The Inevitable Contradictions of Student Learning

Excerpt: I used to lead a university-wide network dedicated to developing the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Every second Tuesday at the dot of 1pm, 10-15 or so staff would shuffle into a room (refreshments in hand) to learn about the evaluation of a pedagogical initiative, to critically review a colleague’s promising idea for a new curriculum project, to puzzle over something SoTL-like we’d collectively read and sought through dialogue to better understand, and to share experiences of what often felt like contradictory university agendas for curriculum, teaching and learning change. At the best of times, folks would find opportunities to write together. And in less busy times, the SoTL publications and teaching awards achieved among us would be acknowledged, and plans made for celebration. In our learning how to be together, the differences in the politics of our contexts and in our disciplinary/professional training did not seem as stark because of our commitment to think well, and to act in scholarly ways about the project of improving student learning. Among us were those who taught students in the typical ways–in seminars, lectures, labs, online and elsewhere, and there were others who saw students in individual consultations regarding specific learning difficulties. Then, there were those (like me) with two jobs: the first, to support faculty take an inquiry-based approach to their curriculum, teaching, student learning, and second, to make a contribution to integrated, systems-level thinking about student learning in relation to the overall curriculum offerings of the university. That disposition – caring for student learning – seemed to be the stuff that held the network together no matter the level or focus of our interest in SoTL. It helped that we laughed together too...

From cornerstone to capstone: information literacy collaboration across the curriculum

Librarians and academics alike are passionate about how students engage with scholarly information. We want students to build on their existing information literacy skills when they commence university and to graduate with the information skills needed for lifelong learning in their chosen profession and society at large. Collaboration between librarians and academics to embed information literacy into curriculum design is a key strategy for developing students’ information skills. But what impact does our collaborative effort have on student learning outcomes and long-term information seeking behaviour? Are our graduates information literate and ready for a complex information society? At Latrobe University information literacy is situated as part of inquiry/research graduate capability. Librarians and academics invest much time and effort in teaching and learning partnerships at the institutional, course and subject level. The emphasis is on a coherent, consistent and coordinated approach to embedding information literacy into curriculum design across these three domains. This approach is supported by reusable online resources that have been developed by library staff at La Trobe and intended for use in a blended learning environment. This paper describes the results of a longitudinal study that tracked the information literacy skills of a particular cohort of students from cornerstone to capstone (2009-2012), and reflects on how this evidence-base has informed collaborative practice and development of learning activities and assessment tasks. The study includes the outcome of international benchmarking for final year students at La Trobe University using a standardised information literacy assessment tool. In conclusion, the paper returns to the importance of embedding information literacy into the curriculum design and measuring information literacy learning outcomes progressively during a course. Highlighting the advantages of collaborative practice in terms of student learning outcomes and graduate capabilities reinforces the impact of library and faculty partnerships in the university teaching and learning environment

Learning Statistics in First Year by Active Participating Students

There has been a growing attention, especially in the last fifteen years on the teaching and learning aspects of statistics education (Chance 2000; Sowey 1998; 2001; Peiris 2002a,b). Although the knowledge, training and skills on statistics are welcomed by many employers, the majority of students still find statistics courses both challenging and unappealing. This paper reports on students’ experience of learning statistics in a first year unit of study MATH1015: Statistics for Life Sciences at The University of Sydney. Following Reid (1997) who argued that a teacher’s approach in a level environment can encourage student learning at a high level, the paper reports on the effects of small-scale curriculum change on students’ levels of motivation and engagement with statistics. Drawing on Ramsden (1992), the paper argues for an approach to teaching and learning statistics in ways that are connected to students’ experiences of the world

Encouraging the scholarship of learning and teaching in an institutional context

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Evaluation of a research based teaching development in first year physics

The School of Physics at The University of Sydney has developed workshop tutorials for first year physics in accord with findings in physics education research. The students work in cooperative groups at a variety of tasks including hands-on activities and discussion questions. The tutorials are self-paced and focus on understanding, with tutors acting as facilitators. A CUTSD funded project to develop a workshop manual is now nearing completion, and the workshops are already being used at other Australian universities. Formative evaluation, such as the use of minute papers and a feedback box, has helped to improve the workshops. The students provide a ‘snap-shot’ of a particular workshop by filling in a minute paper, which allows that workshop to be revised and improved. Summative evaluation of the workshops has been provided by Likert scale surveys and focus groups. The surveys have been administered to large numbers of students and provide a broad overview of the workshops. The focus groups, run by the Institute of Teaching and Learning at The University of Sydney, provide indepth information from a small number of students. The information from the focus groups and the surveys has enabled the expansion of the project both within and beyond The University of Sydney

