HIGHLIGHT #4 || 131
131
HIGHLIGHT | #4
Kate Baker (Perspectives of the 2016 Annual
Teaching Symposium)
Title
Keynote – Dr. Sarah Dyer
Building Appreciative Partnerships
Keele Annual Teaching
Symposium 15th June 2016
Creativity in Higher Education
Author(s)
Kate Baker (1)
Ella Tennant (2)
Frank Rutten (3)
Contact
[email protected] (1)
[email protected] (2)
[email protected] (3)
School
School of Life Sciences (1)
Learning Language Unit (2)
School of Pharmacy (3)
Faculty
Faculty of Natural Sciences (1)
Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences (2)
Faculty of Medicine and Health
Sciences (3)
I attended the 2016 Annual Teaching Symposium to help me to
gain insight into ideas and opportunities from other members of
staff. I will focus particularly on an inspiring session by Sar ah Dyer
of the University of Exeter who brought us up to speed with her
projects surrounding Building Appreciative Partnerships. The
overall message was that it was not always straightforward to
work with students and to collect the information required, and
several attempts might be needed before a successful approach
is reached. Her first project examined perceptions of female
students in STEM and their challenges within their subjects,
such as lower career expectations as they progressed through
their study. After initial student excitement for the project,
the engagement rapidly declined, with very low numbers of
final participants by the end of the study. She found this was
an experiment in partnership which produced limited results,
and she grappled with what it might have lacked and what she
could do differently in future. Following this she shared how she
had used an appreciative enquiry approach, which asks what
is working well and what is best practice, sharing ideas and
stories to create a shared image of the preferred future. She
needed to innovate and improvise the way to create that future
and hence adopted this different approach. The appreciative
enquiry approach goes through the processes of definition,
discovery, dream, design and delivery to destiny. She conducted
interviews to find out what enables partnerships to flourish.
Key themes including learning (teacher becoming a student
with the students, working together to find the answer to the
problem); time and space (conducting a classroom outside the
class timetable); evidence and communication, and people were
seen as important. This work resulted in the Third Space Project,
which created a set of challenges cards designed for use by
anyone wanting to develop partnership learning. The idea is
that it will provide a chance to work differently and expand and
embed creativity, valuing everyone’s ideas of what is important.
Overall I thought this was a very interesting concept and enjoyed
hearing about the challenges and highlights along the way.