Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education (Oct 2024)
Critical learning development and the crisis of the university: a collective consideration
Abstract
This participatory session concerned consideration of the ‘critical turn in LD’ (Syska and Buckley, 2023: 107), manifest through an emerging critical LD movement – as centring an academic literacies approach (Hilsdon, 2018; Asher, 2022, 2023a; Dhillon, 2023; Rooney, 2023) – as a response to ‘the crisis of the university’ (Bacevic, 2017). The focus is on the positionality of LD/LDers within the increasingly neoliberal university, and to this critical learning development movement. Time and space are provided for sharing experiences, worries and hopes for LD/HE and to collectively explore the contemporary realities/trajectory of LD/HE – and alternative futures. The central cause of the crisis of UK HE, exacerbated by government and senior management responses to COVID-19, is intensifying and accelerating processes of the ‘deep neoliberalisation’ of the public university – reflected in industrial action concerning ‘pay devaluation; pay inequality, based on gender and race; excessive workloads; and casualisation’ (Hall, 2020a). The session explores where LD/LDers are positioned within the HE crisis, before considering how critically oriented LD/LDers who believe HE should be a social and public good can best respond to the crisis, while connecting such to wider contemporary societal and global crises. Specifically: • How might LD/LDers respond to different contexts of crisis in ways that encompass LD’s developmental/pedagogical ethos, emancipatory values and empowering academic literacies approach (Syska and Buckley, 2023; Webster, 2019)? • How do we link with wider critical educational theories, practices, communities and struggles? • What might be the role of critical Learning Development and academic literacies? The objective is critical reflection on contemporary LD/HE contexts – with take-aways, as thus grounded in actual lived experiences of the crisis, including: • Developing understandings as to self, team and LD contemporary positionality. • Considerations of possible actions and next steps, including the potential for an ALDinHE CoP focused on critical LD and academic literacies.
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