Sarah Britten Jones
Designing the learning university
Summary
Universities are centres of knowledge generation and learning, yet paradoxically they have very little self-knowledge. They find it easy to learn about a topic external to them, but have limited mechanisms to be able to take a view overall. Institutional self-awareness and the ability of an organisation to know itself from multiple perspectives are essential capabilities in our increasingly dynamic, complex and unpredictable world.
This research seeks to understand how a university might learn about and change itself through the multi-faceted experiences and knowledge of its people. It will investigate the mechanisms used to gather, process and act on feedback to develop institutional metacognition and continuous improvement.
Additional info
The primary site for this qualitative research is Oxford Brookes University where I currently work as a lecturer in design. I approach my research from the position of an Insider Researcher, with the inevitable advantages and disadvantages this entails. The motivation for this research stems from my own experience working and studying within universities. Using a multi-method methodology, I am using methods from institutional ethnography, inclusive design, service design and operational design.
Institutional ethnography is a framework that situates research within the everyday experiences of peoples actual working lives, which Dorothy Smith claims is a women’s standpoint. Historically, women have been excluded as subjects from organisational relations of discourse and ruling, originally created by and for men. The foundations of institutional ethnography are in the women’s movement, which attempts to erode the barriers that exclude women from having agency within organisations. A focus for this research is recognising, valuing and utilising Other Knowledges, including those of people not meaningfully listened to within the university because of their qualifications, status, gender, ethnicity, age, role or other difference.
Service design methods are used to map the journey of a decision and visualise the feedback mechanisms within the university. Service design and inclusive design methods use empathy to prioritise users and stakeholders in the identification as well as the solutions to problems. By drawing upon the rich knowledge within the institution, universities can become more capable of making decisions that are informed through their many internal and external touch-points. Greater organisational self-knowledge generated through multi-faceted feedback can enable the university to change itself in response to external challenges in a timely way.
Institutional eyewear
These epistemological and ontological augmented reality empathy googles provide the university with a view of itself through the multi-faceted lenses and knowledge frameworks of its people. They provide the university with different viewpoints, simultaneously. These goggles are a provocation, a speculative approach that enable the university to both see and understand itself, from every perspective and mental model, at the same time.
Collective visualisation of Oxford Brookes
This icosahedron of transparent organisational drawings was constructed from the drawings of staff and students at Oxford Brookes University in January 2019. It provides a multi-faceted and mutli-layered view of the organisation through the organisational mental models of the participants. One person's mental model can be seen through the lense of another's.
A model for organisational learning
Organisational learning is difficult to see and therefore hard to measure or know
whether, where or how it has happened. Models can help us to visualise complex, non-visual processes or systems, such as a
learning process. When I try to imagine the learning process of Oxford Brookes University, my
tendency is to see it as a three-dimensional activity, happening in time and space.
Physical material helps me to understand something that is by nature intangible. The
material representations of a process can communicate not just proximities, proportion,
quality, sequence, time etc. but they can also enable us to have a tacit relationship to
the information. When we encounter material in space, we relate to it through our
bodies, which can help us to embody the information contained within the material.
This model is a three-dimensional interpretation of the SyLLK (Systemic Lessons Learned Knowledge) model developed by Stephen Duffield (2015) to visualise wiring an organisation for the
capability of learning. It represents the various organisational systems that need to align for a lesson to be learned and remembered in various forms across the organisation.
Redesign the university in an hour
This workshop was delivered during the Oxford Brookes Teaching and Learning Conference (BTLC) with staff in June 2019. The aim of the workshop was to share with participants how
they might use design thinking and physical materials to reimagine the university.
