Open Paper Session 4: Teaching creatively to enable a diversity of students to flourish
12th May 2023
Wednesday 14 June, 15.15-16.15, Online
Two Academic Exchanges (verbal presentations of 13-14 minutes, each followed by 6-7 minutes for questions) and two Lightning Presentations (verbal presentations of no more than 6 minutes, each followed by 4 minutes for questions).
This session will be chaired by Arran Stibbe, Professor in Ecological Linguistics and National Teaching Fellow.
Recording of the session
Academic Exchanges
i. Creative Focus: How Encounters with Nature Encourage Student Attentiveness
Susie Olczak and James Fisher (School of Arts)
This presentation will discuss the role of creative practice in developing student focus. In fine art, haptically thinking with materials is used as a strategy for understanding and assimilating encounters with the physical world. Through this slow process, students’ attentiveness and focus on their ideas and learning is fostered and enabled to flourish.
The presentation communicates Susie Olczak and James Fisher’s University Teaching Fellowship (UTF) project, Encounters with Nature. The principal focus of the project was on making artworks while actually in a natural environment and the impact this might have on focussed learning and, more widely, wellbeing. The project grew out of the Fine Art course team’s response to teaching a practical subject online during the pandemic. We believe that the adaptations made to support learning in situations where learners were separated from the benefits of haptic connection in Fine Art have a wider application in other subject areas and for focus and wellbeing more broadly.
The project began by directly comparing phenomenological experiences and encounters with nature first-hand with imaginative experiences with nature encountered virtually by undergraduate and postgraduate students living in different environmental contexts. Focus groups conducted after the second iteration of the residency demonstrated that students’ sustained experience of encounters with landscape significantly increased their perception of focus both during the encounter and in their ongoing studies.
ii. Towards Trauma Informed Practice in Higher Education
Louise Livesey (School of Natural, Social and Sport Sciences)
Trauma informed practice is slowly gaining traction in health provision, statutory education and other settings. However, higher education has been slow to adopt trauma informed practices. Partly this is due to the perceived division between the academic and the pastoral. Mindful that it is clear that students and staff come to higher education with trauma histories and experience traumatic events whilst in higher education, this paper will pose challenges to how we can embed trauma informed practices in higher education to help all members of a higher education institution to succeed. By exploring the trauma informed key principles, this paper will suggest ways in which higher education can adapt from its roots in the ‘gentleman scholar’ model (with its Eurocentric and class biases) to be more inclusive, adaptive and relevant to a wider recruitment pool with better continuation and success rates for students and greater retention and achievement rates for staff.
Lightning Presentations
iii. Workshops as a vehicle for educating practitioners working with young learners … and what the kids say about them!
Kirsten Wing, Colin Baker, Mark De Ste Croix and Will Roberts (School of Natural, Social and Sport Sciences)
In 2020, Sport England facilitated the evaluation of Boing; a workshop-based practitioner education intervention in partnership with UoG and Oxford Brookes. Boing aims to educate practitioners on a play-based curriculum in Physical Literacy (PL) settings through a 90-minute online workshop and resources. Decreasing Physical Activity (PA) levels in youth has led to an increase in international political and academic attention to address this ‘physical inactivity’ crisis. Practitioner education has been proposed as a potential solution, however, little has been published on the effect of such programmes. This two-year project was unique in exploring both practitioner and learner to evaluate both groups’ experiences.
The project used the RE-AIM framework of evaluation with three data collection methods: (1) pre, post and 6-month follow-up quantitative questionnaires exploring perceived changes in knowledge, confidence and attitude in practitioners (2) practitioner interviews focused on perceived barriers and facilitators to practice and finally (3) ‘unfinished stories’, a novel drawing-based narrative technique exploring experiences of the young learners associated with practitioners who attended the workshops. 1,600 practitioners were sampled across a two-year period.
Results indicate that workshops were statistically effective at improving knowledge of, confidence to deliver and attitude toward PL. However, retention 6-months post workshop was compromised highlighting that ongoing support may be needed. Concerningly, a gender gap was evident with those who identify as female reporting lower levels of knowledge and confidence pre-training. Notably, children had a very different view of ‘play’ in comparison to the practitioner as many young learners drew technology. The relationship between ‘digital’ and ‘physical’ play must be addressed moving forwards to support learners. Overall, workshops are effective in an education programme, however longer-term support and considerations must be made to fully support retention and sharing.
iv. Building relationships through storytelling
Inger Brit Lowater (School of Natural, Social and Sport Sciences)
We are relational beings and have traditionally used storytelling to build community and learn from each other. Storytelling may make us think of professional storytellers around a campfire rather than something we do. But as humans we tell each other stories all the time, whether it is about the awful morning we just had, or something funny that happened the night before. To learn and be creative we need to feel safe, as our brains need a sense of safety to be open and receptive. Find out a bit more about how storytelling can be used in simple ways to create better relationships in groups, teams and lectures. There will be examples of how this has been used effectively within the University and practical suggestions for how you can get started using storytelling to improve the teaching and learning experience for lecturers and students.