Opening the Curriculum: A brief personal history

Posted on 11th March 2018 by Emma Claire Sweeney

Dennis Walder, Emeritus Professor of Literature

It was the mid 1970s, I’d left South Africa, and was a Research Fellow at Edinburgh University, doing a PhD on Dickens and teaching there to supplement my income.  I had heard about a radical new university offering degrees for mature, unqualified students, and when my friend the historian Angus Calder offered to let me sit in on one of his tutorials, I jumped at the chance.

I was amazed by the enthusiasm and motivation, as well as life experience, of Angus’s students, compared with my Edinburgh University first years.  Conventional university teaching seemed just that – conventional; and, what’s more, it served a very limited section of the population.  At the time, only 4% of school leavers were admitted to university, and almost everyone seemed well satisfied with that. But I was not.

So I applied for and became a tutor on the 19th century Novel course, which, unlike elsewhere at the time, assumed that you should study the novel as a European phenomenon, including texts in translation. After being appointed Arts Staff Tutor in Scotland and meeting the course team led by Arnold Kettle, I began to contribute more and more, since I was a Nineteenth Century Novel specialist.

I was seconded to Walton Hall to help revise and rewrite the (already hugely popular) course, and when a post fell vacant, I applied for and was appointed Lecturer and became chair of the new novel course team which, in those days (the 1970s-80s), included central academics, staff tutors, editors, production advisors, administrators, BBC colleagues and external assessors, all of whom would vigorously contribute to discussion and debate, with the result that our course materials – published booklets, radio and TV programs and summer schools – were of the highest quality.

The course team was and still is even in its slimmed-down versions the key, and I remain suspicious of attempts by other universities (increasingly nowadays) to offer distance material without this kind of input.  My own former Edinburgh PhD supervisor once confessed that he took our materials with him when preparing to teach in the USA; it was a common experience to find well-thumbed copies of our texts in other university libraries and on their lecturers’ shelves.

Acceptance of academic quality was more formally assured by being part of the national external examining system: we examined elsewhere and, more importantly, colleagues from other universities examined with us.  I recall one external exclaiming at a Board: ‘I agree this should be a first, but . . . perhaps not a transcendental first!’ Yet our classifications were increasingly accepted by other universities as well as by employers, irrefutable evidence that the OU was a ‘proper’ university, our graduates as good as any, often indeed – given their motivation and hard work over many years – better.

The Arts Foundation courses (for which I wrote) and which were repeatedly revised, seemed our most radical departure from the traditional curriculum, truly inter- rather than simply multidisciplinary, and a key to all the other Arts courses. The Literature curriculum was relatively traditional, perhaps to ensure its status, perhaps because of the orthodox backgrounds of the teaching staff (although Kettle had taught in East Africa).

I had long been impressed by the writings of former Anglophone colonies, and had begun publishing on South African drama, especially Athol Fugard (I wrote the first book on his work), and I proposed including a play by him and two black actors on a new Modern European Drama course. It did not strictly fill the bill, but after much debate the team agreed to include it as ‘political drama’, beside Brecht and John Arden, and in 1977 Sizwe Bansi is Dead became the first of the ‘New Writings’ to enter the curriculum. The student response, especially to the TV version, was tremendous.

This strengthened my resolve to propose other ‘post-colonial’ (as they were starting to be called) texts for the curriculum.  Our new third-level ‘Literature in the Modern World’ course offered the opportunity. With Angus Calder, Dinah Birch and Richard Allen, we wrote ‘blocks’ of teaching material on poetry, prose and drama from West Africa, the Caribbean and India, adopting the phrase ‘literatures in English’ instead of English Literature, to encourage an awareness of growing debates about the origin and nature of contemporary literary studies, and to prevent writings from abroad being ghettoised. We developed a related summer school at York, and I edited a reader of critical essays and documents, widely used outside the OU and revised for a second edition which remains in print with sales of over 60,000.

