 Mae'n gwelwch i chi'n gweld i ni allwn. Mae'n gwybod eu hun ar y bun oed, yn gyda wahanol, ac efo i gyddoch i ni gwyloedd ar y gwyloedd, felly bythnau bod yn gwych yn ôl. Rwy'n ei ffrindio ddiwrnod i gael ar y peth mwy. Felly mae'n parwod i chi i mae'n gweld i chi. Mae nid i chi'n gweinwch am yr ysbyn. Mae'n ddwy'n digwydd i chi. Ond yna arhyf y byddai gydain gyda ddisgu particularly ar y berthyn ni o fwy opnol. ond ond ond ond o'r phrefiannwys. I do, I expect that phrase has come past your eyes, through or past your ears quite a bit recently, with the government's Teaching Excellence framework. I take a position on Teaching Excellence, which is that it's logically entirely impossible to make any judgment about teaching excellence unless you first have a discussion and some sort of agreement about good education. In other words, what is education for? If you don't know what education is for, you haven't agreeed, you haven't understood or you haven't shared a perspective on what education is for, then the sense of teaching accents doesn't make any sense. A'w gallwn gweithio eich gweithio gyda'r cyfforddiol ar y gweithio gweithio'i gweithio a'r grannu ac'r sicrhau ac roedden nhw, fel y cyfforddiol chi'n gweld dros y Syrdd Cymru a'r Ymgylcheddol, gallwn edrych ar eich cyfforddiol. Ydych chi'n gallu bod hi'n eich gweld o gweithio'i wneud o y pwysigwyr am gyfer gweithio. Ben ddymaeth o gyfoddiol, yn gallu ei cyfrifio'u gwyrdd ac ydych chi'n gweithio'i gyfforddiol ac'r sicrhau. don't step back and really think about. I'm going to talk through the Connected Curriculum Framework and Initiative. I'm going to say something about how we're enabling change in this direction at UCL just briefly towards the end. And there'll be lots of chance for you to ask questions and make comments and disagree, and agree even maybe with me afterwards and contribute your perspectives and your examples and ideas. First of all, something about education, research and scholarship. I don't know if we have any philosophers in the room, but I certainly drew quite a bit on philosophy myself. I've got quite a multidisciplinary, but mostly arts and humanities, social sciences background. Fundamentally to me, the idea of good education is a philosophical one. It's around values and it's around what do we think education is, what do we think learning is. Some of you may be familiar with the notion from the continent, from Germany in particular, of education in the German word that's often used for this is Bildung. There's no direct translation in English for the word Bildung. We might describe it as education, but it isn't exactly education as we would think of it. Drawing from the field of philosophical hermeneutics, which is a very interesting field. Anybody aware of it at all or interested in it? One or two nods, it's always great to see. I think, and some of us have been discussing this quite a bit at UCL and beyond, that we need to revisit the idea of what education fundamentally is. The German philosopher Gadema during the 20th century wrote about education as Bildung, as self-formation, as developing oneself through critical dialogue. The German word Bildung is connected with the German word Bildt, which is German for picture. If you imagine having a picture of yourself that you want to move towards, that captures something around Bildung. What's also really central to Gadema's notion is the concept of the widening of horizons through education. If you imagine that each of us is standing on our own hill because we are all distinctive people and we've got different pasts and different perspectives, we have our own horizon. Each of us has a very particular knowledge horizon and that will be affected by our background, our prior learning, our disciplinary orientation, our professional orientation, the different aspects of ourselves that have brought us to this point. There's a wonderful German word in the philosophy, which is Horizontfeschmelzung, which is all one word. Don't you love long German words? I just think they're wonderful. Which means the merging of horizons and this notion of education and dialogue plays a really important part in this concept, is that each of us standing on our different hills with our different perspectives and our different sets of values and our levels of understanding and our range of understanding, that we can connect with one another to a certain extent. We can't stand entirely in someone else's shoes, but we can visit other people's hills. We can engage in dialogue. We can collaborate. That through that means our horizons can begin to merge, so we all end up with wider knowledge horizons. But what's absolutely fundamental to this concept of education, and I think it's very timely in 2016, which has been the most extraordinary year, hasn't it? Who would have anticipated all of these things that have happened this year has been most extraordinary. But a key concept in this notion of building is this one, that the human mind needs to remain unsatisfied with what it imagines it knows. So, this is an intellectual position that we take in this conception of education, which is that I know I'm standing on my knowledge hill, but I also know that other people are standing on different places and looking at different angles and so on. Therefore, I'm going to hold on to the notion that everything I think is so, or anything that I think is so, may not in fact be so, or maybe adapted or changed or developed. Which is, if you think of it, a very scholarly position to take. Let's just take, you know, rounding this sort of circle into the so what is education for them, so what's the purpose of it? I've mentioned the personal development in the sense of, you know, that each of us, if we are going to be educated, each of our students who are educated are moving towards perhaps another picture of themselves through dialogue, through connecting horizons. But collectively as a society, what is education for? What are we doing? I don't know what you think you're getting up in the morning for. Sometimes I wonder what we're all getting up in the morning for when you sort of, you know, we're all busy and we're spinning a whole bunch of plates at the same time. I found this UNESCO publication very inspiring and it spoke to me and my values. And it encapsulated in this phrase, education is for the global common good, embodying a shared responsibility for a sustainable future. Now, maybe that isn't what you think education is for. Maybe it's not what SOAS thinks education is for. I suspect it might be, but, you know, I don't want to prejudge as an institution, as a shared institution. But the argument I would make here is unless we have the discussion and say so, why are we doing this? And also we revisit that discussion reasonably regularly when we're making decisions about practice and policy and so on, that we will never be able to come to the point of saying, well, is this good teaching? Is this what we want to do? Because it's about what impact we have in the world. Now, another way of thinking about education that kind of connects with this, but comes from perhaps if you like a different hill, is thinking about the scientific evidence, the research-based evidence of what good education is in the sense of how do students learn and develop effectively. And depending on your disciplinary orientation, you're likely to be more or less convinced by more scientific papers, by more scientific analyses, or perhaps by more humanities-based, perhaps philosophical papers. You may embrace the two, which would be extremely commendable. I don't know if you've come across work by Carl Weeman in the United States. He's a physicist. He's actually a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who's turned his hand, subsequently, to investigating physics education. And he does it in a really scientific way. And he sets up different ways of running classes and he measures things, and you have a whole bunch of statistics saying that students did this well or that well. In broad terms, what he finds is that students who engage in active inquiry do consistently better than students who are just lectured to in the traditional sense. Now, that won't come as much of a surprise, I'm sure, to many of you, in the sense that there's been a long discussion over time about the fact that we need to engage students in active learning. But there are some really specific measurements and experiments, essentially, that he sets up, that if you're interested in thinking about good education in that sense, evidence-based, effective learning methods, if you like, do have a look at those papers. If you're interested in that too, but you're more interested