Papers by Sandra Sinfield
There are numerous avenues for improving student engagement. This chapter focusses on the respons... more There are numerous avenues for improving student engagement. This chapter focusses on the responsibility of the teacher set within the context of the contemporary landscape of Higher Education. We place emphasis on the lived experience of being a teacher – the unique perspectives, challenges, limits and potential capacities of the role – and heighten awareness of how engaging with the complexity of the learning relationship can open up possibilities for reducing barriers to students’ meaningful engagement with their learning. The underlying assumption is that student engagement is fundamentally linked to staff engagement: with students, with the process of teaching and with oneself as a teacher; and furthermore, that the way in which we as teachers engage, or do not, with students has a significant influence on how students engage with us and with their learning. This chapter explores: • staff engagement as an agency for student engagement • the educational landscape of engagement: ...
Discourses of Assessment can be complex and contradictory with many voices calling for a de-stabi... more Discourses of Assessment can be complex and contradictory with many voices calling for a de-stabilisation of the essay as the sine qua non of academic achievement (Creme 2003): Moral panics about plagiarism have suggested we design plagiarism out of assessment with more creative challenges than the traditional essay (Viz. http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/TLTC/connorj/plagiarism/Staff/ ); somehow the essay remains. Tackling disability suggests making ‘reasonable adjustment’ for students with SpLD – and that all students be given the choice of undertaking the alternative assessments thus developed (Ingle 2013a, Ingle 2013b). And still the major adjustment is not to re-design the assessments – but to allow more time in which to complete or submit the traditional written assignments.
Postdigital Science and Education
The pandemic affected more than 1.5 billion students and youth, and the most vulnerable learners ... more The pandemic affected more than 1.5 billion students and youth, and the most vulnerable learners were hit hardest, making digital inequality in educational settings impossible to overlook. Given this reality, we, all educators, came together to find ways to understand and address some of these inequalities. As a product of this collaboration, we propose a methodological toolkit: a theoretical kaleidoscope to examine and critique the constitutive elements and dimensions of digital inequalities. We argue that such a tool is helpful when a critical attitude to examine ‘the ideology of digitalism’, its concomitant inequalities, and the huge losses it entails for human flourishing seems urgent. In the paper, we describe different theoretical approaches that can be used for the kaleidoscope. We give relevant examples of each theory. We argue that the postdigital does not mean that the digital is over, rather that it has mutated into new power structures that are less evident but no less i...
Postdigital Science and Education, Nov 17, 2022
Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie
(2) to extend established academic writing scholarship by introducing critical realism as a conce... more (2) to extend established academic writing scholarship by introducing critical realism as a conceptual framework for justifying plural, democratized, multimodal, diverse and inclusive forms of academic writing; and (3) to develop a philosophy of change that lays a foundation for diversifying writing pedagogies. (p.1) In this way, she hopes to decolonise, democratize, and make socially just the university and its practices: to truly welcome diverse students and challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy that dominates our times. The book is divided into five (large) chapters, opening with a "Letter to My Reader" and closing with a "Signing Off" and "Afterword". We provide a brief chapter by chapter synopsis to give readers an idea of the arguments put forward, before addressing the strengths and limitations of the book in our review. Chapter by Chapter Synopsis Letter to My Reader Molinari's critical take on academic writing is reinforced by her "Letter to my Reader." Here, she addresses the reader directly, acknowledging that a year of a pandemic, working from home, and teaching in loungewear or at the kitchen table may have impacted writing, and, yet and still: "this is a serious book, it is an academic book and what makes it academic is the knowledge it deals with, the references it draws on, the research that has gone into it and my identity, my right to be a writer who is present in her text" (p.1). And, in this very open and welcoming voice, Molinari draws on the history of academia, socio-semiotic research, integrational linguistics, and studies in multimodal and visual thinking, to argue that writings themselves be reconceptualised more broadly. That dialogues, chronicles, manifestos, blogs, and comics be recognised as multimodal academic artifacts able to harness a wide range of epistemic affordances.
