University of Greenwich Journals and Working Papers

Wilson, Jon

Getting the best out of your students through cultural appreciation – multiculturalism in a ‘British’ university business classroom setting

Walker, Simon

1 
 
Editors’ introduction 
In 2010 the university hosted two annual conferences focused on learning and 
teaching. The first, Inspiring Learners: Equipping the Next Generation of Graduates, 
explored the interplay between learning, teaching, employability and the wider world. 
The second conference, Future Learningscapes: a 21st Century Challenge, invited 
delegates to consider how the technologies that surround us, and now impinge on 
every aspect of our life, might shape future learning and teaching practices, and provide 
a better understanding  of the approaches and environments needed in the decade 
ahead. 
Although both conferences developed quite different themes, and attracted very 
different audiences and constituencies, the papers that emerged from the presentations 
addressed common challenges and issues. We believe that there is considerable value 
in capturing the process that conference presenters undergo in writing a proposal, 
presenting their work, and engaging the audience in a discussion of the issues, and 
then analysing these discussions and writing them up as an act of scholarship. The 
following chapters in our third issue of Compass, then, are much more than a set of dry 
academic conference papers – they are the result of interactions and reflections with 
other practitioners and research peers about their research into teaching and 
(technology-enhanced) learning. 
We have maintained a similar format to previous volumes. In his opinion piece, James 
Derounian provides a brief, lively report, giving readers who were not at the conference 
a flavour of the day. His reflection 
on David Robinson’s citing of Mandela echoes many practitioners attitudes to teaching - 
better to do it slow...and right. The pressure is always for immediate action. His 
conclusion that inspirational teaching and learning is the payoff for increased student 
Compass: The Journal of Learning and Teaching at the University of Greenwich, Issue 3, 2011 
 
2 
 
debt will strike a chord with many university managers keen to add value within the 
context of increased fees and competition. 
The three case studies provide us with many new ideas and strategies that are 
transferrable across subjects. Although different disciplines undoubtedly have signature 
pedagogies, the common thread that joins these case studies together is learner 
engagement. 
Sandra Clarke discusses how technical subjects can be made more interesting by using 
strategic   and highly engaging methods of teaching and assessment. She provides a 
set of principles which are 
illustrated with novel examples, such as commissioning students to take photographs of 
the ‘dry’ subject for use in lecture material and demonstrates that this varied approach 
to teaching not only engages learners more, it produces better results. 
Rose Heaney’s case study from the University of East London has lessons for many in 
other institutions and on courses not remotely related to herbal medicine. Much of the 
innovation echoes the use of computer marked assignments by the Open University 
and, collective feedback to the cohort. Heaney reflects on the need to develop an 
academic community in which staff develop with their students, but notes that students 
need support to make the transition to new modes and initiatives - we should not 
assume they are all digital natives. Heaney’s model extols many of the benefits of e-
learning and proposes evolutionary change – successive innovations and introductions 
from the bottom up, and with peer involvement, is, in her opinion, much more likely to 
succeed than revolution, particularly if imposed by those who do not have to implement 
proposals. Our history is littered with such initiatives. 
Sandra Rankin and Rob Willson recount how their initial experience of working with 
psychology students to create digital posters using video and YouTube resulted in a 
new approach to scaffolding the learning tasks and its assessment.  Their example 
Compass: The Journal of Learning and Teaching at the University of Greenwich, Issue 3, 2011 
 
