Much of my role at the University involves curriculum research, education support and academic staff development. No two days are the same and I enjoy that diversity. It’s stimulating to move from one project to another and work with so many interesting people across the institution.
By background, I’m an archaeologist and I still work in that world on my annual leave and non-Bristol days. I volunteer as Archaeological Co-Lead with Dig the Castle (Great Torrington, Devon) and as a Board Member within the international charity Archaeologists Engage. One would imagine it doesn’t impact my everyday job much but surprisingly it really does.
A huge part of my archaeological work is all about community engagement. This translates to co-production and co-creation activities that place the community participants at the heart of everything we do. We’ve seen dementia patients volunteering with artefact processing resulting in weeks of better physical and mental health. Young offenders working on site have improved their personal confidence, skills and outlook for positive futures.
The success of Dig the Castle resulted in national recognition such as winning Community Project of the Year (Marsh Awards, Council for British Archaeology). Lots of press attention followed our awards and this catalysed a new sense of success leading to new investments in this historically-economically deprived rural community.
Why is this relevant to my education work?
Because co-production and co-creation are powerful education tools when working with our students. They are the means to transform meaning-making and metacognition. I firmly believe that when students increase their intrinsic motivation, within a supportive learning environment, they thrive academically as a direct result.
Enhancing student opportunities for student-led experimentation, agency and autonomy can be scary if you’ve never tried them before. Let’s take a look at an example of a small-scale approach: reading optionality and peer-to-peer learning.
Students are required to undertake reading before a seminar, choosing between two papers. In class, students discuss and reflect on their reading, sharing insights with the students who haven’t read the other paper. Their agency is limited to two options, but just a little autonomy like this can help them feel they have control over their learning. This method also encourages peer-to-peer learning and creates opportunities for dialogue. A variation on the method sees students sit in pairs with one who has done the alternative reading and sharing their reflections one on one; a good option with shy cohorts who want to avoid class discussion.
To take this a step further, we can get students to suggest new readings or topics and build this into programmatic approaches. We might ask students at the end of second-year, for example, to pick research-rich themes and case studies for the next cohort of students to explore; perhaps on topics that were interesting to them but not covered at depth. Small efforts like this make students feel like they have a hand in shaping the learning environment for others, not just themselves. Any sort of co-created curriculum design (e.g. student advisory panels, curriculum workshops) can often lead to positive sentiments towards student’s own personal learning.
More advanced agency opportunities are common in our degree programmes – when student chose their own research topics to explore in projects and dissertations. The Community Engaged Learning Team is amazing at helping staff connect their students to local civic partners who have interesting projects that need doing. For students, they get to have a meaningful challenge with the potential for real local impact. For external stakeholders, they get the benefit of our students’ research work and insights. It’s a win-win situation for everyone and often results in transformative learning for our students. Because these projects are real-world applicable, they feel authentic and tangible. Authentic is a cornerstone of our Assessment and Feedback Strategy! They are also fantastic for skills-building and generating compelling evidence for post-graduation job interviews.
We can also invite our students to co-create our learning resources, again this can be on a programmatic level. Anything our students create in a unit might be a great resource to draw on later with other students, not just an exemplars of how to do things right but as inspiration and provocation. This might include infographics, blogs, podcasts, videos and more. On the theme of assessment, we can ask our students to be involved in developing rubrics or scoping assessments too.
It is always exciting to embark on new ways to engage our students with their learning and foster a love of discipline. Through co-creation and co-production, we have the means to give some control over to our students and demonstrate trust in their capabilities. As I’ve learned from my archaeological fieldwork efforts, trust is in itself a transformative mechanism to bring people together.
If you have other examples of what co-production and co-creation look like in your curriculum, please get in touch to share your story on our blog!
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