Postdigital Science and Education
He is founding editor-in-chief of Postdigital Science and Education journal and book series 1. Pe... more He is founding editor-in-chief of Postdigital Science and Education journal and book series 1. Petar is 45 years old and lives in Zagreb, Croatia. *** The 'Teaching in the Age of Covid-19' Trilogy In 2020, Postdigital Science and Education published 'Teaching in the Age of Covid-19' (Jandrić et al. 2020) which is a collection of short testimonies and workspace photographs submitted in the first half of 2020. 2 Each biography is labelled as [Unchanged biography.] or [Updated biography.]. For updated biographies, readers are encouraged to refer to 'Teaching in the Age of Covid-19' (Jandrić et al. 2020) and 'Teaching in the Age of Covid-19-One Year Later' (Jandrić et al. 2021a) for comparison. 3 Each figure is labelled as [Unchanged figure.] or [New figure.] For new figures, readers are encouraged to refer to 'Teaching in the Age of Covid-19' (Jandrić et al. 2020) and 'Teaching in the Age of Covid-19-One Year Later' (Jandrić et al. 2021a) for comparison.
Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education
There is a feeling in the Learning Development community – and in academia more generally – that ... more There is a feeling in the Learning Development community – and in academia more generally – that discipline staff see the academic writing of students as a problem better ‘fixed’ by others. However, staff at a writing workshop held within a learning and teaching conference revealed positions that were more nuanced, inflected, compassionate and ‘responsible’ than this. Writing collaboratively around the words produced by staff at our workshop, led to new insights into ways that staff could support student writing as an emergent practice. We decided to collect and share the many ways that discipline staff might be encouraged to harness writing in their own curriculum spaces: a staff guide on supporting writing and other forms of learning and assessment emerged. In this paper we discuss collaborative writing as a method of inquiry as we explore the contested terrain of academic writing, challenge the notion of ‘writing skills’, and model a more emergent form of exploratory writing.
International Journal for Students as Partners
The present paper builds on Elbow’s (1998) idea of ‘free writing’ and other creative approaches t... more The present paper builds on Elbow’s (1998) idea of ‘free writing’ and other creative approaches to writing as we explore methods to foster students’ academic writing skills. Rather than focussing on a deficit student in need of ‘fixing’, we introduce and reflect on the usefulness of free- and creative writing exercises as we explore how we can enable students to find ‘a voice’ as we support them on the way to becoming successful academic writers. In this context, we argue for academic/study skills support that takes students ‘serious’, and builds on their existing strengths, knowledge – and writing skills.
The present paper explores the pairing of a second year Peer Mentoring in Practice with a first y... more The present paper explores the pairing of a second year Peer Mentoring in Practice with a first year Becoming an Educationalist module and the role that reflective writing – in logs and blogs – plays in encouraging our students to engage with the material, to write to learn and to produce narratives of the self in times of transition.
Journal of Play in Adulthood, 2021
In our advocation for playful and creative practice, we engage in collaborative writing as a meth... more In our advocation for playful and creative practice, we engage in collaborative writing as a method of inquiry. In this paper we have extended that practice, conducting a collage conversation between the three of us reflecting on playful practice in academia through visual means, and using this paper as a meta-reflection on the value of collaborative practice and writing to promote a culture of research for academics primarily engaged in teaching. As we are located on different continents, the conversation unfolded synchronously and asynchronously: with us sending images of our thinking and responses back and forth. This shared playful and visual conversation has been captured for this article and supplemented with case study examples of how we utilised such playful practice with our student and staff learners. We argue that playful practice is even more important in these lean and mean times as it enables an honest but suitably supercomplex dialogue about learning, teaching and research that recognises education's human element. Playful practice is inclusive and empowering: it strengthens the individual while at the same time enabling connection-with peers and the larger social and academic context.
Double Helix: A Journal of Critical Thinking and Writing, 2016
This report builds on selected notions of critical pedagogy to explore the use of critical writin... more This report builds on selected notions of critical pedagogy to explore the use of critical writing exercises to promote critical thinking skills in undergraduate students. The report explores the value of these exercises in the context of a first-year core module of the Bachelor of Arts with Honors Education Studies at London Metropolitan University (United Kingdom). The population of students in this program tends to be internationally diverse and minority, and comes from working class communities. The student diversity is perhaps especially important to cultivate in learning education studies, which itself involves knowing how education “works in different countries and cultures.” But teaching, according to Freire, is often an exercise in colonial oppression—that is, it tends to erase student diversity in the process of remediating perceived “deficits.” And this erasure of student diversity thereby inhibits their ability to excel in education studies. This would seem to locate Freire’s site of colonization in the Honors classroom, which a Freirean approach attempts to undo through critical writing exercises. The aim of this paper is not only to critically reflect on the means and methods used to foster students’ criticality, but also to bridge the gap between students’ and teachers’ understanding of a well-known study criterion—that of “being critical”—to prepare them for a globalized, professional world where criticality is seen as a key element for a successful career. We argue that the skills acquired in the module, and through its critical writing exercises, are transferable beyond academia and into the professional arena that our students will inhabit.
