Tag: rethinking spaces

Meet the BILT Student Fellows

Meet the Student Fellows… Lisa Howarth

BILT

We asked our Student Fellows to write us a short blog about their background and what they are doing as part of their BILT role. The following blog is from Lisa Howarth, who has been a BILT Student Fellow since December 2018.

I am currently studying for a MSc in Education and Neuroscience, which combines my interest in brain development with my career in primary school teaching. I am passionate about education as a means towards social justice and have taught in the UK, Hong Kong and California. In San Diego I taught a project-based curriculum, with a focus on equity, personalisation, authentic work and collaborative design. The level of student engagement was extremely high and their creativity, confidence and sense of social responsibility was inspiring. Although these children were accustomed to an innovative inquiry-based curriculum, where they were accountable for their learning and could think critically, they struggled when attending university.

The gulf between teaching in primary and secondary schools and teaching at university was particularly apparent to me after returning to higher education as a student after a break of several years. I believe that higher education should encourage and facilitate critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration, and that teaching spaces should reflect and inspire an evolving pedagogy. For this reason, I am very excited to be working on the project ‘Making the most of our teaching spaces’ as a Student Fellow.

I hope to gather views from a range of staff and students about their experiences and expectations of teaching spaces at the university, to encourage conversations around a changing pedagogy and to give students and staff a sense of ownership over their spaces. When undertaking this project, I would like to gain inspiration from the use of space in other teaching and work environments, inquire into a range of perspectives about current teaching spaces and to gather views on the future of teaching spaces, both physical and virtual. I look forward to working with many of you in the future!

News

The A-Ha Moment

BILT

The following blog was written by James Norman, a Senior Lecturer in Engineering and a BILT Fellow. 

I am sure we have all been there, it’s the Monday before the start of term and as we do the final preparation and look at the time table for next week we notice that we don’t recognise the room number where we are teaching. As a matter of fact, we don’t recognise the building either. As an engineer I have taught in most buildings from the arts faculty to Maths to biomedical sciences. Every building has its own character (I particularly enjoy walking past jars full of animal parts and large skeletons, I feel like I am at the Natural History museum), and its own set of distinctive teaching spaces. Standing up to lecture for the first time there is an A-Ha moment. If I had known a few months ago I was teaching in here I would have done this differently. Of course, I could have checked the space out before hand (I always do, as well as sweet talking the porters of the building into accepting large bowed of my printed notes) but something about the moment you stand up to teach brings all the senses alive and makes you think, could I have done this differently.

As a practicing engineer I have spent many years thinking about buildings, drawing them, carrying out calculations. Even now I can describe in intimate detail every aspect of the new building at Oxford Brooks University which I worked on for 5 years. But I can’t imagine what it would be like to stand up and deliver a lecture there. And yet we often expect lecturers and other members of staff to look at the plans of buildings and do exactly that. Or even worse we give them 100’s of pages long technical specifications and expect them to make sense of them and imagine they are teaching in that space.

I would like to explore recreating the A-Ha moment as a tool for helping lectures think about the space they are going to be teaching in and more importantly critique it before it has been constructed. I would like to go one step further and explore whether we can use different virtual spaces to explore teaching and learning and the opportunity for innovation in rethinking space.

Finally, I was recently at a workshop on simulating living on Mars. At this workshop, organised by Professor Lucy Berthoud and Ella and Nicki, two artists who plan to live in a mars simulator for six months, we were discussing sensory deprivation. Many of us in the room assumed that if you wear a VR headset you can fool the body into thinking it is in a large field of corn not a tiny space capsule. However, Dr Ute Leonards pointed out that current research in embodied cognition is looking into whether the body needs full sensory immersion to believe it is somewhere else, that visual simulation is not enough. I am therefore interested whether my idea to create the A-Ha moment to test teaching space will be further enhanced by the smell of new carpet and the babble of excited students looking forward to a whole term of lectures on concrete. Whether the A-Ha moment is enhanced if you really think that you are about to stand up and teach?

For more information on the Mars project see http://www.ellaandnicki.com

If you are interested in helping to create a series of virtual environments or have expertise in the immersive experience please contact James at james.norman@bristol.ac.uk

 

 

 

 

Engaged learning network graphic

Engaged Learning Network – Mingle: Reflecting on Ethics


An open space to reflect on what we have discussed throughout the Autumn Event Series and speak to other academic staff working on Engaged Learning across the University.

