Teaching – Page 3 – History UK

Pandemic Pedagogy 2.0: Tim Reinke-Williams – Delivering undergraduate teaching during the pandemic – some reflections

February 11, 2021February 11, 2021e-learning, Education, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, Students, Teaching, Technology

In the next Pandemic Pedagogy 2.0 post, Tim Reinke-Williams, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton, talks us through how staff and students have coped with teaching and learning through the various lockdowns we have all experienced. We’re sure that his insights will resonate with colleagues at other institutions, so please do share your views in response to Tim’s post on Twitter or even write a post for this blog.

This blog focuses on how the undergraduate History programme has been delivered at the University of Northampton since March 2020. For the most part History staff and students have adapted well, but there have been challenges and we’re continuing to adapt to a changing situation.

Prior to the third lockdown in January 2021 most content was delivered online via weekly sessions in virtual classrooms. Attendance was good, but getting students to move beyond posting brief comments in chat boxes was challenging (notably at level 4), and there were concerns about whether students were staying in the virtual classroom throughout the session, or simply “logging on then buggering off” (a phrase I glibly included in an email, which a colleague decided to abbreviate to LOBO). We have evidence of this: one colleague stayed behind in the virtual classroom until only one student was left, then asked the person “present” if they wanted to chat – the lack of a response suggested they had been gone for some time!

Before Christmas the university insisted that we offered two hours per week of onsite teaching, which we were able to do through core modules at levels 4-5. First-year attendance was good, but staff noted that interactions between students were not as close as in previous years, suggesting that learning mostly online has made it difficult for new students to form friendships and interact in person. Attendance at level 5 sessions was lower than at level 4, but second-year students valued having onsite sessions.

The main challenges were at level 6 where there were no existing core sessions for students to attend each week. We usually run dissertation workshops at level 6 (four across the year) so some of the onsite delivery came through those, but we had to set up a rota to deliver the other sessions, and in general third years were reluctant to come on to campus, so attendance was poor.

The other challenge with onsite sessions was that we were expected to use hi-flex to enable those who did not want (or were unable) to come to campus to participate. Leaving aside that staff had to learn how to use the tech, the overall experience was unsatisfactory, with neither onsite or distance learners getting as much out of the sessions as they would have done had everyone been onsite or learning remotely. Overall the team were pleased when everything moved online in January 2020. Blended sessions were difficult to deliver, and attendance declined as the term progressed.

To conclude by focusing on the students: most have accepted the ‘new normal’ and many have told us that we are doing a good job in difficult circumstances. Some have been frustrated by the inability to chat immediately after classes, so we’re staying in the virtual classrooms after formal teaching concludes and offering weekly drop-ins, but attendance at both have been patchy and despite many being digital natives, it’s clear that undergraduates still want real life interaction with lecturers.

If you would like to contribute a short blog post or podcast/video that addresses how the pandemic has changed or affected history teaching and learning in Higher Education then please email Dr Sarah Holland (sarah.holland@nottingham.ac.uk), History UK’s Education Officer.

Pandemic Pedagogy 2.0: Ruth Larsen – Oh, the places we will go! Running virtual field trips

February 10, 2021February 10, 2021access, accessibility, e-learning, Education, field trips, material culture, museums, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, student engagement, Teaching, visits

In the seventh in our series of posts that build on Pandemic Pedagogy, Dr Ruth Larsen of the University of Derby talks about some of the challenges and possibilities of running virtual fieldtrips during the pandemic. You can tweet Ruth @RuthMLarsen

This post is based on a presentation at the East Midlands Centre for History Learning and Teaching workshop that took place on 11 January 2021 and will be published on the EMC website as well (https://eastmidlandscentreforhistorylearningandteaching.education/).

For staff and students alike, one particularly enjoyable element of some modules is the field trip. Study visits can provide a great opportunity for applied learning as well as being a great way of creating a sense of cohort identity. However, with many museums and heritage sites closed, and the idea of squeezing students into minibuses feeling like a distant dream, it can feel like the only option is to cancel planned trips and offer ‘yet another zoom lecture’. However, in recent years, and especially on the last twelve months, museums, galleries and other heritage sites have created more and more online provision, which means that there are viable alternatives. This short blog is a guide to running a virtual field trip, and provides a brief guide to some useful resources.

