Reimagining the curriculum as social enterprise

Andy Pitchford
Head of CETI

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28 March 2025

Two men with big bushy beards have had a disproportionate impact on my academic career. While I am grateful for their influence, for reasons that I will now explore, I am occasionally troubled by the beards themselves.

Although my experience of them was something like 15 years apart, I am convinced they were identical. Both seemed to have a life of their own. They were Bellamy-like in their voluminousness, possibly with things growing in them. They curled and twirled and swirled a bit in the wind. I am pretty sure that the people behind them were different, but maybe – maybe – the beards were the same. I will continue to ponder this, and perhaps we can have a chat about my conclusions one day, but in the meantime let me tell you about the beardy interventions and why they were so important.

The first gargantuan whiskers belonged to a Canadian seminar leader on my BSc Politics, back in the 1980s. He led a 2^nd year class on Marx, and got quite frustrated with the inability of my group to fully grasp some of the fundamental concepts including the old chestnuts of alienation, exploitation and surplus value. Try as he might in the classroom, we were too dozy, hungover or disinterested to get it. So he took a radical step and organised some field visits for us. To a factory, a building site and a supermarket. With his encouragement we interviewed workers about their daily lives, and with the combination of their gritty honesty, the fresh air and a different environment, eventually the pennies dropped for us. Ever since then I have been interested the use of new settings where knowledge can be applied or made relevant, or where a context gives the credence or causality or confidence that was somehow missing in a classroom. This interest in experiential learning, in ‘learning by doing’, led me to many adventures with what we might now call community engaged or service learning.

Some considerable time later, and by now an established lecturer and course leader, I thought I had cracked the challenge of how to connect communities and the curriculum. We had hundreds of students at our university out on placement-type activities, others running research projects in local charities and there were all kinds of events where we invited local neighbourhoods onto our campus to engage with our subjects. Students were happy and it couldn’t have been going any better. We thought we were the Bees Knees. And then the second beard turned up, or possibly the first one did for the second time around. This time it was worn by a visiting American scholar, for whom ideas of experiential learning were rather old hat. It turned out that he had been running these kinds of projects for decades. He asked a very simple question, which was ‘have you asked local communities what they actually want, or are you just imposing your ideas and needs upon them?’ And that rather stopped us in our tracks. Because we hadn’t.

We were now able to see that we had spent several years ‘scatter-gunning’ students across our local neighbourhoods, without ever really asking what the community ‘need’ or ‘ask’ might be. We were relying on the generosity of partners, and we were doing things to them and maybe for them, but rarely with them. We were causing considerable confusion as a result, and also expecting those partners to take on the burden of the support that the students needed in those settings. So we tried to re-imagine our work.

At this point in time the Blair government in the UK was promoting the idea of social enterprise. Despite some associated controversies, this work was helpful in encouraging us to rethink how a university might act. Instead of regarding external groups and agencies as subservient to our needs, we began to see our potential place in the local eco-system. Listening and consulting, acting with patience for the long term, and prioritising the needs of others came to the forefront of our thinking. Universities could take more responsibility for their impact on their locale, and perhaps even be strategic or deliberate in their pursuit of interventions that prioritised social justice

Of course there are other departments in a university whose gaze will be cast beyond the gates of the campus. Research, marketing, outreach, sports and estates are all functions with responsibilities beyond the front door, so there is a clear need for joined up thinking and the type of horizontal work that universities have seemed allergic to in the past. Working in this ‘horizontal’ fashion was painful at times but it overcame some of the difficulties that external partners face when working with higher education institutions.

For the curriculum, the implications of this new vision were to prioritise those pedagogical modes that were focused on listening. Research-oriented interventions can achieve this to an extent, for example through the medium of consultation exercises, but the tradition of Science Shops had most to teach us here. These shops are small entities that carry out research or knowledge exchange on behalf of local communities or organisations. They respond to demand rather than impose a need. Science Shop staff listen to communities and then package their challenges or problems in ways that groups of students find meaningful, and these projects then become ‘live’ in the curriculum.

Citizens UK: A Whole New Ball Game

Another approach, which we are starting to introduce at Westminster, is the community organising methodology promoted by our partners at Citizens UK. At the heart of this is the development of listening skills, and students are encouraged to engage in listening campaigns as part of their formal studies. The more that is understood about the needs of local communities, the more likely it is that a university’s response in this space is likely to be apposite or welcomed.

Depending on the scale of an institution, there may be other ways that the university can ‘listen’ effectively. Senior Leaders, Development Teams, research institutes and outreach departments can all contribute, but the point here is that the curriculum itself can be repurposed or reimagined to make a major contribution. With appropriate support, students are able to engage with and listen to local partners and stakeholders, and to respond to the needs identified – and will learn a great deal along the way. From repair shops to time banks to living labs; and from the commissioning of art to the development of community events, wellbeing clinics and neighbourhood advice shops, we can find vehicles that enable students to deploy their skills for wider benefits. But if we are to heed the lessons of social enterprise, and engage properly with our local partners, we also need to find ways to open up our imaginations and our ability to listen properly.

Conclusion

I thank the beard, or beards, for the two visits I’ve described here, and hope that this short story encourages you to do two things. First, value the innovations and challenges that the beards in your life might bring to you. And second, try to imagine what your modules or courses might bring to local communities if we can focus on empathetic relationships that foster long term benefits for all.

Image: Curated Lifestyle via UnSplash

About the Author

Andy is the Head of the Centre for Education and Teaching Innovation at the University of Westminster. He has led community engagement initiatives in universities for the past 30 years and was awarded an Advance HE National Teaching Fellowship in 2015 in recognition of this work. With David Owen and Ed Stevens, he published the Handbook of Authentic Learning with Routledge in 2021.