Value Cards

Learning should not be over-assessed and instrumentalised. Teaching should share a focus on employability and success with an understanding of the value of rich experience, creativity, curiosity and – sometimes – failure.

• “The university should be a space for learning and un-learning.” (NFT Blog, BME Liberation Group)
• “The risk of reducing every aspect of learning to a form of economic capital.” (NFT Blog, Blockchain)
• “Is a future without failure a good future? What is the educational value of mistakes?” (NFT Blog, NFT Think Tank: Vets)
• “The opportunity to wonder about stuff… I think that if you lock that off too much you will be too deterministic.” (NFT Video, Values 2)
• “We resist hierarchies that defer to credentials before and above the learned experiences of teachers, students and non-academics on the ground.” (Student Occupation)

Diversity enhances education by exposing learners to diverse perspectives and experiences. However, financial barriers lower accessibility to education; students are living under debt and increasingly high living and course costs, while many staff face precarity due to zero-hour contracts or poverty wages. Where possible, education should be inclusive and promote forms of diversity.

Relationships, dialogues and personal exchanges between students and staff build understanding in a way that transmissive forms of teaching can’t.

Teaching should be designed to provide the time and space for proper relationships and meaningful human exchange.

• “… emphasis for the most part on intimacy or development of relationships.” (NFT Blog, Collider)
• “Continuing desire for personal contact with academics and teachers, but perhaps more as guides and mentors than as didactic lecturers.” (NFT Blog, Pilot Workshop 1)
• “I hope all this technology will allow a more intense dialogue between teachers and students – and teachers not being the ones who detain or have all the knowledge.” (NFT Video, Community)
• “I 100% believe that education is about dialogue.. It’s about a conversation between people.” (NFT Video, Humans)
• “A huge part of learning is about… discussing ideas, benefiting from someone else’s experiences.” (NFT Video, Humans)

The university community should cooperatively shape how – and what – it learns and teaches. Flexibility for individuals, fluency across disciplines and cooperative responsibility for curricula should shape near future teaching.

• “Possibility that students might craft their own learning pathways.” (NFT Blog, Blockchain)
• “We resist the undemocratic and opaque governance of our university.” (Student Occupation)
• “The dissolution of the university as gatekeeper of academic value.” (NFT Blog, Blockchain)
• “I really do value that personal one-on- one experience with a lecturer.” (NFT Video, Humans)
• Use a range of technologies to make the individual learning experience more flexible and tailored.” (NFT Blog, Pilot Workshop 1)
• “Staff and students need to pull together against efforts to run universities like big businesses.” (Student Occupation)