Our New Blog

Welcome to our SharedThinking blog. This is a new addition to the site and something we'll be expanding over time. The blog is centred upon our activities, our research and above all our way of thinking about key problems in learning. That is a view of learning at different levels so we consider the individual but more specifically share a focus on key levels between the group (together or distributed), organisations, institutions and cross-sectional perspectives at the social and cultural levels. In that sense, we are much less preoccupied with the individual level of learning or at least we see the individual development in direct relation to the social and cultural levels. 

We are interested in theory and practice. This includes different theoretical frameworks but principally Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, Turner etc) and a family of related theories are quite central to our thinking. We are interested in practice which organises, structures and mediates learning and development as a group(s). 

We are interested in addressing a number of learning and identity-related challenges. Student-Generated Induction is probably the most widely adopted. That has gone into insitutions throughout the UK and we've been running workshops to support that for 7 years now. Other challenge solutions are being developed and they will be reviewed here on the blog over time. 

Our research is still in its early stages as we come to understand our practice. They should and do inform each other as we continue our work. Again some of our publications will be discussed here on the blog. We will also be developing new studies and re-evaluating that initial body as our understanding grows. We are already collaborating with different academics and universities on a range of ideas to advance our research in new settings. That work will be discussed here. 

Finally, we will also add mention of our events here on the blog. We have been providing professional development for this kind of work since 2012 and it continues today. We have delivered bespoke workshops, national workshops and delivered sessions at various conferences including keynotes at Library and student experience conferences. These events will be announced on the site but also reviewed and discusesed here on the blog. 

Hopefully this immediate piece has given some pointers to the general flavour and content of the blog. It is new so we expect it to evolve and that be quite intermittent at times. We anticipate it will have value to support reflection both for ourselves and hopefully for others as the blog develops. Thank you for reading this far and if you would like to get in touch please email: contact@sharedthinking.info