Such a good day in London yesterday at the NUS, for its Sustainability Oversight Board. We looked at the NUS sustainability operating plan, at various aspects of its Responsible Futures initiative which is mid-way through its pilot year, and at the forthcoming student sustainability summit. Lots of challenging technical issues to address, including where best to place evaluation foci.
I got rather excited at one point in reaction to what I though was a tendency to view academics as a problem. This was not the NUS view, of course, but the notion is out there, especially with those trying to sell their own pet ideas and projects to universities – patronising folk pedalling the need for "innovative pedagogies" come to mind. I'm aways unimpressed; rather than adopt deficit models, it's surely best to start with the extensive expertise that academics do have. Sharing this, has to a good way of helping everyone learn – certainly better than telling established experts that they don't know very much.
I suggested at one point that one way to identify which universities to work with might be to use a 2 x 2 matrix where the axes were:
National Student Survey (NSS) scores (high / low) – green league (GL) position ( top / bottom).
Whilst this is certainly possible, the trouble with this strategy is that the cell: NSS high / GL top is essentially empty, which is a point I've made before. Why this is continues to puzzle me. Here are the essential questions about this:
[1] Why is it that those who do well in the green league, tend to fare badly in the NSS? and
[2] Why do those that do well in the NSS, tend to fare poorly in the green league.
Question 2 is the easier to answer: successful national student survey institutions don't spend much time attending to the issues that count in the green league, and what they're particularly good at, managing student satisfaction, doesn't count for much in the league.
Question 1 is much trickier, and admits of multiple possibility: for example, is it because successful green league institutions neglect teaching and learning? Well, hardly! Given that these are the institutions that, generally speaking, go in for ESD and innovative pedagogy, is it perhaps that they're not all that good at it? Or are their students somehow indifferent to it all – despite what HEA / NUS surveys tell us?
It's a puzzle.
Respond