This week we ask: could the University be a wild place? A resilient ecosystem of biodiversity, interdependent relationships, entanglements and emergence? What would it look like if we let go of command, control and management, and allowed the University to grow and thrive in ways that can't be predicted in advance but might exceed our wildest dreams?
Join us to celebrate the achievements of Prof. Cathy Elliott. Recorded one day after her inaugural lecture, marking a significant milestone in her distinguished career, Cathy talks about her wild approach to education.
Cathy is one of those rare educators who always strives to focus less on grades and more on inspiring her pupils. She has spearheaded ungrading campaigns at UCL, as well as inclusive curriculums and student-led projects on inclusivity, belonging, political philosophy and international relations. She is a co-director of UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics, a co-convenor of the Political Studies Association Teaching and Learning Network, and Vice-Dean Education for UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences. Cathy has made history as our department's first academic on the teaching track to be promoted to Professor. This in itself reflects Cathy's thoughts on education - if we remove some of the boundaries and change some of the criteria , wonderful things might happen (inc. it might be easier for teaching track academics to progress to prof)!
Mentioned in this episode:
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Emily McTernan: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics. This week, we're discussing the career and ideas of Professor Cathy Elliot.
This week we have another of our series of occasional life of's, where we interview our professors on the occasion of their inaugural lectures about their careers in research. This time, I'm particularly delighted to be joined by Professor Cathy Elliot, our first-ever professor on the teaching track in the Department of Political Science and the School of Public Policy.
She's also the Vice Dean of Education for the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences at UCL. Cathy spent seven years managing international development projects in various interesting countries for the British Council, and she says her disillusionment with this work led her to a PhD in Politics here at UCL. She's been here ever since, [00:01:00] challenging and improving our teaching practices and producing fascinating research on both politics and nature, which regular listeners will remember an earlier episode about, which we'll link to, and on teaching in higher education and how we could all do it a lot better. The audience for Cathy's inaugural was filled with both colleagues and former and current students, in a testament to the impact that she has had.
Today, we're going to discuss both her innovative teaching practices and experiments in education, as well as her intriguing proposal that we need to transform these rigid, rule-bound universities—a process she describes as rewilding the university. Welcome back to the podcast. Cathy.
Cathy Elliott: Thank you very much.
Emily McTernan: It's brilliant to have you here. Let's start with your career. It's a bit different from the other new professors we've had on the podcast. And because it's been one so devoted to teaching and to finding your own way through and to making this space for the role that you have now. I've wondered if you could tell our listeners a bit about that experience.
Cathy Elliott: Yeah, thank you. It's been very, it's been a very cobbled-together career. I came to UCL to do [00:02:00] my masters having already had a career at the British Council as you've just, as you've just mentioned. Did my master’s, did my PhD. Did quite a lot of teaching during my PhD, which I just loved. And I really felt like when I was teaching, I just came to life.
And then after that finished, I started getting these, as lots of people do, I got temporary teaching jobs here and there. I was cobbling together the hours I had a few hours at Kings and a few hours at UCL and eventually that grew into a kind of a 0.8 FTE, nine-month contract at UCL. Which at that time was much more common than it is now.
You still see that in the sector quite a lot. Understandably, everybody asked me at the time, how's the job hunt going? Because people found that it didn't sound very sustainable. But I suppose the comparison for me was that I'd been working in the British Council where every three years you packed up all your stuff and you moved to a new country.
So I was reasonably comfortable with [00:03:00] insecurity, and I was reasonably comfortable with uncertainty. I also really wanted to stay in London and I was really enjoying the teaching that I was doing. So, I just clung on. The metaphor I used in the lecture I gave this week was like, a dandelion, with tap roots into inhospitable soil.
I just clung. And my friend and colleague and mentor, Jennifer Hudson, who introduced me the other night, somehow managed to get me a gig as what we call graduate tutor in the department. They were looking after pastoral needs: the extenuating circumstances, attendance, and all that kind of thing, for our 500 a year postgraduate taught students. That meant that I could make myself indispensable. And there's nothing better if you want a job than to be indispensable.