3 
 
illustrates that in our brave new world, we need teachers who are prepared to take 
calculated risks and create new techniques for assessment. 
Following these illuminating case studies, Diana Bath provides insights into the 
emotional aspects of learning. She uses her background of Dance Movement 
Psychotherapy to argue that if emotional responses to learning are not integrated, then 
the learning process may not be complete. For Bath the narrative of ‘personalisation’ 
can reduce the learning context to a mere set of learning needs and strategies. 
Personalised learning calls for personalised pedagogies. 
Jennefer Hart, Theo Zamenopoulos and Steve Garner describe their innovative 
approach to the practice of the ‘atelier’ teaching model in undergraduate art and design 
education at the Open University. They experimented with the use of a range of 
learning enhanced technologies to create a modern studio learning environment. Their 
findings reveal a number of benefits and challenges for staff and students, and provide 
insights into the issues facing staff and their institutions in developing new 
learningscapes in design education. 
Andy Coverdale, LeRoy Hill and Tracy Sisson from the University of Nottingham 
describe how their student-led initiative of introducing social media into formal graduate 
training engaged PhD students in a process of sharing expertise as well as contributing 
to their own professional development. Although they recognise that differences in 
individual skillsets did impact upon their peers’ ability to use the technology, they 
provide a convincing rationale that social media tools now play an important part in the 
development of academic and professional network development. 
Wayne Barry presents findings from the work of the iBorrow project, a self-service 
laptop loan initiative that coincided with the new build development of Augustine House 
at Canterbury Christ Church University. Using Radio-frequency identification (RFID) 
tags, the project was able to map the ways that learners were using these devices, and 
Compass: The Journal of Learning and Teaching at the University of Greenwich, Issue 3, 2011 
 
4 
 
provide new insights to learner behaviour in using mobile technology in large flexible 
learning spaces. 
One of the keynote speakers at the conference, Bernhard Niesner, the co-creator of 
Busuu.com, discussed the uptake of his web 2.0 language learning site with over 2 
million users. In his article, Billy Brick, from Coventry University, reported on his 
experience of integrating the web 2.0 language learning tool, Livemocha. His valuable 
analysis of the various sites that are now emerging identifies the benefits for learners, 
but also discusses some of the issues and challenges in integrating these resources 
and approaches in formal language teaching settings. There are significant implications 
for institutions that realise the importance for employability and diversity of speaking 
other languages. 
We believe that a conference edition, as our journal matures, is a valuable addition to 
the series, allowing readers to reflect upon ideas and innovations and inspiring new 
submissions from practitioners and researchers. 
We hope that you will find something of interest. 
Simon Walker, Wendy Cealey Harrison, Patrick Ainley and Ian McNay 
University of Greenwich 
 


Editors\u27 Introduction

Editorial Team

Brunskell-Evans, Heather

 1 
 
 
Demystifying Theory 
 
 
 
Heather Brunskell-Evans 
School of Education 
Article 
 
 
 
Introduction 
 
A seminar series in the School of Education initiated by myself, together with Professor Andrew Lambirth, 
Dr Priti Chopra and Anna Kilderry, acts as a forum where colleagues discuss the theoretical background 
that informs their practice as educationalists. If I may be permitted to speak here for the core group, each 
one of us has had the experience that theory, ironically, can be difﬁcult to discuss in the higher education 
(HE) context. Such discussions can sometimes lead to a combative situation in which an academic 
from one theoretical background assumes the political and epistemological superiority of his/her own 
distinctive theoretical paradigm. We decided to call the series ‘Demystifying Theory’, since this term   
would serve a dual purpose. Firstly, it would involve an approach where contributors could be open about 
why a particular theorist had come to have such personal signiﬁcance to them as academics interested in 
pedagogic change. Secondly, in revealing our personal investments in a particular theorist, we hoped that 
this approach, set within the context of respect for others’ contrasting passions, might induce sometimes 
opaque theory to spring into life and vivacity. 
 
At the time of writing this, three theoretical perspectives have been discussed: Andrew Lambirth talked 
about ‘Marx and Me’; I talked about ‘Foucault and Me’; and Priti Chopra talked about ‘Spivak and Me’. 
The seminars have been very successful and we hope our pleasure in sharing ideas and the friendly 
discussions that ensued might be a model for the extension of the seminar series into the next academic 
year. We have discovered the School of Education has a panoply of theorists who inform the thoughts 
and practices of colleagues. In this article I take the opportunity to address some of the issues explored 
in my own talk on Foucault. 
 
I brieﬂy rehearsed the nub of the contention between Foucauldian and Marxist educational theorists with 
regard to how to analyse political power. This is pertinent to my own ‘relationship’ with Foucault and my 
proposal that his body of work provides a fertile conceptual ‘toolkit’ for critical analysis of the policies and 
practices of education. Since the purpose of this paper is not to delve too deeply into theory, I simplify   
the theoretical positions of Marx and Foucault. I apologise in advance for the necessary reductionism of 
complex and subtle arguments. 
 
