Creative postgraduate pedagogy for personal and professional learning: Risks and rewards

This chapter explores the implications of innovative postgraduate pedagogy within one EdD module, where providing a flexible, reflexive space to explore professional and personal positioning and identity has proved to be a pivotal point in many people’s doctoral journeys. The initial validation of the EdD linked modules to the Faculty of Education’s research themes and this module, with a given focus on ‘contemporary issues in educational research’, was led by the professional development and identity theme group. I and my co-leader (of both theme group and module) decided to adopt the kinds of facilitative, process-based approaches that we had found to be effective in supporting teachers and other education professionals in deepening understanding of professional situations, contexts and identities and in supporting organisational change. We knew these approaches could provoke powerful individual learning, appropriate for the professional doctorate, therefore from the outset we resisted the academy’s anxious demands which tended to push towards packing the module with ‘content’. We became increasingly bold in offering thinking space, choice and opportunities for structured discussion using a variety of stimulus material.
On revalidation the module was renamed “Research: self and positioning”. Using creative ideas and elicitation tools to challenge and stimulate reflection and encourage risk taking has yielded rich rewards for successive cohorts, encouraging bolder forays into dialogic and experimental approaches. Pedagogic exploration of creative methods and approaches using pictures, metaphors and reflective models to elicit critical dialogue, listening and thinking within safe spaces has prompted new confidence in supporting students’ creativity in directing their own learning.
The assignment, which broadly takes the form of a reflective journal, offers much freedom to interpret brief experimentally for their own ends. This might involve challenging orthodox methodologies, inhabiting discomforting and unfamiliar territories, asking personal as well as professional questions and sometimes pushing the boundaries of academic convention in the discipline. This can help candidates to approach the thesis more robustly, with greater understanding of their own positioning and potential to contribute new knowledge in methodology as well as in substantive content. This chapter draws on evidence from student evaluations, postgraduate assignments and interviews, to consider learners’ responses to the module, the challenges it posed and their reflections on its immediate and ongoing impact.

Implications for the professional doctorate and other postgraduate programmes are considered, where practitioner learning, personal journeying and academic scholarship are intertwined, sometimes in unexpected ways. Using unusual, often intuitive pedagogic approaches with education practitioners reveals new perspectives on professionalism and identity, lives and learning for both tutor and students. However, pedagogy that exposes experiences, emotions and identities to reflexive investigation, relying on trusted peer support, carries risks. Such learning does not always align with Higher Education expectations and structures. Empowering diverse voices requires openness to those voices, subjecting the learning experience to intense scrutiny and questioning assessment frameworks and formats. Enquiry can unearth practitioners’ tacit understandings, laying bare values and views, perhaps prompting deeper realisations and choices hitherto avoided. Nevertheless, such challenges should be embraced, as they are inherent in the richness of the learning within modules where pedagogic and methodological risks are taken, as a precursor to what may be encountered at thesis stage. Shared within a postgraduate learning community, creativity and challenge can gather additional momentum.