Category: Students
-
Academic Challenge and intellectually Stimulating Teaching: 5. Becoming the subject specialist
Ros O’Leary & David Webster “Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” Paulo Freire We propose that we take learners backstage. That they are actors in the drama of learning, and not the audience. As noted…
-
Academic Challenge and intellectually Stimulating Teaching: 4. Developing community and active citizenship
Ros O’Leary & David Webster The implication for thinking about learning as reconstitution of self (or transformation), puts emphasis on developing cooperative learning and learning communities. Drawing on Vygotsky , action theory (Bredo, 1997; Lave, 1996) and the idea of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991) becomes important. Here a novice, or our student,…
-
Academic Challenge and intellectually Stimulating Teaching: 3. Developing Engagement and Harnessing Uncertainty
Ros O’Leary & David Webster We know from research on effective learning that active engagement is a vital element in enabling students to learn – therefore activities and assessment which promote analysis, evaluation and the synthesis of ideas – across a course and beyond – will support effective learning – including discussion in class, group…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
Dave Webster 