Category: LearningAndTeaching
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Looking for the story: how we teach our students to read academic texts
When we teach our students how to read academic (scientific) papers, we send them on a quest to identify the story amidst the academic writing conventions. I briefly show the 5 elements of story we also find in academic papers.
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The Sound of Learning
This week my teaching picks up again, making me reflect about a course I had begun taking on Coursera “Diversity and Inclusion in Education” just to see where I stand with the topic, and what I still ought to learn. Now there was an interesting prompt for reflection, about how we think about our learners,…
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Bite Sized Pedagogy
While I have been rather quiet on here, I have been playing with various ideas, which I am sharing on Instagram (sorry not more Twitter for me, also at Mastodon) The first idea is to share bite-sized pedagogy. I am often told how difficult it is to get a handle on all the terminology and…
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Tip: Covering a Colleagues Teaching Last Minute. And their PowerPoint doesn’t make sense!
Most of us have been there. The threated call! “Could you cover my teaching for me? Because, *insert valid reason here*. Here are the slides for this session.” Here is a strategy that worked really well for me. I had a look at the slides beforehand, yet some of the slides still did not make…
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Looking Beyond: Thoughts on Teaching Models
Dr Vicki Dale and I are running a very hands-on postgraduate course around creative pedagogies. One of the core messages I think we still have to make stronger: take a step back from discipline specific pedagogies. Teaching methods are in the least interdisciplinary–although I vote for transdisciplinarity! So I am making a public plea: teaching…
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An Experiment in Format
This last half year has been challenging with weird and wonderful health issues, busy workload and all around “the world is doomed pre-apocalyptic mood-ness”. However, as long as there is life there is hope. Right? So I have about 50 posts in draft status and work on various OERs. Watch this space. Are you by…
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What is in Teaching?
Some Evening Thoughts You are, you are in teaching. The whole you. Your past, your present, your envisaged future. When your learners bring something to you, challenge you, question you, ask you. They are bringing themselves to you. They are making themselves vulnerable—even if it might not feel like it to you in that moment.…
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Something Different: On a Lunchbreak
I am taking you with me on an adventure. Okay maybe a micro-adventure, nevertheless if you need a mental break from thinking about work–come along. As pebbles crunch underneath my trailrunners I notice: today smells like adventure, here in Scotland! Adventures smell of summer and soil, petrichor, deep dark woods; they smell of minerals in…
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Evaluating learning: an uncertainty principle
Here is my hypothesis: The more we focus on one aspect of the learned, i.e. in exams we force the expression of learning into a specific way and the closer we look at that one specific factor the less we are able to see the effects of said learning more widely. A personal experience example…
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Academia and Buzz Word Bingo
One of the themes of our engagement in #ALTC Winter Conference and #LTHEchat was that the terminology we have chosen to use ‘disruption’ and ‘active learning’ smell too much of buzz-word bingo to sit comfortably with colleagues. And we agree. But … There is also a but … what else are we to use. We…
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The Power of Doodle
The origin of this post goes back to 2011, much has changed since, including my own personal development and career. But let’s get the pens out: I was rather keen on going back to the topic of doodles as I have become more and more interested in Sketchnoting, which you could think about as purposeful…
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Roots in times of Upheaval
All the upheaval this year has brought on reminiscence and reflections–many of which circling around a childhood whose remains can only be found in museums, dusty atticks, or maybe the odd collections treasured individually. Nobody would know of the books we have read. East German children books had such sophisticated and brilliant illustrators. Where did…
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Neurodiversity Celebration Week
So I promised a little contribution for this week’s events. For more about the UofG Neurodiversity Network go here (link opens in new window). Without further ado: My ADHD Superpowers –an attempted poem I design and make clothes, mainly dresses that fitSilversmith, wordsmith and sometimes do knitI draw life with words, images, pens, and brushBut…
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Ethnography of a Museum
Context I am experimenting with writing again. So back to the beginnings of my academic journey and ethnographic writing. Without further ado: An Excerpt The smell is difficult to describe, an echo of floor polish clings to the dry air, the worn Lino floors make my shoes squeak, but it smells of something else; I…