Thanks to all those colleagues who have written or contributed to the books from Surrey Institute of Education published over the past ten years or so, that have informed the evolution of the Ecological University Model that is explored in ‘How to Mend a University’. I couldn’t have got there without you.
Now available for pre-order: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/how-to-mend-a-university-9781350338647/
Follow updates on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/IanKinchin
Five moves towards an ecological university:
Available to order from: Bloomsbury
New paper:
Kinchin, I.M., Balloo, K., Barnett, L., Gravett, K., Heron, M., Hosein, A., Lygo-Baker, S., Medland, E., Winstone, N. and Yakovchuk, N. (2023). Poems and pedagogic frailty: uncovering the affective within teacher development through collective biography.
Arts & Humanities in Higher Education,
https://doi.org/10.1177/14740222221147483 [open access]
We can imagine the future that we’d like to have. Indeed, if we do not have an imagined future, then how can we develop plans and strategies for the future? We must have some idea of where we’d like to be heading. The idea of the ecological university is one such imagined future. Once we have imagined our future, we then need to work how how to get there. How do we work towards an ecological university and escape the bonds of the consumer-driven, neoliberal university? One tool that might help is is the Three Horizons heuristic – offered here and populated with the concept of the ecological university.
Further reading:
Kinchin, I.M. (2022) The Ecological Root Metaphor for Higher Education: Searching for Evidence of Conceptual Emergence within University Education Strategies. Education Sciences, 12, 528. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12080528 [open access]
Authors celebrate the arrival of their new book:
Kinchin, I.M. & Gravett, K. (2022) Dominant Discourses in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives, Cartographies and Practice. London, Bloomsbury.
Available from: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/dominant-discourses-in-higher-education-9781350180291/
review available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00131911.2022.2075138?journalCode=cedr20
Within the ecological university it is suggested that teacher development occurs across three plateaus – represented by three adaptive cycles in the figure. These are a dependent cycle (red), a transitional cycle (yellow) and an independent cycle (green). For further details see: Kinchin, I.M. (2022) An ecological lens on the professional development of university teachers. Teaching in Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.2021394 [open access].
If we conceptualise the ecological university [see previous post] as a ’healthy’ system, I would suggest that we may also be able to consider the unhealthy or ’sick’ university in a similar manner – where some of the elements fail to work, or where integration of the elements has failed for some reason. Hence, the figure in this post offers a summary of ”the ecologically sick university”, in which the adaptive cycles fail to connect across the panarchy, and where epistemological monocultures result in an impoverished narrative ecology.
Prof Kinchin's Blog 