Between institutional strategy and disciplinary differences

The speculative redesign of university courses for preferable futures

Abstract

This paper explores the challenges of curriculum design in Higher Education, focusing on the difficulty of balancing disciplinary and institutional priorities.

During the pandemic, the ‘pivot’ to online teaching kept universities open, but created new problems for marginalised students and for teachers. When campuses re-opened, the rush to return to ‘normal’ also reintroducing long-established forms of prejudice and exclusion, locking in economic logics and the commodification of academic work in place of pedagogies of care. Many new practices that were normalised during the pandemic were discarded with the return to campus. Yet the landscape of higher education had changed in that time.

Recognising that both moves were problematic, we undertook a research-led, speculative programme of research. We undertook interviews exploring staff experiences of pandemic pedagogies, analysing these to create tasks for a LEGO® Serious Play® workshop imaging unrestricted possible future delivery models. This workshop identified competing priorities between participants, with disciplinary norms (e.g. for class sizes) taking precedence over institutional priorities (e.g. for efficiencies of scale). These tensions were used to generate design prompts, framing curriculum design in terms of competing priorities that must be balanced within and across course designs.

These prompts then formed the basis of a second workshop, where course teams from a range of disciplines planned the future redesign of their courses with more constraints. Rather than converging on pre-specified models or templates, the workshop provoked participants to speculate on the kinds of future they wanted to create for their courses, and how these might be accommodated within the limited resources and capacities of the institution.

We conclude by reflecting on the successes and challenges of this approach, and the value of the design prompt for use in other institutions.