Subversion

I’m looking for some (moderately) radical students to help subvert the top-down model that dominates the Irish university sector. I do a quite a bit of research in the Scholarship of  Teaching and Learning, and I have a couple of things going on which I am keen to open up a bit and get some active inputs. I’m actually looking out for students who might be interested in collaborating on two projects, from offering comments all the way to co-authoring papers. One is on how history teaching in universities differs from culture to culture; the other is my ongoing work on group and team based learning using games in my military history option, HI2007.

The international pedagogy study is a completely new one. It arises from a discussion in the HistSOTL panel at ISSOL09 where we felt we should study how history is taught ‘by different people to different people’. I pointed out that in UCC we have an ideal sample for studying this, since we have a large number of visiting US and European students. When I got home, I did a funding application under the research development initiative  in which I formalised it a bit;

“This project will investigate the impact on internationally mobile students of exposure to different pedagogic styles of teaching in different countries and institutions. The project will be grounded in History but open to partners in other disciplines. The project will use a variety of methods to investigate the impact of different pedagogic traditions on both Erasmus students and visiting US and international students in EU institutions.”

Quite honestly, I don’t care if I get the RDI funding, I want to look at this question anyway. Since I have only the barest outline in my mind about the design of the research – we’ll have a survey and some interviews – I’m keen to find some students, especially visiting students in UCC this year, who might be interested in getting involved in designing and testing a survey for this. We’ll need to look at what has been done already, but none of it is quite specific to history and humanities pedagogy which is where I’d like to look.

The other area of work which is ongoing relates to my Hi2007 course. In that, the mid-term assessment involves students working in groups to design a wargame. I have written papers on this already. One was delivered in Valencia, under the title Nvidia, Matrox, Paper?. A second was at ISSOTL09 last month, based on the results of a survey of the course which didn’t work out quite as planned but still produced interesting results which you can read here, and see the video of the presentation here. The focus of this work is to look at how web2.0 tools can facilitate team-based learning, and I plan on doing a new questionnaire for the class this coming semester. This is also the area I’m working on for my MA in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

I know there are some of last years Hi2007 students still around who might be interested in reading the outcomes of the survey, and who might like to chip in comments or even help me advance the work. It is even possible that some of the second years planning to take Hi2007 next term might like to get actively involved in helping to redesign the survey. While we have not done much in UCC with students as active co-researchers in SOTL research, it has been very successful in other places, and I think its time we gave it a go here. In some places it has become quite a significant part of academic culture, and has given students more ownership of the learning process.

My vague target for both is to produce a paper or two for ISSOTL10 in Liverpool next autumn. So this post is open for comments, and people who want to email me are welcome. If we can get this going, we can branch out into other areas.