Author: DavidWebster
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Academic Challenge and intellectually Stimulating Teaching: 1. Cultivating Autonomy
Ros O’Leary & David Webster The first of the five areas of our Academic Challenge and intellectually Stimulating Teaching model, is Cultivating Autonomy. While not wishing to overly stress the Kantian notion of the autonomous agent, potentially atomised in neoliberal isolation, and being hostile to discourse about student resilience for related reasons, we still want to…
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Reflections on Academic Challenge and intellectually Stimulating Teaching: Our Model
Ros O’Leary & David Webster This blog emerges from our roles, as part of the University of Gloucestershire’s Academic Development Unit, working with academic teams to help them reflect on what Intellectually Stimulating Teaching and Academic Challenge might look like for them. While we intend to formalise this material, in a formal academic paper, blogging…
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Hidden Narratives, Resilience & Vulnerability.
As, to a degree, previewed in a recent post, this week saw the How Hidden Narratives Challenge Authority event, here at Gloucestershire. I had the privilege of giving the opening session, on Social Media, and was then able to relax and listen to my colleagues. I’ll post another time about the Social Media talk, as…
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Adventures in Flatland: Learning first..
I can’t seem to get used to it. No matter how many times I sit on the train North from Amsterdam, towards Groningen, the flatness of the landscape shocks me. The undulating Cotswolds are hardly mountainous, but by contrast seem an epic landscape. My first ever trip here, oddly enough, was about climbing something, but…
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The curious case of social media
I’m really looking forward, next week to giving an opening keynote at an event our Postgraduate Research students have put on. Later in the day, @nikirivers and I will be exploring our ideas around resilience, and there’ll be a range of topics, from Anarchy to horror films (I’ll be hiding my eyes during the latter).…
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Student Grandmothers, mitigating circumstances, and process
Yesterday seemed to draw the issue of ‘student-shaming’, and the murky world of staff attitudes to student’s requests for extended deadlines, into the open. The spur for this was a piece in the USA-based Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled To My Student, on the Death of Her Grandmother(s). The piece, written as a character, uses the…
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De-weaponising Academic Challenge. Let’s lionise Vulnerability, and Leave ‘grit’ to the Self-help Gurus.
Ros O’Leary & David Webster In another post, we will reflect on the pedagogical responses that Higher Education practitioners might make to an atmosphere where ‘challenge’ is suddenly (partly due to a shift in the National Student Survey questions) a hot topic. There is a discourse, which we are seeing more of, related to the…
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Is Socratic Dialogue really good praxis?
In contrast to recent collaborative posts, this one is all my fault. The only mercy is its brevity. I am not the first to suspect that the valourising of Socrates, not in terms of founding Western philosophy*, and all that, but in terms of character, and approach, was a little problematic. There’s a blog post,…
Dave Webster 