Professional identity and the LD project podcast

The Learning Development Project podcast was established in summer 2022 to open up the conversation around writing in Learning Development, as we believe that publication should not be the end of the story. We always ask our guests about their relationship with writing since part of the reason we invite them onto the podcast is because they have written something that has resonated with colleagues or had impact on practice. They are writers, and we invite them in that capacity. But how do we see ourselves? And how do others see us? We are writers, authors, podcasters, academics, leaders, colleagues, editors, amongst other labels. However, while there are certain stable aspects to our self-identity, there are less stable ones – such as being a writer – that need to be constantly negotiated. If writing is an important aspect of your identity, how do you get others to see that importance, and support it

Great expectations: our writing tendencies for actionable self-knowledge

We all know that writing for publication is a valuable activity and one that many of us aspire to. We have previously presented it as a form of liberatory practice for Learning Development (Syska and Buckley, 2022) showing how it allows us to shape and develop our ideas as part of a wider conversation in LD, and how in doing so it helps to build the field and our own professional profiles. Yet many of us struggle to write. We explored some of the reasons behind this in a small study and although lack of time is consistently cited as a factor, we believe the root of the issue lies in managing the expectations we have for ourselves alongside those that others have for us and, most crucially, how we respond to those.   In her book The Four Tendencies, Gretchen Rubin identified that internal and external expectations, enmeshed with our particular predisposition when it comes to responding to tasks, go far to explain ‘why we act and why we don’t act’ (Rubin, 2017, p.12). While her Tendencies relate to the four possible combinations of meeting or not meeting inner and outer expectations generally, we have translated this specifically to writing as a way of understanding why many people struggle to write and how they can be supported. The four writing tendencies we have identified – Strivers, Pragmatists, Actualisers and Freelancers – have their own blocks to writing, but also have their own strategies for effectively overcoming those blocks. In this presentation we therefore outlined the nature of the four writing tendencies, helped participants identify their own, and showed how self-knowledge can have a significant impact on our approach to writing, which we can then pass on to our students

Peer reviewing as community building

Peer reviewing is unquestionably the cornerstone of scholarly activity. It is universally seen as one of the very few ways we have to ensure that what gets published has been subjected to rigorous scrutiny by peers. Entering into this dialogue with other experts in the field is of tremendous benefit to authors, even if it hurts sometimes. But it is also so much more than that: peer reviewing helps us develop our own research and thinking capabilities, improve our criticality, and hone the skill of providing constructive feedback. Peer reviewing is an act of service that makes us a better, stronger, and more resilient academic community. Like all acts of service, it relies on the good that is in us: being generous with time and personal resources, being committed to helping others, having a sense of reciprocal responsibility, feeling a constant desire to learn, and being open to dialogic exchange with authors and editors. I believe it is this dialogic exchange that brings us together as a community. As Co-Lead Editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education (JLDHE), the questions I was interested in exploring included: How do we ensure that every voice feels valued in peer review? How do we encourage sharing diverse perspectives to achieve better publishing outcomes? How do we attract peers to reviewing and use their goodwill to build a strong, proud, and sustainable scholarly community in learning development? </jats:p

Using Documentary Film as a Historical Source

This case study provides guidance on how to engage with film as a historical source. Using the documentary Life is Not Black and White (1977) as an example demonstrates how to deconstruct a film and critically evaluate it as a primary source while being mindful of its potential uses as a secondary source. Different types of films may call for different approaches, and there is no magic recipe for a critical analysis of any moving image. All films, however, regardless of their purpose—and this includes newsreels and documentaries—adopt certain narrative conventions and visual techniques that create particular meanings. They also use creative license and a complex visual lexicon to immerse the viewer in the world presented on the screen. This study shows that a careful dissection of the content of the film, followed by a close analysis of the context of its creation combined with information about how the film was viewed and received, can lead to discovering its full potential as a historical source. While we should be careful when relying on film as a source and consider the issues of intention, authenticity, and restrictions on the film-making process, this study argues that a rigorous ‘reading’ of the film may provide material worthy of historical inquiry and offers tools required to embrace it as a valid historical methodology

Editorial

We are thrilled to present to you the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education’s Collaborative Conference Proceedings and Reflections – a collection of collaboratively written reports from the annual ALDinHE Conference that took place online and in person in June 2022. The conference participants this year had a unique opportunity to interact with the content of the presentations beyond the conference space, by contributing to the presenters’ open documents that gathered audiences’ comments, responses, questions, and suggestions the presenters considered and reflected on after the talk. In this sense, these reports are so much more than conference proceedings – they are an extension of the conference beyond the confines of the physical and temporal spaces demarcated by the event. </jats:p

Posters as Primary Source Documents: Analysing a Twentieth-Century Public Health Poster

This case study will demonstrate how to approach a poster as a historical source and how to understand what it tells us about the past. Posters are powerful and evocative documents that combine striking images and often hard-hitting words in order to seduce, inform, and persuade their viewers to take the desired action. While they are meant to work at a glance and generate an instant reaction in the viewer, what you will learn in this study is that a careful process of description followed by analysis and historical contextualisation can reveal surprising layers of meaning in a poster. Their clever arrangement of visual symbolism and verbal invocations, their emotional aspects, and their calls to action make them a unique mode of communication and persuasion. The poster analysed in this study, ‘The Next to Go – Fight Tuberculosis!’, exemplifies these features while demonstrating that it has both local (American) and global (universal) characteristics. While different poster traditions developed in different time periods and cultures throughout the long twentieth century, increased cultural globalisation almost universally enabled their successful deployment by governments, organisations, and individual actors across the world. Understanding how posters work within these specific contexts and traditions and what kind of evidence they offer to a historian will increase your confidence in using them as primary sources