“Teaching is trying to facilitate change, because learning is change”

Learning from experience is one of your permanent topics of interest. What were the key experiences that influenced your interest in teaching and learning development?

This is an interesting question because I had not thought about it for the longest time until the interview. In some ways, I fell into it, that is, it wasn’t clearly planned. Early on though when I was about 10 or 11, I read a book about Helen Keller. She was a young woman born in the US in the 1880s, and when she was about 1.5 years old, she lost her sight and hearing. She was no longer able to communicate, and her parents didn't know what to do at first. Fortunately, they found someone named Anne Sullivan to work with her, and she gradually found a way for the two of them to communicate. This ultimately led to all the work Keller did around disability rights activism and advocacy for deaf and blind people. And I remember thinking at that time, ‘oh, isn't that amazing? That someone was able to help an individual who was unable to communicate. It was quite moving for me, and you have to remember that

I was growing up in the 1950s, when there were not many females working outside the home.

Of course, many things after that led to my career but this memory connects to both teaching and learning, and highlights that it is a reciprocal relationship. The teacher is responsible for trying to understand the circumstances of the learner and helping him or her negotiate those but, ultimately, it’s the learner who is making the change. Teaching is trying to enable or facilitate change, because learning is change.

You have extensively researched PhD graduates, their doctoral experiences and their career trajectories in a variety of settings, while you also supervise PhD students. How did your research help you in your own approach to doctoral supervision?

Like many supervisors, I began by drawing on my own experience of being supervised since I had received no training and had never co-supervised. I had had a mixed experience of supervision myself and in trying to support the student I drew on things that helped me – and avoided the things that hadn’t. But of course, through doing research on supervision and co-supervising, I began to understand that every learner is different.

What worked for me might not work for someone I am supervising.

Once I started to research supervision and explore the supervision literature, I found some broad as well as more concrete findings that I draw on in my supervision practice.

One of them is the importance of understanding the purpose and aspirations of each doctoral student. When I began, I was focused on helping the person finish the degree, which was the institutional perspective. My research and the literature on supervision and PhD career trajectories prompted me to think differently, to ask what careers students were imagining post-PhD. How does the PhD contribute to their life-career goals? Now, if someone contacts me about a PhD, I always ask what they intend to do afterwards, because many people start PhDs with potentially unexamined reasons. I try to enable them to genuinely think about how/ whether the PhD fits in their life-career trajectory. That is a big shift as it means the student and I can then think about what could be done during the PhD that moves towards those goals.

Another important notion is that ultimately it is the student who owns the PhD, the one who cares most about this endeavour. I am there to support. My job is to encourage the individual to take as much agency as they feel capable of. And sometimes to push them to take some, but recognising that initially they will need more support. This means ensuring that the person always has some degree of responsibility for what is going on and gradually ramping that up. The goal is not only the completion of their research project but that they feel comfortable, competent and independent when doing other kinds of research. I also encourage them to take care of their well-being, to live a full life and build a good work-life balance because these activities are supportive of satisfaction and progress. And last, but not least,

I have become much more careful and intentional about the nature of the feedback I give and how I give it,

and in asking the student to take responsibility for writing up notes to verify our common understanding and track progress.

You mentioned the importance of fostering agency. Reading your publications, the interplay between agency and structure and the importance of nested contexts seem to be key concepts no matter the research topic in focus. How could these concepts help us in understanding and designing developmental interventions in academia?

It is important to know that I have only come to understand this profoundly important interplay of the two in the last 10-12 years. That is because the notion slowly emerged out of our early work as we analysed the data and synthesised the findings from our longitudinal studies. At first, we didn't really have a language for it, but it gradually developed and offered an analytic framework for making sense of change. And, as we became more aware of this learning-change connection, it became evident that this interplay of structure and agency incorporates geo-historical and biographical dimensions. The notion of the nested contexts unfolds ultimately through time and the place(s) where you are. But biographies also vary, so you have these moving biographies and geo-historical spaces. For instance, in the case of PhD students, they may arrive in a totally new geo-historical space for their PhD and need to make sense of that. If we think about individual and structural learning within these dimensions,

it helps us to understand how slow the change process is, not just in individuals, but in organisations.

While there is always some slow change happening, institutional change is about a shift away from stasis and can cause ruptures because people are called upon to think and act differently.

Therefore, when you are thinking about designing developmental interventions, whether for research or teaching, there are several interesting issues that come up. First of all, whose agency are we talking about? The developer is an agent in that context and has his/her intentions for change in a particular direction. And being within the nested organizational context, there will be affordances and constraints influencing the possibilities. It could be that the designer is in a centre which has enough resources and a lot of institutional support, and there are rewards for those who take part in their programmes. Alternately, there may be fewer resources, but participation is required and motivation potentially an issue.

