Transitions

It’s been a funny year. I turned 50, was furloughed from the tutor job I love, then made redundant. I didn’t see most of my friends or family for months. I’ve taught antenatal classes on Zoom, and Pregnancy Yoga on Zoom. Mum and Baby yoga on Zoom too. Singing The Hokey Cokey with a doll to a computer is one of the oddest things I’ve ever done. I’ve had Zoom singing lessons, Zoom choir rehearsals, Zoom get togethers with friends and colleagues.

I’ve done a lot of Zoom-ing. And a lot of waiting…

Those who know me well know that patience has never been my strongest attribute. I’d rather walk than wait for a bus, I hate waiting for exam or assignment results, and don’t get me started on waiting for food in restaurants.

Yet…the last few months have forced me to be patient, to wait. I’ve had no choice, the current pandemic has altered our lives like nothing that has happened before. Simple things like buying groceries involved queueing to get into the store, then queuing to pay to get out.

For some things though, the waiting is over and things are changing. Being made redundant a couple of weeks ago hurt. A lot. I’ve gone beyond SARA, to grief cycles and the bottom of the Fisher’s Transition Curve (see image). Luckily I have managed to get some contract work as Senior Learning Designer with Aula Education and I’m hoping it will lead to bigger and brighter things.

Leaving NCT as a tutor hasn’t stopped me believing in NCT Educators and the depth of knowledge they have. With many tutors taking redundancy (a mix of voluntary or compulsory) there is a real chance that this knowledge base will be lost. It makes the Open Publishing side of this project even more important.

I’m aiming to publish at least one article a month from fellow educators starting with Suzy Bromwich-Alexandra writing about her transition from teacher to student.

The times they are a-changin…

H818 Online Conference

On 13th February I will be presenting at this conference, below is the abstract and the online poster.

An accessible version of poster is available here.

Conference Abstract

Title

Unlocking Digital Scholarship for NCT Tutors

Introduction:

NCT (formerly The National Childbirth Trust) is the UK’s largest parenting charity working since 1956 to educate and support parents on their early parenting journey. NCT Practitioners (NCTP) are experts in adult education theory through experience and trained to foundation degree level through the only university-accredited qualification in parenting education (NCT, 2020). Their subject is birth and parenting but their skills and knowledge are rooted firmly in adult and higher education. NCT tutors are experienced NCTPs who have taken higher qualifications in order to train NCTPs in partnership with University of Worcester (UW).

This project focuses on encouraging NCT tutors to share their expertise outside of NCT and University of Worcester circles by increasing their digital and networked scholarship.

Digital Scholarship builds on the tenets of Boyer’s (2016) scholarly activities (Stewart, 2015), using technology to demonstrate specialism in a field (Weller, 2011). Social networks play a key role in encouraging this Networked Participatory Scholarship (NPS) (Veletsianos and Kimmons, 2012; Donelan, 2016) so supporting the creation of these networks will promote Open and Digital Scholarship.

NCTPs and NCT tutors work in an OP way internally, sharing resources and skills between themselves but have few resources to enable them to work in a more globally networked manner. Open Access Publishing (OAP) facilitates the dissemination of knowledge openly by enabling access to articles and papers freely and across networks and is increasing year on year (Piwowar et al., 2018). OAP offers opportunities for NCT tutors to share their wealth of knowledge further, and for little or no monetary cost. However, NCT tutors identified that they lacked the knowledge or the space online to openly publish articles (Kelly, 2019).

Methodology:

Donelan (2016) suggests that practical training, including the modelling of best practice can increase participation in digital scholarly activities (p13) so a two-pronged approach was taken in this project.

A short multi-media workshop identifying some simple steps NCT tutors can take to be more networked and open will be produced.

Alongside this, and to model the encouraged behaviour, a blog publicised through social media platforms was written regularly. A basic web repository was created, on the same site as the blog, for articles to be uploaded and published openly following OAP principles (Costello, 2019).

Conclusions:

At the end of my workshop NCT tutors will be able to engage with networked or digital scholarship more confidently.

The presentation at the Online conference, will look at progress and success to date, identify obstacles encountered and highlight any future adaptations planned for the project.