Setting up a virtual field trip

In much the same way that running a ‘live’ field trip requires preparation and consideration, it is important that virtual field trips are properly prepared and introduced to students. Before running the trip, do make sure that you reflect on its purpose, consider its role within the module, and focus on what you want students to get out of the experience. In order for it to be an effective part of the students’ learning you may want to:

integrate examples about the place and its collections into the module before the go on the virtual trip. This can include some discussion about the ways in which collections are presented or history discussed within museum and heritage sites.
give clear instructions to students: guide them to certain elements of the virtual site, or set them particular questions to consider, so they know why they are there.
create a short guide or video ‘walking’ students through the site (especially if there is no help section on the providers’ website). Many of the virtual sites can be a little difficult to navigate at first, especially those which have a virtual reality element or are very large.
provide guidance about how long to spend on the exercise, which is especially important if you are visiting one of the bigger museums which have numerous virtual rooms.
consider the students’ diverse learning needs, and think about how the accessible the virtual site is for all learners on the module.

Where can we go?

One of benefits of running virtual field trips is that it possible to go to places that would have been previously inaccessible due to time and/or financial constraints. In particular, the opportunity to visit museum and heritage sites overseas is now open to many more students, meaning that field trip is not the preserve of British history modules.

One of the best collections of virtual museums is provided by Google Arts and Culture. This site includes virtual resources for a wide range of heritage sites, archives and other cultural institutions from around the world. They have tours of some museums, including Rijksmuseum, and the National Museum, Delhi. Other institutions provide virtual exhibitions, such as this one from the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, which can be a really rich resource for students to engage with.

For other institutions, you have to get directly to the museums’ websites; this includes large museums such as The Louvre and The Vatican Museum. There are numerous guides to virtual tours, but one of the best for British heritage sites is curated by the Art Fund, which is regularly updated with information about new exhibitions. The provision is expanding all the time, so it worth rechecking the website of a favoured institution to see if they are offering virtual visits, guides or exhibitions.

Follow up activities

In my experience of running virtual study visits, I have found that students have generally got a great deal out of the experience. However, it has been the post visit discussion and activities which have been central to embedded the learning. By setting up the field trip carefully you can then use the experience in later sessions in the module; this can help to stop the exercise from feeling like ‘busy work’, and instead help students to understand how it was integral to module.

As one of the benefits of running a conventional field trip is the ways in which it can help to form a sense of a student community, you may want to consider running small group activities following a trip. These could include collectively writing a review for the site, sharing ideas about a learning resource for school children, or maybe collectively curating their own exhibition based on objects that they identified in the virtual field trip.

While there can technical teething issues at first, by guiding students, embedding the learning from the trip fully into the module, and by using it as an opportunity for group working, virtual field trips can be a really positive addition to a module. The chances to visit sites from across the world, to compare and contrast different approaches to public history and to get access to places that are normally out of the reach of the students means that virtual field trips, along with their traditional counterparts, may remain part of the way in which we teach in the long term.

Pandemic Pedagogy 2.0: David Gehring – Less is More and No Student Left Behind

February 9, 2021February 10, 2021e-learning, Education, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, Teaching, Technology

In another of our posts following up on Pandemic Pedagogy, David Gehring of the Department of History at the University of Nottingham shares his thoughts on experiences of teaching during the pandemic. Feel free to share your own insights via our Twitter account or even by writing a blog post yourself!

Think back to those halcyon days when we regularly taught in a classroom. We, along with our students, were all within the same four walls, within the same physical environment. Then again, the playing field was never even for our students because their backgrounds and levels of cultural and social capital vary based on a range of factors well outside of our control as individual instructors. Despite the challenges posed by the uneven playing field, we, inside that classroom, could see if a student looked uneasy, uncomfortable, or confused; we, inside that classroom, could adjust the discussion, accommodate to student needs, and lift up those who needed the assistance.

Think now (February 2021). In an online teaching environment (Teams, Zoom, etc.), the playing field is even more uneven due to variations among our students’ IT hardware and internet connections, their levels of confidence when navigating the internet, and their study space while away from university campuses. How, therefore, can we create a welcoming community and learning environment for all when the challenges just got harder for those who need our support the most? At my university, Microsoft Teams has been the principal platform for online teaching, and, in many respects, it has matured remarkably since we all learned of its existence back in March 2020. When used alongside another virtual learning environment with which students are already familiar (e.g., Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas), Teams can be a real complement. Newer features and functions include breakout rooms, file storage, notebooks, blurred backgrounds, and collaborative tools. In time, Microsoft will add more bells and whistles. These tools can genuinely enrich the student experience, and embed knowledge and understanding in fun and fresh ways. What’s not to love?

But.