Aside from the designers as agents, you have the participants as agents. And the challenge with such interventions is that they take up an incredibly small part of the participants’ lives. They may come for an hour a week for 10 weeks, and they fit this into everything else that is happening in their lives – lives that we know nothing about. So, their participation is not only removed from their day-to-day work but just a miniscule feature of their lives. Moreover, each of them comes with different biographies and from different nested contexts even if in the same institution, so that while some departments may offer good support to learn/change, others may offer little or none which again will influence the potential for learning and change. That is one of the reasons why even imagining that any change can result from these interventions is incredibly hard.

This also raises the question of how to understand impact while being aware of the agency and contexts of those participating in a developmental activity.

Yes, very much so. This is why examining the interplay of structure and agency provides a good analytic frame. It does not answer the question of how we can actually know that the intervention has had an influence in the direction we wanted (or a negative influence). But it offers a framework for thinking about what factors to include and exclude, given the purpose, resources and constraints, in any tracking of change as well as which are feasible and which not. And that is why, when you look at all the programme evaluation literature, even outside of higher education, there is this constant question of how we can ever know what the impact of an intervention might be.

Likewise, I find the framework reminds us that while we can only do a little bit, we can still do the best we can. For me, it means that I aim to be in touch with participants beforehand and ask them to complete a pre-intervention survey in which, among other things, I have them name what their goals are. And I always share this in the first session, so we can begin to develop a collective image of the group while retaining the uniqueness of each individual’s experiences. In other words, I pay attention to all those things that can help me know them better, while getting them thinking about what they are trying to achieve. Because if they know what they are trying to achieve, they can track that. You want the person to have a goal that they can work towards and people can have different goals even within the same programme.

I also believe the reason why departmental- or programme-based interventions can be influential is because they take place within particular practices, sets of resources and constraints that everybody shares. In this context, it is much easier to learn how the proposed intervention ‘fits’ and what things might disrupt or facilitate the intended change. That is the advantage of being able to do local development activities that are closer to the actual workplace. For example, in a locally-based supervisory training programme, where the programme director and supervisors from the same department are all there, they can talk about what works and what doesn’t, and how they can change that.

In 2023, you delivered a keynote lecture on supporting significant learning at the first Higher Education Pedagogy Conference at ELTE. Your upcoming lecture focuses on whether and how should we prepare students for their future. It might be interesting to think about the connections between the two: is the future-readiness of students a result of significant learning or is it a new dimension that needs specific attention?

I believe it is a different perspective. In my previous lecture and in the theory of significant learning, the focus is a person-centred one. It conceives of the learner as a whole person, not just as someone studying history, with a focus on life skills and work skills from a learning perspective. It is a more psychological approach, and I value those kinds of approaches because they provide another analytic tool. But, for me the interplay of structure and the interaction is missing. You are looking at the student, and thinking: if the student is taking my course in history, what can I do beyond helping them understand history and how it is situated within other fields of knowledge and can be useful in the day-to-day and the future? But it does not attend explicitly to the nested structural geo-historical influences. And the way I think about future-readiness and agency comes from a stance recognising that we are all embedded in these nested contexts, these structures – not just the course, program department, and university, but also society. So, while the students are only in my course, and only at the university for a short period of time, the society we and they are living in is increasingly turbulent and labour markets are constantly shifting. Therefore, in my view, it is even more important to think about the future of students who are graduating during these turbulent times, and whether this means that beyond our responsibility to help them become more knowledgeable in our field, we should consider expanding our responsibility to help them prepare for a lifetime of change. In this way, future-preparedness is distinct from significant learning and brings together what I think is an important framework for understanding learning and change.

This can also be a question of time and resources available for teachers, and whether we expect them to prepare students for their futures in a way that might be interpreted as another big task among the existing responsibilities.

Exactly, and it is very hard for teachers to think of engaging in this on their own. And, it can be a collective effort, perhaps a departmental programme or a university. In Denmark, for example, Aalborg University uses problem-based learning as an institutional pedagogic strategy, and Roskilde problem-oriented, project-based learning. Creating such distinct coherent curriculum experiences for students means thinking collectively about a pedagogy that looks at the subject matter from a different perspective, understanding that life is a mixture of disciplines. So, while it is lovely to be able to delve down into different specialisms, ultimately, if we are to survive, we have to live an integrated life which brings together these different forms of knowledge. And that is probably the long-term implication of taking up the fostering of student’s future-readiness – it will mean thinking differently about the nature of knowledge, the nature of the learning tasks we give students, and how we as individuals in universities relate to society. While efforts at such change can be done by individuals, ultimately this will not be sufficient. But if enough individuals think it is worth doing, you can begin collectively to change, and institutional investment sought to provide the necessary conditions make it more feasible for students and teachers to accomplish.