It is hoped that the project will prove inspirational for NCT tutors and lead to further open and networked projects.

References

Boyer, E. L. et al. (2016) Scholarship reconsidered : priorities of the professoriate. 2nd ed. [E-book]

Costello, E. (2019) Bronze, free, or fourrée: an open access commentary. Science Editing, 6 (1). pp. 69-72. ISSN 2288-8063 [Online] Available from: http://doras.dcu.ie/23048/1/bronze%20access%20open%20access%20free_ocr.pdf (Accessed on 3rd November 2019)

Donelan, H. (2016) Social media for professional development and networking opportunities in academia, Journal of Further and Higher Education. Routledge, 40(5), pp. 706–729. Available from: https://www-tandfonline-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/doi/full/10.1080/0309877X.2015.1014321 (Accessed on 30^th December 2019)

Kelly, K. (2019) Conversation with Helen Darlaston. 30^th November 2019.

NCT (2020) NCT Training. Available from https://www.nct.org.uk/get-involved/nct-training (Accessed on 2^nd January 2020) Stewart, B. E. (2015) In Abundance: Networked Participatory Practices as Scholarship, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. Athabasca University Press (AU Press), 16(3), pp. 318–340. Available from: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2158 (Accessed on 30^th December 2019)

Veletsianos, G. and Kimmons, R. (2012) ‘Networked Participatory Scholarship: Emergent techno-cultural pressures toward open and digital scholarship in online networks’, Computers & Education. Elsevier Ltd, 58(2), pp. 766–774. Available from: https://www-sciencedirect-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/science/article/pii/S0360131511002454 (Accessed on 2^nd January 2020)

Weller, M. (2011) The Digital Scholar: how technology is transforming scholarly practice. London, Bloomsbury Academic [E-book]

What I do…

I’m often asked what I do. And my answer is often vague. I’ll mention that I work with parents to explore birth and early parenting, then I might say I also teach yoga for pregnant women, and also for postnatal women with their babies. I will mention I work for NCT, and then have to explain that it used to be called National Childbirth Trust. It is the UK’s largest parenting charity, and makes a difference to thousands of parents every year. It’s campaigned over the years on issues such as Dads’ being allowed in labour rooms to support their partners , women being able to feed their babies in public and, most recently, perinatal mental health with the Hidden Half campaign.

Hold on! I hear you say. I thought you worked for a university, how does that fit in with Birth and Parenting education?

Ah yes, I’m an Associate Lecturer with University of Worcester. I work with an amazing group of women to train NCT Practitioners to work with parents before and after they have their babies. It’s a foundation degree course and taught across the UK. In order to become a NCT tutor I had to study adult education in some depth over several years, as well as being an experienced NCT practitioner in my own right. It led to a second degree (see graduation photo above) and a Postgraduate Degree in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

I’m not surprised if you haven’t heard about how NCT trains it’s practitioners. We are, as an educational organisation, not great at telling the world what we do. Perhaps NCT Education suffers a little from impostorism at an organisational level. NCT tutors are educators and academics. We have decades of experience in adult learning, group theory and facilitation theory. We are reflective practitioners at every level, grounded in evidence led educational practice. But we don’t share this with the world. A few of my colleagues have published articles and papers about our work, but they are the exception. When we look for evidence about adult learning we look outside our own organisation. Yet we know how adults learn. We see it in our own practice all the time. We underrate our experiences and knowledge.

This weekend I was at our annual Education and Practice Weekend and I had the opportunity to speak to my colleagues about my current studies. I had been inspired by thinking around open pedagogy and digital scholarship. I mapped Bronwen Hegarty’s attributes of Open Pedagogy (2015) against NCT educational practice and showed my colleagues the many parallels to how we work. I then asked them to consider how they could work more openly? What might be the benefits and risks? How they could share their knowledge and experience with a wider academic audience? To my surprise they were enthusiastic and open to the ideas I proposed and I look forward to reading and sharing their contributions to adult learning and education theory.

In future, I hope that when I’m asked what I do, no one is surprised by NCT’s academic side. That we become known, not just by our contributions to birth and parenting but for our depth and breadth of knowledge about how adults learn.