Avid readers of this blog might recall that I completed the University’s Teaching and Learning Support Programme in 2011. I recently took the opportunity to complement this valuable training by attending a subject-specific event run by the Council for College and University English, at Keele University.
The event began with a fruitful workshop on close reading, where the teachers became the taught! Dusting off memories of our distant undergraduate days, we were grouped with unfamiliar faces and given unknown poems to dissect and discuss. After the brief thrill of together turning words into meanings, we reflected on the role of close reading in our classrooms: What is it for? What kinds of students does it accommodate? How can we model it better?
Always an important aspect of any such gathering, dinner gave the opportunity to meet other delegates: inspiring and energetic people, all of whom are committed to teaching well. On the second day we continued to learn from one another’s experiences and observations, specifically exploring techniques for lecturing and small group teaching. There were eruptions of laughter, as the occasional improbably awkward teaching experience was recounted, and the appreciative scurry of pen on paper as we recorded others’ ideas for how to engage students.
Professor Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway) then provoked our understanding of ‘The Identity of the English Lecturer’, digging for the unconscious philosophies marking every moment of our teaching. For example, what are we silently saying through the shapes of our classrooms?
The event proved to be a precious opportunity to reflect on my teaching practice among a cheerful community of early career peers. I left newly invigorated to exploit connections between my teaching practice and research activities, and counting many new colleagues as fellow travellers on that adventure.
‘What did I do wrong?’ may be a sadly familiar phrase to tutors when notifying students of poor academic practice in their written work. It was chosen for the title of our collaborative TLDF-funded project because it captures the confusion and lack of understanding which is characteristic in student responses to plagiarism and poor academic practice accusations. Such accusations can destroy the confidence and downgrade the final result for otherwise intelligent, committed and hardworking students. Our project aims to uncover some of the reasons why student difficulties with referencing arise, and collate good practice teaching materials for use in subject teaching and for self-development throughout the University.
Difficulties with referencing and plagiarism are an area of concern for all HE institutions in the UK. Problems go beyond knowing how and when to write a citation. Both tutors and students regularly report a failure to understand the purpose of referencing to support a critical discussion. This inability to apply principles of rigorous independent learning goes to the heart of poor academic writing.
There have been increasing efforts on the part of academic departments and central services to provide solutions to this problem through guides, taught sessions, exercises and digital tools like Turnitin. We are all far too busy to keep re-inventing the wheel! So the primary aim of the project is to collate best practice examples of teaching materials and make them available in a format which can be easily adapted for other departments.
We also hope to discover why it is that, even where there is plentiful, comprehensive and highlighted guidance, student difficulties persist. Why are students not using – or not understanding – the guidance available? How can we best persuade them to take referencing at university seriously? We plan to include suggestions with the ‘toolkit’ of teaching materials.
While we are limited by the scope of the current project to focusing close attention on a limited number of departments, we are also planning to briefly survey academics across the university on this topic. In the meantime, we would be very happy to receive any comments, experiences or examples of good practice. Please feel free to contact any member of the project team named above.
Last week’s T&L seminar, by Dr Neil Morris, on the use of technology in enhancing the student experience was a superb overview of the array of technology that our students seem to be familiar with and that many institutions are incorporating into teaching. A key highlight for me was the data that Neil was able to share with us to dispel some of the myths and highlight some benefits of a relatively simple addition to our teaching (that many of us may already be using) – the use of audio recording lectures.
Based on a sample of 120 students (data yet to be published):
76% have listened to more than half of the lecture audio recordings available to them
On average students listened to audio recordings of lectures twice
73% indicated that the availability of audio recordings did not influence their attendance
93% thought they were important.
60% were happy with the unedited version
84% used the recordings to write detailed lecture notes (ideally the students want the recordings available within an hour of the end of the lecture as this is when they are writing their notes up).
Add to this the published data that use of audio recordings improves exam results (Morris, 2010) and it really did hit home that this is an “easy win” in the use of technology in enhancing the student experience.
Significant effort at the University of Reading has been focused on all aspects of Internationalisation. In the School of Biological Sciences, we are working toward enhancing Global Employability of our students (both home and overseas) to produce high quality, highly competitive Global Graduates. Our vision of a Global Graduate will be someone who is highly competitive in the international market and who will be able to successfully practice their chosen science globally.
