Category: Teaching

Pandemic Pedagogy 2.0: David Gehring – Less is More and No Student Left Behind

e-learning, Education, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, Teaching, Technology

In another of our posts following up on Pandemic Pedagogy, David Gehring of the Department of History at the University of Nottingham shares David Gehringhis thoughts on experiences of teaching during the pandemic. Feel free to share your own insights via our Twitter account or even by writing a blog post yourself!

This post is based on a presentation at the East Midlands Centre for History Learning and Teaching workshop that took place on 11 January 2021 and will be published on the EMC website as well (https://eastmidlandscentreforhistorylearningandteaching.education/).

 

Think back to those halcyon days when we regularly taught in a classroom. We, along with our students, were all within the same four walls, within the same physical environment. Then again, the playing field was never even for our students because their backgrounds and levels of cultural and social capital vary based on a range of factors well outside of our control as individual instructors. Despite the challenges posed by the uneven playing field, we, inside that classroom, could see if a student looked uneasy, uncomfortable, or confused; we, inside that classroom, could adjust the discussion, accommodate to student needs, and lift up those who needed the assistance.

Think now (February 2021). In an online teaching environment (Teams, Zoom, etc.), the playing field is even more uneven due to variations among our students’ IT hardware and internet connections, their levels of confidence when navigating the internet, and their study space while away from university campuses. How, therefore, can we create a welcoming community and learning environment for all when the challenges just got harder for those who need our support the most? At my university, Microsoft Teams has been the principal platform for online teaching, and, in many respects, it has matured remarkably since we all learned of its existence back in March 2020. When used alongside another virtual learning environment with which students are already familiar (e.g., Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas), Teams can be a real complement. Newer features and functions include breakout rooms, file storage, notebooks, blurred backgrounds, and collaborative tools. In time, Microsoft will add more bells and whistles. These tools can genuinely enrich the student experience, and embed knowledge and understanding in fun and fresh ways. What’s not to love?

But.

Our own abilities as instructors vary significantly. Some of us aren’t very confident with these new bells and whistles; even if we are, the frequent updating of the software means that we’re not all running the same version of Teams, and, as a result, we may not all have access to the newest features. How can we expect our students – non-traditional, disadvantaged, middle-class, or well-heeled – to keep up with these changes when the world around them is in such flux, when, quite rightly, their priorities may lie in family care? Even if they’re savvy enough to know how to navigate breakout rooms, collaborate via the notebook, or use Talis Aspire, that doesn’t mean that their IT hardware or internet bandwidth can take it. (Never mind the limitations of my own network at home.)

So, what can we do? Less is more, with, ideally, no student left behind. No PowerPoints. No screen sharing. No breakout rooms. No whiteboards. No bells. No whistles. Just the equivalent of a seminar room with me and them, cameras on. It’s basic; it’s straightforward; but, in avoiding the complications and potential stress levels that come with the newest and latest, we can lessen the chances of losing students along the way. The move online has already put many students at a disadvantage, and I’d like to avoid exacerbating that disparity. Keeping things low-tech, à la March 2020, can make the seminar feel a little old school when our other colleagues are using the breakout rooms and collaborative tools that we don’t. Should all of us go ‘less is more’? No, I think not. Rather, variety in pedagogical style has always been part of higher education, and our students should continue to be exposed to different styles of teaching, to different modes of learning. Variety, after all, is the spice of life. Long may it remain.

 

If you would like to contribute a short blog post or podcast/video that addresses how the pandemic has changed or affected history teaching and learning in Higher Education then please email Dr Sarah Holland (sarah.holland@nottingham.ac.uk), History UK’s Education Officer.

Pandemic Pedagogy 2.0: Andrew Jotischky – Assessment during the Pandemic: ‘Take-home exams’

assessment, e-learning, exams, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, Students, Teaching

Andrew Jotischky kicks off week 2 of our Pandemic Pedagogy follow-up with a blog post about the challenges of assessment – particularly exams – during the pandemic. Andrew is Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway University of London, having previously taught for twenty years at Lancaster University. He teaches courses on various aspects of medieval religious life and thought, on crusading and on medieval food, at undergraduate and MA level. His most recent publications include, co-authored with Bernard Hamilton, Latin and Greek Monasticism in the Crusader States (2020).