In Conversation Together: Student Ambassadors for Cultural Competence

Amani and Tai: We’re academic developers interested in working in partnership with students. In 2014, we trialled partnership through working with six Student Ambassadors as part of the Sydney Teaching Colloquium. The Colloquium is the university’s annual teaching conference and usually draws around 300 participants, mainly academics, to discuss teaching and curriculum practices. The theme of the 2014 Colloquium was ‘Is our assessment up to standard?’ The Student Ambassadors: • developed a social media campaign to engage the Sydney student community in the Colloquium; • designed a session on assessment to present at the Colloquium; • devised and executed a Colloquium evaluation strategy; • curated and developed resources; and • contributed to the planning and writing of a co-authored journal publication (Peseta et al., 2016). The experiences and outcomes from the trial gave us courage to try again and so the following year, we engaged another six Student Ambassadors for the 2015 Colloquium. This time the theme was ‘Cultural competence is everyone’s business,’ which linked with the university’s new strategic focus on cultural competence (The University of Sydney Strategic Plan, 2016-2020). We followed the 2014 model described in Peseta et al. (2016), where students were selected via an expression of interest and interview process. We were mainly looking for undergraduate students interested in learning about cultural competence (CC), who could see the relevance of CC to students’ experiences of university more broadly and had creative ideas about how to do it, and who wanted to develop their knowledge of university CC initiatives. The students were paid for their time spent as an ambassador, which involved approximately 40 hours of face-to-face meetings, preparation, participation in the Colloquium, and a post-Colloquium focus group over 3-4 months

Dancing with power in ‘We are the university: Students co-creating change’

Much of the student-staff partnership literature calls for increased collaboration and power sharing among staff and students. Less common are accounts by student partners themselves that take up the challenge of what partnership and power feel like as universities embrace their neoliberal trajectory - and - purport to do so on behalf of students themselves. Especially acute is the conundrum of how partnership initiatives can, and do, reproduce the very power dynamics they set out to transform. We are a group of students and staff working in curriculum partnership together at Western Sydney University. The context of our work together is the 21C project, a university-wide strategy to transform curriculum, teaching, and learning, drawing on ‘partnership pedagogy’. In this paper, we engage in a process of reflexive inquiry to interrogate a new elective unit that many of us are involved in as advocates, co-creators, as students and staff learning together, and as evaluators, called We are the university: Students co-creating change (WATU). To highlight partnership’s intricate power plays, we offer a fictionalised account to reflect our multi-voiced experiences of being involved in WATU. We have come to understand power’s simultaneity in partnership as forms of power over, as permission-giving, as sharing (or partnership), and as the power to act (agency). The account is our story of partnership’s inevitable contradictions - a collaboration that teaches us about the challenges of working together while being cautious of partnership’s transformatory claims

Editorial 9.3

This Special Edition of JUTLP is unique in that it examines a single university\u27s approach to curriculum reform, providing insights from many of the people who were engaged in the process. At La Trobe University in Australia the mechanism for engaging in discussions at a university level has been encapsulated in an institutional strategy known as Design for Learning (DfL) (La Trobe University 2009). From 2007, former Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) Belinda Probert and former Pro Vice-Chancellor (Curriculum and Academic Planning) Tom Angelo, led an exciting and edgy curriculum change initiative intended to build on La Trobe’s learning and teaching strengths, while simultaneously building a systems focus for ensuring curriculum quality and renewal. The blueprint for the DfL described its principles thus: “ … highlight[ing] breadth of choice, equity, flexibility (options), learning centred-ness, research and evidence based decision making, a systems focus (rather than making individuals responsible for things they do not control), and support (resources)” (La Trobe University 2009, p. 7). With goodwill, energy and a profound sense that ‘something needed to be done’, in the early years of the DfL, the university was alive with fresh talk of curriculum, teaching and student learning galvanised by new leadership, a commitment to evidence-based change, resources to fund curriculum innovation, together with the promise of reward and recognition. Imagine the scene: committees and communities spring up to think together about complex pedagogical issues, spirited discussion takes place, departments and faculties share resources and good practices, new staff are brought on board with responsibility to make things happen. The 7 papers represented here describe both large and small curriculum change initiatives – some funded by the university and others done out of love, curiosity and interest

The Inevitable Contradictions of Student Learning

Excerpt: I used to lead a university-wide network dedicated to developing the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Every second Tuesday at the dot of 1pm, 10-15 or so staff would shuffle into a room (refreshments in hand) to learn about the evaluation of a pedagogical initiative, to critically review a colleague’s promising idea for a new curriculum project, to puzzle over something SoTL-like we’d collectively read and sought through dialogue to better understand, and to share experiences of what often felt like contradictory university agendas for curriculum, teaching and learning change. At the best of times, folks would find opportunities to write together. And in less busy times, the SoTL publications and teaching awards achieved among us would be acknowledged, and plans made for celebration. In our learning how to be together, the differences in the politics of our contexts and in our disciplinary/professional training did not seem as stark because of our commitment to think well, and to act in scholarly ways about the project of improving student learning. Among us were those who taught students in the typical ways–in seminars, lectures, labs, online and elsewhere, and there were others who saw students in individual consultations regarding specific learning difficulties. Then, there were those (like me) with two jobs: the first, to support faculty take an inquiry-based approach to their curriculum, teaching, student learning, and second, to make a contribution to integrated, systems-level thinking about student learning in relation to the overall curriculum offerings of the university. That disposition – caring for student learning – seemed to be the stuff that held the network together no matter the level or focus of our interest in SoTL. It helped that we laughed together too...