In the Spring of this year, we initiated a pilot project funded by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) to develop and promote best practice in teaching and learning, that would directly contribute to students’ skill development and work experience. Our pilot project was recently highlighted in the ‘University of Reading Internationalisation Newsletter’, which is distributed widely across campus and alumni.
Over the Summer, we led focus group workshops with students to better understand their concerns with regards to 6 defined areas: Teaching Methods, Learning Styles, Assessment Methods, Academic Support (including tutorial teaching), Technical Support and Career Management. These workshops were well attended with both international and home students, and included students from other Schools within the Faculty of Life Sciences. Continue reading →
I am excited to announce the launch of OSCAR the Online Studio Community at Reading. This new digital platform has been developed to support the vast range of teaching and learning activities that happen across studio modules in Art, within the department itself but also off-campus and internationally.
While the studio remains an important environment for students of Art it is no longer the sole site of production. The OSCAR initiative has emerged in response to the changing requirements of studio teaching and learning in a culture of nomadic, digital, and transcontinental art practices.
On receiving a TLDF grant last year to develop this project my main concern was to create a useful, dynamic site, and not merely anotherhoop to cajole staff and students through. Keen not to compete with or replicate the functionality of Blackboard, Flickr, Facebook, etc., the new site has been designed to connect and exploit these existing web platforms where we already had strong presence. As such, OSCAR has become a portal to the Art community at Reading: a collation to one site, of blogs, groups, feeds, and links, that map the extensive reach of the department’s studio activities.
One of the core objectives has been to make visible the multitude of student events, projects, and exhibitions that happen across our programmes at home and internationally. OSCAR’s large image galleries feed from our regularly updated image archive on Flickr. There are also blogs for our visiting artist lecture series, student-led gallery programme and off-site projects.
Crucially, it’s not all controlled by staff. Students can join groups and get involved by posting to discussions and blogs. As the site evolves we hope to further student involvement in the administration and management of the site. OSCAR’s 24-hour accessibility supports the varying timetables of our students, who may be studying on a joint honours degree, on a work placement, or on exchange abroad. It is also a platform for our research students who are based across the globe.
OSCAR collates the diverse and far-reaching aspects of our ambitious teaching and learning community in Art, supporting flexibility in a progressively mobile culture where the studio is continually re-imagined.
Our Teaching & Learning Showcase Series continued yesterday with a session on ‘Sharing good practice in the use of Turnitin’. Turnitin is an online service which allows educators to check students’ work for similarity with other sources as a tool for plagiarism prevention and development of academic writing skills.
Turnitin automatically generates an ‘Originality Report’ with a ‘similarity index’ expressed as a percentage, and links to matched sources, including other students’ work, the internet, and other publications. It’s available at Reading through the University’s VLE Blackboard as well as a web portal.
As Associate Dean Orla Kennedy, who has been chairing these informal lunchtime gatherings this term, pointed out, the event coincidentally took place at the same time as a meeting of SCAM (the University’s aptly named Sub-Committee on Academic Misconduct) but still saw a good turnout of some 20 colleagues from academic and service departments across the University.
Speakers Virginie Ruiz (Systems Engineering), Sara Broad (Institute of Education) and Mary Morrissey (English Literature) are among those leading the use of Turnitin in teaching and learning at the University. Each shared their approaches and experiences, highlighting different aspects and issues surrounding the use of Turnitin, before addressing questions and concerns from colleagues.
In September British baking was celebrated during National Cupcake Week. The BBC’s Great British Bake Off has been tremendously popular. Niche cup-cake shops have been springing up on the high street…and quite right. Most of us love cake.
Part 3 politics students enjoying cake
With this in mind, last year I introduced a 10 minute break in the middle of my two-hour Part 3 seminars. During that ten minute break my students and I sat together and chatted over a Tupperware container of home-made cake. We had decided on a cake rota at the start of the autumn term. Each week a different student volunteered to made cupcakes, fairy cakes, millionaire’s short bread, lemon drizzle cake, chocolate brownies and carrot cake.