‘Literature in the Modern World’ was four years in the making and served some 10,000 students before being replaced by another Twentieth Century Literature course, chaired by Suman Gupta, which continued to highlight current debates, while incorporating texts dealing with contemporary society, now inevitably including writings from beyond as well as within the UK, by migrants as well as by long-established citizens.  In terms of quality as well as relevance, the work of authors as diverse as Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Nadine Gordimer, Grace Nichols and Abdulrazak Gurnah was always going to have an impact.

At the same time, I joined History colleagues to set up a ‘project’-based ‘fourth-level’ course, with several lines involving minimal teaching material but substantial reading and set texts, aimed at bridging undergraduate and postgraduate levels (the MA was still in its infancy) through more independent student work. We taught the courses we were creating, believing it had always been a blunder to allow fulltime OU academics to create courses and appoint and monitor tutors (ALs) without teaching face-to-face themselves, and not only at occasional day and summer schools. The result was hugely rewarding for all concerned, producing students who did go on to postgraduate work, although numbers were inevitably limited by the nature of the provision.

Yet with the Department personnel expanding under my headship to include fellow experts like Robert Fraser, David Johnson and Susheila Nasta, it had become possible for a wider range of texts, voices and countries to be included on my project course (‘Post-Colonial Literatures in English’).  At the same time, while involved in setting up a Singapore version of the Arts program, I engaged with Ban Kah Choon of the National University there to write a Singapore version of the course focusing on local authors and texts to ensure their voices were dominant, not just ours from the UK. Without a course team, the results were uneven: it was difficult to replicate the depth and accessibility of the UK-based course.

University teaching material should always be informed by research, and it seemed natural to set up a research group while developing these initiatives – although as one colleague remarked at the time, mine was at first a group of one.  I was not fazed, and the Postcolonial Research Group has now survived for many years, organizing seminars, raising substantial funds from UK research bodies, and creating a Departmental culture in touch with developments in this still vital area of present-day literary study, whatever it is called – ‘world literatures’ is a recent favourite. The skills involved in critical reading are transferable, and the point remains to highlight the issues raised by any study of literature with texts suggestive of experiences beyond narrowly-defined European national cultures, through teaching that recognizes the claims of history and politics as well as aesthetics.  Or so I believe.

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Response to Direct and Mediated Contact: Further Questions

Posted on 20th February 2018 by Emma Claire Sweeney

Richard Allen

The analysis and the questions raised in the previous posting on Direct and Mediated Contact in Literary Pedagogy are pertinent to the future of Literary Studies. My comments here don’t dare to provide answers but raise two issues which I think are relevant and which might require Suman’s questions to be posed in a more nuanced or variegated way.

First there’s a tendency to see Literary Studies and Higher Education in a somewhat monolithic way in Suman’s piece. In fact Higher Education has had and continues to have a strongly social class related hierarchy. So, do universities which attract and accept applicants from private schools and have significant endowments face the questions you raise in the same way as universities which are struggling to achieve recruitments and maintain income and whose managers then feel they need to ‘restructure’? Certainly some of these elite universities have found already methods of keeping the costs of direct contact pedagogy down by dint of employing junior researchers and others with ambitions to be academics in a way that is close to the ‘gig’ economy which has spread so much in recent years in the UK. There perhaps isn’t either a simple relationship between high status and direct contact pedagogy since a good number of the FE Colleges that have developed HE streams have found ways of teaching HE students in a quite intensive ‘direct contact’ way. This is to a significant extent because their teaching staff aren’t involved in research — another factor that is relevant to the issues here. But perhaps as relevant here is the fact that these FE colleges do not share/enjoy the massification and growth in student numbers that are found in most middle ranking universities. So perhaps the questions Suman raises are particularly pertinent to the middle of the hierarchy. Or maybe one should also put things onto a time dimension and say they are particularly relevant to the middle of the range now but the question will come to others in time?

