http://www.lancs.ac.uk/dialogue_nw/index.htm

Success is the Journey not the Destination
Introduction
Please note: this PDF version does not contain the many links to websites and documents that are available on the website version. This is available at: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/dialogue_nw/events/success/index.htm
This short booklet is an edited collection of the ideas and resources which were presented at the Dialogue NW event at Blackpool College in October 2009 called
Success: Never Standing Still. We hope that those who attended will be able to use the resources and activities themselves and that it will be stimulating as well as useful for those who were unable to attend.
As with all of Dialogue NW activities this event was more than a training session telling people how to do it – instead we wanted to provide a space for critical discussion and reflection. Our focus was on the learners and what success meant to them, acknowledging that this may be very different to official concerns and discourses around recruitment, retention and achievement.
If we start from the learner, then success is more about the journey than crossing an imaginary finishing line: it is about the hurdles, the timing and in some cases the stamina to finish what might feel like a gruelling race. It also allows us to appreciate that the journey is not always straightforward and it is often easier when travelling with others. It is much more than the bullet point statements often used to describe or monitor success.
We started the day by thinking how learner and institutional perspectives on what counts as success may be different. Comments and discussion from participants suggested that although we know about these differences we often get drawn into organisational or official views of success, putting our own professional knowledge on the back boiler. People felt that professional