IN-PERSON: Learning. Life. Work

Abstract

Traditionally, universities centred the expertise and the interests of individual academics when designing and approving curricula. The institutional power of the expert whose research publications underpin their pedagogy remains a powerful (self)construction of scholars and scholarship across many contemporary disciplines. At the same time, however, many contemporary universities face an increasing challenge to their relevance and to their legitimacy as increasing numbers of potential students either choose not to study or, worse, begin their studies but choose to leave before gaining their qualification. And students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds – ironically those who universities seek to include – are over represented in the ‘never started’ and the ‘dropped out’. In this paper we argue that three separate but related factors mean that this challenge to universities has become a crisis for us all. First, the turmoil of the Covid-19 pandemic is neither over, nor is it properly understood. Second, fundamental differences between the lived experiences of academics and (prospective) students with respect to their media literacy are opening a chasm of misunderstanding. And third, the organisational and personal tendency to revert to established, time-honoured patterns of behaviour when under stress leads to conservative solutions instead of radical, transformative ideas. We further argue that it is only centring the learner – meeting our students where they are – that gives the best chance of redesigning curricula to meet current circumstances. Using the example of the Bachelor of Communication Studies degree at Auckland University of Technology in Aotearoa New Zealand we will show how such an approach can, despite initial opposition from academics, in fact provide a space for them to design truly innovative, connected, and playful courses that can, and do, meet the institutional and societal requirements of a relevant and useful qualification.