in the way that plays through with humanities-related or social science-related subjects, have a look at Jamie Wood's work, and he's come to similar sorts of conclusions about using more types of humanities framing. So, I'm now going to say something about research, because what we're talking about here is not just teaching, is it? It's about what is a higher education institution for, what is a university for, because we, in my view, we should be thinking about the whole ecosystem, not just the one thing, because everything interacts with and affects something else. So, what is research for? Okay. And what is research? Well, you may be familiar with this traditional definition of research as having sort of two modes, if you like, mode one and mode two, so that you think of researchers either pure or basic research within a knowledge field where you're kind of investigating, because you're investigating, if you like, and then all sorts of things will emerge from that. Or mode two research, this so-called real-world kind of research sometimes, where you're actually trying to address explicitly from the beginning real-world challenges. That's often multidisciplinary research. Paul Merse, in the recent study review paper, described researchers advancing the frontiers of knowledge, and I think we'd probably all agree that whichever kind of research we're engaging in. I actually think that polarisation is a bit of a false one, because there's lots of sorts of research that actually somewhere in between. Or what we would agree is that research sets out to advance the frontiers of knowledge. And then I'm thinking, okay, so what's the difference then between advancing the frontiers of knowledge through research and widening our horizons through education, or widening our students' horizons through education? Actually, this is starting to look quite connected. And yet, if you look at the policy landscape, not only nationally, but across Europe, and indeed often in institutions, I don't know about those, so I'm not going to make any, or the institution that you come from, I'm not going to make any assumptions. But it's very typical in institutions for that policy landscape where you have a research excellence framework on the one hand and the teaching excellence framework coming through on the other, that you then have a teaching committee or an education committee and you have a research committee. But who is looking at the connections? Who is looking at the way in which this could be a much more synergistic set of activities? Often there isn't anybody in an institution doing that. But for a European Union paper from 2013, Mary Macalese says, there is no contradiction between the imperative of good teaching and the imperative of research, which critiques, refines, discards, and advances human knowledge and understanding. And not only would I say that there is no contradiction, I would say there are enormous synergies between these two sorts of activities. And yet we somehow seem to operate through all kinds of strange things that have emerged over many years in the sector, as if the two were somehow different types of things. It's different things. I'm not saying you can entirely conflate them. I'm just saying that there are so many connections. So one of the terms that in the past has been used that tries to look at the connected notion of research and education has been the term scholarship. So some of you, just out of interest, how many of you are familiar with this notion of Ernest Boyer's scholarship? Just one or two of you. That's OK then. I'll tell you about it without feeling that I'm just repeating everything you know. So Ernest Boyer in 1990 in the States wrote really what was quite an influential text at the time called scholarship reconsidered. And he said, we believe that the time has come to move beyond the tired old teaching versus research debate and give the familiar and honourable term scholarship a broader, more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full scope of academic work. And I'm sure if you think about your role, whether or not it's described as academic, incidentally, there'll be a whole range of different activities that you undertake. But any of them can fall under this notion of scholarship. So Boyer talked about discovery, which we might think of as more like research in the traditional sense of research. Integration of bringing things together, connecting things, of application, applying that discovery, if you like. Later he talked a lot about engagement in that space. And I'll come back to that because I think it's very important. And teaching, the scholarship of teaching. So some of you might be familiar with the term the scholarship of teaching and learning, sometimes called sotl. And there's a whole kind of movement right across the world and lots of conferences and so on, which come under this sotl kind of heading, the scholarship of teaching and learning, where scholarship is directed at investigating one's own teaching or the teaching that's going on around us. So although Boyer said we need to have a capacious sort of meaning and we need to see all these connected, what happened when he said there's this and there's this and there's this and there's this, is that somehow then we all went on and said, oh, let's just look at this then. And then other people went on and looked at another one. So we lost that connection, which was kind of a bit strange. So the scholarship of teaching and learning is written about a lot and it's a great thing to investigate your own teaching and aspects of your own educational provision. So definitions include that it focuses on teaching and learning strategies underpinning the curriculum. This is inquiry, this is a form of inquiry, seeks to involve students by providing opportunities to learn in research mode, to develop undergraduate research, for example, is a research-led form of professional development. So our own inquiry into our practice, obviously, is a developmental activity and it can inform policy and practice at institutional level, for example, in career development and promotion, something I'll come back to in a moment. But another wing of Boyer's framing was this idea of the scholarship of application and engagement. And it seems to me that this is the one that we keep losing sight of in the sector. It kind of pops up here and there and some people do really good stuff. But as a sector, we don't really say, how are we engaging people with our scholarship? Whether it's our scholarship or whether our students are learning and they are engaging others with their learning. We don't spend so much time really kind of investigating that. So, Glassic and others, following on from Boyer, actually, in the American sort of tradition, says, scholarship, however brilliant, lacks fulfilment without someone on the receiving end. The discovery should be made known to more than the discoverer. Teaching is not teaching without students. Integration makes scant contribution unless it's communicated so that people benefit from it. And the application becomes application by addressing others' needs. And you think back to what we were saying about the purpose of education for the global common good addressing others' needs. Now, what about scholarship? What are its values? What's the purpose of it at the heart? So, in a recent paper, interestingly on the Bolognau process, Rhindall cites a letter that was written by a school principal who survived World War II, and this was the letter. Dear teacher, I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. So, I am suspicious of education. My request is help your students become human. Well, how often do we have discussions about these sorts of things? And maybe 2016 is the year we need to start talking about these sorts of things. Rhindall says, what kind of knowledge will make a difference and influence one's life as an existing being? We should view building this education as development first and foremost as a question of being responsible in relation to oneself as a human being. I don't know if when you came to this session you imagined that I'd sort of dive straight in with, well, here's a really good idea for your teaching or here's a really good idea for your assessment. I will come back to some of those things in a moment. But it seems to me that you can't make sound and sensible and creative judgments about how we do those things unless we first have the conversation about why we're doing it, what we care about, who we want to impact through what we're doing. So maybe this is just a moment when you can just stop in your busy life and just have some thinking about that and possibly