EXPLORING PERSONAL PEDAGOGY
DAY 4 Thursday March 30th
It seems obvious perhaps, but one of the recurring thoughts I've had during the #creativeHE conversation is how closely entangled teaching and learning are. You cannot teach without learning  and every time a teacher helps others learn they themselves are learning through the situation they are created. Its always niggled me that as teachers we rarely if ever declare  how we have committed a lot of time and energy to learn the stuff we teaching, nor do we admit to struggling with any of the concepts we teach. Instead we prefer to keep it all a mystery. Consequently students see teachers as teachers rather than what they actually are professional learners that teach.

I have to admit that I rarely stand up in front of a class any more. Occasionally I do but the context is usually professional development for education professionals. However, I do spend a lot of time thinking, reading and writing about education (learning) and share my writing openly through blogs, articles and books so I guess that this is a type of teaching in the sense of I learn in order to share my knowledge and help others learn.

Today I have been trying to piece together the history of my pedagogical thinking and realised that this is the history of my life. So it's taking me longer than I anticipated. But  its proving to be a useful exercise and at the end of it I know I will be more confident in being able to explain what I mean by my own personal pedagogy - which is the object of the #creativeHE conversation.

​As part of this project I began to think about one of the aspects of my pedagogic practice - the way I try to learn by synthesising and concept building and capturing this in pictures. For example I shared a picture this morning which was based on an interpretation of the information provided in the survey to the question of the most significant influences on teacher formation and development. The making of pictures or annotated diagrams is an important part of the way I synthesise and the way I make sense of complex ideas which have many elements, relationships and processes. This approach is particularly common in the natural sciences which I can relate to as a former geologist. Once I have formed a picture or diagram I can then use it as a mediating artefact in my teaching - in the sense of sharing ideas and my meaning with others to help and enable them to learn. So I include below a short narrative about how I have used picture making as a means to explore and teach the idea of personal pedagogies. 

EXPLORING PERSONAL PEDAGOGY 
DAY 3 Wednesday March 29th
 
Today's conversational challenge is to make and tell a story about how we have developed an aspect of our practice so that it is uniquely our own. So while other teachers might do something similar we do it in a way that is personal to us - it has our signature on it. I invited participants to share a story about how they had introduced and then developed a new educational practice in response to changes in thinking and the insights they gained from the experience. I offered my own example of how I introduced and developed a technique to facilitate the use of imagination and critical thinking in problem solving. It was a useful reflective exercise bringing home to me the complexity of developing a personal pedagogy.

READ MY STORY HERE

EXPLORING PERSONAL PEDAGOGY
DAY 2 Tuesday March 28
 
Today's challenge is to use the idea of metaphor to explore the underlying orientations, qualities  and characteristics of a personal pedagogy. Our choice of metaphors are very likely to engage with deeply held beliefs and values about the way we help and enable others to learn.  What metaphor(s) might you use to describe your own pedagogical thinking and practice and why you choose the(se) metaphor(s)?
 
I have come to the conclusion that experienced teachers need a bag full of metaphors to embrace the range of thinking and practices we employ as a teacher. For example almost any protracted experience of encouraging and helping others to learn will involve Erica McWilliam's trilogy of 'sage' 'guide' and 'meddler'. Just recently, when thinking about how teachers encourage learners to use their creativity I developed the idea of instigator which seemed to fit some of the work we are doing with #creativeHE where the teacher get things going and then 'get out of the way'. All too often teachers do not get out of the way yet this is key to enabling other people's creativity to flourish and I must confess there are lots of situations where I don't get out of the way.
 
I could list many more metaphors that might help reveal ways that encourage and help others to learn, but I will focus on two that seem to explain the way I think and act pedagogically - at least in my current context.

'BROKER'
 
The first is that of a 'broker' and it reflects both current and past circumstances of my life - I do not practice as a teacher in a university but I do try to engage others in learning processes like the #creativeHE conversation through which they can learn. I developed the idea of a broker many years ago while working in a number of HE agencies (HEQC, QAA, LTSN & HEA) where my job was build networks and engage people in social learning in order to develop the knowledge I needed to research a topic, develop policy or share and develop practice.
 
The idea intrigued me so much that I wrote a book exploring its meanings and interpreting my and others practices through the brokerage lens. I wrote 'brokerage is a tool for engaging socially complex communities. The idea of engagement extends from drawing someone into conversation to encourage them to think about something, to systematically drawing many people or an entire community into discussion and perhaps action. It is fundamental to change where there are lots of different interests involved and complex negotiations are required in order to share perspectives and advance thinking about what needs to be done. I drew this picture in book which I guess reveals my fundamental orientation as a teacher. I see myself as a creator of processes that can explore the potential (affordance) of a situation for learning - an idea that I returned to and developed over a decade later in the idea of learning ecologies.
 
There is no simple definition of brokerage because perceptions of meaning are context dependent. For example:

1. in business, a broker is an agent, promoter, dealer, fixer, trader, someone who buys and sells;
2. in politics, a broker is a diplomat, mediator, go-between, negotiator;
3. in the information world, a broker is someone who knows how to access or acquire information and who provides a gateway to information resources;
4. in education, a broker is a proactive facilitator who connects people, networks, organizations and resources and establishes the conditions to create something new or add value to something that already exists.

