Author: Maren Deepwell

Like everyone else, I found last year very tough indeed, even with several key advantages: I have years of experience in my role; I had weathered other crisis before this one and I knew how to manage some of what 2020 threw at us; I had successfully led the transition to us working online a few years ago and we were thus able to continue our work with less disruption than many others. I am proud of what I achieved last year, and what I was able to contribute to the continued success of the organisation, to the well being of our staff and to the efforts of our Members.

As I head back to my desk in 2021, I feel like I am starting a new job and I have blogged about looking ahead here and also in this post. I wrote about how being the CEO of a small, independent charity, the leading professional body for Learning Technology and an organisation who used to rely on face to face events for 50% of its annual turnover is a very different ballgame in this new context.

I feel it is important to re-examine the context my professional practice as a leader, as someone working in Learning Technology, as the CEO of a small, independent charity, as a feminist and as a human being in order to be mindful of why my voice and my work have value and relevance.

To find inspiration in what I can achieve and where I am making a difference even as global events continue to unfold.

Situating my professional practice

I recently read a very elegant and eloquent book How to Make Art at the End of the World (Loveless 2019) and I was struck by how powerful an introduction the author opened with. Not only did that first chapter provide a clear and convincing argument, but it very intentionally situated the professional practice and perspective of the author within a wider context.

With everything that is going on in the world, I feel this kind of situating is becoming ever more important, and I would like to reflect on some of the key points Natalie Loveless and explore how they relate to my approach to leadership. As an aside, as far as I can see, this is an excellent read beyond the introduction, so if powerfully theoretical discourse on artistic research and academic practice is your thing, I would strongly recommend this book 🙂

Acknowledging fierce, feminist, decolonial colleagues

In the acknowledgements Loveless mentions how much her work depends on and is inspired by colleagues in her university and whilst I work in a much small organisation, I have built up a strong network of ‘fierce, feminist, decolonial colleagues’. It takes extra energy to be all of those things in the challenging times that we live in and enduring this pandemic has certainly made it even more important to stay principled in professional practice. Finding time to address these issues through volunteering or activity in networks has been nearly impossible, so instead I have and will continue to use my sphere of influence to make a difference in whatever small ways I can: donating free conference places or speaker fees, promoting voices that would otherwise find it hard to find an audience and highlighting inequality and the actions we can take to address them everywhere I go.

Acknowledging my context

In one of the paragraphs in the introduction, Loveless reflects on how her “arguments and examples sometimes fail to fully account for the ways in which similar debates have been taken up… [by] voice and texts from other cultural, geographic, or institutional locations” going on to say that she recognises that by choosing one perspective, informed by her context and training, results in another perspective not being told. “All I can hope is that what is missing does not overshadow what is present, and that the claims at the heart of this book come across with respect and care” (p. 13-14).

Over the past year I have worked at educating myself about issues such as how to promote gender equality, fight digital poverty and racism in Learning Technology, and that has made be ever more aware of how many blind spots I have. I want to get better at acknowledging my own context, the relative privilege that shapes my view of the world and my identity.

Being ALT’s CEO gives me the opportunity to give a platform to others, but it also requires me to represent the views and voices of the community I represent. Part of my job is being visible, to have a public profile, to be on stage and to have a voice. And I very much relate to Loveless’s aim to get her message across with respect and care and an awareness of my own context.

Working in… compromised times

Since working in a leadership role, things have certainly changed in the world and writing this in lockdown in a country in which I, as a European, am now more formally classed as an immigrant and required to have proof that I am allowed to access medical care or work makes this even more palpable.

“There is no longer any question that we are living in compromised times, within which the fantasy of an uncompromised self is isolationist, privileged and dangerous (Shotwell 2016). Global ecological and economic collapse are discussed with alarming regularity in the newspapers and newsfeeds that surround us” (p.16). All this has a direct impact on my professional practice.

Part of my job as CEO is to manage risk, and this certainly has become more ‘red’ as various crisis hit us.

My responsibility is to enable the organisation to fulfil its strategic mission, to achieve its aims – and also to ensure that we contribute to the public good.

To make a positive difference to Learning Technology professionals and the work that they do, in very compromised times.

