Newsletter - January 2025
A happy new year from Matt Phillpott
A slightly belated happy new year! I can’t quite believe that we now live in 2025! As I was growing up, the year 2000 sounded futuristic, now we’re beyond the future of Back to the Future, passed the rise of the Terminators, and according to Star Trek just about to enter into World War III, having fought genetically enhanced humans in the 1990s!
Science fiction has been trying to predict the future for as long as it’s existed. Sometimes it can be quite close, and other times its way off. The same is true for thinking about sustainability when we create new courses for learners - how do we ensure that what is taught (and how it is taught) is useful for learners not just now, but ten years from now, or even longer? With the advent of Gen AI, the risks of climate change, and increasing political instability, it seems harder than ever to predict what will be needed in the future. Then there’s the uncertainty for Higher Education institutions in general. Funds are tight, workloads excessive, and learner demands ever increasing as they are turned into ‘paying customers’.
So, how should we respond? There are numerous ways that we can and should attempt to tackle these issues, but for me, these are the key principles I’m planning to operate by in 2025.
Strengthen critical thinking and information literacy
It is my strong belief that this is by far the most important thing that we, as educators need to do. It doesn’t matter what subject you teach or how you are involved in that teaching, but ensuring that learners go away with better skills in criticality is essential. Disinformation is rampant and it’s increasingly difficult to tell what is real and what is fake. All learners, no matter their discipline, should be taught critical thinking skills and information/digital literacy. Only by increasing the number of people able to analyse information for themselves and not take claims at face value, can we combat misinformation and stop some of the more dangerous challenges to our societies.
Embedding sustainability principles
When designing a course I want what is learned to be useful for the learners not just at that moment, but far into the future. Courses need to be sustainable in terms of their content and use of tools and materials. This is not always easy to achieve, as it’s difficult to judge what will and won’t be useful in the future. However, we can try. For instance, in the PGCert that I help to teach we don’t supply VLE content about teaching/learning in relation to Gen AI, despite how important a subject that is. Instead, we offer a webinar and regular conversation opportunities so that the discussion is about where things are with Gen AI now, and not where they were 6 months ago (which might as well be a century ago). And, when we do talk about Gen AI it’s not so much about what the tools do now, but about how we might instil understanding of good practice in ourselves and our learners.
Embed diversity and difference of opinion in the curriculum
We seem to be increasingly extreme in our disagreement with each other and there seems to be an increasing tendency to look for what looks similar to ourselves and what agrees with our viewpoint. This saddens me. There is a real need to ‘open minds’ to other possibilities and to learn how to view topics and events from other people’s perspective, and to find ways to be respectful of differences and different opinions. Only by educating those skills will people become more open and kind to one another (hopefully). This includes a focus on cross-cultural communication and knowledge but also conflict resolution skills. It also includes a focus on ethics, and being able to judge what is right and what is wrong.
Summary
So, how do I plan to employ these principles this year? I hope to use the keywords of diversity - sustainability - criticality as a lens to examine the work that I produce and to ask myself in what ways learning content (in whatever form) fits these criteria. If there isn’t enough of one or other criteria, then changes need to be made! It’s not as if I don’t work to these principles anyway. They are always there, in the back of my mind or key to the methodologies that I use when designing and developing learning materials. Howevr, this year I’m putting them front and centre in a slightly different way. That includes the work that I do here at Adventures in Pedagogy, as well as courses that I run or work on.
I’m also interested to hear what you think about these principles. Do they chime with what you are doing? Are they similar to models or principles that you have seen elsewhere? Have I missed anything important? Do let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.