Editorial Paper

A word that often appears either directly or implicitly in this issue of ELiSS is ‘autonomy’ or one of its cognate terms. Occasionally ‘autonomy’ slides across the surface of an article or film shot, but, more commonly, it lurks behind the eyes or within the sinews of writers and speakers. In one sense this is no surprise — so much of social experience involves claims for autonomy and defence against oppressive practices that delimit a capacity to choose self-determining outcomes in social relationships. Yet in another sense its presence here is surprising: no contributor to this issue, whether commissioned or otherwise, set out to explore autonomy and its territory. Those commissioned were simply asked to write and report on the work on which they lead. Articles and audio-video material submitted for consideration for this issue simply did not seek to address autonomy. Yet the term and its application permeates our material.

In this issue our contributions bring out the dynamic of learning and teaching, both inside the university/college and outside. The movement may be circular requiring a radial model illustrated by Julie Hughes, or it may be a reflective monologue as shown in Steve Spencer’s interviews. There are of course other approaches in this issue.

We are continuing our practice of inviting either a Vice-Chancellor or P-VC with responsibility for learning and teaching to write on a topic from their institutional perspective. In issue one Dr Peter Noyes, Vice-Chancellor of Newport University, illustrated an institutional approach to e-learning. In this issue we are very pleased that Alison Halstead, P-VC Aston University, discusses the development of learning, teaching and innovation from her institutional perspective. She brings out the potential impact of key ideas on innovation from management studies for impact on learning and teaching in ways which are relevant for social scientists.

We also continue our practice of inviting national teaching fellows to write on their work. We are therefore pleased that Alison has written for us as she brings to her P-VC role experience as a national teaching fellow and senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA). Julie Hughes from Wolverhampton University shows how her national teaching fellowship work has spearheaded developments in e-portfolio activity both in her university and beyond. Julie brings out a personal project involving close research links with key partners extending into the US-based national coalition for e-portfolio research (NCEPR). We introduce two further elements in this issue of ELiSS. We include a set of video interviews by Steve Spencer. Steve has worked with different groups all over the world and has contributed much to C-SAP’s programme. In these interviews Canadian women describe their experiences of immigration and living in a ‘new home’. We would like to receive more video interview offerings that offer both ideas for classroom practice and opportunities for reflection on critical social science issues. The ELiSS board is constituted to enable reviewing of video submissions. However, our approach does not simply take and require refereed submissions, welcome though they are. We will publish interviews, conference presentations, reports that we feel are of interest to the social science community.

We are pleased to publish the presentation Norman Sharp of QAA Scotland made to the 2007 C-SAP annual conference. Norman brings out many of the issues facing debates over enhancement and assurance and he brings out the contested nature of learning and teaching. This sits alongside our further addition in this issue. We publish an initial dialogue on critical pedagogy. Joyce Canaan and Sarah Amsler accepted the invitation to write a position piece on critical pedagogy to be submitted for comment and response from two educational developers. In their turn Janet Strivens and Ranald Macdonald took on the role of commentator(s) and we are pleased that two colleagues with such wide experience were able to contribute so helpfully to this issue.

Autonomy is not simply a concept in philosophy or social science. It permeates so many fields of inquiry with its emphasis on being able to make choices, and of course what constitutes good decisions. One starting point is that of A.L. Kennedy in her recent novel Day. On the opening page Alfred Day, former RAF gunner, only survivor from his Second World War crew is contemplating his future. It is 1949, the war is over but memories crowd in: capture and time as a POW, the crew who became the family to replace a brutal father, the married woman he met whose husband was still missing. Day notes that a man [sic] ‘had to imagine he’d got a chance at freedom, a bit of space. The interval between alternatives, that gave you space’ (Kennedy, 2007: 2). It is as ‘an interval between alternatives that give space’ that we can consider autonomy.

It is perhaps surprising that relatively little of the important feminist analysis of autonomy has permeated learning and teaching discourses. Partly due to the rejection of the concept by some (Judith Butler), and partly to the constant treading over the Rawlsian ground, there has simply been less attention paid to work on self and autonomy, relational autonomy, autonomy as competence which has inspired the feminist recuperation of the ‘project’. The work of Marilyn Friedman, Diana Meyers, Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stolja has simply had less impact than it should. If we are serious about considering learner choices and teacher actions in the widest political sense (Canaan and Amsler this volume) then we have to enter these debates. Strivens and Macdonald focus on the institution and the art of possibility including reference to what is possible but not as yet imagined — a key part of autonomy. That is important and it is what some of our project reports address. Helen Jones shows how localised work spread through positive buy in and engagement to become an international collaboration. Similarly, Mike McManus shows how collaboration across two institutions with major inputs from other contributors including colleagues outside the HE sector changed student learning. In short, both projects illustrate relational autonomy (Meyers, 1989, 1997; Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000; Friedman, 2003) where it is the purposive building of relationships and trust that enables change to happen. This is what is so difficult to achieve at both discipline and institutional levels. This is a theme which is picked up in Norman Sharp’s video presentation where he shows how a policy level intervention (ELIR) can impact on institutional autonomy. He also shows how student involvement supports institutional plans, a practice that is regularly found in UK higher education.

