Webinar 4 – Telling the story of changing pedagogy.

This article is part of the Education Espresso series hosted by Adobe pedagogical evangelist Mark Andrews and Editor in Chief of Wonkhe Mark Leach. Contributors include Professor Cara Aitchison, vice-chancellor, Cardiff Metropolitan University; Emma Leech, director of marketing and communications, Nottingham Trent University; and Dr Ashmita Randhawa, honorary research fellow at the SKOPE Research Centre, University of Oxford.

There was a time when promises of academic success were enough to convince students to join a university. But the expansion of digital communication has created an open forum for them to express their subjective desires.

Rather than simply earning their degrees, students increasingly look for a sense of belonging, confidence, purposefulness and self-actualisation from higher education. Therefore, universities need to show how they can support meaningful personal and interpersonal growth. That means demonstrating the value higher education institutions can add to reaching their wider goals, while placing students at the centre of their own educational narratives.

When Professor Cara Aitchison became vice-chancellor of Cardiff Met in 2016, the university had fewer than 10,000 students and a turnover of less than £100 million. Recognising a need to grow, diversify and improve to ensure long-term sustainability and autonomy, Cara led the development of a values-driven strategic plan. Her team agreed on an institutional strategy built upon the shared values of creativity, diversity, freedom and innovation, all underpinned by behaviours of leadership, trust, courage and accountability.

By committing to a clear shared identity and delivering on initiatives that embodied these characteristics, Cardiff Met grew significantly in the following six years. It reached 12,500 on-campus students with over 10,000 TME students worldwide, and has a projected income of £160 million for 2023.

“We’ve coined this phrase of ‘One Cardiff Met’, and I think people have really bought into it,” Cara commented. “The values were the key, though. Getting everyone on the same page right at the beginning.”

This incredible transformation gave Cardiff Met the stability to redirect its efforts into pedagogical transformation. Drawing upon their values-driven strategic plan, they rolled out Cardiff Met EDGE with the goal of integrating Ethical, Digital, Global and Entrepreneurial mindsets into every programme.

The effort to carve out a distinct identity has enabled Cardiff Met to gain significant traction. Tying this identity into course content and delivery through EDGE also enables students to translate these shared values into action. By creating a strong link between personal values and higher education, Cardiff Met has managed to create a powerful emotional core around which to build pedagogic stories.

As director of marketing and communications at Nottingham Trent University, Emma Leech found that around 25% of enquiries from prospective students concerned the nature of their courses. Students seemed particularly interested in the structure, assessment, content and delivery of each course, as well as the value and enjoyment they were likely to get from it.

Arguably, the answers to these questions could be found in prospectuses and brochures. But while these texts are useful for delivering facts, they generally fail to bring university courses to life.

“There’s a fallback quite often to points of proof, which are purely informational rather than emotional,” Emma suggested. “What we’ve seen over the last few years is a demand from prospective and current students for information to be brought to life, to feel more personal and to really engage with their needs.”

But following the COVID-19 pandemic, universities are increasingly supplementing catalogues and web updates with interpersonal webinars, live events, digital Q&As, videos and hybrid events. There’s even a greater focus on bite-size information and quick taster sessions that reflect the instant gratification of social media shorts.

Adopting a holistic cross-channel approach has had an immediate impact on students’ understanding of the courses on offer. It allows a core message to be segmented throughout the student journey, intimately connecting their goals with the content of their chosen courses. In doing so, students are better able to step into their future experiences and envision moving through their academic narrative first-hand.

In 2020, Dr Ashmita Randhawa, honorary research fellow at the SKOPE Research Centre at the University of Oxford, worked alongside colleagues Dr James Robson and Dr Ben Holgate on a paper titled Storycraft: The Importance of Narrative and Narrative Skills in Business. Their research showed that business leaders considered storytelling to be a core need in business as a key component of communication and interdisciplinarity.

The ability to understand, relate to and operate across different departments allows employees to empathise with different situations and settings. This not only improves internal cooperation, but also makes it easier to decipher why customers and clients use certain services.

Ashmita pointed out, however, that: “The concept of narrative skills is underdeveloped and undertheorized. It simply doesn’t feature in the career services literature or in the employability skills framework.”

While higher education waits for research to catch up, universities can begin to model these interdisciplinary skills through the use of pedagogic storytelling. By creating a narrative regarding the interaction between course content and wider goals with students at the centre, universities can emulate the interdisciplinarity employers want to see. This both demonstrates the value of these skills and leads students to develop them over time.

Pedagogic storytelling plays a dual role in engaging students with higher education. First, it highlights major personal and professional values and links them to course content, allowing students to visualise the growth offered in the university experience. Then, it delivers that content in a manner that reflects employment contexts, giving them a direct insight into narratives as a business tool.

This results in students who are better able to understand their learning within a larger interdisciplinary framework. By recognising the value of other fields, this leaves them better able to resolve social, economic, civic and occupational issues through cooperation. In turn, this supports the sense of belonging, confidence, purposefulness and self-actualisation required to create meaningful change in a complex, ever-changing world.

Click here to watch the webinar this article is based on.