Immersive undergraduate programme
Jo Tait University of Surrey
What was the context/situation/challenge?
A three-year degree programme in Independent Studies at Lancaster University, in the early 1990s. As a mature student, I already had a teaching qualification, and had taken a huge leap from a life where I had been running my own business and being a wife and mother.
This programme (which no longer runs in the same way) involved a first year experience in which students took two taught courses with a third, learning-focused, group-based module. Small tutor groups encouraged students to work together on projects of interest and involved peer assessment and feedback.
The second and third year allowed students to negotiate a supervised programme of taught and project-based modules, where up to 8 of 9 modules could be project-based. Each student was responsible for designing and implementing each project and finding an academic subject supervisor prepared to advise and assess. As I remember it, students were required to present a coherent outcome for summative assessment, though I may have invented this last requirement for myself.
What were the particular characteristics of the situation that engaged you in an immersive way?
As with many mature students, commitment to study involved a conscious decision to abandon an earlier identity. Think of the film, Educating Rita, with the additional complexity that there was almost unlimited choice in subject matter and assessment.
The self-organised programme of study was explicitly about my learning, rather than pre-ordained curriculum content in a single discipline.
There was no distinction between ‘real life’ and the curriculum. Formal learning was only valued when it contributed to the main project – my own understanding of learning and change. Selecting taught programmes and enrolling supervisors was personal and strategic.
What forms of learning / personal development / change emerged from the situation?
What did I learn?
- Negotiation and decision-making based on whole-person, complex models of what learning is and what it is for (given uncertain future contexts).
- Awareness of the way different disciplines frame knowledge. What Goodyear et al x(2007) call epistemic fluency – ability to understand and translate between different sorts of knowledge and learning.
- Authentic, participative research – engaging people in enquiry within and beyond university contexts.
- Presentation and assessment in a diverse range of ways – outputs included an interactive board game, a learning resource pack, workshops and poetry as well as formal essays and reports.
- Sense-making as an ongoing project – provisional process not final product.
What words/concepts/feelings would you use to describe the immersive experience?
Terrifying Authentic
Exhilarating Integrative
Exhausting Confidence-boosting
What principles or lessons can be drawn from this story?
With some structure - appropriate induction and some explicit ground rules – undergraduate students can choose to engage themselves, peers and staff in their learning.
Although it is probably unrealistic (given current HE structures) to make this a model for the whole curriculum, there is potential to experiment with a single module that runs alongside the whole degree and focuses on immersive, personal enquiry. The aim should be to show how a learner has made sense of the learning programme as a whole, in the context of the person, their life and their activities – formal and non-formal work.
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