Workshops - A process or a strategy?
I've been spending some time reflecting on the workshops we ran on Unit 1 of the Graduate Diploma last year. As a first time Course Leader, I had many revelatory experiences in those short 10 weeks. Revelatory I guess because it's actually amazing how you can plan a series of workshops towards some pretty well-defined aims and outcomes only to find yourself at the end of each somewhere else entirely. Often with no idea how you got there.
It’s a disquieting feeling but not an entirely unwelcome one. I have noticed my own tendency in workshop design towards manipulating knowledge towards ‘precise and identifiable outcomes’ (Anderson 2010:206). The idea I find myself returning to again and again is one about workshops as strategies and one about workshops as processes. So I thought I might unpack this (not entirely formed) thought right here…
Strategy vs. Process
Strategies are generally designed to direct action towards a specific ends. While they might recognise changeability and uncertainty, a strategy tends to assume that there is a preferred outcome that we can plot a path towards.
While working through a strategy, we might produce novel variations, but we are less likely to discover a completely new way of doing things. After all, the 'thing to be done' has already been decided; it is the basis of the strategy.
In my experience, a process is quite different. Despite our best efforts to package ‘the design process’ it is rarely a pre-determined path. Processes tend to be more like a series of small strategies. So, to me at least, a process can be both a method and a philosophical approach. The thing I have discovered, and come to realyl appreciate, is that a process does not necessarily guarantee an outcome.
“ A line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination ... A line of becoming has only a middle”
Training vs. Education
Reflecting on previous experiences I can see how I’ve often designed workshops strategically. I've spent a significant proportion of my career developing corporate training. Experiences that tend to be packaged and sold as strategies. This is despite the inevitable reality that there is rarely a single strategy that will suit everybody's needs. Where I have taught strategically, I have found discomfort. Rightly so, it can be difficult to apply the learnings from a workshop to broader professional realities. Yet still, participants tend to want strategies. Or perhaps strategies are what they are sold and herein lies an infinite loop of missed opportunity? Square pegs, multiply shaped holes. Cake or death.
It happens in education too. In a previous teaching role, I was given a folder of workshop briefs for the unit. Each had its own introductory talk and workshop brief — a series of instructions leading to a pre-defined outcome. There was limited scope for the student to do anything but follow the prescribed process towards the 'desired' outcome. Learning was an assumed by-product of this process (strategy).
Who’s knowledge?
I’ve realised that the fundamental design flaw in such approaches is that are rooted in, (read: restricted by) the biases, knowledge and understandings of the tutor. In this way, teaching can be used as a method to legitimise and perpetuate a very specific type of practice. I can see how seductive and straightforward it is to teach from these very rational and practical spaces. But we must stop to ponder (as I recently have) what new ways of thinking and practicing all this practicality is stifling. A point beatufiully made by recently by Maya Ober. Our students/trainees/workshop participants/colleagues are not just ‘knowers,’ they’re people (Barnett, 2004). They bring their own experiences, understandings and knowledge to the game. So here’s the question I’m pondering for my own educational designs… how do we create the opportunity for disciplinary ways of being and practicing to be expanded, rather than prescribed?
“The aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness)”
Self-authorship
Safe to say, the way I approach the curriculum (in all its forms) has changed dramatically over the course of this year — largely as a direct result of my experiences in my own workshops. Each has given me an opportunity to consider the idea of student self-authorship, particularly the ways that workshops offer opportunities for knowledge to be mutually constructed.
I remember reading Marcia Baxter-Magolda (2006) really early on in my career. She outlined three educational principles for enabling student authorship:
the curriculum should validate learners knowledge as knowers alongside their teachers
the curriculum should respect and situate knowledge in a students own experience
expertise and authority are shared between a students, peers and teachers
I’ll be honest, I didn’t a clue what this meant when I started. How could I? I hadn’t yet had the experiences that would make these points so salient to me. I get it now. I’m trying to keep these principles front-of-mind in my planning for this academic year by reflecting on the multitude of ‘unintended outcomes’ that emerged from the workshops last year.
These curious entanglements of people, curriculum and expectation. The range of cultures, disciplines and ways of knowing that students bring with them. How all these things converge to produce 'moments' and tensions in the curriculum. I've chosen to see these as opportunities rather than failures. I am starting to wonder how I might teach the subject from a more open and conceptual position rather than a technical or skills based one?
I anticipate that this will be less of a strategy and more of a process.
Yay.