Over the past few weeks members of the HUK Steering Committee, coordinated by Prof. Kate Cooper (Royal Holloway) have been putting together a project to support historians as we move out of the ‘emergency’ phase of online teaching and start planning for the next semester/ term. Following our Steering Committee meeting in early June, we ran a survey of members’ views. This has helped us form a working group to generate some useful resources and to run (online) events. We are keen to reflect on the ‘emergency’ phase of teaching and learning and to share best practice through collaborative problem-solving.
To that end, we’ve divided our ‘Pandemic Pedagogy’ activities into two broad strands:
- Lucinda Matthews-Jones (LJMU), Yolana Pringle (Roehampton) and Manuela Williams (Sitrling) are developing the strand on inclusivity and community-building.
- Kristen Brill (Keele), Kate Cooper (Royal Holloway) and Jamie Wood (Lincoln)are working on our second strand on pedagogy and online tools.
The inclusivity strand will kick off with the first of a series of Twitter chats today (Weds 3rd June) at 11am. Here’s the poster:
We hope that you’ll be able to join us.
Alongside this, the pedagogy and technology group aims to produce some pages for the History UK website over the next few weeks, each of which will involve a short summary of the results of our information-gathering on three topics:
- An overview of tools for online teaching – an annotated list introducing various digital tools people may have heard of but not used.
- An introduction to various ways of staging digital small-group interactions that move replication of face-to-face teaching (e.g. lectures or seminars).
- A page focussing specifically on tools and strategies for collaborative close ‘reading’ (including images and other media) and annotation of ‘texts’.
Our key aim here is to produce short, user-friendly and practical resources (i.e. case studies rather than research papers or theoretical works).
To draw on the knowledge that’s already out there to inform this initiative, we are conducting a survey of historians in HE. Please follow this link to complete it:
We will be sharing the results of our work as soon as possible via the HUK website and/or Twitter account.
Finally, if any historians are interested in joining our group to help out with this initiative, then please do get in touch with any of us directly.
Kristen Brill (Keele)
Kate Cooper (Royal Holloway – @kateantiquity)
Lucinda Matthews-Jones (Liverpool John Moores – @luciejones)
Yolana Pringle (Roehampton – @y_pringle)
Manuela Williams (Strathclyde – @ManuelaAWill)
Jamie Wood (Lincoln – @woodjamie99)