I did that for seven years, which is a long time. I did that through the pandemic, which was hard work. So sitting on Zoom calls, watching people's lives fall apart, was hard work. But I really liked it.
I did a lot of teaching around the sides of that as well. But I was listening to students. [00:04:00] Getting involved in their lives. Trying to help them figure things out. Trying to support them, not just to get a degree, but to feel as if somebody cared about them and would listen to them.
It's nothing I haven't seen in those seven years. It's just the law of big numbers, right? Addiction, pregnancy, and homelessness, sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Everything you could imagine. As time went on, these jobs started to get regularized and you started to see around the country, these three year teaching fellowships. For me, it seemed to be a really obvious improvised solution to a problem that we had, which is that we need people that are good at teaching in H.E. We've got massively increased access to H.E. from when I was a student 30 years ago. We have lots of students coming. We have very high expectations from those students. They're very good students. They care, their parents care, the general public care about higher education. But, we hadn't been focusing on it. We'd been focusing in research-intensive universities, very understandably on research. That's very demanding and it takes up a lot of people's time. So, we talk about research [00:05:00] opportunities and we talked about teaching loads, right? Teaching burdens. And I thought, this is the thing I'm good at. So my co-author, Ellen Watts writes about this moment where you think if only this were a good job, right? If only this were a permanent job and a job where maybe one day I'll get paid a bit more, maybe get promoted, and if only people would respect me then I wouldn't mind doing this. This would be all right. What's not to like? You hang out with students. They're students who care about your discipline, that you care about. They're motivated. They want to learn. You get to inhabit a university, you get to use the library. You get to carry on writing either on your substantive research or, as I did, pedagogical research, right? Research into teaching and education. You get a lot of autonomy. You get a lot of choice in what you do. You get to enjoy your teaching. Why wouldn't that be a good job? Why wouldn't anybody envy me that job?
Emily McTernan: This is reminding of David Grabber's distinction between the 'bullshit job', which is just a terrible job and it's doing nothing for the world and the 'shit job,' which should [00:06:00] be great, but just has terrible conditions.
Cathy Elliott: Exactly.
Emily McTernan: It's not the job it's self is good, or the work is good
Cathy Elliott: and meaningful work.
Emily McTernan: The job is bad and the work.
Cathy Elliott: Yeah.
Emily McTernan: And it's meaningful and important that you're doing it.
Cathy Elliott: Yeah.
Emily McTernan: But we put some stuff around it, like insecurity and status, that make it unattractive.
Cathy Elliott: Exactly. It wasn't even so much so the money was liveable on really, because we were getting paid at the same grade as our colleagues on research and teaching contracts. There were some issues around progression, but the money wasn't terrible. The insecurity is scary for lots of people, but for me, the issue was really respect, right? Do people think my work is meaningful? Can I be proud of myself? Or, are other people proud of the work that I'm doing? Because that's a question of how other people see us, which is very important for humans who are social creatures. And then through the prism of how are the people see us? Like how do we see ourselves?
Emily McTernan: Yeah. Are these the ideas you're exploring as well in your recent co-authored article 'The Joy of the Teaching Track'?
Cathy Elliott: That's right. I wrote an article with so it's [00:07:00] Ellen Watts, Keith Smith, Rose Gann, Kalina Zhekova, who's our colleague in the department, and Madeleine Le Bourdon. We are all teaching track people. We've all been having these conversations about how much we like our jobs, how much we wouldn't like the other job, which is sold to us as the promised land.
When people ask me how the job hunt was going, what they meant was, are you going to get a research and teaching job? Like your job? And those are cool jobs, like I understand why anybody would want a job like that, and those are amazing jobs. But it wouldn't be the job for me. Actually, if I had the choice now to have one of those jobs or to have my job, I would choose my job. I think all my co-authors on the article would say the same thing. We love teaching. We love being part of a teaching community. We really enjoy getting together and talking about teaching. We love our students. Our work is in education. We don't want to think about teaching loads. We want to think about the delight of education, the joy of it, how meaningful education is, how working with students is such fun.
