LILI 2003 closing plenary

The closing plenary at LILI 2003 was delivered by James Wisdom, Educational Development Consultant. James spoke about the LTSN Generic Centre’s Imaginative Curriculum Project, encouraging participants to reflect on notions of imagination and creativity and, in the words of one participant, “tying the threads together”.

James presented of the Imaginative Curriculum Project in terms of aligning student learning with assessment processes – a theme echoed throughout the conference as a whole.

Pressures for change

In its paper Pressures for curriculum change the Imaginative Curriculum Project identified eight individual forces:

• concern for academic standards
• professionalisation of teaching
• skills for the knowledge economy and employablity
• use of ICT
• learning through life and development of self
• the market
• democratising/popularising higher education
• doing more with less

So how do we go about changing the curriculum? The project identified three environments for change:

• the technical-rational environment of the institution
• the social environment of the department
• the psychological environment of personal beliefs

These can be applied in any combination, and there are many more processes as well. The bottom line is that it is a creative process, where we use our professional creativity, linking knowledge, skills and imagination.

What is the curriculum?

A model can be constructed around six elements:

• concepts, philosophy and rationale
• learning goals
• content
• learning and teaching methods and learning experiences
• student assessment
• processes of curriculum review, evaluation, research, redesign or transformation

However, as soon as this model is examined in detail it explodes from a simple model into a complex range of ideas. In order to make changes to the curriculum we have to know and be able to work successfully with many, if not all, of these diverse elements, sometimes simultaneously.

James demonstrates the complexities of the curriculum

Building creativity into the curriculum

Many teachers interviewed by the Imaginative Curriculum Project rejected the notion of creativity in practice – in reality they may have inherited someone else’s course and have to negotiate in small spaces for minor improvements and marginal shifts. However, it is it possible to build creativity into the curriculum by looking at the notion of enjoyment.

Concepts associated with creativity include excitement, communication, originality, ambition – but are we being sufficiently ambitious, or are we missing one of the target areas? The notion of creativity must interlock with notions of assessment and student perceptions of assessment. We need to bring creativity into assessment.

The traditional and the emerging curriculum

The traditional curriculum is under pressure from a range of emerging challenges. The new world needs new ways of learning, new attitudes and new sort of knowledge. This represents a big challenge to higher education, and the ownership of this challenge hovers around the notion of assessment. In focus groups with law students since 1989 James found uniformity of assessment, with little variety and a mainly teacher-based model of pedagogy.

Is it possible to reconcile traditional models of teaching with the new pressures? Teachers still work through the subject – we don’t teaching learning to learn as a skill, but learning to learn law. In order to help students to learn how to learn and to know themselves as learners we should move from a delivery to an engagement model. We should open up our processes for students to understand, for example by involving them in devising assessment criteria and designing the syllabus. Then the traditional curriculum may map more successfully onto the emerging curriculum.

Last Modified: 12 July 2010