we can discuss it later. One of the things that we're doing in the space where we're discussing this at UCL is we're looking to something that I'm sure a number of you might be familiar with, which is this notion of liberating the curriculum. You may be familiar with a video on YouTube which is called Why Is My Curriculum White where students, possibly even students from SOAS were involved. I'm not sure certainly UCL students were who were questioning the content of much of the curriculum that we offer in our various institutions. And why is it that the knowledge is so heavily dominated by white, male, European knowledge, knowledges, and isn't really global. I suspect SOAS does much better with these sorts of things than many other institutions. But it's worth mentioning. We have a strand of activity around liberating the curriculum at UCL. If you are interested in it, do have a look at the web page. There's a little animation and various things going on because obviously it's something that goes much further than just in one institution. It's a really important area. But can you see how it connects with what I'm saying about scholarship and making a difference to the world and making sure that we connect in with different perspectives and different knowledge horizons and the values that we want to uphold? But we are also talking about engagement. And it seems to me the oddest thing, if you look historically, that we, in our scholarship, and I think this may be coming back to haunt us somewhat in 2016, that our scholarship has often been amongst ourselves and to ourselves. And that we've not been so good across the sector as a whole in our scholarly investigations, whatever the nature of them, in really making sure that the outside world, in all its variety, gets to understand the relevance, the importance, the impact of the scholarship that we engage with. So, I mean, our typical scholarly products, if you like. I mean, if you're involved in scholarly activity, what do you do? Do you write an article for a journal? How many people read it? Millions, of course. Give conference presentations. I mean, I do these things, so I'm not criticising. Of course, they're useful and important and part of what we do and part of our identity. But what about all the other methods of creativity and expression that we could be tapping into with our scholarship, if we're going to take that notion of engagement seriously? What about visual and creative expressions, multimedia, interactive modes, blogs, film documentaries? Don't you think that film documentaries are kind of the equivalent of the old school essay, in some ways, because if you design a really good film documentary, it has lots of the features of a really good essay. And yet then students can do this. Really quite new technologies afford so many opportunities. So it's just a moment for you to ponder on and think about how you express your scholarship. And expressing scholarship is not just a question of conveying what you know, if you like, in the sense of communicating knowledge. William Pinar, who writes about curriculum, actually again in the United States. I don't know why I'm referencing so many people from the US today. But he talks about teachers being communicants in a complicated conversation. And he says expressing one's subjectivity, who you are, through academic knowledge, is how one demonstrates to students that scholarship can speak to them. And how, in fact, scholarship can enable them to speak. I think he takes a really interesting position. A lot of us have talked over a number of years about the idea of teachers as facilitators. The teacher sort of facilitates the other person's learning. Like, in a sense, you kind of set something up and the learning happens. And there's a kind of value in that. But Pinar is quite critical of that idea. And he talks about teachers and students being present in the same space and sharing real conversations. So we all express who we are and we genuinely engage with one another. Not that the teacher obsents themself from the moment. I'll leave that for you to ponder on. Some of you might have comments or questions about it. So I've been thinking quite a bit about this scholarship. I had a paper published recently. All the references are here if you should want to follow anything up. And obviously the slides will be available for you should you be interested. So I was thinking about these sorts of things. Scholarship is the principal space that connects integrity, the values, if you like. Research, teaching, learning, practice, personal development and contribution to the world. And it's scholarship that embodies that hermeneutic principle that we started off with that the human mind must remain open which is at the core of critical thinking and creative being. And if we are indeed moving into a post-truth society, post-truth is obviously the word of the moment according to the Oxford Dictionary at least. That is at the opposite extreme of this, isn't it? Which is we want to keep testing. We want to keep our critical faculties in operation. I don't know how clearly you can see that. I can't see that very well on there. I can see it a bit better on there. There's a sort of model that looks at the connectedness of different sorts of scholarship that should you be interested, do take a look. But the point about it really is that at the centre it's engagement informed by critical inquiry and dialogue. And whether it's education or research or whether you're inquiring into education through the scholarship of teaching and learning, whether you're inquiring into research which is a very interesting scholarly area to investigate research itself, whether you're engaged in scholarly leadership in your field or you're working towards that, you want to do it or you see it as personal academic development. All of these things are connected by that central principle, I would argue. And just to give you a moment to just think, well, am I a scholar? Where is the landscape of my own scholarship? Am I thinking of it in terms of scholarly activity? I've asked this once or twice before in other settings and sometimes people have said, oh, well, I'm not really a scholar because I'm only an ex. You know, I'm only a, I don't know, e-learning adviser or I'm only a, you know, I only work in the library. I mean, or I'm only a lecturer, I'm not a professor. Or, because we all think we're only, whoever we are. But my argument is that scholarship is a disposition. It's a personal position you take in the world. It's not about what it says on your job title. So perhaps if I can encourage anybody today to own scholarship or think about what that might mean for you, then I will be very happy. At the same time, I hope we're all thinking about, well, if we're thinking about scholarship in this sense, what might that mean for our students? And if we think about curriculum and if we think about how we teach and how the students learn and how they get assessed, then maybe we might want to start thinking a bit differently about the sorts of things they do or the way the curriculum is organised. And that is what we've been doing at UCL. So we've been taking some of these ideas and other ideas and we've been saying, okay, why don't we think differently now about curriculum? If we all can take a scholarly position, our students and ourselves and, you know, not just any people in particular roles, but everybody in the institutional community, then how might we reframe the way in which we develop our curriculum? And particularly as well, focusing on this notion of engagement. How can we, if we are bringing our students into that scholarly space so that they can become scholars, how are we encouraging them to engage with others about the scholarship that they develop? So, just to give you a bit of context at UCL, you may or may not find it interesting, Michael Arthur arrived three, just over three years ago, I actually started at UCL just after that, having been the vice chancellor at Leeds previously, but he came to be the president and provost at UCL. And he said very early on, at UCL our top strategic priority for the next 20 years is to close the divide between teaching and research. It's quite a big thing to say in an institution like UCL that has had all its prestige over many years through research and not through student education, quite brave. He apparently pitched that at his interview for his job and basically said, if you don't accept this, don't appoint me. You can imagine council absolutely loved it. And soon after he came, we had a whole bunch of town hall meetings and discussions, students were very much involved and all sorts of activities