(Re)Imagining higher education: an inspirational guide for academics

Presentation abstract We live in times of certain uncertainty with Higher Education in constant need of reflexive adaptation. The Reimagining Higher Education project, funded by the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE), explored creatively and playfully the future of education. It invited the academic community to participate in workshops to reflect on the current status of Higher Education and, at the same time, to conceptualise what form a humane and integrated Learning Development, the holistic and sustainable fostering of academic literacies and practices, would take within that Higher Education system. The outcome is an open-source guide of Higher Education models, real and idealised, that potentially have the power to change perspectives and attitudes. In this short presentation, we (the project team) will showcase the guide, outlining what a more inclusive, empowering, and creative academia would look like. Our research participants have imaged the unimaginable: universities open, accessible, full of trust, care and laughter. Please join us to further reflect on the future of academia, with hope and positivity.

insights gave pause for thought.Sandra, Sandra and Tom's approach provokes awe in the way they challenge so many of the established practices and assumptions of higher education.Our role as Learning Developers is described as helping students to navigate the rules, assumptions and complexities of higher education but Sandra, Sandra and Tom turn this on its head and fight to make higher education less complex, to encourage students to break the rules and challenge the assumptions themselves.Never mind navigating through them on an established path, students should be free to choose their own directions and remove obstacles rather than accepting them or working around them.Sandra, Sandra and Tom make this dissension playful and joyful too -an amazing achievement.
However, the main thing to take away from this resource showcase was the need for more inclusive representations of what higher education is, who it is for, and what its purposes are.Visualising it, like one participant in the resource, as a gloriously colourful water scene with students represented as fish in the 'HE System' or river, seemed both hopeful and indicative of what higher education, and LD more specifically, could, and should, be.Similarly, it was hopeful that so many of the images generated in the workshop were of trees, plants and nature.Inspiring, joyous, and a thing of beauty, this is a resource to return to and reflect on again and again, to bring creativity more resolutely into our practice.That it was co-created with students supported by ALDinHE funding somehow makes it all the sweeter.
Image: A visual reflection on the session tweeted by Jacqui Bartram (@jaxbartram)

Author's reflection
Play provides the energy, the eruptions, the poetry and the connectivity for engagement and success.Play transforms deficit-fixing teaching, it is creative and emergent, it provides spaces and places of reimagining and agencyplay has the power to transform education, and educational experiences and outcomes (Sinfield et al., 2019).
In many ways we inhabit 'interesting times!' Richard Hall (2018;2021) writes of the alienated academic and the hopeless university, and he is not wrong.We find ourselves working in these supercomplex and challenging times.However, there exists even more urgently the need for a politics of hope -a belief that things can be different.Our own practice is playful, creative -and harnesses arts-based practice.
As Laing (2020) argues, 'art has begun to feel not like a respite or an escape, but a formidable tool for gaining perspective on what are increasingly troubled times.'In our session we talked about what a more positive, inclusive and empowering higher education would (should) entail, and we showcased the results of our ALDinHE-funded small-scale research project.In creative, playful workshops Learning Developers and other academics 'built' the ideal higher education.They collaged, drew, sketched, animated, and made.They wrote poems of what is and what they would like learning and teaching to be -an 'appreciative inquiry' of what makes liberatory and empowering higher education practice.'Makes' and session and guide feedback showed that creative and playful research gives 'voice' and creates 'joy.' Participants feel empowered, similar to our Studentsas-Partners who worked with us on the research and designed the look and feel of the Guide.To good effect, for example, their cover was nominated for the GGS/GSA Images of Research Competition 2022-23 people's choice award by the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of Calgary.We need more spaces and placesand time -that allow us to dream and imagine.Because, as Chrissi Neranzti in the Abegglen, Kamal, Burns, (Re)Imagining Higher Education: Akhbari and Sinfield An inspirational guide for academics __________________________________________________________________________________________ Guide Preface (Abegglen et al., 2023, p.2) states: 'Anything we can dream can happen.'play in higher education: Creativity in tertiary learning, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.23-31.doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-95780-7_2 Fellow and was part of the #creativeHE collective that won the Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) by AdvanceHE 2022.Together with Tom and Sandra Abegglan, she has co-edited the book Collaboration in Higher Education: A New Ecology of Practice, just published by Bloomsbury (summer 2023).