This is a draft of the presentation that will be given at the HEA Social Sciences annual conference - Teaching forward: the future of the Social Sciences. For further details of the conference: http://bit.ly/1cRDx0p Bookings open until 19 May 2014 http://bit.ly/1hzCMLR or external.events@heacademy.ac.uk ABSTRACT The UK professional standards framework (UKPSF) is “a national framework for comprehensively recognising and benchmarking teaching and learning support roles within higher education”. The HEA aligns its Fellowship categories with the framework descriptors, which are “a set of statements outlining the key characteristics of someone performing four broad categories of typical learning and teaching support role within higher education”. A core aspect of achieving professional recognition via HEA Fellowship is the ‘Account of professional practice’ (APP). Applicants must provide a narrative account that outlines their experiences in relation to a series of ‘areas of activity’, illustrating their account with examples of how these activities demonstrate their competence in relation to ‘core knowledge’ and commitment to ‘professional values’. Part of our role as Academic Development Officers with the HEA is to facilitate workshops that provide opportunities for those preparing to apply for HEA Fellowship to reflect on and develop their practice. With the aim of highlighting the role that creative activities can play in providing the space for critical reflection, we have organised a series of inter-disciplinary workshops that engaged participants in activities such as creating images to represent their academic habitus, forum theatre; creating ‘rich pictures’; and, using poetry for critical reflection. Each of us has been drawing on a different analytical model – critical discourse analysis, appreciative inquiry and narrative analysis – to analyse video recordings of workshops, artefacts created by participants and post-event interviews. The aim of this analysis has been to explore how practitioners are not simply ‘subjected to’ the discourse of professionalism, but have the potential to shape the discourse through the articulation of their practice. In this workshop colleagues will be asked to engage with creative workshop activities that focus on the UKPSF dimension of ‘professional values’ and feedback their views on the usefulness of our approaches to data analysis.

1. Jenni Carr, Jennie Osborn and Natasha Taylor
Teaching forward: the future of the Social Sciences 21 – 22 May 2014
Connecting with creativity to
(re)articulate „professional values‟

2. 2
UK Professional Standards
Framework
Areas of
activity
Core
knowledge
Profession
al values

3. • Respect individual learners and diverse learning
communities;
• Promote participation in higher education and
equality of opportunities for learners;
• Use evidence-informed approaches and the
outcomes from research, scholarship and continuing
professional development;
• Acknowledge the wider context in which higher
education operates recognising the implications for
professional practice.
3
UKPSF: Professional Values

4. Narrative analysis

5. 5

6. “our species thinks in metaphors and learns
through stories” (Bateson, 1994, p.110)
“Metaphor has the power to change our
reality: words affect concepts and “changes in
our conceptual system do change what is real
for us and affect how we perceive the world
and act upon those perceptions” (Lakoff and
Johnson, 1980, p.146).
6
Metaphors

7. “We always live with multiple subjectivities, but we
generally conceal the multiplicity behind a few
predictable and typical guises. Poetry invites us to
explore the plural identities of human be(com)ings
constituted in the play of language.” (Leggo, 2004, p.
12)
“teachers, both beginning and experienced, should
learn to know themselves as poets in order to foster
living creatively in the pedagogic contexts of
classrooms and the larger pedagogic contexts
outside classrooms.”(Leggo 2005)
7
From narrative to poetry . . .

8. Jenni Carr, Higher Education Academy
Discourse, Power, Resistance 2014 8 – 10 April
2014
Interpretative repertoires, ideological
dilemmas and subject positions

9. • What is forum theatre?
9
Forum theatre

10. “ a lexicon or register of terms and metaphors drawn
upon to characterise and evaluate actions and events”
(Potter and Wetherell, 1987)
• Language itself is a form of practice. We do things
when we talk.
• Placing an emphasis on agency within the flexible
deployment of language.
10
Interpretative repertoires

11. “lived ideologies…composed of the beliefs, values and
practices of a given society…they are not at all
coherent or integrated…[but] characterised by
inconsistency, fragmentation and contradiction”
(Edley, 2001)
• Overlap with interpretative repertoires, but here the
focus is on what we do when we negotiate conflicting
repertoires.
• A negotiation that reflects relations of power.
11
Ideological dilemmas

12. “All discourses, then, construct subject positions from
which they alone make sense.”
(Hall, 1997)
12
Subject positions

13. Edley, N (2001) „Interpretative repertoires, ideological
dilemmas and subject positions‟ in Wetherell, M.
Taylor, S. and Yates, S. (eds.) Discourse as
Data, London, Sage
Hall, S (1997) „The work of representation‟ in Hall, S
(ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and
Signifying Practices, London, Sage
Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. (1987) Discourse and
Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and
Behaviour, London, Sage
13
References

21. • Reviewing clip from forum theatre
• Rich pictures and metaphor of „the
parade‟
• Using poetry for critical reflection
21
Choice of activities

22. Question:
Are our analytical approaches useful in
terms of evidencing that these activities
provide opportunities for people to reflect
on their professional values?
22
Analytical approaches

23. 23
Where is the
subject?