This year I rolled out my pilot project across all of my Part 3 seminars. This may seem a rather self-indulgent concept. Six seminars a week does, I admit, equal six slices of delicious homemade cake. But this isn’t just about the cake and the simple enjoyment of baking. Cake has pedagogical value.
Part 3 politics students enjoying cake
In these breaks we chat. We don’t just chat about the actual topic of debate in the seminar. We talk about dissertations, essays, careers and controversial authors. We complain about the price of food, the weather, what’s on TV, the economy and politicians. We bond a little more as a group and everyone, including me, becomes less intimidating to the quieter students. We carefully tidy our cake cases away, scoop up the crumbs and start debating the topic of the week again. We’re relaxed, refuelled and reenergised.
Optimal learning occurs when students are happy, calm, engaged and often when they feel part of a wider group learning experience. Cake can help to deliver this environment.
Having sketched out my pedagogical interest in combining the teaching of critical practice with a close study of Samuel Beckett’s work in the first part of this blog post double bill, let me now tell you more about the actual teaching project itself: after a series of lectures, seminars, presentations and workshops, I give the students a poem by Beckett, and ask them to devise a piece of drama in response, about which they subsequently write a piece of reflective documentation. I keep the instructions on the brief deliberately open, and the students develop their ideas, shoot and edit, in consultation with me. You can watch one such response, to Beckett’s “What Is the Word”, directed by Matthew Andrews, Leila Pourhosseini and Olivia Witt here:
With the allusions to Beckett’s own experience of aphasia, the use of stylized movement, ambiguous space, pared-down narrative and rhythmic repetition, Beckett’s influence is evident. But the piece also develops a distinct aesthetic identity: Beckett’s work often has the camera capturing action unfolding on a stage-like space, whereby, as my colleague Jonathan Bignell has argued,
“the duration of camera shots and the common use of long shots giving access to the completeness and depth of the space militates against the camera’s restriction of choice about where to look, so that the camera’s agency as an instrument of selective perception is diminished.”[1]
Here, the camera has an investigative, active agency that probes into the space, which, together with the rhythmic editing, addresses the thematic concept of (obscured) vision and its relationship to knowledge, in a particular way. Here, Olivia Witt thoughtfully remarks in her documentation that the intention was “that the shadows on the male character’s face would depict his obscured knowledge in a way which could not be expressed through a complete lack of light, as shadows require light to exist, thus the male character’s knowledge is not absent, just concealed.”
Through the bringing together of the range of expertise and resources we enjoy here at the University, I have been delighted to facilitate the making of such research-driven, critically reflective student work that I hope you agree vividly demonstrates the students’ skills and understanding. What it shows is that creative (and, indeed, playful) experimentation and the current emphases on professionalization and employability are not binary opposites; in fact, one can, and should, meaningfully inform the other.
[1] Bignell, Jonathan. Beckett on screen: the television plays. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009, p.141.
Here in Film, Theatre & Television, over the last couple of years, I have been fortunate to be able to devise an interesting teaching project that draws on the Department’s long-standing expertise in teaching critical practice, the Faculty’s expertise on the work of Samuel Beckett, as well as the University’s unique resources, including the facilities in the Minghella Building and the Beckett Collection.
For those of you who may be less familiar with the term, the teaching of ‘critical practice’ means the teaching of practical work in such a way that practice is a methodology for exploring critical and conceptual issues in concrete terms, whereby “‘creative’ practice and ‘critical’ analysis are conceived as mutually supportive activities”.[1] Having been closely involved in the devising of critical practice for television over the last decade, I decided to set up a project that inflects this with a focus on Beckett, especially his work for television. My pedagogical reasons for this were manifold, and included the following:
Firstly, because the modernist aesthetic of Beckett’s plays for television is unlike anything undergraduate students come across in their own television viewing, approaching Beckett’s work places in-depth research very readily on the students’ learning agenda. To be able to come to grips with the abstract textures and complex sound-image relationships of programmes such as Ghost Trio (1977), a close study of Beckett scholarship is essential.
