Getting access: access to land and the right to roam

Nick Jackson (University of Kent) was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2002. In this article from the Autumn 2003 issue of Directions Nick sets out his plans for his project aimed at developing a Web-based resource for teaching access to land.and looks back on the first year.

About me

I have been a lecturer at Kent from time immemorial, specialising in land/property and tort. My selection as Kent NTFS candidate was on the basis of my work over the last few years using ICT to open up our programmes to a range of different students with limited access to our Canterbury campus – for example part timers and students based in Chatham and Bermuda. A central element has been the Web delivery of lectures as mp3 files. This previous work has needed a lot of organisation, as it operates right across the department, but it is technologically and pedagogically modest.

About my project: legal area

The Web-based teaching resource being developed for the National Teaching Fellowship project is more ambitious and has a much narrower substantive focus – access to land. To quote from the project bid:

Should I be able to walk where I like on private land in open country? If it disturbs the owner’s grouse? If it erodes publicly treasured landscape? (A right to roam under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 is being introduced during the currency of the project.) Should I be able to walk where I like in the town centre of my home town? (Obviously? But where public streets have been redeveloped as privately owned malls, English law currently allows the owner to ban me for any reason or none.)

The principal focus will be on the public rights of way highlighted in the quote, but easements and other private rights of access will also be covered, giving a connection with – and hopefully a point of entry into – the traditional property law syllabus. A whole range of other issues can be framed as ‘access’ questions – for example Aboriginal land rights, illegal tenure and regularisation in Latin America, homelessness in this country, even what can be put on the project website and who can read and write to it. Thought will be needed on how far and in which directions the project should spin off from its central themes and examples.

About my project: educational aims

What I want to do with this material is open ended (experimental; involving other people who will have their own ideas; providing a range of alternative resources for teachers and students to use in their own way), but not, I hope, incoherent. I aim to explore the use of ICT and forms of co-operation it enables, applied in depth to a fairly narrowly substantive area, to promote:

1. Learning which reaches high academic standards, flowing from, and into, research – students will be given contact with national and international experts and with practitioners (for example through interviews and discussions presented as sound files, followed up by Web-based open access discussion) and there will be essay competitions with publication on the site.
2. Learning which connects the legal classroom with contemporary issues, with history, with locality – the fun aspect of the project is the creation of a local interest area focused on the cycle path I use into work, which runs along the old Canterbury-Whitstable railway and on ownership of and access to Whitstable beach. This has involved complex co-operation between a whole range of organisations and a lot of social and legal contention. I am confident this can become a useful local resource and forum. I think it can also connect ‘traditional’ students with the area in which they are studying and the politics of their studies, and, hopefully, encourage non-traditional students into higher education.
3. Innovation in the syllabus – access issues give a concrete base for students’ critical reflection on property, are substantial enough to ground a discrete short option and are interestingly awkward to pigeonhole, promoting cross-over into environmental and constitutional courses. A variety of model teaching packages will be made available on the site, supported by independent learning and self-assessment packages in a basic version for open Web access and extended versions for download by Iolis. (These aspirations challenge the hostile view that the use of ICT in teaching inevitably means dumbing-down, anti-intellectual skills training and/or uncritically conservative syllabi – which view I take to be common if often tacit, and not always wrong.)
4. Co-operation between institutions in preparing and delivering learning materials to which there is free and open access.

(This aspiration expresses my own worries about the privatisation of ICT supported teaching resources, as institutions come to recognise their value and the use of virtual learning environments makes it easier to limit access to them.)

Project progress

The first year of the project has been a very interesting one for me personally, but frustratingly analogous to the standard first year of a PhD; having to map the area for oneself and being pulled in directions not envisaged initially, with a lot more time spent on reading and assembling material than in ‘writing up’. Reassuringly, many other National Teaching Fellows across disciplines report finding much need to learn and to reflect (as well as a lot of extra responsibilities which tend to come with the fellowship).

It has been very rewarding to begin to work with local groups and agencies at the sharp end of public rights of way issues, to see the passions those issues engender (in the professionals as well as in the campaigners) and to begin to illuminate the Property course at Kent with them. It has been less universally illuminating to absorb and think about educational theory and the scholarship of teaching much more closely than I had done before (as a practising teacher long enough in the tooth not to have been required to do a PGCHE or the like). It is not easy for any teacher to achieve or articulate a critically reflective practice, or even to be prepared to question one’s own habits and to learn from the experience and ideas of other people. The literature can sometimes help and inspire (perhaps most frequently when subject specific). But it can as often repel, when the platitudinous and/or philistine is peddled with messianic zeal and glowing testimonials.

A particular issue, which developed for me only as I began to engage with the project, is access to e-learning material. That access to the project site should be open started just as an assumption, but has become for me an instance of an important principle. The current readiness to take teaching seriously, and the proliferation of e-learning, offers hugely exciting possibilities for teachers and students from different institutions to learn from each other and to co-operate with each other. And, simultaneously, those possibilities are undercut – not least by the institutional assertion of intellectual property recently encouraged by the HEFCE working group and the disappearance of material behind the technological walls of the virtual learning environment. I have had the opportunity to learn a lot about this issue and have begun to write about it, including presenting a paper entitled Public space and public hyperspace: access and ownership at LILI 2003.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010