 
I carry this idea and these sorts of practices with me in my everyday work for Lifewide Education & Creative Academic

'ECOLOGIST'
 
Which for this purpose is someone who thinks about teaching and learning as an ecological (relational) phenomenon. I have been developing this idea which I have grown from my own experiences of learning and trying to achieve things and explored it through lots of writing including a book. With the benefit of hindsight I can see how the roots of this idea run back into the idea of brokerage and I could now offer a description of a broker as someone who is applying ecological thinking to their role of engaging a community. So as a teacher I am now mindful of the model I have created and when I design and animate a process to encourage, help and enable people to learn I am thinking about the things deliberately and unconsciously in this model.
 
References
Jackson N J (2003)  Changing Higher Education through Brokerage Ashgate
Jackson N J (2017) Exploring Learning Ecologies LULU
McWilliam, E. L. (2009) Teaching for creativity : from sage to guide to meddler. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 29(3). pp. 281-293. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/32389/1/c32389.pdf
 
 
e to edit.

​EXPLORING PERSONAL PEDAGOGY
DAY 1 Monday March 27
 
It's day 1 of our new conversation aimed at exploring the idea of personal pedagogy - the particular ways and means by which we, as individuals, encourage and enable other people to learn, develop, create and achieve. Our aim is to encourage lots of people to share their perspectives so that we might gain new insights and develop new meanings for this idea.
 
As in previous explorations I am using the affordance in this experience to think about my own practice - more particularly how my own pedagogical thinking and practice has evolved. How and why did I come to know, believe and value the things I value in learning and education? and how do these things affect the way I try to encourage and enable others to learn?  These are some of the key questions that underlie our inquiry.
 
The idea of personal pedagogy has emerged through our project on Creative Pedagogies for Creative Learning Ecologies. A creative pedagogy implies that we personalise the abstract idea of pedagogy in our uniquely creative way in order to create opportunities for learners to use their creativity.  Therefore studying this process of personalising pedagogy seemed worthwhile. I immediately looked for opportunities (affordances) in my life and three different opportunities were available to me in March. I incorporated these into my learning ecology and these are shown in the diagram. In fact, one of the key influences on my thinking, beliefs and values about the way people learn in order to achieve something difficult and challenging is my own attempt to understand and explicate the idea of a learning ecology.

​ I have been developing this idea over the last few years so I have thought about it deeply and written about it. If an idea about learning is worth having it has to be applied to our own experiences so I try to be conscious of my conceptual model of a learning ecology whenever I design a process to enable other people to learn and also try to evaluate my experience using this model as a reference in an attempt to improve the model. So this messy picture documents my activities during March 2017 to develop the idea through a process of social interaction and learning involving 1) #LTHEchat 2) TLC seminar 3) face to face seminar & workshop at Dublin Institute of Technology  and 4) #creativeHE conversation.

​The question for today is, 'Who or what has influenced your thinking, your beliefs and your values, so that you help other people to learn, develop, create and achieve in a particular way?'.
 
I am the architect of this #creativeHE conversation so to answer my own question how did I arrive at this particular pedagogical practice... It's a long story but one element of it is the 'see one, do one, teach one' mentality that my wife, who is a GP is fond of telling me is how she learnt when training to be a medic. First I observed a #creativeHE course led by CN without joining in. The next time it ran in  I joined in as a facilitator and learnt what it meant to facilitate, then I offered to facilitate a conversation which I did. So that is an important part of my pedagogical narrative with Chrissi Nerantzi the key person WHO afforded the opportunity and then introduced me to the tools and the process showing me how it worked through her own example.
 
But it was in the 'doing one' that the real insights came. The insights you need to attract people who are willing to contribute so that you achieve a critical mass of engagement and to create the sort of assets that will stimulate thinking and engagement. This is the fourth time I have led a conversation so I now have experiences to draw from and build upon. In this one I have included an online questionnaire as part of the knowledge building process which is a something I often use when I present at an institutional teaching and learning conference.  Another element I have added to the basic #creativeHE process
is to facilitate curation of the assets developed through the social learning process through Creative Academic Magazine. I can trace both of these add on's to a deeply held beliefs that: 1) make me turn events into longer processes and 2) try to derive the maximum benefit in terms of knowledge development from any situation. These beliefs and practices I think can be traced back to my work as a sort of knowledge broker working for several different HE organisations (HEQC, QAA, LTSN & HEA).
 
But to answer the question of who were the big influences, who shaped me in a fundamental way, I think it's, my mother and father who instilled in me my work ethic, a grammar school teacher 'Mr Miller' who  taught me the value of believing in a student and who introduced me to geology, which became my passion.   Some  teachers do more than teach a subject they inspire you and shape the course of your life. It was my good fortune to have this teacher spot something in me and give me a second chance and then enthuse me with a new subject called geology. He helped me get a place a university and then the rest was down to me but he was the one who influenced the direction of a significant chunk of my life.
 
It was also my good fortune to find myself, thanks to a chance conversation with a lecturer at Imperial College (another important influence of the direction of my life) at a postgraduate teaching and research institute in Saudi Arabia working with two colleagues, Colin Ramsay and John Roobol, who taught me the meaning of collaboration. They had a serious influence on my professionalism as a teacher and they were the biggest influence on my early formation as a geology teacher and academic scholar.
 
Since then I have been subject to many influences and I guess we are the accumulation of many small influences. I am fortunate to have met and worked with many good teachers including, Professor John Cowan, who although I did not see him teach, his thinking, wisdom and mentoring have influenced me greatly. I also pay tribute to Fred Buining who introduced me to a number of facilitation techniques that expanded my pedagogical repertoire, and Chrissi Nerantzi who introduced me to the world of social learning through social media who has been a significant influence on my thinking and practice in recent years - including my practice in facilitating this #creativeHE conversation.
 
And I should not forget my own children who have taught me many things but above all shown me the value of a lifewide perspective on learning and achievement.