Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Always Coming Home - a paper accepted by the UCFV Research Review

"I left home too young" - Bob Dylan

The UCFV Research Review have accepted a paper I wrote with Ms Aurélie Owens* of Cranfield University, entitled 'Always Coming Home: Applying Force Field Analysis as a Structured Approach to Eliciting Ongoing Organizational Contexts and Requirements for Flexible Learning'.

The paper is about helping academic and professional university staff to engage with flexible learning. We will argue that flexible learning is, in Ursula LeGuin’s phrase, “always coming home” because transformations to flexible learning can never be complete. This notion suggests that flexible learning actually requires a constant personal and institutional commitment to change management and staff development. The paper features a tutorial on applying Force Field Analysis (Lewin, 1951) to drive staff development workshops to engage academic and professional staff in the personal and institutional changes heralded by flexible learning. It also includes reflections (Schön, 1983) on the use of Force Field Analysis from a facilitator and a participant observer. This is an example of practice-based research (Bourner and O’Hara, 2000), which enables professionals to make informed decisions about if, where, and when to use a particular method. As The UCFV Research Review is not a specialized educational journal, we will introduce flexible learning, its critiques and some of the burning issues which herald widespread change to individual practice and institutional structure in higher education.

References

  • Bourner, T. & O’Hara, S. (2000). Practitioner-centered research, in: Bourner, T., Katz, T. & Watson, D. (Eds.) New directions in professional higher education (Buckingham, SRHE/Open University Press).

  • Le Guin, U. K. (1985). Always Coming Home. New York: Gollancz.

  • Lewin K. (1951). Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper and Row.

  • Schön, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.

*Aurélie Owens has been active in the plagerism debate.

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