Ditching Deficit Thinking

We were delighted to welcome Dr Victoria Honeyman from the University of Leeds. She summarises here thoughts here.

The University sector is changing quickly. Not all institutions are changing at the same pace, and not all of them started in the same place, but the institutions we currently see and the experiences our students have at university are notably different to those who taught them, regardless of their age. ‘Ditching the Deficit’ was a conference which largely discussed how teaching, learning, assessment and other aspects of university education could be moulded, shaped and reformed to aid students to get the most out of their education and from themselves. In my short presentation, I wanted to explore what had changed within the university sector, what the likely impact of that was and how we could engage with it going forward to create a lively, constructive, comfortable environment for our students to thrive.

While recognising the opportunities in universities, we also need to be aware of the difficulties. Perhaps the biggest issue is staff fatigue and workload. All of us are working harder, longer and in more expansive ways than we have before. The campus has now extended into our homes with the extension of TEAMS and ZOOM and the expansive use of email, and while that has brought amazing benefits, it also means we suffer from burnout. We are often trying to do more with less and that is not sustainable. Academics have also changed. There is a much wider group of individuals working at universities, with very diverse views, priorities and backgrounds. In addition to these wide range of interests and issues, universities have an increasing amount of metrics which they need to speak to. This means universities are required to focus on more issues with more oversight from external bodies. This can be wonderful – it can draw attention to discrepancies in the system, structural issues and create fairer educational spaces more adept at working with different groups to create excellence. It can also create paperwork, irrelevant processes and meaningless tasks which suck up our time and focus.

There are ways of dealing with this, although they are not always successful. We are beginning to recognise that different people have different skills. The best researchers aren’t always the best teachers and vice versa. In our sector, we need both and we need to stop pretending that all researchers can provide world-class teaching and all teachers can produce world-class research. We also need to value both of those things equally. We need to recognise that our staff and our students are different. We are a diverse community and that is our strength, but we cannot try to force people – students or staff – into a straitjacket, driving the creativity we value out of them so they can deliver exactly what we want rather than being allowed to excel and create innovating teaching and research which we weren’t expecting. As a sector, we are getting a bit better at that, but for many of us, we still feel that our best attributes are sometimes the things we have to hide rather than embrace them to their full potential.

Ultimately, all of us involved in university teaching and learning want to help our students to develop their skills, learn amazing and interesting things and be able to use those skills when they leave university, in whichever field they move into. We want them to be successful, to be independent thinkers, to disagree with us if they want, to be able to pull apart arguments and create better ideas and approaches. We want to hear about their experiences and how they think about something, what they read and what they thought of it. That requires students to have space to think, confidence to believe their own voice and to express their own opinions and the skills to analyse arguments and viewpoints in an appropriate way, rather than name calling on Twitter. Some of the biggest challenges in academia are in this area. Recognising that all students don’t have the same ability to sit certain types of assessment doesn’t mean they don’t have the skills or the knowledge we want them to have. Sometimes, it means they simply can’t pass the artificial task we have created for them. They could demonstrate their knowledge and skills in other ways, but often computer systems and routine mean we expect students to bend to our will rather than trying to consider how we can help them. This is changing, but it isn’t just about effort on the part of academics. It often takes time and money to create a more level playing field, and it isn’t easy. However, it is worth it and we know that when we see our students excel and become confident in their own abilities.

While we continue to try and deal with long-standing issues such as inclusiveness and fairness, we have new battles to fight. So, what are the new battlegrounds? While there are some that are genuinely new, such as the implications of artificial intelligence on assessment, sadly many are not new. We continue to discover ways in which we need to expand our horizons and think differently. Staff wellbeing is not a new issue. We work in a competitive field where we are judged, often on a daily basis, on our work and how innovative or intelligent we are. That can be punishing, and it always has been. However, the circumstances we find ourselves in currently are making that situation unbearable for valued members of our profession, and we need to recognise that and remedy it to ensure we don’t drive people away from academic life.

We need to recognise it for our students, so that their degree doesn’t become an endurance test. We are expanding our horizons beyond the English-speaking world, which is a challenge for many who are not well-versed in other languages. We are trying to decolonize our curriculums but how we do that and to what end-point is unclear currently. When will we know if we have been successful? We are also trying to work with industry and employers to ensure our students can explain their skills in a language which employers understand – a language which is often very different to ours. Academic life is always challenging, and there are battles to be fought on how we achieve our aims, but the aims themselves are usually worth fighting for.