The second issue here is the relation of study and employment and the ideological frameworks within which English Studies sit. The dominant framework for government policy makers now seems to be that the study of Humanities subjects should be subsidised less than the study of, for example, Medicine or Engineering. A higher government subsidy for these latter ‘useful’ subjects might — the Panglossion argument recently advanced goes — enable universities to reduce the fees for Humanities subjects. More likely any reduction in fees would be matched by a reduction in resources allocated to Humanities, hastening the shift to mediated contact pedagogy learning which Suman describes.  What is the result of thinking through the issues Suman describes in this frame? Is English Studies taught by ‘mediated contact’ likely to produce a social group competing for middle ranking ‘white collar’ jobs — just the group that some predict will be most detrimentally affected by increased automation and artificial intelligence? Research done by Suman and myself with others in India has perhaps a potentially intriguing relevance here. There we found that in the group of elite universities, studying English Literature was seen as valuable by students not just because of the skills they learned but because it would provide them with the skill and knowledge to position themselves within a high status social group. Can the whole range of what Suman calls ‘cultural formations’ be directed to a simple model of what students will do after they graduate or are different approaches required? How do those creating courses understand and place themselves in a ‘cultural present’ formed in such a variegated environment?

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Direct and Mediated Contact in Literary Pedagogy

Posted on 17th February 2018 by Emma Claire Sweeney

Suman Gupta

Teachers and researchers in literary studies at The Open University have delivered Higher Education (HE) programmes using up-to-date methods and technologies for almost 50 years. In this they have followed the mission of the university: in particular, to make HE accessible to constituencies which may otherwise not benefit from it. Reaching and enabling students across distances, in different locations and under varied circumstances, is vital for the university’s mission. Of necessity that has entailed both making special arrangements for direct contact with students and using the available technological means for mediated contact. The Literature and Creative Writing Department has enjoyed remarkable success in this, and met all the standards of academic excellence appointed for the HE sector as a whole (including old and new universities).

Members of the English and Creative Writing Department at The Open University are therefore uniquely placed to engage with questions to do with teaching and learning literature by using multiple means and across multiple locations. Such questions are now becoming salient for the HE sector at large. Teachers and researchers in the department are accustomed to asking difficult questions about literary pedagogy before they are posed in conventional HE settings, and resolving them.

This posting is devoted to raising and clarifying such a question, of moment to present-day literary pedagogy in the HE sector generally.

The HE Sector

The HE sector, in widely dispersed locations around the world, is contemplating a significant shift in pedagogy. The shift is from the dominance of direct (face-to-face) contact towards foregrounding mediated contact via digital networks in teaching and learning. The latter is no longer the preserve of what was conventionally regarded as the ‘distance education’ part of the HE sector. It is being considered or incorporated to varying degrees across the sector. Policy moves to facilitate this are widely evident; significant investments are being made in the technological means to enable this; and large-scale publicity campaigns are underway to encourage it.

The sector-wide shift is contemplated predominantly for economic reasons. In brief, it is held that the costs of direct contact in HE pedagogy are now too high to be managed by public funding or fee regimes, such that HE can be provided equitably across disparate socio-economic strata and territories. Should conviction in direct contact be dislodged, a greater number of students in widely distributed locations (potentially globally) can be processed at low infrastructural and staffing costs – putatively without compromising the academic and pedagogic quality measures that exist.

This sector-wide drift has naturally excited the enthusiasm of education policy makers, university managers and corporate investors in HE. In broad outline, the following points cover the thrust of investigations underpinning the shift so far:

  1. The shift is between two pedagogic poles: full direct contact (in classrooms and tutorials; between students and teachers, amongst students and amongst teachers) on the one hand, and no direct contact (fully technologically mediated teaching and learning) on the other. The shift is not contemplated as abruptly flipping from one pole to the other. Rather, it consists in a gradual process of reducing direct contact and correspondingly increasing mediated contact.
  2. The factors that determine this process are: (a) development of internet-based technological affordances/capacities which may approximate expectations grounded on the norm of direct contact; (b) gradual reduction of infrastructure and staffing resources to acclimatise students to pedagogy by technological mediation; (c) installing measurements of academic quality and pedagogic effectiveness such that this process garners confidence amongst student populations, academic communities and broader publics. Thus, research has focused largely on two issues: first, how to make it technologically possible?; second, how to convince all that it is desirable?
  3. The success of moves in this shift are ultimately always measured in monetary terms: i.e. the financial investment in providing HE should be reduced, while maintaining confidence in the HE ‘product’ such that returns on investment should increase.