happened. And we developed a 20-year strategy called UCL 2034. And you might be sitting there thinking for goodness sake, a 20-year strategy, you know, five-year strategy is more than any human being should have to bear, but the reason why it can be a 20-year strategy is it's essentially about the values of the institution. It's about who do we want to be as a community as we move forward in this big complex institution. And the area that I'm responsible for is the second one, a global leader that UCL wants to become a global leader in the integration of research and education underpinning an inspirational student experience. It's a great thing to have a long-term plan because it means that instead of thinking about your teaching or curriculum development as a set of quick fixes, I'm not saying that occasionally a quick fix isn't a good idea, but instead of focusing your attention and your energy on that, what you can do is saying, in an absolutely ideal world, in five years' time, in 10 years' time, beyond that, what kind of community do we want, what kind of curriculum do we want? And that can start driving different kinds of conversation. So, we introduced, well, I suppose I should say I introduced, but with the support of the whole institution and it was approved, if you like, this connected curriculum framework. Can you read that okay? Well, we're going to break it down in bits anyway. The connected curriculum framework is our way into, in a very big, multidisciplinary, very diverse institution, our way into having the conversations about where do we want our curriculum to be in years to come. And I'll talk you through the framework and just give you some examples so that you can see what we're actually doing. Just on the left, the book, Should You Be Interested, will be out in the new year. And it's all open access because it's values-based. So, the book, when it's published by UCL Press, about a connected curriculum and all the ideas behind it and the examples will be available in 2017. So, the core principle, learning through research and inquiry. So, that's at the heart of the thinking. How can we get students to learn through research and inquiry? How can we really focus in on that critical approach, that critical thinking? And as part of that discussion, we have a number of questions that just keep coming up in discussions. What is research in our subjects? What principles, practices and values underpin our research? We've had some wonderful experiences of being in a particular department and finding that colleagues who kind of work next door to each other on the same corridor have never had the discussion about really what drives them with their research or what they're passionate about or what they're currently doing or what their values are. In what ways are our students already engaging in forms of inquiry? In every programme of study we find, there are times in the degree programme, whether it's undergraduate or postgraduate taught. Obviously, PhD students or PhD programmes are, by definition, inquiry-orientated. We find that there are lots of examples, but it's very random as to how many opportunities students will get or how those opportunities are located in the degree itself. And do our approaches to student assessment actually promote that authentic inquiry? Or are we actually creating, through our assessment methods, behaviours in our students that don't encourage them to inquire but encourage them to soak up information and regurgitate it? I'm sure none of that happens where you are, but occasionally we do find that happening at UCL. So we've now got six dimensions that all relate to that core principle. The first one being students connect with, actually the new version is connect with researchers and with the institution's research. Are students introduced to and inspired by the latest research in the field, including that undertaken by the department? Do their courses and the wider activities and events in their department enable them to meet, learn from and challenge researchers and others, professionals, education-focused scholars and so on? Now you may say, well of course the students must meet the researchers, of course that must happen. Well sometimes, but what we're finding with our research and I'm finding it elsewhere as I travel around as well is that it isn't something that has been specifically considered in many departments about exactly how the students and when the students meet the researchers. So I'll just give you an example, we've come up with all sorts of ideas, but there's a website, obviously a connected curriculum website with lots of different examples and I can only touch on a few today because it's soon be time for you to start asking me questions. But one example is what we call Meet Your Researcher, we sometimes call it Meet the Professor. There's lots of information about it online, and it's run slightly differently in different departments, but the common ground is that students, when they arrive at the institution, certainly on undergraduate degrees, in some cases on postgraduate taught degrees too, are put together in small groups and they're tasked with investigating the work of one of the researchers in the department. They find out everything they can about that person's research and then they go meet the researcher and ask them lots of dastardly questions like who funds your research and why do you think they should? And what have you done to change the world so far? And when do you think you're actually going to get somewhere? No, not really. We do ask them to be fairly polite, but we do also ask them to ask some challenging questions, because what we want is for our students to understand that when they come to university, they're not at school, it's a different environment. It's not about just being told what the right answer is, it's about thinking about how to investigate and to understand what researchers are doing is a really helpful thing. So what the students do in these small groups, having met the researcher, is they then construct some kind of communications artefact of their choosing. It could be a film, it could be a web page, it could be a PowerPoint presentation with a voiceover or whatever, to express the work of that researcher, to communicate the work of the researcher, to a lay audience, to somebody in the local supermarket conceptually. And the researchers love it. The feedback is absolutely brilliant. Researchers absolutely love having so much attention put on them. And in fact, what we found is that the responses in terms of how satisfied are you with this sort of activity are coming the way up in the high 90s, both from the students and from the researchers, because they find the whole thing very enriching in terms of sort of breaking down those barriers. The researchers are actually also very surprised at how capable the first-year students are coming in to ask intelligent questions and to produce things, because I sometimes think that colleagues forget that the students haven't just been born when they arrive and they have actually had a past and they've developed all sorts of skills and can do all sorts of things before they even come. Okay, so that's meeting the researchers. Now, what we found was there was a random way, different ways in which students did meet researchers. But when you look at the design of the programme, do you have a modular degrees where you are? Do you call them modules or units or whatever? The modular system has its advantages, it also has its disadvantages. It can be that the students end up... It's a bit like a smorgasbord of opportunities. And it can be that the students end up having completed their meal, eaten a whole lot of pasta but had no vegetables in terms of the things they choose, unless you design your programme really well. I'm sure you do. But what we've been looking at is is there a connective storyline of inquiry and the pattern of the learning research activities and assessments which helps students to build their own coherent learning narrative? Is there a clearly constructed sequence of inquiry-based activities across the years of study? Could we even break down some of that modular split between, oh, here's a first-year module, a second-year module? That's only a convention that we've fallen into. It doesn't have to be like that, does it? So we've been looking at whether you could maybe take a module from the first year and the second year and the third year and build it into a kind of fluid tube where the students could do all sorts of things and take risks and, you know, and you could break the regulatory pattern of the way we've done this. And of course, if you're