Encountering Ancient Worlds is mandatory for all our single honours (Classics, Classical Studies and Ancient History) first years. The unit was recently redesigned, moving away from an emphasis on imparting information and instead aiming to equip students to tackle challenges associated with transition to HE.
The unit aims to build students’ confidence and ability to reflect on their learning process whilst promoting an inclusive community identity. This blog has been co-written with Millie and Imogen, two 2nd year students who took the unit last year.
Metacognition
When redesigning the unit, I particularly wanted to help students understand the mechanics of learning in HE. I was convinced that sharing my knowledge of teaching and learning scholarship directly with students would help them better understand their experience. In class, students listened to podcasts of academics discussing active learning and studied models such as Bloom’s Taxonomy to make sense of how their learning was evolving. The subsequent discussions encouraged students to share their experiences and ‘survival techniques’. They also allowed tutors better to understand student perspectives and the ways of working that they find most effective.
Millie & Imogen: The unit gave us an understanding of how learning in HE differed from college or sixth-form and helped us to be aware of expectations. Exploring different modes of learning established the precedent that university learning should be active and thrives on student engagement and awareness of their learning processes.
Our ability to offer a student perspective on learning also helped form our relationship with our tutors. This is crucial because by becoming aware of our weaknesses and anxieties, teaching can be better adapted to promote students’ progress. Shelley and Hannah’s attention to student voices was evidence of the investment they made in our learning and fostered an engaging and collaborative environment.
Collaboration
Classics is an umbrella discipline involving historians, literary analysts, archaeologists and others. Our individual programmes develop students in these specialist areas but we need to pool our specialisms collectively for maximum effect. Throughout the unit, we celebrated students’ diverse interests, skills and experiences and facilitated combining them.
We started building community in Welcome Week with a field trip to the Roman fort at Caerleon. In early classes, students collaborated on low-stakes, practical activities, such as handling our coin collection or plotting creative re-tellings of classical narratives. The variety of activities encouraged different students to take the lead each time.
Having built trust and appreciation of diversity, we enabled productive discussions of potentially difficult topics such as gender and violence in antiquity. A jigsaw learning approach allowed students to build a broad picture of ancient experiences. In the final weeks, students worked in small groups to design and present research micro-projects.
Millie: Upon entering university everything feels high-stakes, from making new friends and joining societies to performing in class. By giving us frequent practise in low-stakes, collaborative environments, I really felt that my wellbeing was prioritised and the transition to university made smoother. It allowed me to gain confidence from my peers and practise using my voice in a new, daunting environment. Rather than fixating on my performance, I was able to learn and explore my discipline from a basis of genuine enjoyment and interest. This allowed me better to enjoy later units and, I believe, to perform better.
Exploring a different theme each week allowed us to find topics that particularly resonated with us. Within each theme, a choice of case studies allowed us each to choose a match to our interests but we were expected to relay what we found to our groups. Collaboration was not simply a by-product of the class but integral to it. We could not engage with the course content fully without connecting with our peers. This reflects the nature of knowledge-development in our discipline and I appreciated Shelley and Hannah’s emphasis of how our activities mirrored collaboration between professional academics.
Reflection
Key to this unit is providing space for students collectively and individually to reflect on their evolving university experience. Quiet writing time built into classes allowed students to gather their thoughts and they were encouraged to keep a reflective journal. In week 3, students submitted a 300-word formative report reflecting on their initial impressions of university and received feedback signposting sources of support and offering practical advice. In the summative reflective essay, students took stock of their development over an entire teaching block. These assessments also encouraged reflection on our own practice, affording us greater insight into our students’ experience of transition to university.
Imogen: The assessments’ focus on personal experience made it relevant to every student. We had the opportunity to think about how we study and consider what skills and habits we want to take forward. I will continue filling in my learning journal after class throughout my degree. I felt its benefit particularly when writing my summative assessment.
The ‘what, so what, now what’ model of reflection has been useful in other units, particularly for source analysis. Thinking ‘what does this mean’ is something we’ve considered throughout school but having a structured method of thinking through my own responses and their consequences when analysing longer, denser texts at university has been very helpful.
Millie: The feedback I received on my formative assessment encouraged me to delve deeper into my learning process and to specify more precisely my strengths and weaknesses. This gave me the initiative to practise reflective learning skills such as keeping a learning journal and being aware of the impact of my participation on class dynamics.
This blog is just one example of collaboration between staff and students in this unit, which has also included co-creating a class for this year’s cohort. Our collaborative ethos demonstrates that students and tutors can together create an environment in which we can all flourish and advance our understanding of the ancient world.
Really wonderful that you have shared this work and great to hear the student voices and how they appreciated this supportive unit.