2015
There’s a bit of a project underway in the School of Media and Communication (where I am found) which is to think about where, what and the like for 2015. Where would we want to be in 2105.
First off, the time frame is too short since if we are serious about genuine change it just takes longer than this. I was involved in the rebuilding of the curriculum in the Bachelor of Communication (Media) degree, and more recently the new honours program (of which I’m the Program Director). The media program threw out our entire curriculum, and then rebuilt it. I reckon it took us 2 years to work out we wanted to throw it out, and to get an idea of what we wanted in its place. In that time we still had not really worked out the third year of the program. It took another 18 months or so to go through all the regulatory hoops required for such an amount of change. Then we started teaching it, tinkering as we went.
So, 2015, is only 3 years away and in that time I guess where I would want the school to be is in being well down the path to fundamental change in its curriculum and probably pedagogy. I don’t care that much what the programs are called, they can keep their current names if necessary, because I think that sort of rebranding, even it if produced some new whiz bang degree of new-you-beaut-this-is-the-model for media and communication studies at university this century, if the how and why of the pedagogy is untroubled then the model is deeply broken.
However, I don’t think this is possible in three years. A university department is slower than an oil tanker to turn around. There is the dead weight of the administrative compliance regime that pretty much doubles the time to do anything, and then of course there is the issue of simply finding the time, energy and goodwill to engage with the idea of change. Academics, even radical thinkers, are surprisingly conservative about a lot of things, and curriculum and pedagog is one of them, so in three years I would think change would be started, but not implemented.
Hence an alternative could to be trial something quickly, at the margins, in an agile sort of way. What I was thinking was having a lab like environment which might be available to a common cohort of students for one year (two semesters) which was just, well, educationally out there. Engaged, making, multidisciplinary, process orientated. Risky. Not for all students, and certainly not for all staff. Somewhere to test and see. If it works then it can be expanded (and if it doesn’t it gets changed, or reversed). Students would stay in their existing degrees, so not a lot has to change. Then I realised that each degree is made up of specific subjects with very specific learning outcomes and so even this is actually quite hard to do. If not impossible. It is like the apparatus of the university requires you to make something, plan it, without ever having the opportunity to test it, then implement it (which is actually the testing of it). If it fails there is no fall back available, the program simply is terminated. It is the antithesis of the creative, innovative practice that underwrites all those examples universities are fond of using to illustrate to us how they would like us to be! (This realisation can very dramatically erode your morale and desire to be an agent for change in an institution like a university. Even where it doesn’t the experience of continually banging your head into this sort of arse about inertia can wear you down to the point where you just surrender, opting for the course of least resistance because to try to achieve change is a black hole of a truly Kafkaesque universe.)
So, if necessary, set up an experimental degree program in media and communication. Even call it that if it helps to give you the wriggle room needed. Open to all. Not tied to any discipline or practice. Make knowledge. Make knowledge objects. Leave a trail. Of critique, making, intervention, and discovery. Turn the university upside down so it becomes about learning and research at the same time in the same event. A Bauhaus for media and comms for this time – but not the sort of stratified curriculum and model of the Bauhaus. But that is where I would want the school to be headed for in 2015. From this, then let it work its way out so that other students, other staff can participate, get the idea, and take it home. So it could have teaching internships for school staff, 1 or 2 a semester, with the requirement that they take something from this place back to their own programs to implement.
That was my first riff.