The Learning Development Project

Academic Literacies (AL) is an approach to teaching and supporting learning that seems to be integral to Learning Development - but should it be? Apart from the focus of its purported transformational value on seeing and being but not doing, leaving it thin on practical pedagogical value, it bundles up tensions and contradictions that are difficult – some might say impossible �

Student engagement is complex and multifaceted. Ten years ago it meant engaging the student voice. Since then it’s become much more about attendance, attention, motivation, presence on campus, belonging, engagement with the curriculum, and more; ‘student engagement’ covers all of these, so it’s important for us to be clear what we mean when we talk about student engagement.

‘I’m a perfectionist’ is often a glib response given in job interviews when we’re asked to identify a weakness. We offer it up modestly, sure that it will be received as intended: a desirable trait, one showing dedication, commitment, and high quality. Yet what if that were not true? What if, in fact, perfectionism was rigid, unattainable, and damaging? Jane explains that t

Critical thinking is one of those concepts that we teach and use with students, but Emily Danvers makes clear that it is actually much more complex, contextual and contingent than it might first appear. It’s a practice of asking deliberate questions about knowledge and claims to truth, and it can very much depend on who you are, what you’re thinking about, and why. It also invo

The intensifying neoliberalisation of HE over the past few decades is all part of a long trend of universities producing who and what the dominant powers in society wish, according to Chomsky. However, the university has always been a contested space with emancipatory possibilities existing alongside domination and oppression. LD, as part of higher education, is also part of that c

Third space, while rightly celebrated as a vital engine for collaboration in higher education, brings with it also the risk of becoming no space at all. Although working in the margins and between the cracks can bolster change and act as a point of resistance, there is also a danger of retreat, defence, and invisibility. Julie contends that it is our role as third space professio

Race is missing from Learning Development, but it is inescapably present in our lives and in the lives of our students. Why, then, this disconnect? Ryan’s proposal for a pedagogy of race consciousness (PRC) is a way for us to wake up to the realities of racial difference, to allow students the opportunity to not just bring their lived experiences into the classroom, but to value

Third space. It’s a concept most of us will have heard of before, and many of us will identify with it. But what does it actually mean in practice? For Natalia Veles, third space is a space for collaboration and the building of collaborative capital. When the focus of a project is on the learning and the people involved, rather than outputs alone, everybody wins. It involves havi

Show notes Decolonising the curriculum is more than diversifying the authors on a reading list. It’s about the nature of knowledge, and questioning where that knowledge comes from and why, so that we can better understand the history of the paradigms within which we work and live. As such, responsibility for it lies beyond the subject, extending into third space and Learning Deve

Show notes The term ‘third space’ is, these days, readily familiar and recognisable, the concept well rehearsed since Celia Whitchurch first applied it to those boundary-crossing ‘blended professionals’ in higher education, in 2008. However, its definition remains somewhat elusive, its apparent capaciousness also risking a loss of meaning through being too broad. Third spac