About seven or eight years ago, as Head of Department at my previous university, I was involved in discussions with colleagues about the possibility of setting up a distance learning MA course. It didn’t happen in the end, for various reasons, but I remember the moment of shock at the realisation at just how much preparation time was needed to put on a single 30 credit course. I’ve thought about that many times over the past few pandemic months, when many of us involved in teaching History at university have been either designing courses for distance learning delivery, or converting existing courses for partial or wholly online delivery, in the space of a few weeks rather than months – and with sketchy training at best. It’s true, of course, that the technology has changed rapidly over the past few years, and that it’s possible to deliver online in ways that would have been unimaginable even in 2015. Even so, in the months since the March 2020 lockdown, we have all learned, at great speed, how to do things at that we hadn’t previously considered part of our jobs.

As I write, there is no prospect of anything like a return to ‘normal’ teaching this academic year. It’s worth asking ourselves what the legacy of pandemic teaching will be. From the multitude of things we’ve learned to do in the past nine months, what might we choose to retain as good practice in a post-pandemic world? What follows is an entirely personal view of one new practice that has changed the way I have thought about teaching and assessment: the online ‘home exam’. This was adopted hurriedly by many universities, including my own and the one where I am an external examiner, once it became apparent in April 2020 that traditional unseen ‘in-person’ exams would no be possible. Instead of a two or three hour period of sweating – or freezing – in a room often far from suitable for the purpose, students have 24 hours to write and submit their answers online, with a word limit instead of a time limit.  Since there can be no attempt to police the way they sit the paper, it is effectively an open-book exam. The system is far from perfect, of course. The traditional exam venue at least has the merit of equalizing the experience, whereas the online ‘home exam’ can expose inequalities between students who experience digital poverty or lack of appropriate space at home and those with plentiful access to books, fast broadband and privacy to work. If ways can be found for allowance to be given for these problems, however, there are real merits in the ‘home exam.’ My experience both as an internal and external examiner was that the overall quality of answers was significantly superior to the traditional exam answer written in a hurry – we’re all familiar with the ‘knowledge dump’ syndrome, the student suffering from nerves, the ‘off day’, and all the reasons why the in-person exam so often fails to reflect students’ true abilities. The ‘home exam’ allows time for reflection, for coherent, structured and well-informed answers. It also gives initiative to students, who have to make choices about how much time to spend on the different tasks involved in the exam, how much thinking and preparation time to allow themselves, how much to read or look up. It is more likely to produce a set of answers that tells us, as teachers, what our students’ real abilities are, rather than how much they can remember on a given day, or how fast they can write. And, of course, their answers rely less on our palaeographical skills. For these reasons, I hope that universities continue to find a place for the ‘home exam’ format even after it is no longer mandated by the need for social distancing.

If you would like to contribute a short blog post or podcast/video that addresses how the pandemic has changed or affected history teaching and learning in Higher Education then please email Dr Sarah Holland: (sarah.holland@nottingham.ac.uk), History UK’s Education Officer.

Pandemic Pedagogy 2.0: Lucinda Matthews-Jones – The Paper-Based Digital Classroom

Annotation, COVID-19, Digital History, e-learning, Education, independent learning, informal learning, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, student engagement, Students, Teaching

The second blog post following on from our Pandemic Pedagogy initiative is by Lucinda Matthews-Jones, a lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University. She teaches nineteenth-century gender and urban history modules. Her dynamic and innovative teaching approaches were recognised in 2018 when she awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Individual Teaching Award. Beyond the classroom, she researches ideas of home and urban domesticities in the British Settlement Movement, 1880-1920. Lucinda tweets @luciejones83.

I am a paper-based lecturer and teacher. Before COVID-19, you would have found me moving around my university building with large rolls of paper and a tote bag filled with coloured pens, glue sticks, post notes, and scissors. For me, asking students to work on paper in groups or as individuals enabled them to break down and cement their ideas through a visual format. It helped me to see what they had picked up and to expand these points in classroom discussions.

