Becoming the lecturer your students want you to be
On 9 May, this year’s PG Cert cohort held a poster exhibition to display the culmination of the projects they had implemented with their students as part of the course.
The Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education not only brings together new teaching staff from across the university, but is also mixes those with an academic, higher education background with those whose expertise is more firmly grounded in industry, allowing for multiple levels of cross-pollination.
Lecturers from Computer Games Development, Performance, PE and Sports Coaching, Musical Theatre and Animation, amongst others, shared the challenges their students faced when trying to navigate their learning in higher education. Through action research projects covering issues around academic literacy, webinars, engagement and reflection, the participants showed how they had tested out solutions to address these issues, offering discovering – as so often – that there was rarely a single solution.
The PG Cert course is designed to give new lecturers the confidence to do things differently – to step away from the traditional ways of teaching they probably experienced themselves and instead play with more creative practice. For example, one lecturer with a passion for gamification introduced his ideas for engaging students in class by creating different characters they could adopt.
The posters reflected on the results of the projects and threw up potentially inspiring implications for further practice, such as the power of collaboration as illustrated in the teamwork of two Animation lecturers.
All of the posters will be presented at SLTCC. Sign up, take a look, and share in the journey of becoming the lecturer your students want you to be.