Workshop: Bending the Rules with Dr Gurham Singh

On March 18th this year, I attended an online workshop with Dr Gurham Singh titled Bending the Rules: Enhancing Assessment for Equity. This session was organised by the AEM team and is available through the AEM and Attainment Resources Moodle page.

I had actually heard of Dr Gurham Singh before, as his name was mentioned in one of our early PgCert classes. I noted down that he is Visiting fellow in Race and Education at UAL. Further from my notes I have written down in my notebook; ‘let’s not teach our students as customers. Individuals. Holistic. Belonging. From customer care to pedagogy of caring.’ To offer further info on Singh’s work, he is currently Principal Lecturer in Social Work at Coventry University and Visiting Professor of Social Work at the University of Chester. His bio on the university website reads:

‘I describe myself as an academic activist in that what inspires me both in my teaching and research is the desire to transform individuals and society. I always seek to deploy a critical sociological imagination in my work as well as espousing democratic, humanitarian and universal principles. My belief is that committed scholarship has the potential to enable human societies to respond to the challenge of all kinds of inequalities, at the local, national or global level.’

I also came across an article on the Shades of Noir website from February 2019, recapping a workshop titled: HOW TO FACILITATE OPEN DISCUSSIONS ABOUT RACISM, IMPLICIT BIAS AND STEREOTYPES IN THE WORKSHOP SETTING BY DR. GURNAM SINGH, CBE. I find these notes about being human important:

‘To define a human is to understand another as a thinking/feeling being. ‘Rooted in ‘humanitas (Latin)’, meaning as ‘human nature, and/or kindness’, to understand humanity and value everybody’s right to think is to begin on the path to true commital to social justice education.’

About the Bending the Rules workshop – I found this very interesting and informative. Singh – describing himself as an academic activist – started off with a broader view of our current society and climate – what is happening in the world right now. (See slide above) In the last year, we have seen the murder of George Flloyd and the BLM protests that followed, lived through several lockdown and Covid-19, we have endured Brexit and Trump, and there are the recent (well overdue) discussions around the safety of girls and women after the recent murder of Sarah Everard as well the interview with Meghan and Harry and their revelations about the royal family. He questioned: What is this moment of crisis? Describing it as a ‘reflective post-modernity moment’, Gurham Singh talks about the despair but also the hope born out of our reactions to these events. The world is not fixed – we have the power to change. We can’t go back, but we’re not quite sure how to go forward. He says:

“We must embrace this new world where every human being is valued according to their natural gifts and capabilities rather than what society deems they are limited by.”

I found this summary of recent events interesting. It was also a throwback to my time as a trend researcher as these ‘macro trends’ are an important part of how a trend forecaster starts their research, by looking at key events happening in the world around us and linking this to how we may collectively as well as individually respond to this.

Following this broader look on events, Dr Gurham Singh moved on to focusing on assessment and how there are changes happening within this field also. The power dynamics between teacher and student is transforming into one that is more balanced rather than the educator holding the higher power. He says: “we are moving into a role of us being curators of learning and for some people that is really threatening”. We may need to re-evaluate our academic identities where we are all curators of learning. This includes the methods of assessment – something we have had to question due to the changes in circumstances during lockdown and online studies. We need to learn to bend rules or think beyond rules.

About equity – I find this very important and interesting. Equity is about not treating people the same, as in fact doing so would would be unequal. The quote in the above slide is very important and links very well to my previous blog post AEM, Equality vs Equity, Assessment. We must be aware of the different barriers students are facing and support each individual in the best way necessary in order to not only make assessments fair but also to let them feel that they belong in that space. Belonging feeds confidence, which creates happier, more successful students.

“Maybe bending rules is just another word for creativity and innovation.”

Overall this workshop was set to challenge our perceptions of the traditional methods of assessment and to be open new methods as without breaking the rules we will not develop. We must assess with equity of collective input and remember that students are people and individuals. It is also interesting to question why it is that in our society we put most value in the written word and what we can do to change this in order to be more inclusive.