However, the norm of direct (face-to-face) contact in HE pedagogy is a powerful one, not easily dispelled, for three reasons:

  1. It continues to be the unquestioned basis of formal school education. The transition from school to HE is therefore likely to be rendered disjunctive/unsettling by this shift.
  2. Conventionally, in HE the entire received system of pedagogic practice (and therefore knowledge production generally) has developed on the precondition of direct contact.
  3. Consequently, the existing measures of pedagogic quality have been firmly based on direct contact. These are embedded in factors such as ‘resources’ or ‘environment’, and in practices such as ‘tutorials’, ‘lectures’, ‘seminars’, ‘conferences’, ‘workshops’, ‘supervision meetings’, etc. The very language of HE pedagogy is premised on direct contact.

Literary Pedagogy 

All the above issues are being intensively researched and investigated to facilitate the sector-wide drift. The thrust of this research is: how to make the shift happen across the sector so that it becomes economically profitable without becoming socially disruptive? The ongoing research is strongly determined by the need to make it happen as a sector-wide strategy. Contrarians articulate their interrogations accordingly, more to question this process in general conceptual terms (and sometimes to highlight inequities) rather than to examine the methodological nuances and integrity of this process from discipline-specific viewpoints.

There is therefore a discipline-specific space in contemplating this process which calls for more attention than it is currently receiving. This discipline-specific space is of especial significance or, rather, appears variously fraught from the perspective of humanistic disciplines, and particularly with literary pedagogy in mind.

That does not mean that the process of this shift should be resisted by literary scholars. It means that the process urgently calls for more careful and deliberative reckoning from the perspective of literary pedagogy than might be the case for some other areas. This reckoning could be with a view to either appropriately informing or carefully adapting the process so that literary pedagogy remains sustainable. The very substantial existing market of literary studies could then not only be suitably catered but expanded further, and the vitality of literary scholarship enhanced.

To convey why the disciplinary perspective of literary pedagogy calls for particular attention apropos of the shift, the somewhat overloaded term ‘culture’ is called upon in a reduced sense here. For present purposes, ‘culture’ refers to social references, allusions, preconceptions which render communication collectively meaningful (i.e. to large or small collectives, at broader or contained levels).

In some academic disciplines – such as mathematics, many areas of the natural sciences and some of the social sciences – there is a high degree of pre-existing consensus on the relevant terminology, evidence bases and inferential methods among scholars. Therefore, scholarly and pedagogic practices for such disciplines generally have a low sensitivity to context-specific cultural characteristics. Their integrity is not indifferent to cultural factors but work relatively consistently across a wide range of cultures.

And in certain academic disciplines – including most areas of the humanities, and particularly literary studies – consensus is sought by constant clarification and negotiation of the relevant terminology, evidence bases and inferential methods among scholars. A continuous interplay between distinct cultures of production and reception and analysis and pedagogy is entailed. Necessarily, a high sensitivity to and awareness of context-specific cultural characteristics is called for. That includes the cultural context in which pedagogy itself is undertaken.

In literary studies, this necessity is embedded in the very structure of disciplinary pursuits and organisation of disciplinary knowledge. Thus, for instance, critically engaging with literary texts calls for joined-up reflection on one or more of the following at the same time:

  • The cultural factors which bear upon the writing of a text in its historical context
  • The cultural circumstances of the historical context wherein the text is made public (the process of publication)
  • The cultures of reading in every period in which the text is perused and discussed
  • The cultures of translation, adaptation, publishing, criticism, pedagogy to which the text is recruited in various periods
  • The present day cultures in which the text is studied again, where its continuing relevance is registered – which is really a way for students to come to grips with and become productive within the cultures of the present in all their complexity and immediacy.

