Day One – Teaching and Learning
Posted on | August 31, 2008 | 10 Comments
A working model for the conference so far is based on three sessions of provocations each day.
Two speakers will provide responses to themes that have been established beforehand, following which the audience will be invited to take over the discussion.
Done in blocks of two hours, there will be two major themes for each session. There can of course be more, depending on what people want.
Then for the final session of the day we’ll invite responses to the proceedings from stakeholders outside the academy.
Day one of the conference will focus on Teaching and Learning. Among the themes suggested for discussion so far are:
- student demographics: how students are changing as a result of wider socio-economic trends; strategies for teaching in different contexts
- student-centred learning: the impact of feedback/assessment processes
- the corporatisation of teaching
- internationalisation
- issues surrounding online delivery and other new technologies such as blogging, social networking sites
- teacher training
- the devaluation of teaching: particularly the impact of the grant cycle on teaching
- sessional teaching and contract labour: what this means for institutional futures, career models, and the personal lives of staff
- combining teaching and research: incentives/disincentives in the system; workload weighting
- the state of the job market
- best practice in teaching
- teaching-only positions
- issues for management in teaching/administration
- designing a teaching program
- tenure
Possible external respondents for this day might include high school representatives, union delegates, instructional designers, Vice Chancellors…
What’s missing? Which themes should we pursue? Who should lead the discussion?
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10 Responses to “Day One – Teaching and Learning”
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August 31st, 2008 @ 6:52 pm
I’m kind of interested in the moment in a simple question – where did the teacher go? While I think that considering student experience is completely necessary, and agree with active learning approaches, I think teachers have been reduced to circuits or conduits between market/institutional and sometimes (like WebCT/Blackboard) technical systems (which are deeply cognitivist in the most simplistic of ways) on the one hand, and students, who are having “an experience” in some amputated way. Where did the teacher “experience” go, beyond the experience of “feedback” and performance indicators? Are they also learning, for that matter? What happened to the pedagogical relationship? And how did Cultural Studies sometimes lose track of this relationship, assuming it did? In simple idea terms, how did everyone implicitly buy so easily into a cognitivist paradigm in learning and teaching that they spent years pulling apart “everywhere else”?
August 31st, 2008 @ 8:17 pm
Hey Mel,
Conference sounds like it’ll get a few tongues going!
And great to see you planning in public. A couple of additional topics I’d certainly be interested to hear about:
* AUTC (formlerly Carrick) vs the ARC – If teaching matters so much, why is teaching-based research funded so poorly?
* Higher Ed Developers Vs Higher Ed – Despite the rapid rise in the number of ‘higher education developers’ in Australia unis, why do most academics (or perhaps most research-intensive academics) view these newcomers with suspicion and often derision? (This probably fits into your exiting topics, but a provocative session title never hurt anyone!)
Oh, and a quick practical question: (if these conferences are open to everyone?) what sort of mechanism do you envisage people using to justify funding from their institutions if formal paper presentations aren’t the go? I know that getting funding for an unconference or similar is pretty tough – most unis, incl mine, want to see evidence of an abstract accepted or no $!
September 1st, 2008 @ 8:58 am
Agree with Tama re AUTC. Funding is very much second class. On position of educational developers/designers… Their role is not well understood or developed in most institutions. Sydney Uni might be a standout here with 12 developers and three project managers centrally funded, three academic directors (each one day a week equiv) and many EDs also working in faculties – not sure. Same with the options for supplementing teaching online to enrich learning (**not** replacing pedagogical relationship – pace Andrew) are now so varied that it’s beyond most academics to envisage what’s possible. Working with proj mgrs enables academics to see new ways to understand the pedagog relationship, and doesn’t always end up with more online content. When online content is developed through the USyd system it is much more likely to be thought through and planned to support curriculum goals.
September 1st, 2008 @ 11:05 am
Looks like this idea has legs! I’m already learning plenty…
To answer Tama: the conference will be free and open to everyone.
Given that the conference is organised by the Early Career Researchers ‘node’ of the CRN, there will be a pool of travel support available particularly for early career researchers to apply for. We will be calling for expressions of interest in due course once we iron out the details–we haven’t been able to predict yet how many people would be interested in coming.
September 5th, 2008 @ 11:14 am
Andrew, if you’re still around, your question is not yet so simple that I can understand it – where did the teacher go? The teacher is still there teaching away like the blazes, surely? I know I am and so is every other teacher I know.
Where is the ‘here’ your question is posed from?
September 5th, 2008 @ 5:27 pm
Hi Laura,
Yes – absolutely the teacher is still teaching away like blazes. I certainly didn’t mean we had nothing to do! The case is – quite ridiculously, the opposite (and I have a lighter load than many). What I meant I guess was simply that one reason teachers are so busy (and having to do their best in increasingly difficult circumstances) is that in all the workshops etc I go to, teachers are treated as kinds of teaching machines. In rather old-fashioned terms, the teacher as a person is somewhat occluded. At best they are treated as “professionals” although this again has a particular tone. To put this in another way, although much current rhetoric about teaching emphasises students as, at best, having some kind of experience about which they are totally aware, and at worst, consumers, teachers are more or less not mentioned, except as facilitating either “student experience” (normally of the reductivist cognitivist kind) or “student consumption” of programs. So teachers are reduced to a kind of (very put upon and increasingly controlled) circuit or interface between external system and students (the ambiguous position of students within all this is of course another topic). Perhaps the better question might have been – “where did teacher experience go in rhetoric about learning and teaching?”. Of course, it’s not as though this kind of reduction and control of work experience/enjoyment hasn’t happened in all manner of other workplaces, but that doesn’t mean we should put up with it.
September 6th, 2008 @ 6:48 pm
It’s easy to ignore, though, largely because it is rhetoric (at this stage.)
September 6th, 2008 @ 6:59 pm
just wondering if “internationalisation” covers the franchising of curriculum to a) off shore providers (colleges etc.) and b) universities in developing countries etc?
September 7th, 2008 @ 4:18 pm
Hi Anna, thanks for your thoughts here and earlier. It would be great to have you at the conference!
It can mean these things and more. I’m certainly interested in the second point. And on the first, I was thinking for instance about the number of off-shore campuses our own universities are running, especially with the assistance of junior faculty.
There seems to be a trend that junior academics are being hired with the expectation that they will spend some time teaching overseas, and/or delivering online courses so that these can be run simultaneously for international and domestic students ($$).
Apart from avoiding the obligation of appropriate resourcing, this seems to involve a couple of assumptions: that younger staff will obviously have the digital literacy to carry out these courses (highly problematic, for a number of reasons), and that they will have the mobility to teach elsewhere (so, no family commitments, etc).
Just a couple of the concerns this raises on top of the ‘presence of the teacher’ (see above)!
September 7th, 2008 @ 8:26 pm
i would certainly love to see some discussion about this; at my present job i oversee curriculum taught at four state campuses, south africa & malaysia (also our campuses) and singapore (a private provider – but we mark their assignments!). at my new job, i am unsure how things will pan out but given we teach in distance mode i am expecting some form of franchising of our curriculum to overseas institutions to either be in place or on the cards.
i agree with your points about the assumptions about mobility and technological literacy this implies, but (in my experience at least) it also comes with very little institutional support for the construction and maintenance of collegiality between the different hierarchies of staff involved in delivering these programs… a junior member of staff is managing the delivery of curriculum by (sometimes) more senior colleagues in other countries as well as armies of sessionals they neither select themselves. what kind of working relationships / dynamics can develop in this context?
oh, maybe i should’ve prefaced this with “don’t get me started”…:) sorry…