But how could I replicate this in the digital classroom? There has been a tendency to think that this needs to be done through digital tools. But if the non-digital class can be based on mixed media then why not the digital, too? Why must the digital classroom be paperless? It felt like digital fatigue had hit both me and the students in the second half of the semester in Autumn 2020. Discussions with personal tutees and other students had made me increasingly aware that recorded lectures were taking a lot of time and energy both to produce and consume. As History UK’s Pandemic Pedagogy Handbook observed ‘screen-time and remote interaction have a cumulative effect; the result is mentally and physically draining’.

My first-year students had a ‘how to respond to your feedback’ seminar coming up for their academic skills module and I wanted to think more creatively about how to get them to engage with the department’s writing guide. I decided that breaking it down and asking students to create a zine relating to the section that they had been assigned would help them to process the complex information written down in the guide and get them to think about how to communicate this in a creative manner. Students were sent class instructions through our VLE (see below).

Here is a picture of one zine and the page from LJMU’s History Guide it refers to.

Here is a picture of one zine and the page from LJMU’s History Guide it refers to.

Students reported that the exercise encouraged them to read the material differently by emphasising the need to break it down and to think about how to display the guide’s information. They enjoyed the idea that the exercise was for a wider audience and not just them reading through the guide on their own. At the end of the session, contributions were sent to me and put into a PDF.

Handwriting and hand drawing can improve people’s ability to remember. Hetty Roessingh, for instance, has noted that handwriting notes and sketching has enhanced her students ‘understanding and remembering’ by encouraging them to make ‘personal connection’ through ‘creative thought’.  Roessingh continues that ‘hand-written notes matter and endure over time.’ Asking students to do paper-based creative exercise also changes the embodied experiences of digital learning. It encourages the eyes to look down and focus on the task, minimising screen time during a seminar.

The picture above shows a mind map illustrating one approach taken by students.

The picture above shows a mind map illustrating one approach taken by students.

This session was intended to be light-hearted and a bit different from previous weeks. What I found was that I really enjoyed it. The conversations were dynamic and interesting as I moved around the breakout rooms. I felt more like me as a lecturer, having neither the know-how nor confidence around some digital technologies that others have used to transition their teaching online. Paper based activities will now be the focus of my teaching in semester 2.

What paper-based activities have you been using in your teaching? I would love to hear!

Class instructions

To help you prepare for the next assessment we will be digging into the LJMU Writing Guide. Together we will create a zine of top tips from this based on your feedback and what surprises you from the guide and feel your peers would benefit from.

Before class: 

  • Please make sure you have downloaded: LJMU_Writing_History_v1.pdf
  • Have some paper and any coloured pens to hand. You can also bring newspaper, magazines, glue, and scissors if you want to do something more multimedia. But you do not have too. You can do this exercise on a class.

In class: 

  • You will be spilt into groups and given a section
  • Be able to take an image of your hand out and email to  Lucie for her to collate.
  • Be prepared to summarise and explain your zine page.

Want to know more about Zines? Read here: How to Make a Zine: Guide to Making Your Own Zine During Quarantine – Thrillist (Links to an external site.).

If you would like to contribute a short blog post or podcast/video that addresses how the pandemic has changed or affected history teaching and learning in Higher Education then please email Dr Sarah Holland (sarah.holland@nottingham.ac.uk), History UK’s Education Officer.

Pandemic Pedagogy 2.0: Amy Louise Blaney – Recreating Informal Spaces in Virtual Learning Environments

blog, COVID-19, e-learning, Education, informal learning, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, student engagement, Teaching, virtual learning environments

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is continuing to affect the ways in which history is taught and assessed at universities. Following on from our Pandemic Pedagogy Handbook, History UK has commissioned a series of blog posts exploring how staff, students and institutions have responded to this continually evolving situation and the pedagogical challenges it has presented.