thinking, oh my goodness, what do they say in regulations about that, the answer is they say, oh, we're going to have to think about this for a bit. And we say, yes, we'll work with you because we can't have regulations driving good education. The education has to be good. And then we get the regulations to support the good education and we drive it round that way. And to be fair, they've been great and we've been working on it really positively. So what might that look like in practice? Well, for example, in our medical degree, which is a six-year programme, so complicated, they've got through-line themes that follow through and they've also got one portfolio, professional portfolio, that the students follow through the whole six years and build on. And obviously, in a professional programme, it's kind of a little bit more common to do that sort of thing, but we're looking to do it in other kinds of degrees as well. This is our archaeology degree. And you can see that they have a research through-line in the years of study in archaeology. And they also have a global citizenship through-line and they build those things, they connect those as well. So it's basically thinking about the shape of the whole programme and where that anchored story of development happens in the modules. However, it's not just obviously about the one subject. What's really important is interdisciplinarity. Students make connections across subjects and out to the world is dimension number three. It may surprise you, or it may not surprise you, but there are still a few programmes at UCL which are very, very monodisciplinary. I mean, so monodisciplinary that you do the same thing all of the time and you don't stand outside of that very traditional way of looking at that one thing very much at all. So we're challenging everybody. Where are the moments in the degree where students can use different knowledge lenses, if you like, stand on different disciplinary hills to pick up the analogy from earlier? The global challenges that we all face are by definition multidisciplinary, aren't they? We're not going to address human wellbeing or child poverty globally, or all of the other things that we really care about in every field or cultural sustainability by looking at it through the lens only of one discipline. Of course, it's important to have strong disciplinary roots. But along with this, we're looking at in what ways can the students connect outwards to the world by making these different connections? Are they thinking about their ethical bearings in the world? Thinking also about things like research integrity, social responsibility, global citizenship again. We have a few examples in the Bartlett School of Architecture that students from different disciplines collaborate using London as a research laboratory and they go out together in their cross-disciplinary groups and they investigate all sorts of activities to do with the built environment and social dimensions of that. We have a global citizenship programme that reflects the multidisciplinary global challenges. There's a lot going on, but what we're doing with the framework is we're asking every single programme, every single programme leader and team and the students who are representing that programme to look at what their opportunities are in their programme and whether they want to build on those. I'll just briefly mention the Workplace Connection 1. Students connect academic learning with workplace learning. This again won't be new to you, that we're all thinking about how can we make sure students really connect their work at university to further opportunities in the workplace. Are they developing a range of professional attributes such as leadership, project management and so on? Many of which, by the way, come through very strongly through a research approach. Can they make and articulate conceptual and practical connections between their academic learning and lifelong learning? The issue here is often about articulation. Often we might say, of course the students have developed this skill and this skill and this skill because it's embedded in that activity, but what we find in the research is that the students can't necessarily articulate the skills that they've developed to others and that becomes a really interesting thing to think about where in the programme or in co-curricular activity that run alongside it, can we actually make that happen? This is probably one of the slightly more radical ones and comes back to the idea of how we express our scholarship. Are some of the student assessments outward facing, directed at an identified audience, giving students a voice going back to PNR beyond the class, can students demonstrate an ability to use a range of digital media effectively as well as the more traditional modes and so on? It seemed to me for a long time that there's an awful lot of human effort put by students into studying and learning or enquiring, learning, and then writing that up or presenting it in some way back to the people that know all about it. Don't you think with me that that's a bit odd? Don't you think it would be more useful if they actually presented it to people who don't know and might actually get benefit from it? I've been looking at real-world scenarios where students can write or produce things for local charities, organisations, NGOs. It will differ again from one discipline to another, but it's very motivating to students to have an audience. Here are just a few things that I've spotted going around the place. At the University of Leicester, students do a Dragon's Den pitch to the NHS about with sustainability suggestions. UCL, the museum studies students, actually run a public engagement series and they develop digital resources for visitors to the museum. Lots of other examples across different subjects. Lots around video actually. There's quite a lot being done with video, but also specific journals, presentations, conferences, undergraduate research conferences. Some really interesting work going on there. Finally, human connections. Are students explicitly invited into an inclusive research and learning community? The dimension is students connect with each other across phases, i.e. across phases of learning, different year groups, undergraduate, postgraduate, you know, so on. And with alumni. We're really looking at how we can do more with alumni and bring alumni into this community. Those are the sorts of questions we've been looking at. The alumni coming in have just been wonderful in contributing rich ideas to the community. We've had final year medical students teaching junior students who are about to start on the wards. Lots of other examples. Alumni mentoring, peer study groups, all sorts of things. I know that, in fact, you were saying that your PhD students do mentor other students. It's exactly the sort of thing. What it does is it creates a connected community rather than a lot of disparate cohorts. So that's the framework. It's a simple thing, but, as you can see, it's a prompt to lots of things that go beyond simple, and that might produce some really good developments. So I'm just going to finish very quickly by saying how we're actually making this happen. UCL is not the sort of place where you can give an edict from the centre and say, on a Monday we want you to do this and on a Tuesday we want you to do this. No, that isn't going to work at all. In fact, generally speaking, quite rightly, higher education is not the place because what you have is a lot of expertise and nobody wants to be told. What we're saying is have the conversation and tell us what you're going to do. Have the conversation about these sorts of things and wherever that takes you and tell us what you're going to do. So lots of inspiration through dialogue. Lots of examples of case studies of good practice and so on. Lots of working collaboratively with students to enhance the talk programme. So everything we do has a very strong student partnership notion, including grants. So we provide grants centrally for students and staff, but students taking a lead to develop projects, change projects. I'll just say a little bit more about that in a second. We also embed the framework, the connected curriculum framework, into quality review. So it's not entirely outside the quality review system, but it's in a nice sort of gentle way. So I don't know if we have something called internal quality review that happens every five years and departments get reviewed by a panel of peers and an external, et cetera. It's fairly common, I think. So where they write their self-evaluation document, they write a little story about the discussions and the developments