“Critical thinking appears in university curricula, course outlines, and statements of graduate attributes, and yet there is both uncertainty about what it entails and passionate debate about its essential nature.” (Jones, p.169) Looking through lists of programme learning outcomes, one word often comes to the fore: ‘critical’. Across the full range of subject areas, from…
“…teaching was not a job like any other job, but a crucial site of struggle.” (Giroux, p.160) Life in Higher Education gets tougher every day: resources are low, our authority is undermined, and the pile of marking only gets bigger. As will become clear in the reading for our next SoTL session, Henry Giroux understands…
Higher Education in the UK is catching on to a phenomenon that has preoccupied US Higher Education research for some time – assessment of the impact of tertiary study on progression in student learning. More specifically, what is the learning gain, or the ‘value added dividend’, for a student if they decided to invest in…
It may sometimes feel – and be the case – that the nature and structure of modern higher education leads students to focus upon performance, and that we dedicate ourselves to teaching in ways that are designed, at least in part, to eventuate in short-term student achievement. We, therefore, spend time finding ways to allow…
How would you define what an essay is? Do disciplinary essays share sufficient characteristics to warrant the common name for this type of assessed writing? How would you define the writing style and standard expected of students producing a report for laboratory work or projects in the Physical Sciences or Mathematics? What are we asking…
Why do some students get stuck on particular disciplinary concepts? Why is it that this difficulty is sometimes encountered when the concepts seem perfectly straightforward to us as their teachers, or when other students in the same cohort grasp them with ease? Investigating this question in the context of an ESRC funded project on Enhancing…
How can we be certain that students are integrating their different learning experiences at University and, furthermore, that they are developing the capacity to apply that learning to the wide range of different contexts that they may experience after they graduate? This is a question that has bearing on what has become a perennial pressure…
‘Built into action research is the proviso that if as a teacher I am dissatisfied with what is already going on, I will have the confidence and resolution to attempt to change it. I will not be content with the status quo…’ (McNiff 1988) At our next meeting, on the 19th April, we take a…
Our meeting on the 11th March 2016 addresses the topic of student engagement, something of a buzzword in recent years. The focus will be on whether and to what extent the concepts of ‘student engagement’ and ‘disengagement’ help us to understand the complex factors underpinning current concerns in teaching and learning in higher education. The…
“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” John Dewey The adage “learn from your mistakes” is a familiar one. It implies that getting things wrong can – and perhaps should – be a formative experience. By making mistakes, we self-reflect and analyse what…
As the reading for this session outlines, critiques of the concept of “deep learning” that have emerged since the 1990s have been few and far between, but no less insightful for it. Central to their arguments is the claim that the principles of deep and surface learning have been so seductive – and politically timely…
The association of the word deep with the word learning is pervasive in higher education: it is ubiquitous in the research literature, it crops up in the delivery of teaching courses, in conversations about learning effectiveness and in institutional consultation and policy documents. It is a pairing of words that is normally used to denote learning that is somehow…