To turn to the institution, there are different levels that we need to consider and any one issue of a journal at this early point will not automatically pick all these up. Nor should it - an online journal should create spaces for discussion including real-time audio that enable a discussion to take place over a period of time. It is something for the editorial board and readership to consider — how best we develop different institutional levels including contrasts, difficulties and even sheer misperceptions as opposed to the bland overall report we all have to produce from time to time.

In this particular issue Jim Moir and his colleagues, again from two institutions, as well as Carl Walker and his colleagues explore research into two specific initiatives: PDP, the first year undergraduate student experience and levels of engagement. We are pleased to carry papers which use different methodologies and which tackle a major issue for all of us — levels of student engagement and ‘switched offness’. It is the spaces between alternatives that form the image of the student world in these papers. Exhortations to change practice are important and appropriate particularly in the fast-changing world of digital interconnectedness that several contributors address. But it is not simply about changing practice. Such changes are at best minimal factors in bringing about change. This is a pity, given institutional and sector investment in such factors. Far more important is the notion of self, identity in all its forms no matter whether bathed in a postmodern light, or treated through the glare and hubris of late modernity; it is here that change occurs. So many initiatives and everyday requirements are rendered procedural rather than specific — it is of course easier to maintain control through proceduralism but says little about either values or care.

It is these double edged swords that Halstead, Hughes and Norman Sharp in their different ways address. Sharp brings out how an enhancement agenda can move beyond the procedural while Halstead shows how a combination of value development and decision making can create change. For all our contributors professional development is the glue that cements the relational elements. Such is the complexity of institutions that there will be different outcomes and different forms of achievement in different places.

If we consider the disciplinary level, then C-SAP is, together with the other subject centres, a significant player in the formation of disciplinary allegiances and pedagogic issues. ELiSS is a contributor to this work. We offer in the conventional sense an opportunity for contributors to argue and analyse pedagogy and curriculum in broad terms. But we also offer the opportunities of a web 2.0 environment, and, who knows, at least some reports in the near future of web 3.0 activity: increased machine reading/searching capacities, increased interoperability, intelligent applications so that the already considerable advances in ‘whole community existence’ such as that of ‘Second Life’ are extended. As a web 2.0 refereed journal we have ensured that in this first year we have included the audio and the visual. But put like that such a step sounds limited. What needs to happen is for readers and different networks of social scientists and others to use web 2.0 affordances — to engage with the debates that Joyce Canaan and Sarah Amsler and Janet Strivens and Ranald Macdonald offer, to bring forward through video discussion responses to the issues raised by Norman Sharp, and, of course to introduce something new and different that takes us beyond where we currently are.

Responses and ways of taking arguments forward do not have to be written and even in written form, they do not have to be ‘conventional academic’ in expression. There is surely a role for audio feedback so responses by mp3 are welcome, as are podcast and webcam recorded responses. Adobe Connect may well be highly suitable for this. As someone who attended an overseas conference recently, I recorded audio material for an ongoing second year course in the gaps between sessions based to some extent on responses to conference activity. I then read and responded to student online question responses; I felt course location and classroom ambience was of little importance for those particular few days. I was interested that a student apologised for missing a session but she felt she had to go on the demonstration against government bail out of banks. So at least in this case a rich environment was established - students felt able to combine political action with academic activity regardless of the physical presence of the tutor.

Web 2.0 usage goes much further than this — it is the networking facility to different forms of learning engagement that may be so powerful. The voices Steve Spencer enables us to hear are indicative of this. Again we become aware of the spaces between the interval. Here the interval varies from interviewee to interviewee in time, location and history. Thinking more generally about online developments, whether VLE-based, or mediated through another medium, there is little doubt that academics have colonised aspects of teaching in creative ways, regularly involving learners in this work. Julie Hughes is able to show us at first hand how this takes place. Her paper, with those of Jim Moir and colleagues and Carl Walker with colleagues raises questions for how learners mediate and distil experiences. So often the competence banner is raised in this regard, and while this may be helpful, what is more purposive is to consider the sort of competences that feminist philosophers have explored in their scrutiny of autonomy: including self-reading and self-direction as separate but linked competences (Meyers, 1989). ‘Self-reading’ may sound indulgent but how you read about yourself and how you engage with other’s texts on you and with you is distilled into a competence in Meyers’s work in ways which are progressive.