These are great jobs. The only thing that makes [00:08:00] them not great is if they're not treated with respect or if they are in, if the contractual stuff around them that the insecurity and all of that, which still exists in the sector, makes them less good jobs.
Emily McTernan: Does the gendered aspect of these jobs trouble you a little bit?
So an observation, which I haven't carried out a proper study into is that it is predominantly women who are on the teaching track style jobs.
Cathy Elliott: Yeah.
Emily McTernan: There are more men we know, and there are some research and teaching jobs. Does that worry you?
Cathy Elliott: Yes. So now, in the article, we have some statistics on this, and it is true that women are overrepresented and that people of colour are overrepresented in these teaching jobs. Although that changes when you regularize them.
Emily McTernan: Oh, fascinating.
Cathy Elliott: Yeah.
Emily McTernan: As they become better jobs, surprisingly.
Cathy Elliott: The analogy is nursing, right? Nursing used to be an overwhelmingly feminized profession. Then, it became professionalized, and you needed a degree to do it, and suddenly, men started flocking into nursing because it became an attractive job. The same is true, I think, with teaching. In the [00:09:00] Political Studies Association Teaching and Learning network, we have loads of men now, it's almost like we're almost getting to that problem of oh, the manel, we need to find some women to sit on these panels.
It is true that women are socialized in a particular way and that teaching is understood to be a caring role, and we'll never completely get away from that. Women will be doing more service than teaching until society as a whole changes. But I think once you get rid of that insecurity and precarity, then these jobs do become very attractive to men, and there were lots of great men doing them.
Emily McTernan: Fantastic to hear. I guess one more small point of challenge, if I may. It’s a funny moment here because I'm sitting here with my research and teaching job, one of the old school jobs.
I love it partly because of the joy of teaching, right? That is a large part of the job. One thought is maybe you can spread that joy to the rest of us who also do research, and see that our research and teaching are much more aligned with each other. That was the old goal of research-led teaching. But the real question I had is a worry that a friend of mine who is president of his UCU branch at a university about to undergo [00:10:00] swinging redundancies, massive cuts. Perhaps the institution would rather like it if we had teaching contracts. Because they don't have to pay for us to wander off into the weeds and see what we find in a way that doesn't produce anything that's productive to the university directly. That doesn't make money for the university. In a way that students in those seats produce money.
Cathy Elliott: Yeah.
Emily McTernan: Does that ever trouble you that this is a kind of slippery slope to the cuts that are going on at some of these Russell Group institutions?
Cathy Elliott: We have people who do research and teaching, but also really love teaching. I just think we're all a wonderful complement to each other, right?
You need to have diversity in an institution, and different people will always want to do different things. I would never want to do a job that was around, I don't know, alumni engagement, or looking for philanthropy, or something like that. But I've got colleagues who absolutely love that. That's great. I don't have to do it. They can do it. I've got colleagues who really love doing admissions and love to do an open weekend. Brilliant. You can do that. I'm happy not to do that. I just think that's no problem. Absolutely. But when we are doing our research on the teaching track, perhaps we'll [00:11:00] do more pedagogical stuff, and we might do more teaching throughout a career.
Then you have the power and money. I think that's right. I know I always felt as a kind of I were a member of the trade union. I'd be standing on picket lines and things, and I would be standing on picket lines with people who thought I shouldn't have the job that I had.
For all sorts of really good principled reasons, because they felt it was a way of eroding those kinds of research and teaching careers. I think getting rid of the precarity, making sure education-focused people also have the opportunity to make those jobs better, is a partial answer to that, right?
One of the things we argue in the “Joy Of The Teaching Track” article is that we should also have time for research. We should also have time for thinking, we should also have access to sabbaticals, right? We shouldn't. I sat in a meeting once, very early in my career, where somebody proposed that the main role of a teaching fellow, which is what we were called then, was to do his marking [00:12:00] so that he could get on with his important research.