that have come from looking at the dimensions of the connected curriculum. So it's not a box ticking exercise. It's a genuine story, if you like. However, I've said it's not a box ticking exercise and it isn't, but for departments that want to address how far they've got with their six dimensions, obviously you can't see the detail of this, but I'm just pointing out that it's available should you want to see it online in a PDF. There's a little sort of evaluation grid so that departments can say, well, how well are we doing with this one? How well are we doing with this one? And so we've set in a sort of process for them to sort of self-report on how well they're doing and make plans to go forward. But I will comment on this. I mentioned earlier that I would come back to it. We're also making changes to promotion criteria to reward educators and education leaders. This is in a context in which researchers have very traditionally been the ones to get the promotion and the esteem and the reward and get to the top echelons and so on. Now, because we're breaking down the barriers between research and education and people are getting much more involved in a shared activity, we're looking at changing the criteria. In fact, they're out for consultation on new criteria with the union right now. And if you're interested in that aspect of what you might want to do here, there was a paper that I published with Claire Gordon from LSE called Rewarding Educators and Education Leaders looking at what we need to do to break down these old esteem ideas, differences in esteem. So we argued that if we start to break down some of the structural and conceptual divides between research and education and think about the shared scholarship that we're all involved in, we can develop distinctive new forms of research-based education and move towards achieving parity of esteem for educators and researchers. And finally, I'm just going to mention two things just because you might be interested in seeing them if you want to look them up. One is I mentioned about the students' projects. So that scheme is called UCL Change Makers and the things that students are doing to lead on change in education in their department or beyond because some of them are working beyond their own departments as well. You can find out about on the website. And we also have a scheme called UCL Arena which is our Higher Education Academy accredited developmental scheme. And I know you have one which is called Professional Development in Higher Education at SOAS where colleagues in doing these sorts of developmental things can also get external, well, internal and external awards as fellowship, senior fellowship, and those things as well can feed into promotion. So where have we been? Well, excellent or good education needs a values base, I would say. And that's where I started and it's kind of where we need to finish in a way. A scholarly disposition for widening our horizons and being brave enough to doubt what we think we know connects education and research and it can underpin curriculum development. An institutional department can only take ideas forward through that kind of creative dialogue that I was talking about. You can use a curriculum framework or some other way of having that conversation. But we do also need to review policy neighbours. We need to change the culture in which we're working if these things are really going to happen. And make sure that we're always working with students as co-creators. So all of these things that I've talked about have been staff, students working together and that's really, really vital in order to take forward new educational possibilities. So enough of me. I've concluded my talk and I'm really interested in knowing your views and whether you've got any questions or comments. Utterly committed to that idea, yes. I don't see why scholarship should not take place in any context and certainly in a professional context. A scholarly disposition in a professional context is actually rather fundamental to the notion of professionalism, isn't it? To sort of reviewing and considering one's own role and contribution and what it means to both to do well but also to do good in a professional setting. I'm very committed to that idea. The corollary of it, or the opposite in my view, and this may be terribly controversial, in my view it's perfectly possible to be a really successful researcher in a field and not be very scholarly. And I say that because I think a scholarly disposition for a really successful researcher who teaches should include a disposition for thinking, I wonder if the way I teach could be done differently. Is there any evidence? Should I look into this? Might I think about changing the way I do? And it's not so common, but occasionally you do meet people who are really at the top of their game in research, who in my view don't fulfil the category of scholarly disposition. So I do say that's a bit controversial, but you know, why not? Yeah. ..without top-down management facilitating of it, I was interested in worried students producing an issue in a way that they managed to get that through. But from what I understand, or have heard about how that worked, involved of small groups are very committed, quite powerful in the university, getting the year of management, and getting them to agree to role with the facilitator. It couldn't be brought in by committed academics at all in any way, without management on board. It's a very interesting question. There's a whole field of research that looks into the diffusion of innovations. There's a famous guy who writes about it quite a lot, isn't there? It's quite fascinating what happens with any innovation in society. It might be a field that some of you are familiar with. And how new ideas get adopted and diffused into practice or not. And it's full of lots of subtleties. My own view is that you need bottom-up and top-down at the same time, and middle-in as well at the same time. So as much as you can do to have a multiple approach is really good. I think you can have any number of good ideas, but if there isn't genuine committed support from the top, I don't think it will fly, and it won't sustain itself unless you've also got that longer time frame of, this is what we're going to do over a long time frame. Especially because to severe regulations changes and changes to ideas of assessment, generaties, and you need to trust your first years in one, you need to get rid of a model of what you'll be getting to. You let them do something interesting and maybe defer to it. You need to get rid of a lot of hierarchical things. Exactly. Of course, what happens as in many institutions is that you get some who are the early adopters and go in hook line and sinker right from the beginning and say, we're going to really try this. In one or two cases, we're almost trying it before we even quite got to the point of defining it. So we have a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences degree at UCL, which is quite rare, where it's combined arts and sciences, where students have to do both. And that is a very connected curriculum in lots of different ways. And the students are immensely engaged and immensely employable when they come out and they get involved in a lot of enquiring. But that's something that takes a lot of planning and you can't do it. You can't, as I say, it's not quick, fixed territory. It's where might we want to go. Actually, my question is related to the previous one. So I was wondering the participation of students. Is this a compulsory for everybody to be involved or they are just like volunteers, so they work together? And how do you, but I don't know how do you marry the benefits that they can get from this type of project? Yeah, no, that's a very good question. So, through our changemaker scheme, there are lots of other examples of ways in which students get involved, but the changemakers is the institution-wide thing that's driving things forward. We have a range of different ways in which students get involved. No, it's not compulsory for them to become involved as change agents. They volunteer to become change agents. But some of the students will then engage in a project where they will pitch something or they will do something with their department to the extent that they might then hold focus groups with all of the seminar groups. So there are means of getting more students involved. Because obviously one of the things we're concerned with is that we want equal access to involvement for students who may not have the same kind of resource or time availability to get involved in these kinds of things. So some of them become changemaker