My CeLP journey began a couple of years and a couple of role changes ago. I have been lucky enough to work in a breadth of different educational institutions in a variety of diverse posts throughout my career, but the decision to apply for CeLP meant that I had to think about the evolution within and between those professional spaces carefully and coherently. This was both a luxury and really hard! Whilst I implicitly knew my own rationale and logic for having made specific professional decisions, articulating the values that influenced them was incredibly challenging. What I ended up doing was producing a painfully descriptive, flat account of my LD journey, that I can now, in retrospect, see was a pedestrian attempt to capture the what of my practice as opposed to the more meaningful why. This came through very strongly in the feedback I received on my first application (hang on – did I just get a resit?!) which, whilst disappointing, was incredibly helpful in pushing me to feel the discomfort that was absolutely essential in demonstrating why what matters to me shapes what I do.
I challenged myself to do some free writing about times throughout my LD practice that had been exciting, fulfilling, (I hope) impactful, exasperating and those well-intended gems that had fallen flat on their face. I had cups of coffee with admired LD colleagues and asked them for honest feedback and reflected on conversations with students. I gazed back into the mists of time to my own experiences of being an undergraduate student, and to more recent periods of juggling work, study and family as a mature learner. In paying more attention to my own learning journey, to the emotions and ambitions that have driven my work, and how my contribution is perceived and influenced by others, I unsurfaced a deeper engagement with what LD really meant to me as a practitioner and the ways I drew on my values to advocate for both my students and our community.
This also provided a lovely opportunity to immerse myself in the distinctiveness of the LD endeavour, in the overt acknowledgement that our valued community is characterised by empathy, compassion, an appreciative perspective and genuine care for one another. I have lost count of the times that a sense of professional location in LD has inspired me and given me a renewed sense of purpose and focus. Whilst in many ways an ephemeral part of my ongoing development and identity, it has practically led me to try new things and form new collaborative partnerships, and that feels like a real privilege.
Writing a CeLP application also allowed me to document things that I was kind of instinctively/ iteratively doing in the context of wider practice trends and literature (around play based learning, compassionate assessment or hidden curriculum, for example) and again the opportunity to articulate some of these interests has deepened by practice toolkit and extended my development network. That’s one of the really exciting things about being an LD-er; you never quite know what might be coming next, but it all makes sense when you put it together.
A CeLP application isn’t an easy ask, but is well worth both the intended and the unintended learning outcomes. I have learned much about what drives me, and have engaged in the most challenging of professional reflections, giving me renewed respect for students engaging in exploratory practices in the name of learning! As well as the thrill of now being a CeLP holder, I am grateful for the structured opportunity to examine my practice values and aspirations. I would absolutely recommend pursuing accreditation of ALDinHE as an excellent way to relationally examine one’s own practice, to revel in our unique community and as a transformational opportunity to reflect on the richness of that community on continuing to develop our practice.