Pedagogy Frailty and Resilience

By Alexandra Pitt, Learning Enhancement Team

Pedagogic Frailty and Resilience, was a conference at the University of Surrey showcasing Professor Ian Kinchin’s (2007) model of Pedagogic Frailty and the research it has inspired, including case studies at different levels of Higher Education Culture such as individual student up to curriculum design and institutional policy levels. The concept and approach provide rich grounds for further study, but from my day at the symposium I took away a number of questions surrounding the concept of resilience and what we ask of students as they travel through their studies.

Professor Ray Land at this conference explored the difficult territory that we ask students to negotiate and advocated that educators do not shy away from what he called troublesome knowledge, or ideas that we might find challenging. We in fact need to provide the opportunities for our students to launch into liminal spaces, where they may feel uncertain, confused or challenged - it is really in these spaces that transformative learning takes place. Naomi Winstone, also from Surrey University, reinforced this further and spoke about our tendency to interpret resilience as simply getting over things or bouncing back, when what we really want is for students to not only bounce back, but to advance from where they were before any challenges came along.

This conference opens these discussions and provokes questions about how we encourage students to walk into challenging territory. In my experience, students often arrive at the University with preconceived ideas about what it means to study at university, and this is often an oversimplified idea of learning skills, gaining knowledge and showing that knowledge through the occasional essay or exam. It often takes a good deal of time get students engaging with more advanced or opaque learning outcomes such as critical thinking, but some aspects of learning, such as overcoming failure or having our beliefs or identity challenged, are even more hidden. We often ask students to plunge into difficult learning experiences, sometimes without warning, and this symposium for me was a call to pay attention to frailty and resilience, in this process. We need to make the complexities of learning explicit and help students to expect, recognise and navigate the troublesome terrain of learning so that they can thrive, rather than just survive.


References:
Bateson, P.&P. Martin (2013) Play, Playfulness, Creativity and innovation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lindauer, M.S. (1998) Interdisciplinarity, the Psychology of Art, and Creativity: An introduction. Creativity Research Journal. 11, 1. Pp. 1-10..