Sussi Louise Zimmermann deltog i December 2009 i Society for Research in Higher Education’s  (SHRE) årskonference hvor det overordnede tema var: Challenging Higher Education: knowledge, policy and practice. I den forbindelse blev der efterlyst kommentarer til SRHEs nyhedsbrev.

Nedenstående indlæg blev bragt i SRHEs februar nyhedsbrev :

Mess, ‘dishonesty’ and widening participation
Sussi Louise Zimmermann (Roskilde)

For a delegate from Denmark international conferences offer fascinating comparisons. The Danish HE sector, small compared to the UK, has its challenges, but tuition fees and parent-dependent students are not among them. My own institution, Roskilde University (RU), is teaching heavy, with a special brand of pedagogy built on research-based teaching, interdisciplinarity, problem-orientation and project work. The students are actively engaged in their teaching and learning, so the traditional boundaries between teacher and student are often, in the spirit of the SRHE Conference theme, ‘challenged’. Wenger would probably be thrilled. From this context three speakers especially caught my imagination: Tara Fenwick and the concepts of mess, blurry boundaries and knowledge wars; Karla Benske in the symposium “The challenge of widening participation”; and Louise Garcia and the discussion of “Academic dishonesty”. 

Having for years helped RU teachers learn to teach, I have seen how massification brings pervasive, radical, extensive change, and not only for the student experience. Increasing diversity in the student body brings great challenges for the teachers/supervisors/lecturers. The innovation- productive mess entailed in constant negotiation of fact, and conflict about what constitutes ‘good’ knowledge, often make teachers and students equal participants on the knowledge war battlefield, or so it may seem. HE lecturers’ frustration and resistance to giving up territories is understandable, but unproductive. Lifelong learning has no meaning and impact if it is not executed at all levels.

Karla Benske suggested focusing on how to qualify the teaching staff to cope with the multifaceted needs of a very diverse student body. Blurred professional boundaries and flexible new teacher identities in an HE system challenged by widening participation have increased the demands of “teaching smart people how to learn”, as Argyris put it. Smart people, as HE teachers must be, need the ability to learn and un-learn continuously, to earn the respect of students and colleagues every day, and to navigate more comfortably in the mess of uncertainty and negotiable power structures.

Louise Garcia made us think: facing a Pirate Bay generation in an age of ‘Googlerization’, who’s to say what is yours, what is mine, who knew it first, who said it first? In an Anglo-American system of mainly written assessment, copying and borrowing (or being very inspired by) literature and text are widespread. But where are the boundaries in the knowledge war when there are as many generic skills and histories of education as there are students? Who defines when it’s a crime to be inspired? When is it creative use of various media and when is it academic dishonesty? At RU the exams are part project reports and part oral. The reports are written in groups of up to eight students and it is hard to say exactly who wrote what where first. Can the other seven be held responsible if one chooses to copy a page from a book or internet site? Is it academic dishonesty if they jointly re-write a text so that it cannot be recognized, but then present it as their argument? And in the individual oral exam, can you punish a lax student for using a peer’s well-formed argument? How does one recognize academic dishonesty in these circumstances, in a messy world of widening participation and teaching/learning challenges?

Thank you for a very inspiring SRHE conference. I shall take these thoughts to Denmark and RU and engage in discussion with my colleagues there.