This suggests that C-SAP in sponsoring ELiSS is making a significant investment in promoting debate and cross-discipline pedagogic activity. We all know of the disciplinary boundaries as well as the allegiances. C-SAP activity in different fields including race and sustainability has specifically sought cross-disciplinary activity. We need to reflect this in the journal. Specifically, we need to encourage colleagues working in the many different branches of criminology to share experiences and write/speak/draw/represent for us. ELiSS will remain a conventional academic journal in focus with regular refereed papers and project reports - that is the currency we all work with. ELiSS can also become a ‘virtual commons’ on the US model as a source for inquiry, debate, exchange. To achieve this distinctive outcome the journal has to work closely with C-SAP while maintaining its independence. It has to do more in terms of the conventional advertising approach: promotion through interest groups such as ALT, CETLs, JISC etc. But what is more important is that ELiSS becomes a site where social scientists from anywhere in the world can find approaches grounded in teaching and learning. Such approaches are often applicable to a wide range of issues.

ELiSS has so far related its two issues to C-SAP conference venues. We opened with an emphasis on Wales with a commissioned article from a Welsh university as well as an article from a social scientist from Wales. This issue is published as C-SAP heads for a conference in Scotland. We were delighted to receive a paper from colleagues at Abertay and Robert Gordon, and also to publish a keynote from Norman Sharp and QAA Scotland delivered at the first C-SAP conference.

2008 has seen two issues of ELiSS. In terms of numbers of articles and coverage the total for the year compares favourably with other online journals in their first two years. The organisation of the journal has gained considerably from Sophie Allen’s input. Sophie is the journal administrator based at Sheffield Hallam and employed by C-SAP. ELiSS has much to do to make others aware of its existence and the opportunities it provides. We hope that running two special issues in 2009 as well as one broad-based issue will help increase awareness and also act as a spur to colleagues to encourage others to read and to comment. We plan to release a special issue on e-learning edited by John Craig (University of Huddersfield) and Richard Pountney (Sheffield Hallam University) in April 2009, a special issue on internationalisation to follow up the November 2008 C-SAP conference. This issue is scheduled for June 2009 and will be edited by Malcolm Todd and Anthony Rosie. We will then publish a regular issue of the journal in November 2009.

However, we would like to develop a more sustained online dialogue with readers and contributors. The feedback section and commentary provides a starting point. We encourage readers and viewers to use this facility to feedback responses to individual articles, and to ELiSS more generally. But we particularly welcome developed responses leading to papers we can publish that either debate issues raised by contributors or take forward points raised in an initial way through the editorial. In the first issue the editorial outlined some aspects of cultural hybridity with reference to Europe and to Latin America, but much remains to be discussed: how valuable is the contentious term ‘hybridity’ and how can be either used or critiqued through teaching and learning? Similarly, in response to this second issue of ELiSS we welcome responses on autonomy. For instance, how can relational autonomy be promoted effectively and what difference can it make? What are the ideological issues and the implications for learner experiences for so often promoting independent learning rather than engaging with learner autonomy? Can relations between autonomy and learner autonomy be explored further, and what are some of the implications for teaching and learning? This debate is particularly relevant for distance education — see ( Gokool-Ramdoo, 2008 ).We therefore welcome much more work on the field of autonomy.

We also welcome contributions on the purpose of the university and its role in the next twenty years. This is to take forward points raised by Norman Sharp in his rejection of consumerism, and Joyce Canaan and Sarah Amsler in their different contributions to critical pedagogy. Such contributions might well reflect on a point raised by Ranald Macdonald - Stephen Brookfield’s view of Marcuse’s concept of ‘repressive tolerance’. Marcuse represents a key point in critical thinking and critical pedagogy. His point, as developed by Brookfield, is that the ordering of curriculum content as well as its mode of communication will display hidden preferences; it will position ‘weaker’ or more vulnerable discourses and people in less strong positions. How does the university order and organise its curriculum? How does it meet claims for inclusion and respect, particularly in the context of substantial increase in online learning and distance education? These are amongst the questions which we invite readers to respond to through papers, audio and visual responses. We also welcome requests to lead on particular topics in ways which will generate further research and will provide careful reflection on practice.