Here, research visits to the Beckett Collection, very helpfully facilitated by archivist Guy Baxter, have also been extremely useful for the student learning experience. These visits to the beautiful building on Redlands Road have not only made my students more aware of the breadth and depth of what their University has to offer, but more specifically, have vividly demonstrated the precision Beckett used. So, for example, in Quad I + II (1981) the movement of the hooded figures is through Beckett’s own notes revealed to have been timed to the second. With such detailed planning laid out in front of the students, it is clear that their own work will have to be carefully considered.
Secondly, by encountering work that so decidedly move away from the dominant realist aesthetic of television, engaging with Beckett encourages the students to take a step away from what has become naturalized and self-evident, both in terms of the medium itself and their understanding of it. This critical distance encourages them to adopt a mindful use of, the conventions of television, both for the rest of their undergraduate study and beyond.
Thirdly, engaging with Beckett, who worked across different disciplines, also encourages students to draw on their studies in other parts and modules of their degree, such as in theatre and English literature. Of course, studying Beckett also means that students see the published research of a range of their tutors, and making students more aware of staff research (and the fact that staff do research!) can only be a good thing.
Because this is turning into a rather long post already, I have decided to turn my reflections into a two-parter, and will say more about the actual work the students have gone on to produce in the second part. Stay tuned!
[1]Lacey, Stephen and Pye, Douglas. ‘Getting Started: An Approach to Relating Practical and Critical Work’Studies in Theatre Production10 (1994): p.21.
I have been working with a placement student, Rachel Glover, a third-year undergraduate in Politics and International Relations, to carry out research into digital literacies for student employability, focusing on the University’s extra- and in-curricular work placement schemes.
Rachel and I were invited to speak at the Teaching & Learning Showcase on ‘Assessing work placements’ here at Reading on 11 October. (http://www.reading.ac.uk/internal/cdotl/NewsandEvents/InternalEvents/cdotl-TeachingandLearningShowcaseSeries.aspx) The showcase events are a series of informal lunchtime gatherings which provide an opportunity for colleagues to share T & L practices and ideas. The format is three speakers talking about a common topical issue for ten minutes each, with time for questions and discussion at the end.
Rachel and I were up first, followed by Cindy Becker (English Literature) and Hannah Jones (Agriculture, Policy and Development). Organiser Joy Collier had asked us to set the scene a little bit, so we thought we would share some of the insights from our research into digital aspects of work placements, and to show our colleagues the model that we use to evaluate students’ digital experiences. Our presentation slides can be found here.
The framework we use is adapted from Rhona Sharpe and Helen Beetham’s ‘Developing Effective E-Learning: The Development Pyramid’ (2008) which describes the development of digital literacies in terms of access, skills, and practices as prerequisites to becoming a critical, informed, expert user of digital technologies.
Digital literacies and work placements, adapted from Sharpe and Beetham (2008)
If we apply this to work placements, it becomes about affording students digital opportunities. Work placements can provide opportunities for students to experience and explore digital technologies (access); to develop technical proficiency in using digital technologies (skills); and, crucially, to apply these skills in a professional, ‘real world’ context (practices).
This is where the real value of work placements lies – in bridging the gap between students’ learning and how this is applied in a work environment, and in making that connection in the student’s mind, too, so that they are digitally ready and so that they have the awareness and the ability to articulate that readiness in order to make stronger applications, perform better in interviews, and, ultimately, better able to do their jobs.
Developing those higher-level attributes and attitudes – digital literacies – requires reflection. Cindy and Hannah spoke about the ways in which they encourage students to reflect on their placement experience and how this is linked to assessment, which surely then ought to be based on students’ ability to draw out and illustrate their learning and development rather than a descriptive account of, say, the company or their day-to-day tasks while on placement.
Hannah’s closing comments, which suggested that perhaps students should not actually be marked on this at all, that being able to truly reflect on their experience is enough, I found particularly thought-provoking.
My own closing comments were twofold: firstly, to encourage anyone involved in planning, assessing and evaluating placements to consider what digital opportunities might be embedded in them.
And secondly, to consider whether the development pyramid might be applied to planning, assessment and evaluation of work placements more generally, not just to look at the digital angle. After all, having the right tools for the job, learning how to use them and knowing what to do with them, are the building blocks required to develop any sort of professional competence. Thus the development pyramid might provide a useful framework for designing WRPL activities. I will say more about this in another blog post.