Postdigital Science and Education
This paper is a summary of philosophy, theory, and practice arising from collective writing exper... more This paper is a summary of philosophy, theory, and practice arising from collective writing experiments conducted between 2016 and 2022 in the community associated with the Editors’ Collective and more than 20 scholarly journals. The main body of the paper summarises the community’s insights into the many faces of collective writing. Appendix 1 presents the workflow of the article’s development. Appendix 2 lists approximately 100 collectively written scholarly articles published between 2016 and 2022. Collective writing is a continuous struggle for meaning-making, and our research insights merely represent one milestone in this struggle. Collective writing can be designed in many different ways, and our workflow merely shows one possible design that we found useful. There are many more collectively written scholarly articles than we could gather, and our reading list merely offers sources that the co-authors could think of. While our research insights and our attempts at synthesis a...
Postdigital Science and Education, 2022
The ‘Teaching in the Age of Covid-19’ Trilogy.
Postdigital Science and Education
Review of Michael A. Peters, Tina Besley, Marek Tesar, Liz Jackson, Petar Jandrić, Sonja Arndt, &... more Review of Michael A. Peters, Tina Besley, Marek Tesar, Liz Jackson, Petar Jandrić, Sonja Arndt, & Sean Sturm (2021). The Methodology and Philosophy of Collective Writing: An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader Volume X.
PRISM Open Access, May 25, 2021
This Guide promotes writing-to-learn. Academic writing is a contested area that is tricky to navi... more This Guide promotes writing-to-learn. Academic writing is a contested area that is tricky to navigate and master especially for newcomers. However, this does not need to be the case. This Guide is an invitation to move beyond the ‘mechanics’ of writing, to make it meaningful, engaging, interactive and fun. If writing is appreciated as developmental - and appropriately supported - it spurs students to write of their ‘best’ as they write to learn. The illustrations, bright block colours, white space and shapes are all designed to make the content of the Guide come alive for the reader in a playful way that is designed to facilitate adaptation for their own practice and contexts.
This case study examines a module for mainly mature, 'non-traditional' students on the Ea... more This case study examines a module for mainly mature, 'non-traditional' students on the Early Childhood Studies [ECS] open entry degree programme at London Metropolitan University. The nature of the particular module - entitled 'An introduction to Early Childhood Studies: reflecting, learning and communicating' - means that this paper will briefly consider the debate about 'skills' that is presently preoccupying many higher education [HE] institutions, especially in today's Widening Participation climate. I also argue for a change in attitudes to teaching and learning in HE as a whole, referring to current research that is taking place at the University in this area.
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Papers by Sandra Sinfield
The illustrations, bright block colours, white space and shapes are all designed to make the content of the Guide come alive for the reader in a playful way that is designed to facilitate adaptation for their own practice and contexts.
As educationists and academic developers who work with discipline staff to develop their ability to teach our students, our disruptive apprehension is that while our students may arrive with lower academic capital than other students, they have lived rich lives. They have energy, motivation and commitment – and they are desperate to find their voices in this powerful (academic) domain: they want to have their "say". At the same time, they are aware of the reductive lens through which they are viewed; they realise that they must be colonised to survive (Freire, 1970) – or resist and fail. We want our students to resist and succeed at university; to find their academic voices without losing themselves in the process.
A key arena for this successful resistance is the tricky curriculum domain of academic reading. Typically undertaken in isolation, our students find this reading not only overwhelming, but also disempowering and silencing. Our unconventional response is to enlist to our cause the ancient bookscroll: the bound book unbound. This is the story of using the scroll, text unrolled to its fullest extent and engaged with dialogically, with academic staff. Focusing on curriculum innovation and emancipatory practice, we argue that scrolls can change the way our staff teach – and this has the potential to change how our students experience university and university life.