Insofar as literary pedagogy goes, this calls for a clear sense of where, when and why teaching and learning takes place: an immediate apprehension of the social, economic, political, everyday realities amidst which the rigorous discussion of literary texts is undertaken between students and teachers, amongst students and amongst teachers. In this sense, every literary pedagogic space, every classroom, lecture session, tutorial group, seminar group, workspace, etc. forms an immediate cultural grouping. Each of these exist within wider cultures – institutional, regional, and so on — and bear upon the rigorous teaching and learning of literature. Whenever a text is engaged in a tutorial group or a classroom, an immediate set of shared cultural references between students and teachers is called upon, which radiate out to wider collectives. That is the literary pedagogic enterprise.

The Question

In literary pedagogy the norm of direct contact has thus been particularly salient. Direct contact has generally provided the immediate living cultural references that inform teaching and learning. Literary pedagogy has developed through an extended period of disciplinary professionalization, well before ‘literary studies’ in its modern sense emerged in the 19th century, through older teaching and learning practices to do with rhetoric and philology. The real expectations of students, teachers, employers, and society at large with interests in literary studies have been formed accordingly – and these are, in every sense, very large interests.

In contemplating a HE sector-wide or even institutional shift towards increasing degrees of mediated contact (towards a horizon of  minimum or no direct contact), it would be imprudent to consider that mediated contact can replace direct contact on the same terms. The direct-contact teaching space (e.g. classroom) allows for literary pedagogy in a way that a mediated-contact teaching space (e.g. internet forum) cannot. But equally — and this is important — the mediated-contact teaching space might be able to offer modes and models of literary pedagogy which are unavailable in the direct-contact space.

However, the latter possibility has been too little investigated in relation to literary pedagogy. The putative and short-term economic advantages of this shift seem so tempting that HE policy and governance drivers, in government agencies and in educational institutions, are hurrying into precarious, half-baked pushes to make it happen. Breakneck drives for transformation and insistence on embracing change are accordingly enforced. In this vein, it seems expedient to simply try and make mediated contact approximate direct contact as quickly as possible, and to focus on how to do it across the HE sector rather that on what needs to be done for particular parts of the HE sector – such as, for pedagogy in specific disciplines.

Insofar as literary pedagogy goes, it is important that the classroom is a particular sort of cultural formation and the internet forum also a particular sort of cultural formation. They are not the same. The kinds of cultural referents offered by the former are different from the latter. For each, literary teaching and learning have to be arranged accordingly so as to be effective and productive. The direct presence of persons in a classroom allows for relatively easily accessible common cultural reference points. The dispersed presence of participants in an internet forum — perhaps under different political regimes, with different linguistic idioms and abilities, acclimatised to varied social customs – calls for a different way of registering the cultural present. Literary pedagogy is undertaken within and with reference to this awareness of the cultural present.

Given the direction being taken across the HE sector as a whole outlined at the beginning, this situation raises a pressing question for all who participate in literary teaching and learning. The question is best expressed as three questions, but it is really one:

  1. How does direct contact work for literary teaching and learning practices in cultural terms?
  2. How does mediated contact work for literary teaching and learning practices in cultural terms?
  3. In shifting from some element of direct-contact pedagogy towards mediated-contact pedagogy, what needs to be done in practice to ensure that literary pedagogy is enhanced and works in the best interests of students, teachers and society at large?
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Spots of Time

Posted on 15th February 2018 by Emma Claire Sweeney

 

Richard Allen, Emeritus Professor of English (Dean of Arts Faculty 1998-1999, 2000-2007)