That plays into of very neoliberal agenda of cuts and in a sector which is, I'm in a leadership role, like money's difficult. It's really hard. But if these are good jobs, then I don't think they compete with the research and teaching jobs.
I don't think anybody wants universities that are not producing research. If we didn't have universities producing research, somebody would have to do the research. Everybody wants research. And what would we have to teach? And what would we look like as a country if we didn't have universities that were doing research?
It seems inconceivable to me, especially from where we are now, where research is, this very dominant discourse. It seems very unlikely to me that we will end in a situation where we just become big schools.
Emily McTernan: Let's turn to one of the core ideas of your inaugural lecture. This provocative idea of rewilding the university. So if any listeners might be disappointed by this, I was a bit disappointed by this. You said it wasn't to release badges and wolves into the front quad, which that [00:13:00] would be fantastic.
What is it that we should do instead? What are we talking about when we're talking about rewilding this university?
Cathy Elliott: Not wolves! I was trying to think about rewilding as a kind of metaphor. In the lecture, I talked a bit more length about regenerative farming and the way that they use nature. The idea of rewilding really is that our relationship with nature it's gotten out of hand in the way that we try and subdue and control and micromanage all processes of nature to have a beautiful garden or to produce food. And this is destroying the natural world. Britain's one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.
What rewilding advocates are doing is saying, actually, we can work with nature to have things like beautiful gardens and food production. That works very well, and nature bounces back quite quickly. If you just stop using weed killers, pesticides, fossil fuel inputs, and micromanage everything, the soil will come back to life. Then you will both make more money, because you're not spending it on those inputs. [00:14:00] You will also be able to produce food and other good things, and nature will thrive. You'll have things like Nightingales. The things that those regenerative farmers do, I had them as bullet points, right?
They put in some fencing and boundaries. They also take a lot of boundaries out. They allow things to happen. They wait and see. They watch. They trust the process. They hold their nerve. If it seems like brambles are taking over, they don't panic and start taking the brambles out. They watch to see what happens with the brambles. Something else will come along, and they improvise. There's always a kind of cobbled-together solution. A bit like my career, really! Cobbling together these bits and bobs in order to come to a position where they can make the world more beautiful.
A lot of this is around storytelling as well, where we're saying to people what you thought looked neat and beautiful, that's not beautiful. This is beautiful. My argument really is that in the university we've got into this state of learned helplessness [00:15:00] where every time we see a problem, we think if only we could invent a rule or a regulation or a form or a box to tick, that would solve the problem. If only we could coerce the students a bit more, whether that's around attendance or handing their work in on time, or learning the skills we want them to learn, or whatever that might be.
If only we could coerce them a bit more with the promise of grades or the threat of sanctions, then we could solve our problems. That looks remarkably similar to me to this command and control farming. What I'm trying to advocate is actually, let's stop doing that and let's try and think of ourselves as educators, and let's see what grows if we just let go a bit, if we release some of these rules and regulations, if we say to people in your classroom, in your program, in your team, in your department, you could do something interesting. Maybe you could do something beautiful. We permit you. Go for it. If it goes wrong, we'll hold our nerve. We'll trust the process. We'll improvise, and something will be, something will come along. It will be [00:16:00] all right. I think if we did that, the university would really be a place where we're all here because we are interested in learning. We're all here because we're interested in ideas and in thinking together and in being together in community rather than this kind of terrible fear, that I think we're living in at the moment around these rules and regulations.
Emily McTernan: It's certainly true that our colleagues joining us from America are often quite startled by the extent the university centre dictates what your courses can look like, or the department dictates what they can, how they can be assessed, and when you can change your mind about that and all sorts of things like this.
Yes. Is it that more freedom to the individual academic that you have as a picture to experiment in their classroom to see what works for them? Or are you seeing it as a more central process?
Cathy Elliott: I suppose there will be a role for the centre, right? One of the arguments I made is that you need some boundaries, right?
