Abstract

I was awarded my National Teacher Fellowship in 2007. The award was, in part, a recognition for my work on developing the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Warwick and Oxford Brookes as the Director of the Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research. The Centre sought to connect undergraduate teaching and learning and academic research so that students become part of the academic project of the university: as producers of knowledge and meaning. Since leaving Warwick I have developed this work under the slogan Student as Producer. In this paper I set out the intellectual ideas that lie behind the concept of Student as Producer, and how that idea is being developed across the sector and at the University of Lincoln. The theoretical basis for my work is derived from critical social theory grounded in avant-garde Marxism that developed in Soviet Russia after the Bolshevik uprising in 1917, before being suppressed by Stalin, and a group of modernist Marxists working in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. A key issue for Student as Producer is that social learning is more than the individual learning in a social context, and includes the way in which the social context itself is transformed through progressive pedagogic practice. This transformation includes the institution within which the pedagogical activities are taking place, and the society out of which the particular institution is derived. At a time when the market-based model for social development appears increasingly untenable, the creation of a more progressive and sustainable social world becomes ever more necessary and desirable. Work on developing the principles and practice of Student as Producer are currently funded through the National Fellowship Project Scheme 2010 – 2013