teaching

In a hurry

/ AgnesBosanquet / 1 Comment

This is the 13th post in Over a Cuppa, a series which offers prompts to reflect on learning and teaching during the time it takes to make and drink a cuppa. Cross-posted from Teche, original artwork by Fidel Fernando.

Since mid-February, once a week (other than a fortnightly mid-session break) I have posted 300 or so words for Over a cuppa, a series of prompts to reflect on learning and teaching during the time it takes to make and drink a cuppa.

The posts have been focussed on the practice of teaching, rather than students’ reflections for learning. My starting point was a belief that reflective practice is a learned skill, as outlined in Macquarie University’s Professional Learning and Capability Enhancement (PLaCE) Framework, which includes the following capabilities from Foundational to Expert levels:

  • Articulate the principles of, approaches to, and the values of, reflective practice.
  • Reflect on own teaching, learning support and/or curriculum/assessment design practices.
  • Explain actions taken in response to reflection on, and in, practice.
  • Engage in sustained reflection on own educational practices and critique actions taken in response.
  • Implement strategies to promote a culture that values reflective practice.
  • Develop and support the strategic and systematic embedding of reflexivity into educational practice.

I have read (or reread) several books, including Schön’s (1983) The Reflective Practitioner; hook’s (1994) Teaching to Transgress; Brookfield’s (2017) Becoming a critically reflective teacher; Carter’s (2020) Academic Identity and the Place of Stories, as well as numerous journal articles.

I also linked to an interview with Stephen Brookfield, poetry, a meditation, creative non-fiction and my favourite tools for reflective practice – the Teaching Perspectives Inventory, ImaginePhD and the AdvanceHE comprehensive scholarly practice guide.

For each post, my colleague Fidel Fernando created an original digital artwork. Here is a time lapse video of Fidel creating the image for this post:

https://echo360.org.au/media/019d8a01-4bdc-4a38-8434-ed6170ef15d8/public

The reading, writing and drawing that has contributed to these posts belies the fact that this was reflection in a hurry. My initial plans for the series went off-piste as my ‘writing along the way’ took me in unexpected directions, and some of the posts include aphorisms – Put on your teaching cloak, Don’t be the wizard behind the curtain – inspired by conversations with colleagues.

There is still a lot of reflection to be done and the series will continue at the end of July. I am looking forward to finishing Ashwin et al’s (2020) Reflective Teaching in Higher Education and posting about Mary Ryan’s work on reflexivity and Marina Harvey’s ecology of reflection.

In the meantime I want to catch up on some Slow Academic posts that have been sitting in my drafts folder for several months. Slow by name, and slow by nature.

Questioning

/ AgnesBosanquet / Leave a comment

This is the 11th post in Over a cuppa, a series which offers prompts to reflect on learning and teaching during the time it takes to make and drink a cuppa. I have set myself the challenge of keeping these posts to 300 or so words. Cross-posted from Teche, original artwork by Fidel Fernando.

If I had to sum up reflection in one word I would say: questioning. Reflection treats teaching as an experimental learning process.

After (too much) thinking for one word, I discovered Reflective Teaching in Higher Education (2020) has questions as its table of contents. It opens: Who are we as teachers and who are our students? How can we develop the quality of our teaching? Then questions on spaces, curriculum, communication, inclusion… It ends: How do we develop a career-long fascination with teaching? How does reflective teaching contribute to society? I’ll let you know when my copy arrives! In the meantime, the website includes useful individual and group activities.

I am currently reading Sarah Krasnostein’s (2021) The Believer: Encounters with Love, Death & Faith, a work of narrative non-fiction that resists description. Krasnostein writes:

It is thinking—in the specific sense of an honest interior conversation that tries to distinguish between right and wrong, both factually and morally—that anchors the human world. Arendt speaks of the willingness to hold these inward interrogations as the disposition to live with oneself (p 45).

Bell hooks’ (1994) in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom offers the inward interrogations of reflection as a process of imagination:

Excitement in higher education was viewed as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process … Critical reflection on my experience as a student in unexciting classrooms enabled me not only to imagine that the classroom could be exciting but that this excitement could co-exist with and even stimulate serious intellectual and/or academic engagement (p 7).

Initially I thought this post would ask ‘why reflect?’ but the process of writing it, and the books I am reading, made this seem like asking ‘why think?’ or ‘why imagine?’ How could we do otherwise?

Use your senses

/ AgnesBosanquet / Leave a comment

This is the 9th post in Over a cuppa, a series which offers prompts to reflect on learning and teaching during the time it takes to make and drink a cuppa. I have set myself the challenge of keeping these posts to 300 or so words. Cross-posted from Teche, original artwork by Fidel Fernando.

Today’s reflection prompt is: consider the five senses in your teaching.

This morning, I joined colleagues for breakfast and a campus walk guided by the work of an interdisciplinary research team Go Slow for a Mo. As a living lab for evaluating the benefits of spending time in nature, our campus offers an invaluable resource for staff and students. Over the coming months, we will be sharing ways to incorporate this Stress Regulator Trail in your teaching and research practices. I still have grass on my feet and birdsong in my ears.

Last year, I attended two virtual seminars on Learning Through COVID that focussed on embodiment and experiential learning: Why we need our body to learn and work and Rethinking embodied learning. Via Zoom, the presenters prompted participants to use their whole bodies during the sessions (take a look at the pre-readings and videos via the links above).

Over the last couple of years, I have been working on a project that takes a sensory and place-based look at the higher education conference experience. We are drawing on the methods of cultural history research to analyse the experience of conference participation and the themes of place, sociality, embodiment and sensory experience. This led me to pick up Chatterjee and Hannan’s (2015) edited collection Engaging the Senses: Object-Based Learning in Higher Education which discusses the pedagogies of artefacts, artworks, materials and matter.

On Friday, I will be teaching a seminar on the evolution of higher education, and want to engage students across the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains (based on Bloom’s taxonomy for learning and revised by Anderson and Krathwohl). How are you being attentive to the sights, sounds, tastes, smells and touch of learning experiences?

Anderson, L., & Krathwohl, D. A. (2001). Taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman.

Bloom, B. S.; Engelhart, M. D.; Furst, E. J.; Hill, W. H.; Krathwohl, D. R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook I: Cognitive domain. New York: David McKay Company.

Chatterjee, H. J. and Hannan, L. (2015) (eds.) Engaging the Senses: Object-Based Learning in Higher Education. London and New York: Routledge.