Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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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,…
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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,…
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Memes? Srsly? Can memes carry wisdom: neo-Haiku, cute kittens & social media.
Originally posted on Dispirited: At the CESNUR (Centro Studi sulle Nuove Religioni) 2015 conference, I presented a very brief, conversational, paper about memes. It was rather speculative, but may interest/amuse readers of this blog. I am working with a friend on adding a more scholarly tone -but till then… — This talk is a cry…
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No Sleep Till Bloomsbury.. Learning small lessons from big lectures
In the Summer of 1981, I was 13, and living in rural Leicestershire. I have quite a clear memory of cycling my steel-framed racing bike to the new-ish, big Co-Op supermarket at a few miles away, where they had a small record section. I then rushed back with Motörhead’s No Sleep Till Hammersmith live album…
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ACE Report: “The most effective methods for ensuring student success are not widely practiced in higher education”
I was recently browsing articles on Inside Higher Ed, and came across one of their ‘Quick Takes’ pieces, about a report from the American Council on Education, entitled Unpacking Relationships: Instruction and Student Outcomes Two things struck me as I ‘quickly took’ the content. The first was the opening statement: Student success depends, in large…
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Why lectures are brilliant/rubbish, and differentiation reflections
In about 1993, when I was taking my first tentative steps in University teaching, I was invited to a day of staff development training. My memory of that day (indeed, much of that century) is a little hazy, but I do remember being told that that age of the lecture was over. Apparently the way…
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Faith at Gloucester Cathedral
Originally posted on Dispirited: I was honoured to be featured by the fantastic Gloucester-based artist Russell Haines in his current Faith exhibition at Gloucester Cathedral. He had decided early in the project that an atheist voice/faith was going to be part of the mosaic of ideas and beliefs that his project explores. The project attracted some…
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Is written feedback on assignments useless? Listening to Phil Race at Gloucestershire..
On January 20th, we had the pleasure at Gloucestershire to welcome Phil Race, to spend a day with us, talking primarily about the issues of assessment and feedback in Higher Education. You can read more, and download the slides he used, via his blog post about the visit, but I want to focus in here…
Dave Webster 