Two models of power 
 
The conﬂict between Marxist and Foucauldian theorists tends to wander down the following well-  trodden 
path. Contemporary Marxists argue the determining force that drives modern Western liberal 
democracies, and why we do not always function in a democratic way, is global capitalism. The capitalist 
system, in being shackled to democracy, rides roughshod over the humanitarian liberal democratic ideal 
of equity of opportunity. Capitalism is not a static mode of social and economic organisation; rather it 
Compass: The Journal of Learning and Teaching at the University of Greenwich, Issue 4, 2012   
2 
 
 
 
is mobile and ever changing. Nevertheless, whether it is the capitalism of the industrial 19th century or   
the global capitalism of the 21st century, it has the same core internal dynamic. The current education 
system, from primary education through to HE, is an ‘ideological state apparatus’ that mobilises the  
vested interests of global capitalist accumulators and the privileged few. The casualties are the ordinary 
people – the non-privileged girl or boy, woman or man – who gets swept up in its wake. The current 
education system largely trains the masses for the reproduction of the capitalist system and the result is a 
diminution of the individual’s intellectual potential. 
 
It is clear that the economic/social/political model of power deployed by Marxist theory, whether it is the 
power that belongs to the capitalist, the student or the education system itself, conceives of power as 
sovereign. By sovereign power I mean it is made up of the following components: 
 
● a binary division demarcates those who possess power and those who do not 
 
● power is a possession that is held by one group, the privileged class, and it is exercised negatively 
‘over’ the less fortunate 
 
● the exercise of power is accomplished by ideology 
 
● oppressed classes, through becoming conscious of the unjust social conditions of their existence, can 
overthrow power and be free. 
 
Foucault, in contrast, argues that a model of power as sovereignty is anachronistic since it does not 
fully account for how the social control of population is exercised in advanced liberal democracies. The 
sovereign power described by Marxism refers to the kind of power exercised by the pre-modern monarch 
or sovereign. Foucault’s (1977; 1978) pivotal claim is that since the 19th century, power has operated not 
so much negatively, in the form of power ‘over’ individuals, but productively and from ‘below’, through 
normalisation at the deepest level of an individual’s self-identity. Disciplinary normalisation occurs at 
local sites, for example within the family, the education system, medicine, etc. These institutions interact 
with ‘ofﬁcial’ human science knowledge that constitute human beings around a psychological axis of 
normalcy/abnormalcy. Discourses of normalcy set up a dynamic in which human beings self-police or 
discipline themselves around the question: ‘Is my behaviour normal’? Liberal democracy is a political 
system originally conceived in Europe in the 18th century in opposition to monarchical rule and was 
constituted around the alleged freedom of individuals to be self-determining. However, since structure   
is a requirement of all social order, democracy can only function if disciplinary control is exercised but 
not experienced as disciplinary. It is mobilised by the way individuals ‘freely’, through self-surveillance, 
constitute themselves around the axis of normalcy/abnormalcy. 
 
Foucault and Marx both set out to theorise the same problem, namely how human beings ‘consent’ 
to being governed when government does not serve the interests of their freedom. Although each 
argues that human consciousness is determined by its social, political and historical context, Foucault’s 
methodological approach is more radical than Marx’s approach. Marx argues that the individual 
consciousness has been historically acted upon by the ideology of class relations; so that only in a future 
society, when class relations are abolished, i.e. in communism, can human beings have ‘true’ (non-
ideological) consciousness of the conditions of their existence. Foucault (1982), similarly, argues  the 
individual is always and inescapably discursively constituted or ‘subjectiﬁed’. There is a play on 
the term subjectiﬁcation: on the one hand, in liberal democracy, we are subjects ‘of’ our own lives; 
Compass: The Journal of Learning and Teaching at the University of Greenwich, Issue 4, 2012  
3 
 
 
 
on the other hand we are subject ‘to’ a disciplinary power composed around self-regulation and our 
‘voluntary’ adherence to normalising discourses. He demonstrates that in the contemporary period we 
are all constituted by the liberal institutions of the family and the education system, for example, and the 
normalising knowledges or discourses that inform them. These sites conjoin and consolidate from the 
bottom up with larger structures of state power in a network whose overarching effect is oppression. 
Power does not ‘only’ emanate from ‘below’, it is exercised from above too, but sovereign power would 
be ineffectual in a democratic political system if we had not already been normalised in our personal lives 
to comply with it or even want it! 
 