This mingle is part of the Engaged Learning Network’s autumn event series on the ethics of Engaged Learning. Each event is designed to build upon discussions from the previous sessions, but don’t worry if you can’t attend all the events in the series. We will ensure that you will still be able to contribute to and benefit from each individual session.

The Brambles is located at the back of The Hawthorns (home to Conferences and Hospitality) on the corner of Woodland Road and Elton Road.

You can enter through the Hawthorns garden, which faces Elton Road, or through the dining room behind the Hawthorns bar. You will need your U-Card for access.

Please note, this event is only open to University of Bristol staff members.

News

The Gap Between Pedagogy and Design

BILT

The following blog was written by James Norman, a Senior Teaching Fellow and a BILT Fellow since September 2018. 

For centuries universities have taught in lecture theatres. But the lecture theatre may well soon be a thing of the past. The new lecture theatre is the flat-bed teaching room. Or classroom to anyone who has been to school. The flat-bed teaching room offers many advantages over the lecture theatre. It is flexible. People can re-arrange furniture and work in groups. It removes some of the hierarchy between the teacher and the learner. But are flat bed teaching rooms really the solution to all our problems? Do flat bed teaching spaces really make pedagogical sense?

“Pedagogy needs to be explored through the thinking and practice of those educators who look to accompany learners; care for and about them; and bring learning into life.”

(Mark K. Smith, 2012)

Pedagogy is not about teaching. It is about learning. It is about understanding how people learn and by extension where people learn. I have been learning about pedagogy by reading in a coffee shop. Not in a flat-bed teaching room. I learnt to drive in a car, not in a flat-bed teaching room. We teach dentists the practical skills they need in a mock dentist’s surgery, not in a flat-bed teaching room. But what about lawyers and economists. Archeologists and historians. Where do they learn and how do we design spaces that work for them? So much learning occurs not in the lecture theatre OR the flat bed teaching space. So how do we approach the design of learning spaces and how do we keep pedagogy at the center of this process?

Is the solution rows and rows of flat-bed teaching rooms with movable partitions as suggested by the “Learning Space Rating System” (2017) or is it the use of metaphor to imagine our learning spaces as trees or gardens as advocated by The UK Higher Education Learning Space Toolkit? Professor Wright from the University of Bath would acknowledge both of these approaches as design strategies in the design of architectural space. But these are just 2 of 14 approaches. And Professor Wright’s approach is just one of many available design methodologies that can be utilized. So the question becomes how can we best combine pedagogy and design methodology to understand how to enhance the learning of our students. I don’t yet know the answers but I am looking forward to learning in unexpected places to try and find a new perspective on placing pedagogy at the heart of designing space.

Mark K. Smith, What is Pedagogy? (2012), http://infed.org/mobi/what-is-pedagogy/ accessed 14/11/18

Malcom Brown et al, Learning Space Rating System, Learning Space Rating System initiative, EDUCAUSE, 2017.

Gill Ferrell, The UK Higher Education Learning Space Toolkit, Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association.

Alexander Wright, Critical method: A pedagogy for design education, Design Principles and Practices, vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 109-122, 2011.

An interview with...

An interview with… Michaela Borg

BILT

Michela Borg is the Educational Development Manager in the Centre for Academic Development and Quality at Nottingham Trent University (NTU). She has been involved in our SCALE-UP work from the beginning. As they embarked on a pilot of the approach (2012/13), she worked with Jane McNeil (Executive Dean of Learning and Teaching) to recruit and prepare colleagues for teaching using SCALE-UP and she led the evaluation of the work.

In 2017, Jane led a successful bid for Catalyst funding, with partners Anglia Ruskin University and University of Bradford, to increase the use of active learning pedagogies at the three institutions as a strategy to address attainment disparities. She two roles in the project:  she is the evaluation lead for the project overall and she leads NTU educational development support for SCALE-UP.

What inspired the SCALE-UP project?

Back in 2012, Jane visited the United States on a study tour with several other senior colleagues from NTU. She met Physics Professor Robert Beichner at North Caroline State University and returned with great enthusiasm for an approach he had named SCALE-UP.