In a rewild farm, you can't just have your Belted Galloway cows wandering off and going on the motorway. You have to have some boundaries, but the question is, where do you put the boundaries, and who's doing what with the boundaries? So the metaphor I use for my role because [00:17:00] I'm a sort of university leader. I'm one of these awful people who are in the centre, telling every bossing everybody about, telling them what to do. What I would like people like me to be in the role of is more like a wild gardener. What wild gardeners do is they allow things to grow, and they notice what's happening, and maybe they'll pull something out, or maybe they'll put some diversity in.
Putting diversity in is often very useful for ecosystems. To make the metaphor a bit concrete in my role as a wild gardener, right? I do things like with some of my colleagues in the department, we run the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics. I'm also a co-convenor of the Political Studies Association Teaching and Learning Network. What we do in those spaces is we just get people together. It's not so much the individual teacher, although individual teachers experimenting is fantastic, right? We need much more of that. I think people often have this kind of sense of, I'd love to experiment, but I'm not allowed. I want to permit people to experiment on their own. But one of the ways you create that permission structure is we all get together in the CPP, in the TLN, and there are blogs that we write, there are all [00:18:00] sorts of spaces that we've created where that ecosystem can start to flourish. I've started to see, so over a sort of reasonably long career, I've started to see projects that I've started popping up in other places.
I was invited to give a talk yesterday in one of UCL's other departments outside our faculty. And I realized as I was arriving that the reason that they'd asked me was because they'd replicated the project that I'd done in this department, and they wanted to come and they wanted me to come and talk to them about it. I hadn't even known that had happened.
I've had colleagues at other universities talking about the way that I would chair a meeting and how they're going to chair a meeting in the same way now, in a more educational way rather than a sort of command and control way. So by creating these spaces, you create the possibility for ecosystems to flourish and spread. That's my vibe.
Emily McTernan: It's a wonderful vision. Let's make it concrete. I want to talk about the command and control stuff that we do around grading, because I know this is one of your central interests, and you've just literally yesterday published an article against anonymity and grading.
I [00:19:00] guess it's a bit of context. Most of us, most of the time do this in a pretty standard way, right? The student gives us an essay or an exam script. They're anonymous. We are anonymous. We give it a grade.
Cathy Elliott: I could talk about this for a long time. The thing about grading is, we've started to use grades as a kind of way of disciplining students. You will notice that you say it all the time once you start becoming aware of it. We say to students all the time, if you do this, you'll get a good mark.
If you don't do this, you'll get a bad mark. If you hand in late, you're going to lose 10 marks. It's a tool to coerce and control. There's quite a lot of literature on how this creates really big problems in our classrooms. Students game the system, and it produces a lot of cynicism. Students become obsessed with grades, and that's partly because they're getting that message from us and their parents and wider society, that the only thing that matters is the grade, which incidentally is not true, right? They've already won the golden ticket, they're at UCL, and they're going to go out and get a job. It's not true that a high grade in this particular 15-credit module will matter decisively to their lives or not. It means they hide their work from each other because they don't want to give anybody else an unfair advantage. It makes them competitive rather than collaborative, and it makes them minimax.
Students will focus on one topic from your module because that's what they're going to write their essay on, and all they'll focus on is that. Maybe that's the only class they'll turn up to. They will then only focus on that to get the grade, rather than spending their time in that kind of zone of curiosity, learning and excitement.
There's a kind of movement around what we call un grading or at UCL, we tried to call it freedom to learn around just trying to slightly shift this obsession with grades and instead try to think about assessment as a process where students do some work and then they get some feedback, and that enables them to improve their work.
What I've done over the years, it's been a kind of long journey towards where I am now, but the practices [00:21:00] that I describe in the anonymity article are that students do some work. They do it across the term. It's not all at the last minute, and they can't do it in one week. They've got to work continuously. They can then get feedback from me and each other. I have various tricks in order to make sure that they give giving get feedback from each other. They’re then allowed to revise their work based on that feedback. They can carry on doing that as much as they like.
There are various ways, they can get more feedback if they do certain things. At the end of term, they hand their work in, they fill in a questionnaire. The questionnaire has loads of questions on it, which are taken actually from Susan Bloom's excellent work on ungrading. Questions are around the process of doing the work, the effort that they've made, what they enjoyed, what they didn't enjoy, what they've learned.
