(2) The ambiguity of “rules” – January Induction

While shopping for a new board game, you may lead yourself via a variety of factors – from external artwork, through someone recommendation to “weight and size”. On occasion, you might have a favourite genre, mechanic, designer or just maximum/recommended amount of players. However, whatever your motivation is, you should always start by reading the rules and agreeing on them.

Otherwise, you may embarrass (Nygren, 2019) yourself by interpreting house-rules (usually misunderstand, or misread versions of originals) as officials rules. This is especially true to long-lasting games like Monopoly, which has dozens of house-rules varieties (Dodgson, 2017) and some of them even made it to official special “House Rules” (Hasbro, 2014) edition.

But how does it refer to academia you may wonder? Our assignment briefs are those rulebooks. Rulebooks that should be easy to pick up and read. Clear in communicating what is expected of the student to be delivered and how it will be marked.

The education before Higher Education is heavily standardised. It is partially due to its industrial roots (Next School, 2016) and partly due to the desire of simplification of the teaching materials and grading nation-wide (Robinson, 2013). Both of those reasons hurt (Robinson, 2013) the whole purpose of teaching: learning and undermine the fact that we all learn slightly differently (Romanelli et all, 2009) and at varying speeds is unquestionable.

I experienced passionate teachers that went above and beyond to inspire students, and who were destroyed by official complaints from students who preferred to “memorise” everything, rather than a variety of approaches provided. On the other hand, I had teachers who ruled by terror, intimidation, homework-pressure and failing anybody, which to degree broke out from the in-class discipline.

The old grading Matrix (UAL, 2011) was not perfect by any means. However, it provided, in my view, clarity:

• If there was no Harvard Referencing (standard technique), the grade for Research could not be higher than D.
• Your Analysis should not be higher than your Research as it is highly dependant on it.
• Each grade is precisely described and can be easily defended by a tutor or challenged by a student.

While the New Assessment Criteria (UAL, 2019a) are at best lacking (UAL, 2019b) as they can be anything and everything due to being described in a uniform vague, generalised and ambiguous manner. Unless it will be clarified between the teaching team and students and put in writing as a sort of contract that this is what is being understood as “Satisfactory Evidence” it is at best an educated guess.

Students journey feels like an unfair game. They all start with particular skills tree, including their strengths and weaknesses and are put against relatively similar challenges. At the end of it, they unlock their Achievements, and despite the same game time, the end results may be highly varied

I have attended several training courses which were participated by staff from all campuses. On those sessions as well as in various office conversations I have heard at multiple occasions how even lecturers delivering units are uncertain how the brief is going to be marked or what exactly is expected of students to be made. Very often they are not authors of it, and it is more of a hand-down project. Even once I heard of a rare instance of some work to be graded in opposite extremes by two tutors who had a very different understanding of “art”, “creativity” and the brief requirements.

Personally, at first, I have found briefs very confusing what is required of us to be delivered as part of the assessment. And the vague and generic explanation of tutors that it can be anything of any form I like is not very helpful – if I meant to build a swimming pool, what is a point in talking about a sea of possibilities?

In the case of the Teaching and Learning unit:

• A set of 8 blogposts with no form nor limits (Harvard Referencing recommended but not obligatory?) I will most likely try to hit the border early to vent out and see if it is going to help me to ease on imposter syndrome.
• Paragraph on Microteaching session as well as one on Self-Initiated Project are unclear if they can be a blog post within the 8, or they have to be a separate document on its own.
• Pre-observations forms and observation reports x3 (of me by peer and teacher and one by me of a peer) I hope to schedule first with my tutor to have a clue of what is expected at least to get some foundation
• Does the brief by links to any Elective Unit work mean by Curriculum Design? How the two are linked in terms of grading is unclear.
• Case studies are building in total for a short essay of 1500 words seems like a huge task considering my limited amounts of time. As per initial meetings, I am still unclear what those Case Studies are and what they meant to represent.

In the case of the Curriculum Design:

• Why there are options? Like why there is the ambiguity of delivering THIS or THAT? It is for me very illogical and confusing, especially that neither is clear at this point:
  • Annotated curriculum specification (what it even means?) for a proposed whole curriculum (whole as a course, year, unit, block, term, section, class?)
  • Part-Curriculum modification (is it current course? the one I teach on? Maybe one of competition? Something new?)

&

• Curriculum Development plan (Again, what is meant by Curriculum? How can one develop an idea if there is no clear definition of what I expected to be working with?)
• Documentation of curriculum planning meeting (Is it something that we meant to write about if we attend those meetings, or is it just imaginary meeting? Is it something to be done among peers or as part of the work experience?)

As such, by having a variety of group orientated methods being implemented and various colleges sharing their knowledge, I feel worse off. I have a feeling of being lost in translation, confused and dumb. As it seems others do not have such issues and are just getting on with it.

References:

Business Insider. 2017. All the Monopoly rules you’ve probably been playing wrong your whole life. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.businessinsider.com/monopoly-rules-everyone-gets-wrong-2017-12?r=US&IR=T. [Accessed 3 April 2020].

Hasbro. 2014. Facebook Fans to Determine World’s Favorite ‘House Rules’ to Be Included in Future Monopoly Games. [ONLINE] Available at: https://newsroom.hasbro.com/news-releases/news-release-details/facebook-fans-determine-worlds-favorite-house-rules-be-included. [Accessed 3 April 2020].

Next School. (2016). 6 Problems with our School System. [Online Video]. 15 December 2016. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okpg-lVWLbE. [Accessed: 3 April 2020].

Nygren, N. Nifflas on Twitter. 2019. UNO on Twitter. [ONLINE] Available at: https://twitter.com/Nifflas/status/1126854282857320448. [Accessed 3 April 2020].

Robinson, K. (2013). How to escape education’s death valley | Sir Ken Robinson. [Online Video]. 10 May 2013. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX78iKhInsc. [Accessed: 3 April 2020].

Romanelli, F., 2009. Learning Styles: A Review of Theory, Application, and Best Practices. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, [Online]. 73(1), 09. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2690881/ [Accessed 3 April 2020].

University of the Arts London. 2011. Undergraduate Marking Criteria Matrix. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/12270/Undergraduate-Marking-Criteria-Matrix-PDF-124KB.pdf. [Accessed 3 April 2020].

University of the Arts London. 2019a. New Assessment Criteria. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/students/stories/new-assessment-criteria3. [Accessed 3 April 2020].

University of the Arts London. 2019b. Assessment Criteria Level 4. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0031/179734/Assessment-Criteria-Level-4-PDF-94KB.pdf. [Accessed 3 April 2020].