FROM THE ARCHIVE - Education for Sustainability and beyond: contemplating collapse

Education for Sustainability and beyond: contemplating collapse
Arran Stibbe, University of Gloucestershire

This article explores the educational implications of collapse and argues for the importance of equipping students with the ability to break conventions, exercise creativity, and invent new stories to base life on in the very different conditions of the world to come.

Published in Autumn 2010: Networks, Issue 11, pp. 28 - 32.

To access the article

GENERAL NEWS - from HE

EVENT - Surveys for Enhancement Conference
National College for School Leadership, Nottingham
17 May 2012

This conference will present research and practice on the use of student surveys for the improvement of learning and teaching. It will be of interest to senior managers with strategic learning and teaching roles, educational developers, policy and quality enhancement professionals, pedagogic researchers and lecturers at the chalk face. The conference will cover a wide range of issues around the use of survey data, focusing particularly on the National Student Survey.
For more information

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EVENTS - SEDA Workshops - UK Professional Standards Framework for Teaching and Supporting Learning: from PG certs to provision at all levels

Edinburgh Napier University

29 May 2012

and

University of Birmingham

11 June 2012

Due to demand, this workshop is also being held at Edinburgh and Birmingham (in addition to Birkbeck University of London, 24 April 2012). Most universities and HE colleges provide Post Graduate Certificates or equivalent courses for staff new to HE teaching. These events will share expertise and explore models of provision and HR processes for developing and rewarding across the whole range.

For more information Edinburgh

For more information Birmingham

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EVENT - NUS and HEA Student Engagement Conference

The Powers and Perils of Partnership

Radisson by Park Inn Hotel, Nottingham

12 - 13 June 2012

This two-day conference on student engagement, organised by NUS and the Higher Education Academy, will highlight some of the ways that NUS and the HEA have been working to embed student engagement at the heart of every institution. It will include its projects on student-led teaching awards and widening engagement and more.

For more information

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NEWS – reminder about HEA Travel Fund

The HEA travel fund will enable staff and students in UK higher education to exchange and disseminate good practice in learning, teaching and assessment and engage with their peers. The funding may be used to help the applicant(s) attend conferences, network meetings and special interest groups that are being run in the UK. Individuals can apply for up to £300 and teams for up to £500.

For more information

CALL – for papers to Crafting the Future

10th European Academy of Design Conference

The University of Gothenburg, Sweden

17 – 19 April 2013

Deadline for abstracts: 15 May 2012

This conference celebrates the 10th anniversary of the European Academy of Design conferences and contributes to a  discussion on the role of design and designers in crafting our futures. The theme of the conference is the practical knowledge of the designer. How can the specific knowledge of designers be brought forward, articulated and made visible, and how can it be understood and used in contexts like innovation, business development and
social change?

They are asking for contributions to any of the strands below, the main idea is of a return to the roots of design practice as well as theoretical frameworks that enable exploration and further understanding of the role of practice in design, education, business and society.

1. Designing Future Mobility

2. Design Development of Future Homes for Future Cities

3. Design and Innovation

4. MAKING TOGETHER -– Open, Connected, Collaborative

5. The craft of design in design of service

6. Fashion Design for Sustainability

7. Design history as a tool for better design

8. Power to the People: Practices of Empowerment through Craft

9. Design & Craft (Crafting the Education of Design)

http://www.craftingthefuture.se/

NEWS – launch of new website DocWest

Centre for Production and Research of Documentary Film at The University of Westminster

DocWest is the website of the Documentary Film Centre at the University of Westminster. Established in 2009, it brings together an interdisciplinary network of researchers, practitioners and students to foster creative conversations around documentary practice. In their premises in Central London they host an exciting range of screenings, master-classes and conferences involving some of the most prominent practitioners in today’s documentary world.

Their activities involve teaching, film production, and academic research. They aim to redefine documentary discourse, its history and its connection to art and politics through investigating relationships between ideology, history, culture, and the apparatus of artistic production. They pay particular attention to the study areas of Visual Anthropology and Human Rights, Arts Documentary and the Documentary Archive, whilst extending the range of production and research into other fields of documentary study, such as the interactive documentary and the web-based documentary.