Then they tell me how well they've met the assessment criteria. And the assessment criteria are negotiable. So if they don't like those assessment criteria, we can have other ones, but [00:22:00] that has to be agreed. And then they tell me what numerical grade they're going to get. If they're in the right ballpark, and they should be, because they've had feedback, they can have that grade.
Emily McTernan: That's a fascinatingly provocative alternative. Many interesting questions arise from it. Are you finding a gendered pattern in how they're assigning their grades?
Cathy Elliott: Do you want me to talk about anonymity first?
Emily McTernan: Yes, of course.
Cathy Elliott: When you say, is there a pattern, right? That's what people worry about. The thing that people have proposed, and this has come from students. Wes Streeting wrote a report when he was President of the Students' Union around anonymous gradings "Mark my work, not my name". The contention is that if you don't know whose work you're marking, then there won't be award gaps. [00:23:00] You'll be fairer because you don't know who it is.
Intuitively, it makes some sense. But it doesn't work like that in practice. There is no evidence, and there have been quite a lot of studies on this, including systematic studies. There is no evidence that anonymous marking makes any difference whatsoever to awarding gaps, in either direction.
Emily McTernan: Fascinating.
Cathy Elliott: Something else is happening, right? There's a lot of research on why awarding gaps exist. Awarding gaps exist for all sorts of reasons around students not knowing how to do good work. Students do not know what good work looks like. Students do not understand assessment criteria. Students from particular backgrounds, not seeking, not going to office hours, not understanding how to interact with tutors, and not working together in groups with other students. Whereas students from more privileged backgrounds will do these things instinctively because they were taught at school. There's all sorts of stuff around hidden curriculum, which seems to be the real reason for the rewarding gaps.
If you're marking anonymously, then you don't have a relationship with your students that's centred around the work [00:24:00] and the feedback because you can't, but you don't know who they are, and therefore you can't do any of the things that would address those hidden curriculum reasons. So, my work cannot be anonymous, but it does address the actual reasons for award gaps. Which are not that I happen to hate particular sorts of students, but because those students don't know how to do the good work that they are capable of doing, because they, at the end, got a place at UCL, they're capable of doing it for these other reasons.
I did have a look at this. I've always had very supportive external examiners with this ungrading process, and I'm very grateful. But that is the issue that comes up. Will you have award gaps?
So I had a look, and because the students are anonymous,
Emily McTernan: It's really easy to tell.
Cathy Elliott: It's easy to tell. It's possible to have misidentification, but I broke down all the marks that the women were getting, the men were getting, the non-binary students were getting, and then the white students and the students of colour. And I did just basic mean median standard deviation, [00:25:00] statistical significance. There's very slight awarding gap, and it runs in favour of women and it runs in favour of students of colour, but it's tiny. According to my student, who checked it for me, that is a statistically significant finding.
Emily McTernan: That is fascinating. There's this sort of call to all of us to do this stuff better. I guess one thought people might have is that... what would the other view be? The other view would presumably say that we do at the end, even if not all the way through, want to know which of the students are performing at a much higher level than others. Some of them are, there is a difference, there's variation, and they're always, and there is such a thing as good work, and there is such a thing as poor work. And I guess they may be worried that removing all of the kind of commander control silent marking wouldn't give us enough space for that. We didn't give ourselves enough space to pick out the ones at the very top.
Cathy Elliott: There are a couple of things to say about that. First, could we have an entirely [00:26:00] ungraded degree? They do it at Brown University. There are ungraded paths. Often people think about it in terms of pass or fail.
There is a kind of basic signalling function around effort, right? You can't just come to UCL and get a degree, and never turn up and never do any work, right? Even the sort of hardest core ungraders will have to pass or fail. I do have numerical marks in my class because I'm obliged to.
It's just that the students help me decide what those numerical mark should be. I am like pretty vanilla in that way. But then it's the kind of thing that your question is: do grades fulfil a useful function? I am increasingly convinced that they do not. What grades tell us is who did the minimaxing best, who played the game best, who was competitive, and who didn't take a risk?