The first post in this series is by Amy Louise Blaney, a PhD student at Keele University. Her thesis examines the afterlife of the Arthurian legend in the long eighteenth-century and its intersection with national identity formation. Amy is also a part-time lecturer in English at Staffordshire University, as well as a co-editor for Keele’s Under Construction postgraduate journal.

Covid-19 required rapid adaptations of teaching pedagogy and practice and it has been heartening to see HE teachers and lecturers engaging in innovative, accessible, and original teaching in these challenging environments.

Recreating informal and social spaces has, however, proved more difficult. As a student, I have missed the informal conversations that take place with both my peers and my lecturers – the chance encounters over coffee, or the chats that occur before and after lectures and seminars. And as a tutor, I’ve found re-creating such spaces online particularly challenging.

My first online teaching session felt sorely lacking in informality. Launching straight in seemed to leave students cold despite my attempts to create a cheery atmosphere. Getting them to talk to each other – let alone me – felt like trying to cross a digital wilderness, bereft of the friendly gestures that help in situ teaching sessions to get off the ground. We got there eventually, but I came out of it feeling that there was something lacking.

I mentioned this in passing to my mum – a Quality Improvement Officer for the NHS – and she suggested taking 5/10 minutes to ‘warm up’ my crowd. Warm-up activities had worked well with the adult learners on her training courses and, she said, had helped increase engagement.

Given that anything is better than talking into a void, I decided to give it a go and re-arranged my next session to allow for 10 minutes ‘warm-up’. Deciding that even if I couldn’t get students to engage, I could attempt to raise a smile, I raided the archive of internet memes and decided to ask how they felt on a scale of 1 – Obi-Wan.

Scale of 1 to Obi Wan

I’ll be honest, when I got to the relevant slide and asked the question, I was expecting radio silence. Instead, I got a chorus of chat messages with students responding with a number, then replying in chat or via voice if I asked them for a little more detail about how they were feeling. It wasn’t in any way related to the course content, but it woke everyone (myself included) up, got them mentally into the room, and got them talking to both me and to each other.

Since then, my group have told each other how we feel on a scale of cat, made a Mentimeter word cloud about Shakespeare, and played ‘guess the seventeenth-century poet’ together. Students would start chatting as soon as they logged in, asking each other how they were, and responding when I asked them how they’d found the reading and preparation. Sessions were more engaged and livelier. It felt like being in a classroom.

Our activities were only indirectly related to the course content but creating space for such informal conversations is, I feel, vital to learning. As well as providing a sense of comradery and shared experience, conversations that take place within informal learning spaces can inspire new directions in thinking and research and allow for the sharing of ideas and worries in a safe and collegiate space. And if Covid-19 has taught us anything, it is that we need those connections more than ever.

If you would like to contribute a short blog post or podcast/video that addresses how the pandemic has changed or affected history teaching and learning in Higher Education then please email Dr Sarah Holland (sarah.holland@nottingham.ac.uk), History UK’s Education Officer.

Pandemic Pedagogy – your chance to contribute

Digital History, e-learning, Education, independent learning, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, Project, Teaching, Technology
History UK is looking to build on the Pandemic Pedagogy project by exploring the continuing impact of Covid-19 on teaching history in higher education. We are inviting short blog posts (300-500 words long) and/or podcasts/videos (c. 3-5 minutes long) that address how the pandemic has change or affected subject specific teaching practice in History and cognate disciplines.
Such contributions could include but is not limited to:
  • learning and teaching environments: the socially distanced classroom, online, hybrid and hy-flex
  • diversity and inclusivity
  • technology and software or high tech versus low tech
  • assessment methods
  • activities beyond the classroom (e.g. field trips)
  • student engagement
  • health and wellbeing – staff and students
  • student communities
  • collaborative learning
  • the ways in which students have perceived, understood, and responded to the changes and challenges
If you would like to contribute to the next phase of pandemic pedagogy, please email Dr Sarah Holland (sarah.holland@nottingham.ac.uk), History UK’s Education Officer.
We are hoping to begin to release the blog posts/podcasts/videos from mid-January 2021.
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