Foucauldian ideas were introduced into critical thinking about education (Marshall, 1989, 1996) as a 
complement to or substitute for Marxist critical thought in the late 1980s. Over the years there has been 
something of an entrenchment or polarisation of theoretical positions. Two camps were created: those 
who welcomed Foucault’s ideas as a fertile theoretical development of Marxist thought; and those who 
resisted Foucault’s ideas as reactionary and unable politically or ethically to effect change. This latter 
reaction is exempliﬁed by Apple’s (1995) response to the analysis of the relationship between the state 
and HE. He claimed that a considerable portion of critical education research was taken up in the late 
1980s and the early 1990s by “an upwardly mobile fraction of the new middle class within the academy 
... [which] has lost all but the most rhetorical connection with the struggles against domination and 
subordination at universities” (1995:xi). The emphasis on discourse he described as “the linguistic turn”, 
whereby social theorists have forgotten “the world inside and outside education is not only a text. There 
are gritty realities out there, realities whose power is often grounded in structural relations that are not 
simply social constructions” (1995:xiii). Apple deployed Marxist theory to help him in the task which he 
urged us all to carry out, namely “to avoid losing sight of these realities in the economy and the state” 
(1995:xiii). 
 
I argue Apple’s characterisation of Foucauldian thought as retrograde and ineffectual. It exempliﬁes an 
established orthodoxy in Marxist thought, and one that mistakes the term discourse, assuming it means 
language. Discourse is more than language: it is the inter-relationship between what we say (including 
what ‘ofﬁcial’ knowledges say) and power. As a scholar analysing HE from a Foucauldian perspective 
how do I understand my own theoretical activities in the face of this critique? 
 
A Foucauldian analysis of HE 
 
Firstly I argue that a Marxist view that rejects the political potency of the discursive production of 
subjectivity fundamentally misunderstands Foucauldian thought. To give an example: I was challenged   
by a colleague recently who suggested that not many people in the School of Education would accept 
that power resides at the ‘bottom’ and is exercised ‘upwards’. However, my colleague also reasoned that 
top-down power and compliance enforcement are still active but that other tactics are now exercised  
less overtly through normative re-educative approaches rather than power-coercive approaches. He 
argued contemporary politics have set a new ‘normalcy’, for example over the roles of traditionalist elitist 
universities and modern universities, a normalcy that is projected as the natural order. He posited that 
there has been a raft of legislation by the power-holders, based on fear, in an attempt to control through 
surveillance and enforce compliance to a concept of the ‘good citizen’ which is both racist and class- 
ridden. Interestingly, this interpretation of the contemporary government of HE, which sets out to counter 
Foucault’s proposition that power functions from ‘below’, actually exempliﬁes it. 
Compass: The Journal of Learning and Teaching at the University of Greenwich, Issue 4, 2012   
4 
 
 
 
Foucauldian theorists do not deny that in HE power functions in a ‘top-down’ mode and that elite 
and ‘new’ universities distribute students according to class and race. Clearly power functions 
coercively by coalescing around certain groups to form hierarchical divisions, as witnessed by the 
preponderance at new universities of working-class and ethnic minority students. However, whilst this 
may demonstrate power ‘over’, the model of power as sovereignty cannot be taken as an example of 
the quintessential operations of modern state power, global capitalism and their relationships to HE. If 
power is conceptualised as sovereign it obfuscates technologies of power which discursively constitute 
university members – students and tutors – as particular kinds of normalised subjects. Although 
HE is the outcome of the complex relations of advanced liberalism with global capitalism it can only 
successfully govern by governing individuals through discourses of ‘freedom’. 
 