scholars, for example. So they come along and they learn about some aspect of teaching and learning, like last year it was assessment and feedback. And the students come along and they become scholars. They learn about different assessment methods and different feedback methods. And then they go into, they get planted into other departments, departments other than their own, and talk to senior leaders and lecturers in that department about what they know, about what they've picked up about examples of assessment feedback from other departments. Now I was in a meeting today, which was with the provost, actually, and with a department who had been doing not so well on the NSS front and we were having a discussion about what was happening with them. And they were saying the best thing that's happened to them recently is they've had changemaker scholars come in and somehow everybody's defences have come down because they're students coming in and working with the staff. So that's a number of different threads of activity. No, it's not compulsory. Lots of people do come and get involved, which is extraordinary to me that they do, but we do also provide them with a little financial incentive, which also pays them a little bit for their time and engagement. In terms of how do you evaluate it, that's demanding. And we've obviously set up for the whole initiative, we've set up a number, a sort of evaluation stroke research strategy for the whole thing. We've got a number of different things going on, combination of different focus groups and one-to-one interviews, narrative interviews and looking at outcomes and retention and all of those sorts of things. So it's quite a complicated business. So it's not easy to do that, but very worthwhile. So that's the sort of thing that we would say to a student changemaker group, would you like to try and help us work out how we're going to evaluate this? Because the students come up with really good ideas that they think will work better for themselves than we would imagine. Yeah. Thinking back over some decades at UCL, the tensions between teaching issues and research issues. Yeah. There are two sort of areas that I think maybe you haven't talked about really much. One is time. Yeah. And a lot of academic staff are then come down there, motivated really by trying to minimise the time that they spend on teaching. Of course. And that's because of their perception, of course, which hasn't changed that much of what gets to you on in their career. No, that's right. Second issue is responsibility. Because what's happened to some extent, this is not in the last few years, but to a slower extent over earlier times, is that new ideas have come in about integrating across years and things like that. And structure, of course, has been sort of dictated by people with these ideas, by people coming in as professionals, as we're teaching them on that sort of idea. And that means that a lot of the people actually doing a lot of the teaching feel that they're being told what to do. Yeah, yeah. And that they're no longer responsible for it. They don't really think it makes sense in relation to what other people are doing. They give a lecture and they don't know that somebody's given an overlapping lecture in some other place and this kind of thing. And they just think they start to take a job attitude to it. That, you know, I'll do what I'm told is going to take me in our lecturing and our university training and our national preparation and that it's draw a line of work that's done. And as long as I don't do it terribly badly, nobody's going to be playing. That's not really what you want. No, it's absolutely not what we want. And of course, you're perfectly right on both fronts, both in terms of the time and also the ownership. Who has decided, who's decision is it to change something, if indeed anything's going to be changed at all from the way things have been done. Say something about time. One of the things that we've done that I think has helped is that we have, again, this implies resource, which of course isn't always available, but because this was an institutional commitment at a high level, it became available, is that one of the things we did was we seconded, fractionally seconded academics from each of our 11 faculties. So one person from each of our 11 faculties has been seconded to the initiative for a day a week. So what you've then got is a team of people, of academics, who are completely rooted in their own discipline and very familiar with their own department, but they have got some time to think about things and how might we develop this and contribute to the development. And I think that's important. I think also you can't create time where there isn't time, but doing things like changing promotion criteria and where the esteem happens, might, especially as people start to come into the profession, you know, to academia from the beginning, might orientate their thinking a bit differently about their time and what the priorities of the time are than has happened previously. That's perhaps just one idea. In terms of the who decides, it's absolutely vital that nobody is telling them what to do. So what this framework is about is saying, well, the six principles of the framework, which look like that, students connect with researchers, there's a through-line of research activity, maybe that's pos you could argue and say, well, why do we need to do that, maybe? You could say why do the students need to connect with researchers, but we don't hear people saying that. Nobody's disagreed with that. To be honest, they haven't really disagreed with the other one. Students make connections across subjects and out of the world. Well, you probably will have a few people saying, why should they have to do anything other than study English literature in this way? Why should they have to do it? I say that as an English graduate. But the vast majority, I have to say, of colleagues say, I think it's worth looking at this. Are there any moments in which we could build in some, and for some, it's really key? Students connect academic learning with workplace learning. Well, of course, there will still be some academics who say, I'm not concerned about students and their employment. I'm here because to teach this academic field, and why should I care about that? Yeah, that's a position, but it's not the position the institution takes. The institution takes the position that we're doing our students a real disservice if we don't give some thought to how, in the curriculum, the students are developing the sorts of skills and attributes that they need when they leave. It's a values principle. Students learn to produce outputs, assessments, direction and audience. We have not had anybody say they thought that was a bad idea. The students absolutely love it. It is, of course, demanding, and, of course, it doesn't mean that every single assessment can be produced to an audience. What we're looking at is something at each level. Of course, you could disagree with that. But what we're not saying is you must do this. You must do it this way, or you must do it then. We're saying, what might this look like for you? And then students connecting with each other. The human connections, if you like. Again, nobody has kind of said we don't agree with that. But at the same time, it has to be... Whatever decisions are made about what's going to happen in the future has to be properly owned by the department. But the department isn't one voice. It's a collection of voices in a department. So what this kind of thing does, it enables that conversation to be had through with people that are more traditionally orientated and the people that have got perhaps slightly more experimental ideas. We'll see what happens. We'll have another look back in five years and see how it all works. Yeah. We're learning with research degrees. So my struggles to imagine a bit more is the PGT. PGT. The intensive one-year... Exactly. Also, actually, finding this works with distance learners as we've heard to the ones that you're on the site. So those two degrees... No, very good question. I'll answer the distance learners one first because I can answer it quite simply and say, that is a challenge. We do very little distance learning at UCL. Very little. But some areas are trying to develop more of it, quite understandably. And so we're really at the very early stages of looking at how we might translate that. So I'm going to give you a very bad answer and say, we don't do it well. We haven't got there yet, but there may be some adaptations and things that could work and other things that couldn't work. I think that, to be perfectly