The students in my class, the risks they take because it's low stakes, and the work they do as a result of taking those risks is often much, much better. I do still get students coming to my office. I was saying, what do I do in this class to get a good grade? What are you looking for?
One student said to me, I just spent the whole time thinking, what does she want? And then I [00:27:00] realized that the question is actually what do I, the student want? If I was an employer in a world of AI in a world where, all the sort of everyday administrative tasks are being increasingly automated, I would want a creative student, who's a risk taker who is curious, who works hard, who's creative, and that's what ungrading can give us. I don't think grading can give us those things.
The other thing to say is that grading's very arbitrary as well as we inhabit a contested discipline. I was also an undergraduate in a different contested discipline.
It is absolutely the case that people disagree on what good work looks like. Students come to me and say, “am I allowed to use a first person pronoun in my essay? Am I allowed to say "I argue", because some of my tutors have deducted marks for this.” Rather than me saying, yes, you can for me and I will reward that with a good grade, we talk about why some people like an objective in personal style and some people, eg. feminists who think the [00:28:00] personal is political, are very happy and very comfortable with a first person, more reflexive, more positional approach. Then we can say to the students, what do you think good work looks like?
Do you think good work looks like this objective and personal approach? Or, maybe they do. That's fine. They get to decide, but then they understand that there are real philosophical reasons behind these differences within contested disciplines, rather than one person disciplining them one way and another person disciplining them the other way, and they don't know where to stand.
Emily McTernan: Before we run out completely of time, I would love to touch on- that is such a provocative picture of how we could all do grading better, and certainly those of us facing a pile of more standard grading may wish to consider whether we could make our grading itself more joyful by taking out some of Cathy's wonderful suggestions.
But I also wanted to touch a little bit on what happens in the classroom. So I have the joy of teaching some, many of the students who also take Cathy's modules. I think they like my emotions module, [00:29:00] they like your nature module. I get a bunch of them together. So I wondered if we could just have a moment to touch on, which is your innovative teaching practices. We've talked about going out into nature on a previous episode, but there's another idea that you've carried out, which is, which you described as extended role play. Yes. Which I would love to hear about, because that is startlingly different from anything I've ever done.
Cathy Elliott: Yes. So I'm not doing role play in the current Politics of Nature module. But I previously had a kind of critical perspective on international development module, which was heavily based on my previous career in the British Council, where I was working as a sort of international development project manager.
So, my students come to class, come to an international development class, often with this kind of idea that they will go and work in international development, and they'll go and save people in other countries, like real white saviour attitudes. I want to challenge that. I want to get them at least thinking a bit about whether that's where they want to be or not. Then, you also get them coming to class and then complaining at the end of class that I didn't give them the magic answer to world poverty. Couldn't fix [00:30:00] it. That’s another thing I want to challenge, right? This idea that you have, that a technocratic solution could be found if only you took my 15-credit module, that you'd be able to go out and solve these issues, right? I want to challenge all that through the medium of “this is what it's like to work in the actual world”.
It started off as a kind of hour-long exercise in a seminar. Then, it grew to a three hour exercise where I got the whole sort of module together to do this exercise. And then it just kept growing and by the end, I'd created this whole world, with all these casts of characters, and it went on the whole term. And we had journalists reporting on the process.
The idea behind it is that everyone was in groups. The groups then mapped onto the kind of networks and friendships that I'd observed within the class. All the groups had a role. What they had to do was prepare a presentation for the minister in a kind of big conference that we would have halfway through towards the end of the term. The minister was also a character in this, and the minister had their team around them, which was also a group. [00:31:00] The minister then had to choose who to work with. They would give a presentation. They would each have an allotted amount of time for the presentation, and then the winner would be the one the minister chose.
