The expansion of higher education, together with the introduction of key disability legislation, has made it incumbent upon universities to ensure that their curricula, the teaching methods they employ and the expectations they have of student learning, do not unfairly discriminate against any particular student or group of students. In the UK, a common terminology…
There have been two interestingly contradictory trends feeding into Technology Enhanced Learning debates in recent years. Firstly, that the traditional lecture is dead; an obsolete mode of teaching whereby an expert imparts their knowledge and wisdom to the passively attentive novice, a model no longer suited to the fast pace of change in the modern…
As has been explored in previous SoTL seminars, the notion of a deep learning approach is more often than not seen as positive thing in that it describes intrinsically motivated strategies to understand material and to see the connections interlinking concepts and ideas. The pervasive presence of deep learning in higher education discourse has been…
“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…