SCALE-UP offered a number of benefits: it enabled the use of enquiry-based learning with larger cohorts through the careful design of both the learning space and the activities; it challenged the dominance of the lecture, providing an accessible framework for tutors who wanted to take a more active, collaborative approach to their teaching. Finally, it was underpinned by a rigorous evaluation that evidenced impact on problem-solving skills, engagement and attendance, reduction in failure rates—particularly for gender and ethnicity—and, better performance for ‘at risk’ student on later modules (Beichner et al 2007).

What are the main elements of SCALE-UP?

SCALE-UP stands for Student-Centred Active Learning Environment with Upside-down Pedagogies. It is an active, collaborative mode of learning in which lectures are replaced by problem-solving and enquiry-based activities that are carried out in strategically-assigned groups. To foster collaborative learning, the re-designed classroom environment incorporates circular tables and technologies to enable students to share their work in small groups and in plenary. These elements are supported by rotating group roles and ‘upside-down pedagogies’ such as flipped learning and peer teaching. The shift away from lectures frees up class time for students to focus on challenging aspects of the material, to work at their own pace, and to receive on-the-spot feedback on their work from peers and the tutor.

What do you think are the biggest challenges when implementing SCALE-UP and what advice would you give for tackling them?

From the beginning, our introduction of SCALE-UP at NTU has been very strategic so while developing the estate and thinking through implications for timetabling are challenging, I’m going to pick course planning and redesign as the biggest challenges. Academic colleagues who adopt SCALE-UP need to get their heads around how the approach works and is different to what they do already. Then there is the redesign element—introducing new tasks into teaching and perhaps rethinking how the module is assessed. In our experience at NTU, we have found that this works best when a course team have considered how SCALE-UP will be used on the course—which module (and preferably more than one), who is teaching it, etc. This increases the coherence and support for students and helps them to see that this is a considered approach to their learning. It also provides support for colleagues using the approach and for new people joining the teaching team.

How can universities help students understand the benefits of SCALE-UP?

I think on one level the answer to this question is simple—talk to them! Of course, it isn’t really quite that simple as for many of our students, this form of enquiry-based learning which centres on groupwork and problem-solving tasks is quite a break from what they have experienced in their past learning and not what they may be expecting of study at university. So, we need to articulate the benefits of SCALE-UP, both in terms of their performance while at University and in terms of the skills that they will hone that will support their employability in the future. We need to help students to understand that while it may be more challenging and a little strange early on, their persistence and engagement will be rewarded.

Is there a specific piece of feedback/statistic you have that would encourage a member of staff to adopt SCALE-UP?

I’ll choose feedback—a quotation from a lecturer who wonderfully articulated the benefits that we intended for SCALE-UP:

“The main thing with SCALE-UP is capturing how students learn because I think years and years of evidence have shown that students do not learn the way we teach so what we need to do is to start teaching the way they learn and that’s what SCALE-UP does”

We are working on establishing an evidence base at the moment as our Catalyst funding includes a substantial evaluation. We are looking at a range of areas: how SCALE-UP impacts on the unexplained disparities in student progression and on student engagement, how it is experienced by students and their satisfaction with the approach, and, which elements of SCALE-UP tutors are most commonly using (or not using) when they use the approach.

If universities could invest in one furniture/ technology to promote active learning, what would you suggest?

Without a doubt I’d recommend round tables. I’m a complete convert and have learnt a lot over the years as I’ve had to explain (and at times justify) their importance in a SCALE-UP room. I think that anyone who has sat in a meeting knows that rectangular tables can make eye contact and conversation a challenge—you end up talking to the people opposite you or at the end of your table rather than those sitting either side of you. And don’t get me started on sitting in rows! It isn’t just something that I care about—students and module leaders involved in piloting the approach were also very positive about the tables. One lecturer commented:

“For me the real positive was the room and Professor Bob Beichner was dead right when he said the most important technology in the room was the round tables, the round tables worked really well for discussions”

Interestingly, Prof. Beichner evaluated the impact of different shapes and sizes of tables on student interaction (Beichner and Saul, 2003). They tested tables of 7, 8, 9 and 10-foot diameter and found that although students preferred the larger tables, these didn’t facilitate communication between the groups. They concluded that 7-foot tables were the best compromise between giving students enough personal space without reducing communication with students who were further away. At NTU, as our estate is at a premium, we had to go a little smaller than 7-foot but the principles remain important.

