Opening our eyes to technology….how students can teach the educators! By Dr Samantha Weston

By edwardwhite Comment Closed

An eye-opening T&L seminar, presented by Dr Neil Morris (University of Leeds) outlined how terribly, terribly easy the majority of our undergraduates find using technology…of all kinds!

Having seen his short video clip about how one of his students used his tablet to video record a lecture, whilst simultaneously annotate lecture slides provided on the University’s VLE, and instantly share his thoughts and indeed the whole videocast of the lecture with his Facebook friends, made me consider how much technology my own students use. As if by magic this week, it has been as if the students knew I was looking for such evidence, as the majority of the Therapeutics Problem Based Learning sessions I have been working in, demonstrated use of tablets, laptops, netbooks and mobile phones in numbers I had barely registered present in the room previously! One group even asked me to check through their Power Point presentation and promptly handed over an extremely professionally finished product….. on a mobile phone!

Anecdotal chatting with other students, introduced the concept of social media working groups. Many of them have set up Facebook Groups to share their PBL materials instantly with each other, and the issue of copyright and confidentiality was raised by Dr Morris in his talk. Having had such a clear demonstration from both Neil and the incredibly technologically-savvy University of Reading student population, I think it is essential now for staff to raise their game to meet student expectations, and begin to engage them in their electronic universe as well as face-to-face.

Reflections on a Training Event for Early Career Teachers of English Literature by Nicola Abram

By edwardwhite Comment Closed

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?’ Researching student referencing practices by Helen Hathaway, Clare Nukui, Dr Kim Shahabudin and Dr Liz Wilding

By edwardwhite Comment Closed

‘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.

When our efforts of internationalisation in T&L and Global Employability go Faculty-wide by Dr Kimberly Watson and Dr Teeroumanee Nadan

By edwardwhite Comment Closed

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 →

Digital Portal Creates New Dimensions for Art’s Studio Community by Christine Ellison

By edwardwhite Comment Closed

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 another hoop 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.

The Value of Cake by Dr Emma Mayhew

By edwardwhite Comment Closed

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.

Teaching Beckett: Critical Practice in Television Part 2 by Dr Simone Knox

By edwardwhite Comment Closed

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.

Teaching Beckett: Critical Practice in Television part 1 by Dr Simone Knox

By edwardwhite Comment Closed

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 Production 10 (1994): p.21.

Embedding Employability in the Department of History: Historic Themes in Practice by Professor Lindy Grant

By edwardwhite Comment Closed

The Department of History has been running a module for Part 2 students called Historic Themes in Practice (HTP) for the last three years. It is an innovative module in conception, organisation and structure. It is designed to make second year students enlarge their views of career possibilities, particularly within the heritage sector, and learn to work together in teams to bring a group project to fruition: in short it is designed to embed employability into the teaching of history. And it takes employability one stage further. Every year, the options from which students choose their group project includes at least one group placement, working to a brief provided by an institution within the heritage sector.

This all sounds like a bit like heavy corporate-speak, so how does this module run? What do the students actually do? Continue reading →

Using technology to find low-tech solutions by Mary Morrissey

By edwardwhite Comment Closed

Like a lot of people, I do not consider myself particularly savvy about technology: when I find that something is useful to me, I learn how to use it. That said, I think we can use learning technologies to come up with ‘low tech’ solutions to our teaching needs. Among the advantage is efficiency in terms of time and money: we already have the kit, and we know how to use it. I offer the following as an example.

It is often difficult to make sure that students are aware of detailed regulations that affect their work but which cannot be summarised or displayed easily. Conventions for writing and referencing are a good example in our department.  Last summer, Pat Ferguson (our Royal Literary Fund fellow whose role in the department is to help student improve their writing skills) observed that we had excellent advice on essay writing, but it was in our large Student Handbook, distributed at the start of the first year. Pat suggested that we make this information available separately.

I thought this was a great idea. I noticed there was other information in the handbook that students need through their degree too: there was information about our marking criteria; there were some very helpful examples that showed the difference between plagiarism and poor academic practice. I took these sections, and I created three separate documents with titles that I hoped would be self-explanatory: ‘Style Guide for English Literature students’; ‘Understanding Feedback – Marking Criteria’; and ‘Plagiarism’.

I uploaded all three documents to Blackboard’s ‘Fileshare’ area for the department, and I created links from the Blackboard courses for all our Part 1 and Part 2 modules. (I am working on the Part 3 modules, but there are over 50 of those!) I also posted the documents in our central ‘Information for English Literature Students’ Blackboard organisation, on which all staff, undergraduates and postgraduate students are enrolled. By keeping the documents in ‘Fileshare’ I can update them every year, to include new ‘standard paragraphs’ for example. I overwrite the old file with the newer version, and all the daughter versions linked to it update automatically.

This isn’t rocket science, but I think it has helped us make useful information more readily available. Having in posted in most of our Blackboard courses makes it more visible; having three small documents (in pdf format) makes them easier to download and print.

Where would I go from here? Students have told me that they like a website with exercises that help with grammar and writing skills that we recommended. It’s based in the University of Bristol:  http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tutorial/index.htm

I would like to create an interactive resource like this, and I know it can be done. The University of Aberdeen took the paper-based ‘Guide to Written Work’ (on which we all relied when I worked there!) and turned it into an internet-based resource with exercises: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/writing/

If anyone knows any low-tech ways that I could do something similar, please let me know!