Dr Lisa Gorton, Course Director at Leeds Beckett University
Presenting at the ANTF 2024 symposium was immensely beneficial. I shared our new progressive curriculum design and received constructive feedback from aspiring and existing NTFs alike, which led to further improvements.
Inspired to design a curriculum based on the central principles of Freire’s critical pedagogy (1970), I was equally determined for my curriculum not to be bounded by the multiple constraints of our increasingly marketized and surveilled institutions (Hall and Smyth,2016). My session outlined the journey my team and I had taken to construct a new curriculum where:
1. We have removed high stakes assessment and numeric grades at Level 4, replacing these with multiple opportunities for formative assessment and qualitative feedback. Constructed around the concept of interleaving (Brumair and Richter,2019), dedicated curriculum time allows tutors to support students as they work through a series of changing, but related topics and developmental activities.
2. We have removed all ‘modules’ at Levels 4 and 5, moving away from siloed-learning and integrating opportunities for students to dive deeper into key concepts from our discipline and the wider social sciences. We use shifting global contexts (we teach tourism management) and have challenged ourselves not to reproduce a westernized perspective, questioning ideas of power and inclusion within our field.
3. We have embedded wellbeing throughout our curriculum with space designated weekly for students to reflect, to develop a growth mindset, and to consider their emergent professional identity.
4. We frequently take learning outside the classroom with embedded community action. Here students not only learn about key issues in tourism but can act with purpose on behalf of our charity partners, whilst developing sought-after skills and building a sense of connection and shared purpose with each other, the course and the wider community.
Designing a non-modular, block-taught, student-led curriculum where course learning outcomes extend past the merely cognitive (Fink,2013) and where due attention is paid to student wellbeing was not an easy journey. Many compromises were made along the way and the second half of my session highlighted the most significant workarounds required to secure revalidation. These included:
1. A modular sub-structure (invisible to students) to allow the course to “fit” into existing administrative systems.
2. A 60 credit exit point to ensure students not completing L4 could still be awarded some credit (formative assessment outcomes ascertain achievement).
There is irony in the manufacturing of a 60-credit exit point when we had strained every sinew to design a course that engages, excites (and thus retains) students. However, in this final battle, I resolved to proceed with pragmatism. Our course is to be delivered from September 2024, leaving behind a set of constraints once perceived as rigid and inflexible but now truly stretched and reshaped (albeit with compromise).
Have we got everything right with our pedagogical risk-taking? I doubt it. We, as educators, must model the ability to learn from our failures, just as we encourage this growth mindset amongst our students. I hope to return to a future ANTF symposium and to report back on our learning experiences.
References:
Alinsky, S. . (1972) Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals; London: Vintage.
Brunmair, M., & Richter, T. (2019). Similarity matters: A meta-analysis of interleaved learning and its moderators. Psychological Bulletin, 145(11), pp. 1029-1052.|
Fink, L. D. (2013). Creating significant learning experiences. John Wiley & Sons.
Hall, R. & Smyth, K. (2016) Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education. Open Library of Humanities, 2 (1), pp. 1–28.
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Image: Image by Greg Montani from Pixabay