Our own abilities as instructors vary significantly. Some of us aren’t very confident with these new bells and whistles; even if we are, the frequent updating of the software means that we’re not all running the same version of Teams, and, as a result, we may not all have access to the newest features. How can we expect our students – non-traditional, disadvantaged, middle-class, or well-heeled – to keep up with these changes when the world around them is in such flux, when, quite rightly, their priorities may lie in family care? Even if they’re savvy enough to know how to navigate breakout rooms, collaborate via the notebook, or use Talis Aspire, that doesn’t mean that their IT hardware or internet bandwidth can take it. (Never mind the limitations of my own network at home.)

So, what can we do? Less is more, with, ideally, no student left behind. No PowerPoints. No screen sharing. No breakout rooms. No whiteboards. No bells. No whistles. Just the equivalent of a seminar room with me and them, cameras on. It’s basic; it’s straightforward; but, in avoiding the complications and potential stress levels that come with the newest and latest, we can lessen the chances of losing students along the way. The move online has already put many students at a disadvantage, and I’d like to avoid exacerbating that disparity. Keeping things low-tech, à la March 2020, can make the seminar feel a little old school when our other colleagues are using the breakout rooms and collaborative tools that we don’t. Should all of us go ‘less is more’? No, I think not. Rather, variety in pedagogical style has always been part of higher education, and our students should continue to be exposed to different styles of teaching, to different modes of learning. Variety, after all, is the spice of life. Long may it remain.

Pandemic Pedagogy 2.0: Andrew Jotischky – Assessment during the Pandemic: ‘Take-home exams’

February 8, 2021February 8, 2021assessment, e-learning, exams, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, Students, Teaching

Andrew Jotischky kicks off week 2 of our Pandemic Pedagogy follow-up with a blog post about the challenges of assessment – particularly exams – during the pandemic. Andrew is Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway University of London, having previously taught for twenty years at Lancaster University. He teaches courses on various aspects of medieval religious life and thought, on crusading and on medieval food, at undergraduate and MA level. His most recent publications include, co-authored with Bernard Hamilton, Latin and Greek Monasticism in the Crusader States (2020).

About seven or eight years ago, as Head of Department at my previous university, I was involved in discussions with colleagues about the possibility of setting up a distance learning MA course. It didn’t happen in the end, for various reasons, but I remember the moment of shock at the realisation at just how much preparation time was needed to put on a single 30 credit course. I’ve thought about that many times over the past few pandemic months, when many of us involved in teaching History at university have been either designing courses for distance learning delivery, or converting existing courses for partial or wholly online delivery, in the space of a few weeks rather than months – and with sketchy training at best. It’s true, of course, that the technology has changed rapidly over the past few years, and that it’s possible to deliver online in ways that would have been unimaginable even in 2015. Even so, in the months since the March 2020 lockdown, we have all learned, at great speed, how to do things at that we hadn’t previously considered part of our jobs.

As I write, there is no prospect of anything like a return to ‘normal’ teaching this academic year. It’s worth asking ourselves what the legacy of pandemic teaching will be. From the multitude of things we’ve learned to do in the past nine months, what might we choose to retain as good practice in a post-pandemic world? What follows is an entirely personal view of one new practice that has changed the way I have thought about teaching and assessment: the online ‘home exam’. This was adopted hurriedly by many universities, including my own and the one where I am an external examiner, once it became apparent in April 2020 that traditional unseen ‘in-person’ exams would no be possible. Instead of a two or three hour period of sweating – or freezing – in a room often far from suitable for the purpose, students have 24 hours to write and submit their answers online, with a word limit instead of a time limit. Since there can be no attempt to police the way they sit the paper, it is effectively an open-book exam. The system is far from perfect, of course. The traditional exam venue at least has the merit of equalizing the experience, whereas the online ‘home exam’ can expose inequalities between students who experience digital poverty or lack of appropriate space at home and those with plentiful access to books, fast broadband and privacy to work. If ways can be found for allowance to be given for these problems, however, there are real merits in the ‘home exam.’ My experience both as an internal and external examiner was that the overall quality of answers was significantly superior to the traditional exam answer written in a hurry – we’re all familiar with the ‘knowledge dump’ syndrome, the student suffering from nerves, the ‘off day’, and all the reasons why the in-person exam so often fails to reflect students’ true abilities. The ‘home exam’ allows time for reflection, for coherent, structured and well-informed answers. It also gives initiative to students, who have to make choices about how much time to spend on the different tasks involved in the exam, how much thinking and preparation time to allow themselves, how much to read or look up. It is more likely to produce a set of answers that tells us, as teachers, what our students’ real abilities are, rather than how much they can remember on a given day, or how fast they can write. And, of course, their answers rely less on our palaeographical skills. For these reasons, I hope that universities continue to find a place for the ‘home exam’ format even after it is no longer mandated by the need for social distancing.