If you could change one thing about HE in the UK what would it be?

As many people reading this will be aware, there are unexplained disparities in attainment and progression for particular student groups, even when you control for grades on entry. At NTU we are working hard to ensure that all of our student have an opportunity to excel in their study and to reach their potential—to transform themselves and their lives and to contribute to transformation in our wider society. Our work to close these gaps has led to a range of creative projects and innovations that support student success. However, this is an on-going challenge.

Who was your favourite teacher at school/university and why?

I studied Geological Sciences in University of Birmingham for my undergraduate degree and we had a professor who taught quaternary studies and palaeontology, Professor Russell Coope. He was a wonderful teacher—funny, thoughtful and had the most infectious enthusiasm for his subject. All of my best experiences were in his classes. I remember washing beetle wings out of sediment to better understand paleoenvironments and, probably best of all, carefully cleaning the bones of a newly-discovered woolley mammoth. It was such a privilege and a thrill that has always stayed with me.

References
Beichner & Saul (2003) http://www.ncsu.edu/per/Articles/Varenna_SCALEUP_Paper.pdf
Beichner et al (2007) http://www.per-central.org/items/detail.cfm?ID=4517

group of students on round table
News

University of Bristol Teaching Space Principles

BILT

Introduction

The principles below are intended to provide a pedagogical framework for the design of teaching and learning spaces. Each of the five principles is oriented towards facilitating active interaction and ensuring flexibility as follows:

  1. The interaction of students with the content or material being learned. Encouraging active, tailored and accessible learning.
  2. The interaction of teaching and learning spaces with social and recreational spaces and the wider environment. Encouraging a cohesive learning experience and promoting well-being.
  3. Interaction between students. Encouraging peer to peer, cooperative and collaborative learning.
  4. Interactions between teachers and students. Encouraging the effective support and facilitation of research-rich learning by teaching and research staff.
  5. Flexibility in relation to current and future pedagogies. Encouraging evidence-based practice and innovation in teaching and learning.

 The Principles

  1. Teaching spaces will allow all students to actively engage with content through appropriate design and technologies that support multiple modes of teaching[1]. The learning that takes place in these spaces will be accessible to all students.
  2. The University will foster a welcoming environment for students beyond timetabled teaching activities, to include social, learning and recreational spaces so that students’ experience of time spent at the University is coherent and integrated and supports their well-being.
  3. Teaching and learning environments will encourage active collaborative interactions between students. Peer learning, multi-disciplinarity, in large or small groups, through and with technology, will be key to supporting students to create, develop and extend their own understandings and learning activities.  Teaching spaces should therefore be designed to an appropriate size to allow for meaningful and comfortable interaction.
  4. Our teaching and learning spaces will allow interaction between teachers, students and others, and will thereby encourage the active facilitation of student learning. This learning environment will be flexible, incorporate appropriate technologies, and have space to move around in by staff and students.
  5. Teaching and learning spaces should be designed using the best current evidence-based practice and flexible enough to allow for emerging and future pedagogies.

Notes:

By flexible we mean that there is no fixed furniture or if fixed furniture is used, it must allow for different types of learning activities. That tables and chairs can be moved easily into new and different configurations. Whiteboards will be available on many walls. Technology and charging points will be available for all users of the space.  There will be no fixed lectern, multiple screens will be available.  Storage space (for spare furniture) and storage space for coats, bags etc, will be available.

[1] Finkelstein, A., Ferris, J., Weston, C. & Winer, L (2016) Research-informed principles for (re)designing teaching and learning spaces.  Journal of Learning Spaces, 5 (1) 26-40.

Designing and Creating Digital Materials (DEO)


The increased availability of mobile devices gives teaching staff an opportunity to allow guided and self-paced learning to continue outside of traditional settings. This workshop will help you to get started in creating digital materials, moving from the initial idea through to creation and publishing the final content. The course will give you hands on experience with content creation tools and approaches and is intended for anyone wanting to create their own online or electronic resources. 
 
By the end of the workshop participants will be able to :
  • Develop a concept from an initial idea
  • Select appropriate tools
  • Design to improve materials ‘flow’
  • Storyboard content
  • Work through the development process
  • Implement the finished content

If you have any queries or would like to discuss further whether this course is suitable for you, please contact Martin Nutbeem.

