Mapping LD in Scotland
Learning Developers are not alone in having jobs that are not among the list of options pre-school children understand and consider. Nor are we alone in having job titles that do not immediately give away what our day to day working lives. Yet, working in a field where people who have very similar job titles can do very different things and people whose to do list is relatively similar can have different job titles can be a tad confusing at times even for those involved in Learning Development.
It can constitute a more serious challenge in terms of consolidating our position in academia, because clear and preferably simple messages about the value a job brings to students and colleagues are more likely to win arguments about resourcing than tentative lists of the things Learning Developers could do. As a fairly small nation, the number of universities in Scotland can be counted with the help of fingers and toes by a single person and when I see the member list of ScotHELD, I can put a face to most names. Despite that, it would have been a challenge to say how many of our 19 institutions have central LD units, for example, or where colleagues report to. I had the vague feeling that being on academic contracts at Glasgow Caledonian University was not a privilege shared by the big majority of colleagues at other institutions, but most of our ‘knowledge’ about the state of LD was more of a vague inkling based on personal conversations.
That was why seeing a presentation about AALL’s database that charts the structures of Academic Language and Learning work across Australia made many of us wonder why we had never attempted to gather such data, as we could immediately see how powerful a tool it could be for Learning Developers advocating for the role of their profession in Higher Education.
Mapping to trace impact
In the initial stages of our discussions, Alex Cuthbert and I realised there was a second important reason why we needed to expand our understanding of the LD work in Scotland. While diversity is a great asset, extensive lack of knowledge of what actually happens in meeting rooms and classrooms when students and Learning Developers meet is also a major barrier to reflecting and conceptualising our practice. How do we know whether theoretical approaches are useful if we have little idea to which degree and how they are used? There are excellent papers, but anything that has gone through a long process of peer review will only represent a small fraction of what is happening on the ground. What feeds our conceptual work beyond our knowledge of our own practice and that of close colleagues? How can we share wider insights into LD with new Learning Developers if these insights are based on a relatively small window of published work, direct experience and personal exchanges? Including questions about LD practice and pedagogy (or andragogy) would provide valuable data to feed the development of our field. Asking about practice and conceptual underpinnings would make our survey longer, but also much more useful. Together with Julia Bohlmann, we started to design our study: Mapping LD in Scotland.
Designing the study
Beyond the decision on specific contents and the best platform to host, one of our fundamental decisions at the design stage was about ownership of the data. The aim of the survey was to provide a tool that would help Learning Developers advocate and develop their field – to achieve this, our data would need to be widely accessible, similar to the way AALL publishes their data on their website. At the same time, asking questions about practice made the data more sensitive and required more time and effort from those who were willing to participate. We decided to make it a community project that would benefit those who supported it with their time: the full dataset would be available to everyone in ScotHELD and we committed to supporting research using the through our infrastructure. Apart from creating an exciting data set through this community effort, it also allows us to experiment with new ways to support research in LD. Following our data collection, ScotHELD now has a number of small working groups dedicated to using the data from the Mapping LD in Scotland survey.
What did we find?
I would love to finish this blog with a glowing description of the situations where ScotHELD members used the results from the survey to improve LD provision in their institutions, links to the high-calibre papers that resulted from it and an inventory of the new collaborations work on it sparked among Learning Developers in Scotland. Unfortunately this hasn’t happened – yet. We are still in the phase of data analysis, but the work on the survey so far has provided food for thought, so here is a shorter, more reflective mid-way account of where we are with it now and what we have learned so far. Some of it is sobering rather than inspirational, but slightly painful insights can sometimes be more useful to help us move forward than those we would like to shout from the rooftops.
Desire for knowledge…or not?
Learning Development has become an essential part of Higher Education in Scotland. Sixteen of the 19 Higher Education Institutions responded to our group survey; of the remaining two we know LD exists at two (and is actually going strong at one of them; we just could not get a group response). Many of the Learning Developers also shared their work through the individual survey, where we received 50 responses, and the practice shared shows indeed a wealth of fabulous teaching ideas and interesting conceptual approaches. Yet, for each colleague who responded, we can think of at least one who did not and many of these 50 responses are the result of very consistent pleading by email. We are realistic enough not to expect a response rate resembling voting patterns in regimes that invent their democratic credentials and the data we have is a very rich source of information, so should this really be a cause for concern? It indicates that for a number of very valid reasons many Learning Developers cannot find the time or do not see the point in mapping the current state of affairs in their field. Those engaged in our Associations are the ones who are in a position (both in terms of circumstance and interest) to care about LD and are passionate about developing the field and their own careers further. We need to have discussions about the direction of travel with each other, but perhaps we should not forget that to achieve critical mass, we also need to ensure these discussions involve as many of us as we can. In Scotland this means more than 50 Learning Developers. Does this involve re-thinking what we can offer them as organisations? Does it involve increasing our advocacy for conditions that make professional development, for individual but also development of the profession, easier to achieve? I would say this is definitely something to explore in future discussion and research.
A snapshot…over time
Our survey gives us a detailed picture of what is happening in LD at a specific moment in time. That again is really valuable data and if we repeat the survey, as AALL did, it will not only allow us to see an individual snapshot but patterns of development over time. It will allow us to write our history, as well as inform our future practice. But the survey has also shown that time is not on our side. Data collection took almost a year. Cleaning the data took various months. Sorting our website and sharing it with ScotHELD members is taking longer than anticipated as well.
Most of these delays are not due to lack of dedication, neither on the part of those who took a long time to answer the survey, nor on the part of those conducting it. None of us has time dedicated to research and professional development. We try to make time in different ways, whether it is working part-time and using unpaid time that is left between paid work and other commitments or using evenings and weekends to squeeze these things in. This is a pattern that applies to most our colleagues – which academic has sufficient protected time for research? It is particularly pronounced for Learning Development, however, where research and CPD is often not even part of our contracts and there are no incentives in terms of career progression. How do we address this beyond squeezing even more out of the hours that we have? This question is not new – it is related to many discussions that we are already having, whether they are on leadership or the purpose of our associations.
Our experience with the Mapping Survey emphasises its importance and the fact that this is a systemic problem, one that cannot be overcome individually. How can we as associations contribute to a solution? I wish the survey had an answer, but unfortunately that’s beyond the scope of the data. Perhaps our experiment with the working groups that explore the survey data for advocacy and research purposes could be a small part of the answer by bundling our efforts to reduce the time and effort needed from each individual to achieve results? Another question to address after our data analysis…