In doing so Foucauldians do not reject the Marxist concern with material conditions. On the contrary: 
they re-conﬁgure materialism (Olssen, 1999). In contrast to Marxist discourses, Olssen argues a 
Foucauldian approach does not represent materialist processes as determined primarily by the 
economic base, or describe the ‘ﬁt’ between state power and capitalist interests in terms of the 
individual’s oppression by a power imposed from ‘above’. With regard to the discursive construction 
of the student, a Foucauldian analysis demonstrates how students take upon themselves the idea 
of responsible citizenship through educational self-maximisation. This shows how the contemporary 
relationship between university qualiﬁcations and personal enhancement and career development 
has historically been put together, the practices which support it, and the relations of power that 
constitute particular kinds of students (who for example currently demand HE as their ‘right’ despite 
the increase in fees). With regard to the discursive construction of tutors, a Foucauldian analysis 
demonstrates how corporatist management practices involve individuals in implicating themselves in 
their own government, where self-government occurs at the intersection of technologies of discipline 
and technologies of self. The market, management, appraisal and performance are ‘regimes of truth’ 
through which tutors, even though they partially demonstrate resistance, are both governed and govern 
themselves ‘voluntarily’. 
 
Foucauldian politics 
 
A Foucauldian approach to power provides a new political imagination for theorists working for 
progressive social and educational change. It suggests abandoning the idea that as human subjects   
we can emancipate ourselves by totally escaping from power. Unlike a traditional Marxist analysis, this 
approach does not involve revolutionary ideas about overthrowing the contemporary organisation of 
contemporary HE, since this would probably be impossible. Freedom lies in reﬂecting upon the micro- 
politics of our discursive ‘subjectiﬁcation’ within HE as well as the macro-politics, and how these micro- 
politics produce us as governable subjectivities. On the basis of that reﬂection, we can act upon the self 
and join up with others to conduct the self ‘differently’. 
 
Where I once felt disturbed by Foucault’s idea that individuals are never ‘free’ in the sense that we   
can become autonomous individuals outside of conceptual systems – or what Foucault (1980) calls 
power/knowledge – I now take comfort in this view. It provides a new political imaginary of the modes 
of resistance needed if, as theorists working for progressive social and educational change, we are to 
challenge power in its various manifestations. Freedom exists in our ability as subjects to comprehend 
how we have been discursively constructed – the task Foucault (1994) describes as a critical ontology 
of the self – and to become political activists at local sites of subjectiﬁcation. Since modern power is 
Compass: The Journal of Learning and Teaching at the University of Greenwich, Issue 4, 2012 
  
5 
 
 
 
productive of humanist subjectivity, the political and ethical task is not to try to liberate the individual 
from the state and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us from the type of individualisation which 
is linked to the state (Foucault, 1991). 
 
Conclusion 
 
Foucault has been utterly transformative in my intellectual, political and emotional life. I ﬁrst ‘met’ him 
some years ago when I was undertaking an MA in Culture, Communication and Society. Quite 
frankly I didn’t like him and found his ‘oeuvre’ depressing, arcane and seemingly without moral 
purpose. 
Moreover Foucauldian theorists were, in my view, academic dilettantes arrogantly impervious to 
any criticism. I set out to demonstrate from a feminist (standpoint epistemological) perspective, 
inﬂuenced by Marxism, that Foucault’s methodology was incapable of addressing the ‘gritty realities’ of 
oppression, reneging on social responsibility by playfully taking ‘discourse’ as its object. However, like 
one of those children’s toys shaped like a man with a round bottom and no legs that becomes upright 
when you knock it down, the more I targeted Foucault’s thought the more it re-asserted itself for 
further consideration. 
 
Foucault asked me to consider at least temporarily changing theoretical directions since fostering 
doubt about Marx’s methodology is not perilous if one can retrace one’s steps. Thus began a long 
journey that witnessed me as an initial unhappy traveller. Rather than engaging in a vacuous 
project,  I now experience his work as providing a powerhouse of tools which help theorists analyse 
the most serious social and political problems of our day. As such he is an intellectual giant who 
takes up his place in the pantheon of those giant thinkers (including Marx) who, across history, have 
helped us, against the grain of traditional or orthodox thought, to ‘see and act otherwise’. 
 
References 
 
Apple, M. (1995) Education and Power. New York and London: Routledge. 
 
Foucault, M. (1980) Michel Foucault: Power/ Knowledge, Selected Interviews, edited by Gordon, C. 
Harvester. London: Wheatsheaf. 
 