The first specialist Literature course, A302 The Nineteenth Century Novel and its Legacy, was half way through its first production when I joined the OU (but not the English Department) in 1973. Before then Literature played just a part in the multi-disciplinary courses that had been produced at levels 1 and 2. Working on a full 60 point canvas was plainly a heady experience and the enthusiasm of the course team was matched by that of the first students. I soon became a part-time tutor for the course and shared that enthusiasm — and the demands of the course. It was wide ranging; Mansfield Park AND Wuthering Heights AND Anna Karenina AND Middlemarch AND Germinal AND Huckleberry Finn to name but some of the texts. It introduced students to literariness but also asked them to read with a sense of literature as involved in the ethical, social, and political. Approaches that were explored in a summer school devoted just to this course. The course ran from 1973 to 1978 — courses were only expected to run for four years then — and then came back by popular demand in 1982 and ran then until 1990.

Later, when I eventually joined the English Department in 1987 (it was the Literature Department then), A319 Literature in the Modern World was part way through its production. The course offered a quite different but equally interesting range of texts as previous courses but marked a major shift in engaging students with the theoretical developments in literary studies of the 1970s and 80s. This latter aspect was not universally popular with students. As course director for a week of the summer school associated with the course, I chaired a feedback session and was getting a good deal of flack from a group of students who seemed to represent the majority. I called on a new person who then said, ‘I just want to say that this course has introduced me to a lot of texts I didn’t know and a lot of new ideas and I’m really glad of that.’ Spontaneous applause showed that she was far from alone and perhaps in a majority. And that’s how it felt as we went on through the years of the course.

And finally, there was A210 Approaching Literature. Literature was in the vanguard of persuading the Faculty to change the policy developed in 1971 which limited specialist subject teaching to level 3. Now we were able to teach Literature in a new way. Positively, in that in such teaching of texts, methods and critical ideas could be spread over two levels (equivalent to two years) — a ladder rather than a single step. Students liked that. This fitted well with a further change that came a few years after, and the Faculty and the University introduced named subject degrees. Again, students liked that. But along with that shift, which brought the OU into the mainstream of UK higher education, came perhaps inevitably a more complex shift — to the world of progression and programmes. Positive again, because it provided in theory a planned rise in difficulty and demand for students; less positive in that it emphasised the frame against the separate elements within — ‘frame’ may here refer to a pedagogical framework or a thematic framework.

Later I learnt more about the system used by most US universities which combine a modular approach with a different kind of frame in which the focus is much less on progression and more on meeting certain conditions linked to skills, but also to coverage, multi-disciplinarity — and the possibility of more intense specialisation. But how could this be relevant given that the ‘international’ OU is firmly linked within UK systems? But how did the original OU academics think outside the box in the 1970s?

Maybe these ‘spots of time’ can — as Wordsworth says — provide ‘a renovating virtue’?

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Expressive writing workshops in Iraq

Posted on 8th February 2018 by Emma Claire Sweeney

Dealing with the past, imagining the future

The effects of war stretch far beyond the battlefield. Many women who have suffered sexual violence in Iraq now find that the process of seeking justice through the legal system inflicts new trauma on them as they are forced to relive their experiences. But new research by Dr. Siobhan Campbell, Dept. of English and Creative Writing, The Open University, and Dr. Meg Jensen of Kingston University London, shows that the use of expressive writing techniques may work to enhance resilience, enable victims to seek justice, and even contribute to social integration.

Expressive life writing is a humanities-based intervention often employed in post-conflict situations, or during periods of cultural reconstruction. Using exercises and prompts adapted by Campbell for the ‘safe place’ created by a workshop, expressive writing can elicit stories in ways that one-to-one interviewing based on current protocols cannot. Campbell’s previous research in non-conflict settings and with combat veterans has demonstrated that the process of writing down reflections and working with the imagination to narrate what is previously unsaid helps survivors ‘detach’ from negative experiences by turning them into shareable stories, thus increasing their sense of well-being and of agency.

How the Expressive Life Writing Project works

Expressive Life Writing puts the creative writing tenet ‘learning by doing’ at its core. It values what can be observed occurring as part of the context of convening, encouraging and recording the writing and the founders believe that the story surrounding the emergent writing should also be told as part of its dissemination.