honest. PGT, say your master's programme as a postgraduate. We are still using the same framework, but obviously some of the things play out a bit differently. So things like the connected through-line. If you've only got a 12-month master's programme and it's rapid, you may say, well, this is a completely connected curriculum anyway. It's only a year. It's already unfolding from this to this to this. That may very well be the case and it's all built into the design. However, we have got some master's programmes at UCL and I've seen them at other institutions as well, which in fact, when you look at them, are quite disaggregated and the students struggle because they're disaggregated. So there are so many choices early on that for example, sometimes students get to the point where they're going to do their research project and they haven't had the sort of preparation that they might need. And you might find if you've got a well-designed programme that's all joined up, you'll think that's odd, but it does actually happen. So we're still using it to actually look at those things. We're also looking at it to look at how the postgraduate taught students can benefit from, say for example, presenting their work to undergraduates or work shadowing PGR students, postgraduate research students. So can we enrich their opportunities? But clearly there's not as much flexibility or room as there is in a longer programme. But we don't think that any of the principles are not sound. They're just applied slightly differently, I think. Slightly more modestly, I would say. We've got some quite good examples coming through. How are we doing? Completely run out of steam at this point. It is a Monday and it's completely understandable. Any further comments or questions? The students' experience is so far for this work. And how have we gathered their feedback on the expression of their voice within this process? I think of all these ideas. But in brackets, how do you see it impacting on your NSS, Teff, that I would say that word? Teff, yeah. Can I be a lynch in the room? Yeah, yeah. Do you see, obviously that's not the driver for this, in which we're adding their visions. But do you see one of the outputs being an improvement in some of their scores? Yeah. Yeah, well, we do see the output as an improvement score. I mean, I showed you the archaeology programme earlier. Archeology is probably our best-performing NSS department. You know, their undergraduate degree, as an example, one of the very best. And it's highly connected in this definition. And so we have students giving us feedback on the things that they're doing in that programme. And the BASC is another one, the Bachelor of Arts and Sciences, that are telling us about the benefits they're finding to these sorts of opportunities. But because UCL is so diverse, and coming back to what you said, because the ways in which this has been responded to are rightly very diverse, because the point is to make things more disparate and different, not to make them more similar. Because in the past they've been similar, and people have done lectures and seminars quite similarly, even though they're different disciplines. What we're looking at now is make it different. If you're a physicist, do something different. If you're doing museum studies, do something very different again. So it's more diversity. But because of that diversity, the following through with the evaluation is obviously a really complex thing. So what we've got at the moment is we've got a bunch of separate evaluations about separate things. Apart from one or two things like the Meet Your Professor or Meet the Research Activity, the induction activity that I mentioned to start with, we've got some really great evaluation data on that over a lot of different departments. Running that slightly with slight variations, which are really, really positive. It's a big thing to do. We hope that when we get to the end of our next five-year phase, our five-year phase, that we'll be able to write some quite detailed research outputs. There'll be some smaller things on the way. And we're doing it under the heading of curriculum as institutional story. So we're looking at lots of threads of narrative, if you like, of the way things have changed and who's benefited and where it's been difficult and so on. We're looking at that way because there's no quick, easy way to do it. We have put one or two questions into surveys that we think speak to this. Do you feel you have opportunity to meet with the researchers and it's quite an easy one to put into a survey? So we can track some of those in that way, but mostly it's a qualitative evolution, if you like, or revolution in some cases. Any other thoughts on that? My first degree was in physics. I really wish that my physics degree had been influenced by the kinds of things you've been saying, because it was a very good training in a lot of classical physics and a lot of physical analysis and techniques and such like. But I learned almost nothing about the frontiers of what... What they taught us was what they knew. I never taught us what they didn't know. Yes, very good. As a result, I left physics. I thought it's not a very exciting subject. It's a semiconductor physics in one area. It was going to go to somewhere, but that was all. And this is just wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, I thought it would be in physiology as a result afterwards. But people in physics and mathematics departments who I've talked to about this kind of issue have said, but before you could even begin to look at the frontiers, you've got to spend a huge amount of time on learning what you do know and what you can do. People with that attitude, you must confront them. No, absolutely. They have a strong argument. They can't re-take up a... They do have a strong argument. That's why I draw on the work of people like Carl Wiman, who has a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who's turned his hand to saying, look, actually, if you do this differently and you don't accept the idea that you've got to tell them a whole lot of stuff before they are capable of doing anything. But that's the only way to have the conversation is actually to look at peers who are working in the same field who might have a different perspective. It is a tricky thing. But what you said, I think you put the nail on the head, hit the nail on the head with what you opened with, which is about whether we're willing to talk about the things we don't know. And actually, I think I mentioned that I'm writing the book, The Connected Curriculum Book, and as part of that, I won't bore you with the details, but I've been getting feedback from various quarters, I had an email from a group of scholars at Cambridge who had, because of the prompt question around what... The question was about what is distinctive about working in a research rich... or learning in a research rich environment. I had this wonderful piece coming about, which was actually somebody's notes from the meeting where they had the discussion, these wonderful Cambridge scholars, and they precisely said that the difference for students between just learning in school or learning in some kinds of settings, and learning in an environment where research is taken seriously, is that the focus is on the edges of the knowledge, is on what that we don't know, and what they were saying is, the special quality that research can give to education is on really highlighting what we can't safely say, rather than saying, we know this, we know this, we know this, actually engaging people with saying, what we don't know is this and this, and it's another way of having that conceptualisation of what education is, but I think it's a more scholarly way to say, we don't know some of these things, and this is what it would look like if we did know, or this is how we might help each other to investigate this, is a much more honest thing. I think the way you put it was really good. It's a much more honest thing than to say, well, know this, know this. I think it's all a matter of degree as well. I mean, there are some programme designs that I can perfectly understand that you might want to spend a year doing quite a lot of very solid stuff before you, you know. It's a matter of degree. You're not going to throw everybody in immediately from day one necessarily, but that's why disciplinary experts have to have ownership of their own decisions, which is really important, I think. Thank you very much, Gillian. You've given us loads to think about. We've all got lots of really interesting ideas to take away from your talk. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.