They focus on international collaboration and they welcome proposals from, and partnerships with, other documentary centres throughout the world. They actively search to promote documentary work that goes beyond Western European and North American traditions. They collaborate closely with Westminster University’s India Media Centre, China Media Centre and Africa Media Centre, and they are currently developing partnerships in Central and Eastern Europe.

They have developed a thriving Ph.D. culture, with both theoretical and practice-based doctoral degrees focusing on a variety of contexts and referencing many different documentary traditions. Current and completed Ph.D.s range from a shared ethnography of a queer club in London to an examination of the new forms of documentary film-making associated with representations of Modern China, and from an investigation into the new visual language associated with ‘mobile-mentaries’, to an ethnography of a documentary film studio in communist Romania.

They aim to provide a platform for initiating, funding and distributing creative documentary projects conceived at the intersection between academia and the industry.

If you feel inspired by the above, they want to hear from you.

http://www.docwest.co.uk/

EVENT - Business models, rights and ownership workshop

2nd Community-Powered Digital Transformations event

20 April 2012

The British Library, London

(Organised by University of Westminster)

Digital transformations mean that cultural and media organisations now find themselves in a new environment in which communities of participants interact to create, curate, organise and support cultural experiences.

This is the second in a series of AHRC-funded events where practitioners and researchers will come together to consider innovative practices, and develop new ideas together. (All welcome – you do not need to have come to the first one!).

This workshop will consider:

• How can communities create new business relationships which work towards sustaining the community, rather than sustaining any given business model or relationship?
• How do we deal with the profound challenges to ownership rights across the cultural industries, which have been created by digital transformations in the roles and relationships of creators, curators, sponsors and audiences?

Speakers include:

• Robert Waddilove, Across The Pond/Google
• Rachel Marshall, Licensing manager, The British Library
• Chris Speed, University of Edinburgh
• James Bennett, Royal Holloway
• Paul Dwyer, University of Westminster

The day will involve presentations, discussions, and smaller-group conversations.

http://bit.ly/digital20april

CALL – recruiting reporters for citizen newswire for the London 2012 Games

#media2012 the online Olympic & Paralympic citizen newswire

The #media2012 project is building up to the Games period now and are hoping to recruit reporters over the next few months, while also firming up an Olympic Question Time programme that will take place around London during the Olympics and an Olympic Social Media Centre, which would foster links between professional and citizen journalists.  The project is not just London focused and has 10 universities around the UK currently involved.

The main premise of the project is to wrestle back some ownership of media production during the most tightly controlled media event in history.

Please go to the website for more information http://www.media2012.org.uk

or contact Andy Miah directly if you think this will appeal to your students editor@media2012.org.uk or email@ANDYMIAH.NET

EVENT - Designs on Research: the role of the undergraduate research symposium

Arts University College at Bournemouth, Fern Barrow, Wallisdown, Poole

25 June 2012

This free workshop aims to disseminate research findings and to share ideas regarding the value and potential of an undergraduate research symposium as an annual cross-institutional initiative within the art, design and media sector.

It will consider how the collaborative research symposium can support and develop students’ final year dissertation work, and in particular how the opportunity for all students to write and design a (conference) poster and to present to their peers in a symposium format can play a powerful role in students’ academic development.

The workshop offers an opportunity to develop further collaboration opportunities and will present a wealth of student posters as exemplars for reference. It proposes an effective model that can easily be applied to other disciplines, in a single or cross-disciplinary manner.

The session will be led by the project creators with presentations by Ruth Dineen (National Teaching Fellow) and students that have been involved in a previous symposium.

This is one of the HEA’s Higher Education Discipline Workshop and Seminar Series. It is free of charge to all those interested in the workshop topic, with preference being given to staff working in HE institutions and HE in FE colleges from across the UK. Places will be allocated on a first come, first served basis. Lunch and refreshments will be provided. 

A booking form and programme is available from Kirsten Hardie khardie@aucb.ac.uk

NEWS - JLDHE, edition 4 now online

The Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education (JLDHE) is published by the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE), and is aimed at those interested in all aspects of how learning is facilitated, and how it is experienced and achieved by students in higher education.

Edition 4 has a wide-ranging selection of opinion pieces, papers and case studies. 

To access edition 4 of JLDHE