In November 2016, Dr Sara Wolfson, a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History and member of the History UK Steering Committee was honoured by the Times Higher Education awards as the Most Innovative Teacher of the Year. This award was sponsored by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) who selected Dr Wolfson, as she “brings alive the past for students using workshops rather than traditional lectures on her courses in order to keep undergraduates engaged” (HEA). Key innovations within Dr Wolfson’s courses are the use of online debates for assessment; role-playing and re-enactments to understand key early modern trials and events; making use of the early modern environment of Canterbury Cathedral; and an embedded public facing poster exhibition for her second year course, Sex, Deviance and Death in early modern England. Dr Wolfson brings her contacts and networks in the heritage and history sectors into the teaching space to not only develop students’ historical knowledge and skills development, but also to foster collaboration with external parties as a means of enhancing the undergraduate curriculum. In August 2017, Dr Wolfson was interviewed by Chris Parr, the Times Higher Education‘s Digital and Communities Editor on ‘What does good university teaching look like’.
Category: Education
Report on New to Teaching event, September 2017
A one day New to Teaching event for early career historians took place in early September at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), London. Peter D’Sena, Learning and Teaching Specialist at the University of Hertfordshire and a Senior Research Fellow at the IHR, ran several events of this kind when he was Discipline Lead for History at the Higher Education Academy (HEA). However, in 2014 the HEA relinquished its direct interest in supporting discipline-specific events of this kind and so Peter sought funding and support from the Royal Historical Society, History UK and the IHR to keep the event going. It’s become an annual event since then. Peter has provided a summary of the event, which follows:
“Over twenty people attended the event, and participated in a series of interactive workshops designed to develop their understanding of innovations in teaching and learning with a focus on curriculum design and authentic assessment, teaching seminar groups, using digital technology in the undergraduate classroom, quality assurance and preparing for the academic job market. Peter led with an interactive session about curriculum design. Historians at Indiana University, such as David Pace, Joan Middendorf and Leah Shopkow have been pioneering the work of decoding the disciplines in order to rethink the ways in which teaching and curriculum design can be more finely tuned to address the conceptual bottlenecks that hinder student progression. In a practical exercise, participants combined this pedagogic strategy with the more well-trodden approach of Constructive Alignment to improve one area of their teaching. Jamie Wood (University of Lincoln), then facilitated a session about small group/seminar work. Some of us may take for granted what a seminar is and what it can be for. By modelling several best practices, Jamie showed participants some of the ways in which seminars can be used to encourage small groups of students to deepen their historical understanding through hands-on and collaborative learning. James Baker (University of Sussex), carried on this theme in his session, though with a specific focus on improving student engagement with historical information and enquiry through the vehicle of the digital humanities. .
Not all of our students are so-called ‘digital natives’ and struggle to understand the ways in which technology can be used to both support their own learning and interrogate the past. Peter’s second session took on the thorny subject of job applications. As you would imagine, in the current climate, this was a session that grabbed participants’ attention.
Finally, we were also fortunate, on this occasion, to have a session from Adele Nye (University of New England, Australia) about quality assurance and standards in history. Her work about recent changes in the ways in which undergraduate achievement is measured in Australian universities gave participants to compare their strategies and processes with the ways in which expectations for history in higher education in the UK have been set out by the most recent QAA benchmark statement (2014). Also present, supporting and prompting participants during these workshops, were Jakub Basista (Jagiellonian University, Poland) and Ken Fincham, chair of the RHS Education Policy Committee (University of Kent).”
All of the presentations from the event can be accessed here.
Strongroom to Seminar: archives and teaching in higher education
Jamie Wood, History UK’s Media Officer, took part in an event on using archives in teaching in HE at the National Archives at the end of February. Jamie, along with other participants in the event, has recently published a post on the TNA blog – follow this link if you’d like to know more.
HUK are hoping to develop further links with the TNA in future – so watch this space…!
You must be logged in to post a comment.