News

More Good News For Education And Pedagogy Researchers In SSL!

BILT

BILT Fellow Jenny Lloyd updates us on the latest from the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law. 

For those in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law who have an interest in education and pedagogy, it’s been a pretty good couple of years.  For the last two years the Faculty has sponsored an Education and Pedagogy conference that has drawn together academics and professional staff from across the Faculty to debate, discuss and disseminate developments in research in education and pedagogy and also in its application.

Feedback for last year’s event ‘Evolution or Revolution’ was really positive. The conference appeared to strike the right balance of academic papers, practical workshops and key note speakers whilst the exhibition provided the space to discuss ideas and network with colleagues with shared interests.  Building upon this success we will soon be issuing a call for papers for the 2019 conference on the theme of ‘Space, Time and Education’. This theme was chosen because it hoped to encourage contributors to think about space and time in all of its dimensions – from the physical constructions of teaching rooms and buildings to the liminal space that so often initiates or inhibits creative change. From the perceptions of time, users of time, temporal constructions of time (i.e.the academic day/year) to historical reflections and implications of working in academia in modern times.  We are also keen to encourage creativity in the formats that contributions might take. Abstracts outlining academic paper presentations are always welcome but if contributors wish to run workshops or communicate their ideas using other media, we would certainly welcome the proposal.

However, that is not our only good news! Something that is particularly exciting is that, following the success of the last two conferences, our proposal for a Faculty Research Group (FRG) in Education and Pedagogy has also been approved. We are thrilled at this development as this has the potential to not only build on the legacy of the previous conferences but has the potential to provide the pipeline of papers and workshops for the forthcoming one. The primary vehicle for this pipeline will be a set of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that provide networking opportunities and support for academics and professional staff with shared interests and who are interested in the co-creation of research.  Feedback from last year’s conference suggested that there was interest in the following areas:

  • Assessment and Feedback
  • Digital Technologies and Blended Learning
  • Learning Theory
  • Employability Skills and Graduate Attributes
  • Designing Learning
  • Space and Time
  • Student Engagement and Transition

Calls for interest and an announcement about a launch event will be sent out soon so watch this space. In the meantime, if you are interested in being a member of the FRG in Education and Pedagogy and/or would be like to be a member of a SIG contact me at jenny.lloyd@bristol.ac.uk  and I will add you to the mailing list.

Digital classroom
Education Enhancement Funds

Building Confident Engaged Researchers Through Active Partnership and Problem Based Learning

BILT

A Teaching Innovation Grant was awarded to Dr Chris Kent and Dr Jess Fielding for the academic year 2017/18 – you can find a summary of the project they undertook with their grant below. If you would like to read the full report, please contact bilt-info@bristol.ac.uk. 

Project Summary

This project was designed to assist the redevelopment of our research methods provision at Year 1.

The newly developed course will focus on active learning in small groups and continuous, low-risk, assessment. Specifically, it will address four main aims in our Year 1 teaching:

1. Enable students to programme and conduct their own experiments within TB1

2. Provide weekly continuous formative feedback on knowledge and understanding

3. Enable effective small group peer support via ‘homework clubs’

4. Embed a culture of student participation in lectures via interactive smart-phone response systems (SRS).

The BILT grant facilitated the redesign and comprised two main work packages

(WP). WP1: development and evaluation of a self-contained series of lab sessions designed to deliver design, programming and analysis skills to Y1 psychology students (meeting aims 1 and 3). WP2: developed a set of home and class activities for summative and formative assessment (meeting aims 2 and 4).

Conclusions

We feel the grant was extremely helpful to us. We have meet our aims and are in a much better place to implement our redesigned research method training courses.

Students, who undertook the pilot, showed a keen interest and disposition to research methods once they were exposed to a hands-on approach to building experiments and understanding why programming and statistics were important (via problem-based learning and active participation in work shops). The students left with a positive disposition towards further exploring research methods and we highly positivetowards the way in which the material was delivered. All students managed to develop their own independent research question, programme an experiment to test it, collect and analysis the data; this is quite impressive given the short six week time scale!

The research skills we developed by actively engaging students in research from the get-go, by showing them they could develop their own simple experiments and analysis with a few simple tools. The problem-based approach to introducing new software was successful and students felt confident in exploring the software.