Beacham Lecture
The Beacham Lecture is an annual opportunity for Goldsmiths and University of London staff to hear a speaker of international calibre on learning and teaching issues. Resources from previous lectures are at the foot of this page.
The 2010 lecture will be delivered by Professor Gill Nichols
The Challenge of Research Led Learning
Wednesday 24th February 2010
Room 309, Richard Hoggart Building at 5.30pm.
The relationship between learning, teaching and research remains a key issue in HE with respect to funding, pedagogy, reward and differentiating institutions. Increasingly the literature suggests that the research-teaching nexus has not been resolved and that it is a constant impediment to the academic community. This may well be the case, but it is also important to contextualise the ever changing landscape of higher education within this perennial discussion. Higher education is politically driven and the drivers are not always logically apparent, nor are the aims of the drivers clear. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) looms ever closer whilst the enhancement agenda appears to be less focused and possibly fading in its importance in the shadow of the REF. The discerning fee paying student has not only arrived but is becoming ever more critical about the quality of the student experience.
The question Professor Nicholls will pose in this lecture is where in all these activities has the notion of the university being a learning community disappeared? Is it an organisational, political or pedagogic loss or is it that we need to revisit the key issue of learning and how to learn as a community?
Professor Nicholls will explore and conceptualise the possible impact institutional and organisational structures have on the form and dynamics of the relationship between research, learning and teaching, the key issues identified include:
• Conceptualising the issues
• Identifying the wider context of learning
• Schools Faculties and Departments
• Curriculum
Professor Gill Nicholls is Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Surrey. Her previous roles include Pro-Vice Chancellor (Academic) at Salford University, Pro Vice Chancellor (Student Experience) at Durham University, Professor of Education within the School of Education and Director of King’s Institute of Learning and Teaching (KILT).
Her research areas include professional development and teaching and learning and environments. She has published nine books, the latest of which is The Challenge to Scholarship published by Routledge in 2006.
All staff are welcome to attend and a drinks reception will be held afterwards.
To reserve a seat please contact
Adam Cresswell (a.cresswell@gold.ac.uk)
Competence, Creativity & Classification
This lecture was delivered by Professor Lewis Elton, Professor of Higher Education, University College London, Professor Emeritus of Higher Education, University of Surrey and winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the first Times Higher Awards.
He has been researching assessment for over two decades, drawing provocative and innovative conclusions. In 2002 he published (with Brenda Johnson) "Assessment in Universities: a critical review of research" [.rtf document].
Goldsmiths is currently conducting a major review of assessment practices across the institution, and it was in the context of this review that Professor Elton was invited to speak. Professor Elton described the evolution of thinking on assessment since the 1960s, and what challenges Higher Education currently faces.
These clips of Professor Elton summarise a few of the lecture's thought-provoking themes:
Clip 1 The opposition between validity and reliability.
"If you want to have a really valid system you will find it less reliable..."
Clip 2 Seven Pillars of Assessment Wisdom.
Suggestions for workable assessment.
Clip 3 The assessment of creativity.
"Interpretivist assessment is used if you don't know the answer until the student produces their answer."
Clip 4 The connoisseurship model.
"How do you find people who can judge something that wasn't there before?"
(The term "connoisseurship" was coined by Elliot W. Eisner in his 1979 book The Educational Imagination (New York: Macmillan) and refined in subsequent editions.)
Clip 5 The classification system.
"He got an upper second - what does it mean? We conflate the unconflatable..."