The beauty of this was that they could work together if they wanted. Anyone can work together with anybody else. It's totally up to them. So, there is a win-win solution available in principle, which is that the whole class can work together. They all go to the minister, they say "This is the answer, this is how we solve it. Please work with all of us". Then, they get all of the time because they can pull their time into the presentation and persuade the minister of the magic answer. In simulations as in life, it's never happened. Because the game is rigged, right? So, I tell the groups whether or not they speak English, I tell the groups who they have dinner with. I tell the groups who they went to university with. We had chat rooms where people who couldn't speak English couldn't go in the English-speaking chat rooms, that kind of thing. I would introduce people to each other if it was useful for them to, if they were the sort of people who might know each other in real life.
Some of the groups were like totally socially excluded, didn't know anybody. I didn't help them at all. [00:32:00] Then I would just show up and be sort of Mr. Biggins from the British Council, getting drunk with them in a bar somewhere, but only the ones that drank. And giving them gossip. So some would get gossip, some wouldn't get gossip. Sometimes I'd say to them, "Oh, the minister is partial to a rumple fiver. I don’t know if you've thought about that?" and then the minister also had all these things that they were interested in. Oh, you had international donors in the mix as well. So the international donors are interested in the Sustainable Development Goals. They're interested in pushing the minister a bit, but the minister also has some power in this situation. Then you've got a group of religious leaders who are also interested in pushing the minister a bit. And incidentally, the minister needs to get elected. So, she would be interested in working with the religious leaders, and then the religious leaders also spoke the local language, so they could coalition build the local people. So, all this stuff is going on, right? And it was such fun. And then the journalists, the group of journalists who were often students who were interested in journalistic careers, would report on it, and then the class could read the reports from the journalists [00:33:00] online. Unless they didn't speak the language that the journalists were writing. And it was just amazing fun, and it was all ungraded.
Emily McTernan: I take it that at the end, they had a better sense of the complexities of trying to get across any of these policies at the government level.
Cathy Elliott: Yeah. And so, they said two things. First of all, they said it's really eye-opening how much power. There are power relations happening at all levels of these kinds of interactions and negotiations.
But the other thing which was particularly heartwarming was that one student said, change can happen. It's possible to change things. There's room for manoeuvre. In all these situations, there are possibilities of win-win. It's just really hard. You have to work at it.
Emily McTernan: Fantastic. On that note, that's the perfect ending. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and offering us your provocative and insightful ideas about the university and the ways that we should probably all go about changing our teaching practices.
Links to the articles we've discussed can be found in the show notes for this episode. And I would say that [00:34:00] we've only gone across the top of some of the innovations that you've enacted. Another one I just want to note just before we close off, is the wonderful inclusive curriculum project about which I will also add a link in the episode notes for anyone who wants to have a look at the wonderful work that Cathy has also been doing on diversity and inclusion.
We just wanted to add something to the recording. So Cathy and I were just talking after the episode concluded, and we circled back to this problem about teaching track careers and the worry that the university would love us all to be teaching only. And we have a better solution, a better answer.
Cathy Elliott: Which is the whole premise of the question, right? The idea that... so I think the worry that you came up with is if people are not productive researchers for whatever good reason, like maybe they're so busy wondering that they haven't written anything in years because they haven't quite got to the point yet, but they're still great researchers, right?
They're the people who could win the Nobel Prizes. They're going to get moved to the teaching-only contracts. That's the worry. And it's the worry that has come out of the trade union as well. And my answer to that, I think, is the whole premise of that question [00:35:00] relies on the idea that the teaching track is either a punishment or a consolation prize.
And what we are trying to say is it's neither of those things. It's this whole own joyful career in and of itself. And it should be just as demanding to get recruited to, or promoted on, the teaching track as it is on the research and teaching track. But it should be that we are recruiting people who love teaching, who want to be doing teaching, and who have a great track record in teaching, right? And so that won't be the people that are being punished for not being productive researchers. Those are different people. And it's in the university, we 100 percent lead both.
Emily McTernan: We are going to return after Easter with the next series. Remember to make sure you don't miss out on future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics. All you need to do is subscribe.
You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts, or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you are there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of your time to rate or review us, too. I am Emily McTernan. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. [00:36:00] Thank you for listening.