What is Academic Co-creative Inquiry?

Ksenija Napan, PhD

Mihi mihiTena kotou katoaTihei Mauri ora!Ko Air New Zealand te wakaKo Medvednica te maungaKo Sava te awaKo Ngati Pakeha te iwiKo tanagata Tarara te hapuKo Ksenija Napan taku ingoaNo reira, tena kotou tena kotou

tena katoa

What would you like to learn today?

• Explore how philosophy and principles of Academic Co-Creative inquiry relate to your teaching?

• Learn more about Academic Co-Creative inquiry and why it employs certain teaching methods?

• Something completely different

What is ACCI?

• An innovative way of teaching and learning inspired by cooperative inquiry

• ACCI is a modification of CI within a hierarchical tertiary education setting

• Through a collaborative process, teachers and students co-create the context and the content for the course and mutually assess its effectiveness

Where has it been applied?

• Spirituality and Social Practice • Creative Social Practice• Symposium Social Work and Spirituality at

Interuniversity centre in Dubrovnik • and in its modified form in Advanced

Principles and Theory in Social Work, Professional Practice, Transcultural Social Practice and Reflecting on Practice

Basic qualities that underpin its effectiveness

• Context • Flow• Choice• Trust • Relevance• Integration• Integrity They emerged as being essential but not exclusive. The ways they manifested varied from context to

context in each attempt to facilitate a course in a co-creative manner.

Questions for academics related to appreciating the context

How is this class a safe place?Which conscious activities do I undertake to make

it a safe place?How students contribute to it?What students do (or can do) to co-create safety

in the classroom?How do I convey my passion and interest for the

subject I teach?Do I know my student’s names? Can I pronounce

them well?Am I interested in them?What are my most common criticisms about my

students? What are their strengths?Which qualities characterise what happens

between participants?How is my course a generally enjoyable course?

Do students appear to be enjoying learning?

• What do I think they like the most about my class?

• What is interesting about it? How is it special?

• What students remember the most at the end of it? How do I know that?

• Which processes contribute to creating a learning community in my classroom?

• How many students do their best? How come?

• What structures are essential for my course to be effective?

• What is negotiable about my course?• How students contribute to make it their

own?• Is my course challenging enough? Do my

students appear to be bored?• Would I like to be a student in my class?

Why or why not?

Questions that relate to the flow

• Have I ever noticed the flow in my classroom?

• What happened?• Did anybody else notice it?• How do I manage and encourage

curiosity in the classroom?• What brainstorm activities do I

enjoy?• What activities my students enjoy

the most?• How do we engender curiosity?• What is the most interesting part of

the subject I teach?• What excites me?• When am I most creative?• How do I express my creativity?• How do student express their

creativity in classroom discussions, assignments and presentations?

Questions related to choices

• What academic requirements, proposed by my academic institution are non-negotiable?

• What academic requirements, proposed by me and my academic integrity are non-negotiable?

• How is flexibility manifested in my course?

• Which choices do I make to make the course different each year?

• What do I believe about choices in academic work?

• Which choices do students have in terms of process, content and assessment in my course?

• Which part of the course would you like to experiment with in order to create more choices?

• How important are choices for your students’ future profession?

Questions related to trust

• How is trust manifested in my class?

• Does the content of my course require level of trust between students themselves and between students and lecturers in order to learn better?

• How can trust be ignored in academic environments?

• How can trust between students be encouraged?

• Is there the ‘us and them’ culture within my department? How does it manifest?

• Are students treated as colleagues? Do they need to do something to deserve this status?

• How is respect manifested within my department? How do I do it? How I see my colleagues doing it? Do I notice when students show trust?

Questions related to relevance

• How will learnings from this course shape my students’ future practice?

• How is the content of my course related to what students do or plan to do?

• How much of my and students’ practice is integrated in the course?

• How often practitioners contribute to my course?

• How is mutual learning promoted – how much students learn from one another?

