"Fostering student self-awareness and agency are vital in building sustainable approaches to learning and personal/professional growth. An unexamined life lived without reflection or self-awareness risks perpetuating learned assumptions, limiting curiosity and undermining engagement," says Dr Gwen Lettis.
Self-awareness enables students to interrogate their values, beliefs and motivations, enabling them to make informed choices about who they are and who they wish to be. “Croí” (Irish for “Heart”) is a process that uses these ideas as a foundation. The process is under development at Munster Technological University (MTU) in Ireland as a tool to help students (UG and PG) clarify their values and goals and integrate them into their work. Students engage in a self-led step-by-step process, which uses a validated value questionnaire and behaviour development approaches (e.g. goal clarification, visualisation, reflection, commitment making) to enhance the potential for meaningful development. Some evidenced impacts are shown in Fig 1 below (Lettis, 2022).
Education isn’t ‘a moment of arrival’, it is better viewed as an ongoing process of becoming. As learners we gain insights and shape personal and professional identity as a result of continual experience, reflection and dialogue; after all, learning has communal as well as individual dimensions. Shared learning environments challenge perspectives, develop empathy and foster deeper understanding. Engaging in the co-construction of knowledge, skills and positive learning dispositions affords students opportunities to see themselves not as passive recipients of learning, but as agents and contributors in the process. Underlying dispositions and beliefs shape how we all engage with challenge, uncertainty and even success. While resilience is often championed as a virtue, resilience without self-compassion can lead to burnout and excessive self-criticism. Balancing perseverance and determination with kindness towards oneself nurtures sustainable growth and emotional well-being.
In the development of Croí, the initial aim was to evaluate its impact in relation to sustainability or “responsibility”, the idea being that if students more deliberately align their professional development with the personal, there can be knock-on benefits for the environment, economy and society too. Croí has been shown to have impact in this regard by helping students to think more responsibly, engage in practical self-enquiry, to self-regulate their action and to develop behavioural intention. Key to the process is the idea that it is important for students to clarify their personal values and goals, so as to develop intrinsic motivation to act as well as think in accordance with their values and goals. Croí aims to allow students to clarify who they are and what they want to become, so they can have stronger agency in the direction they take in their education and their career. It can be argued that use of behaviour development approaches as well as pedagogical approaches is a departure for universities that traditionally encourage development in thinking. The self-led nature of the process is key to encouraging students to take ownership of their path and also ensures that students are not indoctrinated into a particular set of beliefs.
The ‘massification’ of HE means that being as impactful as possible with decidedly finite resources is the only sensible, sustainable approach and enabling students is a key component. Tutors as simple transmitters of information is an unsustainable model if we wish to see high levels of student completion and success. We have to hone our facilitation skills if we are to create spaces for reflection, dialogue, experimentation and help students in navigating complexity and uncertainty with increasing confidence. Genuine recognition, parity of esteem and celebration of the importance of these contributions to learner development and outcomes (through high quality CPD, promotion pathways, awards and leadership opportunities) all signal an institutional culture that values these aspects of a university’s mission. Even the most well-designed learning and teaching strategies, such as Croí, will likely falter if institutional culture does not support and value continuous learning amongst staff; the clue is in the title, it’s supposed to be continuous, not episodic. There are many clever tactics that we can use to make finite resource go as far as possible (e.g. local communities of practice; peer champions; scholarship work; co-creation) but ultimately there needs to be a recognition that failure to invest will prove to be an unsustainable false economy in the medium to long term.
MTU’s development of Croí is an example of this investment in action. Supported by the Higher Education Authority’s (HEA) Strategic Alignment of Teaching and Learning Enhancement (SATLE) funding, Croí is designed to be a foundation for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) by encouraging students to practice responsible thinking, self-enquiry, self-regulation and to have behavioural intention. Our evidence shows that key developments occur as a result of using Croí. Students report clarification of values and goals, increased self-awareness, positive feelings including satisfaction, increased ability to articulate who they are and communicate this with lecturers. Interestingly, this can lead to improved dialogical exchange between student and tutor. This gives the educator the opportunity to tutor in a way that is more authentic to the student’s true values and goals and gives the student a positive learning disposition and confidence to be who they are which can lead to more meaningful work.
What began as a niche, discipline-specific tool is now transforming into a widely transferable Open Educational Resource (OER). It is freely available to the MTU community and, via The National Resource Hub and YouTube, to educators and students throughout Ireland and beyond. Now in the middle of a three-year project, the Croí team is testing and refining the tool. While current evaluations are taking place within MTU, the team will soon be collaborating with external researchers to further prove its success and ensure Croí is as impactful and accessible as it can be.
To access Croí:
- https://hub.teachingandlearning.ie/resource/croi-your-life-your-career/
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBXrWAq3msj_Lj04FAqdcVjJOwdd5BijW
Gwen Lettis, Visual Communications lecturer at MTU Cork, researches Education for Sustainable Development, focusing on integrating personal values into student work processes. She currently leads “Croí,” a project developing a university-wide digital tool to help students apply their core values and goals to their future careers. You can find out more here.
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