If you would like to contribute a short blog post or podcast/video that addresses how the pandemic has changed or affected history teaching and learning in Higher Education then please email Dr Sarah Holland: (sarah.holland@nottingham.ac.uk), History UK’s Education Officer.

Pandemic Pedagogy 2.0: Lucinda Matthews-Jones – The Paper-Based Digital Classroom

February 2, 2021February 16, 2021Annotation, COVID-19, Digital History, e-learning, Education, independent learning, informal learning, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, student engagement, Students, Teaching

The second blog post following on from our Pandemic Pedagogy initiative is by Lucinda Matthews-Jones, a lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University. She teaches nineteenth-century gender and urban history modules. Her dynamic and innovative teaching approaches were recognised in 2018 when she awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Individual Teaching Award. Beyond the classroom, she researches ideas of home and urban domesticities in the British Settlement Movement, 1880-1920. Lucinda tweets @luciejones83.

I am a paper-based lecturer and teacher. Before COVID-19, you would have found me moving around my university building with large rolls of paper and a tote bag filled with coloured pens, glue sticks, post notes, and scissors. For me, asking students to work on paper in groups or as individuals enabled them to break down and cement their ideas through a visual format. It helped me to see what they had picked up and to expand these points in classroom discussions.

But how could I replicate this in the digital classroom? There has been a tendency to think that this needs to be done through digital tools. But if the non-digital class can be based on mixed media then why not the digital, too? Why must the digital classroom be paperless? It felt like digital fatigue had hit both me and the students in the second half of the semester in Autumn 2020. Discussions with personal tutees and other students had made me increasingly aware that recorded lectures were taking a lot of time and energy both to produce and consume. As History UK’s Pandemic Pedagogy Handbook observed ‘screen-time and remote interaction have a cumulative effect; the result is mentally and physically draining’.

My first-year students had a ‘how to respond to your feedback’ seminar coming up for their academic skills module and I wanted to think more creatively about how to get them to engage with the department’s writing guide. I decided that breaking it down and asking students to create a zine relating to the section that they had been assigned would help them to process the complex information written down in the guide and get them to think about how to communicate this in a creative manner. Students were sent class instructions through our VLE (see below).

Here is a picture of one zine and the page from LJMU’s History Guide it refers to.

Students reported that the exercise encouraged them to read the material differently by emphasising the need to break it down and to think about how to display the guide’s information. They enjoyed the idea that the exercise was for a wider audience and not just them reading through the guide on their own. At the end of the session, contributions were sent to me and put into a PDF.

Handwriting and hand drawing can improve people’s ability to remember. Hetty Roessingh, for instance, has noted that handwriting notes and sketching has enhanced her students ‘understanding and remembering’ by encouraging them to make ‘personal connection’ through ‘creative thought’. Roessingh continues that ‘hand-written notes matter and endure over time.’ Asking students to do paper-based creative exercise also changes the embodied experiences of digital learning. It encourages the eyes to look down and focus on the task, minimising screen time during a seminar.

The picture above shows a mind map illustrating one approach taken by students.

This session was intended to be light-hearted and a bit different from previous weeks. What I found was that I really enjoyed it. The conversations were dynamic and interesting as I moved around the breakout rooms. I felt more like me as a lecturer, having neither the know-how nor confidence around some digital technologies that others have used to transition their teaching online. Paper based activities will now be the focus of my teaching in semester 2.

What paper-based activities have you been using in your teaching? I would love to hear!

Class instructions

To help you prepare for the next assessment we will be digging into the LJMU Writing Guide. Together we will create a zine of top tips from this based on your feedback and what surprises you from the guide and feel your peers would benefit from.

Before class:

Please make sure you have downloaded: LJMU_Writing_History_v1.pdf
Have some paper and any coloured pens to hand. You can also bring newspaper, magazines, glue, and scissors if you want to do something more multimedia. But you do not have too. You can do this exercise on a class.

In class:

You will be spilt into groups and given a section
Be able to take an image of your hand out and email to Lucie for her to collate.
Be prepared to summarise and explain your zine page.

Want to know more about Zines? Read here: How to Make a Zine: Guide to Making Your Own Zine During Quarantine – Thrillist (Links to an external site.).

Category: Teaching

Pandemic Pedagogy 2.0: Tim Reinke-Williams – Delivering undergraduate teaching during the pandemic – some reflections