say that most master's students are not state supported. 2. 'Perceived to be good' is a carefully chosen phrase. Schools where pupils get high grades are schools recruiting children from favoured socio-economic backgrounds. There is a suspicion that they recruit able children and add very little to these baseline achievements. By the test of examination grades, these are good schools. If, on the other hand, schools are ranked according to pupil progress, different league table positions appear. A school that recruits poorly performing pupils and sees them leave with average qualifications will head the league tables. However, common perception is likely to favour Leafy Suburb High School, which recruits above average pupils who leave with above average results. 160

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Index

Admissions and access 20-21, 29, 40, 44-45, 80-82,132, 157-160 Andragogy 5, 63-68,124 Assessment of student learning 8-9, 14-15, 37, 43-44, 50, 64, 77, 84, 89,109-111, 122-124, 146-147 Capstone project (see also dissertations) 7, 77, 79-80, 102 Conversion master's programmes 24-26, 131-132,135 Dissertations 7, 102-103, 109 Distance learning 3, 11,132-133 Diversity 26-27, 28, 45, 54, 83, 86-87, 119, 150-157 Double loop learning (see also reflection) 59-60, 110,112-113 Experiential learning 5-6, 29-31, 33 Feedback: - to students 7, 37, 68-72, 110 - to tutors 35-38, 48-49, 63-64, 68-72 Flexibility 27, 42-43, 45, 52, 86, 94,102 Group learning (see also learning sets) 3-38, 46, 140-144 Independent study and learning 5, 24-25, 31, 33, 36, 50 Information technology 8, 11, 46, 99, 129,135, 137-148 Interdisciplinarity (transdisciplinarity) 74-76, 82-83. 92, 115-124,137-148 Learning sets 108 Learning support 53-60 Learning, theories and conceptions of 4-8, 29-32, 58-59, 61, 63-68, 108-109, 141 Markets: - influence of 75-76,156-158 - niche 85-95 Modularisation, effects of 27, 101,147

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Motivation for study 3, 55-59, 67-68.112-113 Part-time courses and students 15, 45, 56-57, 77, 80, 86, 92.113.135 Professional master's programmes 4-6,24-26, 40-60, 84, 94, 97-114.131-132,137-148 Programmes: - design processes 12-14, 46, 60-63. 73-77, 94,109-109,117-118,138-140 - evolution 13, 46-47, 89-90,125-135 - validation 89-90, 93-94,139 Quality 12.17-18. 28,149-150 Reflection on learning (see also double loop learning) 29-30, 33-35. 37. 110, 115,121-122, 146-147 Self-management 43, 49. 56-57. 101-102 Service learning 7,138,144 Standards 12.16-17,19-28, 47-48, 76, 123-124,156, 158,160 Statistics on master's degrees 1-2, 39-40, 85-88,153-155 Status of master's programmes 12, 91-93,117 Students: - age 3, 53, 64 - expectations 10-11,29. 31-32, 34-35, 48, 57-58, 60, 64, 94,119-120 - professional backgrounds (see also professional master's programmes) 3, 57-58 - skills 'deficits' 8, 33, 47, 91-93, 94 - workloads 50, 56, 84, 127-128 Teachers: - intensification of their work 12, 90-92, 94-95. 100-102,117 - selection and training 11-12, 51, 61, 63, 100, 102-103 Theoretical and practical programme orientations 6, 40, 57-58,60,101-102,106, 107.112-113,146-147