• What are my students’ special skills and abilities and how do they manifest them in the classroom and in their work environment?

• How are they nurtured?• Are students aware of the

relevance of this course?

Questions that relate to integration

and integrity• How do I see education having a

transformational potential?• How do I act with integrity and

how I teach my students to do so? Is integrity teachable?

• Is the course I teach compatible with my personal beliefs?

• Are beliefs something people should talk about?

• How personal beliefs influence professional practice?

• With whom can I talk when having an ethical dilemma?

• How are the values, skills, knowledge and beliefs integrated?

• How can I manage my power and not impose my beliefs on students?

And these qualities tend to engender

• Competence• Coherence• Responsibility• Doing one’s best• More curiosity• Love for learning• Cooperation • Fun and creativity in classroom

Main components of ACCI•Learning contracts•Personalising prescribed learning outcomes and phrasing them in a question or statement form•Students define resources, obstacles, set assignment dates and marking criteria•Self and peer assessment•Co-creation of the course content and process•A teacher facilitates the process, collates all assessment activities including peer and self assessment and assigns a final mark according to prescribed criteria and students’ criteria

Purpose for Learning contracts• Personalisation of prescribed

outcomes• Clarifying resources, obstacles,

collaborators and criteria• Living documents – change over time• Allowing uniqueness and individual

approach to each student• When assessing, peer and self

assessing – return to the learning contract - clarity

• I find them useful, but any similar tool can do a job – as boundaries tend to get blurred in this process, contracts help to retain some

Purpose for personalising prescribed learning outcomes and phrasing them in a question or a

statement form• When personalised, outcomes

make more sense to students• Prescribed LOs are made for NZQA

– usually very dry and academic• Phrasing them as questions shifts

students from a merely receptive mode into an inquiry mode

• Questions can change and the more they change the more relevant they become

Purpose for students defining resources, obstacles, set assignment dates and marking criteria

• The earlier students start gathering resources, the better for their inquiry – this happens at the beginning of the course

• When obstacles are defined a student is asked to think about strategies to overcome them

• Students set their own deadlines within prescribed academic limits and practice time management

• Prescribed and personal criteria equally important

Purpose for self and peer assessment

Promotes collaboration and learning from one anotherResembles social practice appraisal processesDevelops reflective practicesIncreases the quality of assignments

Purpose for co-creating the course content and process

EngagementOwnershipStudent centeredLearning from differencesUtilising various strengths in the groupEach course is different and unique, responsive to each group of students, contemporary and aliveSustainability and social justice feature in each course

Purpose for a teacher facilitating the process, collating all assessment activities including peer and self assessment and assigning a final mark according to prescribed criteria and students’ criteria

To help students on their learning journeyPrescribed academic criteria we have to adhere to To ensure validity of peer and self assessmentBecause within academic realities it would not be possible to get away without itAcknowledges inherent power within hierarchical institutions

Results • A co-creative inquiry of this kind resulted in a very high engagement of students, remarkably positive feedback about the course, very high standard of assignments and an increased collaboration between students.

• Peer and self-assessment, especially peer assessment from practitioners in the area of students’ practice, contributed to integration of theory, practice and experience and proved to be useful not only for students but for peer assessors as well.

• Students reported about personal integrity that developed during this process and emphasised the importance of the context of inclusiveness that was co-created where all voices were heard and where a range of alternative views were appreciated and explored for the purpose of learning about respecting difference.

A proposal• Choose one course you teach in 2012• Meet with the team and set up a project• Play with these ideas (an enrich the method with

more)• Contextualise it and co-create it with students • Monthly check-ins with the team and writing brief

reflective journal entries on-line• Evaluate its effectiveness• Publish a joint paper at the end of 2012• Continue developing it if it works

If you want to join me in a research project where you will apply and

contextualise this method in 2012 in your own classroom, please e-

mail me your expression of interest

knapan@unitec.ac.nzby 22.11.2011.