In 2016-17 we collaborated with INMAA for development, a NGO working to foster human rights and provide legal aid. The aim was to offer expressive writing and telling opportunities to women victims of violence and trauma in Kirkuk Governorate, Iraq.  The project also used iterative practice to work with stakeholders on the ground in order to look at current guidelines on the documentation and investigation of rights violations and suggest adaptations to existing protocols for the interviewing process. We developed this work with the support of Beyond Borders Scotland, a not-for-profit organisation facilitating international cultural exchange, and the research was funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Human Rights fund.

INMAA employ a team of Mobile Human Rights Defenders to document instances of sexual violence in conflict. However, it had come to their notice that as not all cases can be brought the juridical route, there was an opportunity to use the site of interview to begin to elicit and value the stories of individuals in ways which might support them in other ways.

Asmaa Al Ameen (INMAA), Meg Jensen (KUL) and Siobhan Campbell, The Open University

In collaboration with the General Director of INMAA, Asmaa Al Ameen, we developed writing and ‘telling’ (where writing was not useful) exercises in a three-unit model that could be employed at the point of INMAA’s initial interview with prospective clients but that had an implicit follow-up built in, thus making it more likely that the clients would return. We provided training to the social workers in the uses and implications of the workshop exercises, practicing these with them as part of the training. The emphasis was on exercises which allowed for recounting of experience but also for ‘imagining the future self’ as part of the set of tools for enabling the witness/survivor to produce and integrate their whole life story in ways that develop a sense of ownership and agency.

A handbook produced in both English and Arabic, was used by the mobile human rights team.  It contains original Expressive Life Writing exercises and storytelling prompts developed by Siobhan, and is accompanied by guidelines to enable the efficacy of the workshops to be tracked.

Asmaa Al Ameen writes in the project report:

The work by Beyond Borders contract teams from The Open University and Kingston University on the Expressive Writing project has gone well beyond expectations in the depth and comprehensive material they have produced. This in turn enabled the INMAA team to reflect on and improve their working practices especially with respect to the interface with victims/clients. The training you have provided to our team of human rights lawyers and social workers has changed the way we work with victims and allowed us to allow these victims to tell their stories.

INMAA outreach, Kirkuk
What next? Impact for the future

As we gather quantitative and qualitative forms of feedback, Campbell and Jensen will further develop the virtual learning environment toolkit of research-based and practicable teaching materials for effective, creative life narrative workshops in post-conflict contexts.

Identifiable outcomes of this work include:

>> Relationship Building – allowing for adaptive change in contested situations
>> Capacity Building – both among activists and those they serve
>> Learning to Learn – a distinctive ability to self-reflect on practice is engendered
>> Creative Expression and personal sharing – individual experience is valued over process

Already, this work has resulted (January 2018) in the development of a UNDP SIRI (Support for Integrated Reconciliation) project in Iraq where Campbell and Jensen are providing bespoke training in expressive writing techniques and workshop convening to UNDP reps, supplying PowerPoints and handbooks in Arabic for use on the ground.

For post-ISIL Iraq, as outlined by UNDP to Siobhan and Meg, the top priorities are ensuring stability and a return to peaceful coexistence, with a view ultimately towards implementing transitional justice, de-radicalization and institutional reform.

The value placed on individual experience and the possible functional value of expressing and recording that experience in a supportive and coherent space is what training in Expressive Life Writing techniques can help achieve. It can provide a sense of coherence and unity of purpose within the groups that undertake the exercises, discussions and the group workshop work.

With expressive telling and writing, vital goals such as social integration and de-radicalization are supported, since this expressive work values not only the expression of one’s own personal experiences, but the skill of intentionally listening to the experiences of others. In conflict and post-conflict contexts in particular, Expressive Life Writing can provide a powerful counterpoint to pre-existing social and political divisions and mistrust as evidenced by the research of Campbell and Jensen and our projects in Iraq.

For more information contact Siobhan Campbell on Siobhan.Campbell@open.ac.uk

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