Onur will be presenting at the LJMU’s annual Teaching and Learning Conference 2015. The conference provides an exciting forum to share and discuss innovative and effective teaching, learning and assessment practices, as well as explore findings from teaching-related research. On the theme of ‘Locations for learning: where does the learning take place?’, this year’s two-day event will showcase the work of academic and professional service staff across a range of higher education teaching and learning topics. These include the use of interactive teaching methods, learning technologies and creative approaches to teaching design.

Onur’s presentation emphasises that ownership of learning in vocational subjects and marks/certificates, as products, can alienate the learner from the learning activity, thus hindering learning. It aims to look at the internal space of the learner and the interference of assessment as ‘measurement’ and various other forms of external ‘quality assurance’ with deep learning, specifically in performing arts, more generally in vocational or professional subjects and, furthermore, creativity and with problem-solving abilities linked to accredited learning at levels 6, 7 and 8 by the QAA (2008). If certificates and grades could be seen as products of labour, then we can engage in Giddens’ (1971) analysis of Marx’s early discussions on how production processes in capitalist mode alienate the worker from the product and how ‘the work task does not offer intrinsic satisfactions which make it possible for the learner to develop freely his mental and physical energies’, a framework that challenges Kleiman’s (2005) emphasis (after Csikszentmihalyi) on intrinsic and autotelic nature of high-level creative activities and its relation to educational provision that wishes to encourage creativity and problem solving: attributes closely associated with performing arts but also linked to higher levels of accredited learning. Kleiman, after Boden, also notes creative and problem solving states are not ‘leaving it to luck’ but they are a more unconscious way of knowing much like that of a tight – rope walker. The presentation therefore intends to question the alienation effect of marking and grading strategies along with (degree) classifications and how such processes might hinder the idea of ownership and ‘a will to be a professional’ as described by Barnett (2009): it aims to invite alternative and more liberal strategies of assessment that encourages ownership and enables self-quality-management. In this presentation the audience will be required to participate in a short activity, and current BA (Hons) Acting Students will assume the role of the ‘lecturer’.

The full conference programme is available here.

The book of abstracts is available here.

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