Foucault, M. (1991) Governmentality. In: Burchell, G. et al. The Foucault Effect: Studies in 
Governmentality. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 
 
Foucault, M. (1994) What is Enlightenment? In: Rabinow, P. (ed.) Michel Foucault: Ethics, The essential 
works of Foucault 1954–1984. 
 
Olssen, M. (1999) Michel Foucault: Materialism and Education. Wesport: Bergin and Garvey. 
 
 


Demystifying Theory

Bradshaw, Noel-Ann

Compass: The Journal of Learning and Teaching at the University of Greenwich Vol 1 (2009) 
1 
 
 
Tribute to triplets: A model for 
successful group work 
 
Noel-Ann Bradshaw 
School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences 
Mention group work to a class of students and an audible groan ripples around the room. 
Nevertheless, according to Johnson and Johnson (1989) ‘learning to work together in a group will 
inﬂuence one’s employability, productivity and career success’; students learn the importance of 
communication, collaboration, cooperation, and compromise (Katzenbach, 1997); and we prefer  to 
mark twelve assignments rather than seventy. However, what of the downsides; the groups that fall 
apart, the students that complain bitterly about their peers, those who don’t participate? The 
list could go on and on, and I am sure the students could add far more to the negatives than to the 
positives. 
 
Key factors inﬂuencing the failure or success of a group assignment are the group dynamics and the 
initial group allocation. As a student myself, I experienced various models but none of them appeared to 
work particularly well, at least not in terms of student satisfaction. Sometimes students are encouraged 
to choose their own groups but that may leave a signiﬁcant few without a group 
– maybe those who have had personal problems and most need support, or those who might be 
perceived as hard to work with. The result is that these individuals ﬁnd themselves in the same group 
and, without strong leadership, this group achieves little. An alternative is for the lecturer to assign 
groups randomly (Hernandez, 2002). This does not go down well with students, especially if they have a 
choice of topics to select from; ‘I can’t work with them. I want to do a statistics project but they want to 
do programming’. In all cases, students feel that group allocation advantages some and disadvantages 
others. What does the lecturer do in the face of this opposition, especially when research offers little by 
way of guidance as to a preferred method to adopt (Chapman et al., 2006)? 
 
Having experienced these models as a student, and having complained bitterly about them at the time, I 
was keen to do better when my own chance came to design a new course with a substantial group 
project element. I wanted my students’ experience to be positive and different and for them to work 
effectively as groups. Above all, I wanted the group work to be fair to the students regardless of 
background, whilst providing them with a valuable lesson about working with others. Employers want 
graduates that are good team players, have excellent communication skills and work well 
as a group (CBI, 2008). Apparently, this is particularly the case for maths graduates who have a 
reputation for lacking these skills – although I can’t imagine why! 
 
My course assignment required groups to choose a mathematical area such as history of 
mathematics, quantum mechanics or ﬁnancial mathematics, to research and then produce a written 
report and give a group presentation. We had a class of 80 ﬁrst-year maths students from varied 
backgrounds. Once the students realised group work was on the agenda, they pestered me 
frequently, asking who would be in their groups and saying things like; ‘I don’t want anyone in my 
group who won’t pull their weight’. The pressure was on. 
Tribute to triplets: A model for successful group work 
 
2 
 
 
After the statutory sleepless nights, I came up with what I thought, and still think, was an excellent 
solution. I asked the students to form groups of three. Each of these triplets was required to decide on 
an area of maths they wanted to study and send me an e-mail with their names and a choice of three 
topics. One problem was that, although I had explained this in some detail in class, on the university 
student intranet and by e-mail, some students did not seem to use any of these forms of 
communication. However, the majority of students successfully followed the instructions. To each 
threesome, I then added three more who were either themselves a threesome or who hadn’t responded. 
This was done with respect to ability, friendship groups and preferred topics. This method is similar to 
one proposed by Mahenthiran and Rouse (2000), who found that student satisfaction and grades 
improved when students were paired before being allocated to groups. 
 