Every few years, usually a year ahead of when a new strategy is due, I undertake a thought experiment. I imagine what it would be like to apply for my job afresh and sometimes in my head and sometimes on paper, I write out a new statement of why I want to be the CEO of ALT, what I bring to the role and what my vision is for the organisation going forward just as I did in 2011 during what seemed like endless rounds of the recruitment process.

This time, as I put myself in this position, the role I am imagining has changed completely. My job has always had a lot of new challenges in it and many steep learning curves, and I love that about it. I enjoy not knowing what kind of new problems each day may bring with it. It’s never boring and it keeps me interested, keeps me developing and upping my game.

2021 is definitely going to require levelling up in more ways than one.

Running a small business, pandemic style

Running a small business, which ALT as a independent charity with a turnover of £500k a year and six employees essentially is, in a pandemic which has wiped out half of its revenue streams at least for a couple of years is going to require a completely different approach to the growing, steady and thriving concern I was building a year ago. It’s a new challenge to work as a team to restructure how we work, what we focus on and how we invest our charitable income to the maximum benefit of our community.

The past few months have shown an upward trend that proves that the measures our Board took and the strategies we have implemented work, so that I feel we are heading in the right direction. With a competent staff team and many committed volunteers, we have everything we need to succeed in 2021 and I am looking forward to writing a business plan that we may actually be able to implement instead of the many versions I drafted last year and which were rapidly overtaken by events.

Working with new audiences

Like many colleagues who work in Learning Technology, I spent most of last year having to adapt to a whole new audience: the biggest group were the ‘just discovered EdTech‘ learners, parents, teachers, policy makers and the general public whose first real experience of what is possible when you use technology for learning, teaching and assessment was the emergency response to COVID-19. Needless to say, that was less than ideal.

For the newbies, the confused, those looking for help and advice, I am going to offer signposting to practical resources, ways to get involved in the right networks, talks that provide some context and help levelling up an understanding of educational technology basics. In short, ways to make sense of what is going on, help to avoid ‘known issues’ and, importantly, I will highlight that there are professionals such as learning technologists, instructional designers, educational, academic technologists, librarians, IT champions and many more who have the expertise to help find the way forward. Learning Technology may not have met a crisis like this one before, but we do have the know-how, research and policies to scale up and skill up.

A second growing group I am working with are those moving from islands of innovation to navigating an ocean, those who are trying to find a way to make effective use of Learning Technology at scale – but not necessarily with a proportionally greater workforce of EdTech experts.

Part of my role is to educate organisations and in particular leaders about the value of professional expertise that Learning Technologists and other experts have, where to recruit them and how to use professional frameworks such as ALT’s CMALT framework in order to align role descriptions and rewards structures appropriately. This is also where our networks knowledge exchange opportunities are essential and where I can contribute a wider perspective on developments across the UK.

My core community are those who have real expertise and experience in Learning Technology. All of whom have done a year of heavy lifting through ever increasing pivots online, creating and sharing resources, running support sessions, advocating for safeguarding the well being and safety of staff and students as educational technology became an emergency response.

More than ever before, my job here is to fight for professional recognition and reward, to influence policy makers and leaders to take on board the expertise of those who know how to tackle the challenges ahead of us and – to champion their voices.

Yet there is also a need for working on the darker impacts of the past year: acknowledging burnout and exhaustion, overwork and stress across sectors. Taking action against those who are profiteering from the EdTech emergency response, who are taking unethical practices and scaling them up. Surfacing the impact of digital poverty affecting students and staff.

Together, these three stakeholder groups open up a new direction for my role as CEO, and for ALT as the UK’s leading professional body for Learning Technology which was established in 1993.

Setting new aims

Last year gave me a new context and a rapidly expanding group of stakeholders. So I am starting 2021 with a very different job to the one I had a year ago and that is exciting.

With the input from a strong and strategic Board of Trustees, the results from ALT’s Annual Survey (which is still open for responses until 11 January 2021) and the expertise of our staff team, it will be interesting to see what new aims we set out for the year ahead.

One project I know that I am going to contribute to is ALT’s Ethical Framework for Learning Technology, setting out principles for the ethical use of Learning Technology by professionals, institutions and industry.

Let’s see where we go from here 🙂