I appointed one member of each group to act as the contact person with whom I communicated. I 
chose this person purely on the basis of whether they were reliable at answering e-mails and were 
generally good communicators, as I felt this was essential for group cohesion. I gave this person a list 
of their group with their university e-mail addresses. The idea was that now each group of six would 
come up with a working title for their group, assign the work to each group member and just get on 
with it. Perfect! There were enough committed people in each group to make it work and so the 
members would only need to chase a couple of students. In the case where groups were unable to 
resolve differences, these would then be referred to me. 
 
So did it work? At the time of writing initial indications and feedback are very positive. Those group 
presentations I have seen have been excellent and these were not only from the groups that I expected 
to do well. A major beneﬁt has been that students who were less engaged in their studies have been 
placed in groups with motivated peers, who encourage them to perform. Previously,   these students 
might have ended up in a group on their own and achieved very little, but now they are being 
challenged and stretched. Another beneﬁt is that some students, who might have been intolerant of 
other students’ weaknesses, are now in a better position to understand that others have genuine 
difﬁculties and are legitimately not always able to attend class. 
 
Did anything go wrong? I have to admit that one group came unstuck, but this was due to 
unforeseeable, personal problems affecting all but one of the core people in the group. However,   on 
the positive side, several groups contained students who hadn’t spoken to each other before, and this 
has been very beneﬁcial in helping the group dynamics of the cohort as a whole, without them feeling 
that the process was unfair. The inevitable problems that arose were overcome largely without the 
need for my intervention and will provide valuable experience for students to talk about at job 
interviews. Students’ feedback has suggested that, unusually for group work, the allocation of 
members to groups was seen as fair to all in the class. Most of these students will have to do a 
signiﬁcant piece of group work in their ﬁnal year. This, I hope, will have been a good preparation for 
them. 
 
 
References 
Confederation of British Industry (CBI) (2008) Taking Stock: CBI Education and Skills Survey 2008. 
Online. Available at www.cbi.org.uk (accessed 26 April 2009). 
Chapman, K. J. et al. (2006) ’Can’t We Pick our Own Groups? The Inﬂuence of Group Selection 
Method on Group Dynamics’. Journal of Management Education, 30: 557–569. 
Tribute to triplets: A model for successful group work 
 
3 
 
Hernandez, S.A. (2002) ‘Team Learning in a Marketing Principles Course: Cooperative Structures 
that Facilitate Active Learning and Higher Level Thinking’. Journal of Marketing Education, 24(1): 73–
86. 
Johnson, D. W. and Johnson, R. T. (1989) ‘Social Skills for Successful Group Work’. Educational 
Leadership, 47(4): 29–33. 
Katzenbach, J. R. (1997) ‘The Myth of Top Management Teams’. Harvard Business Review, 75(6): 
82–92. 
Mahenthiran, S. and Rouse, P. (2000) ‘The Impact of Group Selection on Student Performance and 
Satisfaction’. International Journal of Educational Management, 14(6): 255–65. 
 


Tribute to triplets: A model for successful group work

The development of e-learning platforms is fundamentally changing the nature of education across all disciplines. Art and design education has traditionally taken place within a studio environment and its model of teaching and learning has been informed by the ‘atelier’ approach which has a distinctive educational and cultural history. Signifi cant pressures arise today in undergraduate art and design education and partly these drive the need to establish an effective and viable modern studio experience. Not only must any new studio support student learning of practice and principles, for example, by allowing students to work alongside experts, it must foster the community and culture of the creative industries. As if this wasn’t diffi cult enough, any innovation in teaching and learning must not incur the huge costs and resource demands of our current models of art and design education and it must be scalable to provide a stimulating experience for large numbers of students with diverse backgrounds, abilities and needs. This paper reports on a suite of studies that were carried out as part of a JISCfunded project titled ATELIER-D. The aim of the project was to create an online virtual design learning environment that replicates and improves the features of traditional face-to-face studio education. The paper makes reference to new curricula at the Open University, particularly a new FHEQ level 4 online design course fi rst presented in February 2010 to 350 students

Not a member yet

Getting the best out of your students through cultural appreciation – multiculturalism in a ‘British’ university business classroom setting

Editors\u27 Introduction

Editorial Team

Demystifying Theory

Tribute to triplets: A model for successful group work

The learningscape of a virtual design atelier

Data sources:

570

736