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Vol. 7 No. 1 (2010)

Published: 1 January 2010

Articles

  • Editorial 7.1

    Geraldine E. Lefoe

    Welcome to the first issue of Volume Seven of the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice. We would like to welcome the substantial number of new reviewers who have joined our Review Panel. With the increased profile and resultant number of submissions this will assist in keeping the workload manageable. Our fully electronic submission system is well established now and authors can make use of the online submission process which allows tracking of papers through the system. We would like to farewell our Production Assistant Carole Evans who has made a wonderful contribution to our journal over a number of years and welcome Michelle Kent who will now take on this role. I would also like to acknowledge the significant contribution Dr Meg O’Reilly makes to the journal as Associate Editor.

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  • What do university teachers do all day (and often into the night)?'

    Josie Arnold

    Teaching and the student experience are interlocked. This paper takes a personal look at the pleasures and pressures of teaching in contemporary higher education. In doing so it adds to the definition of teachers’ work in higher education, surveys some of the creative and positive sides of University teaching and shines a light upon the impact of increased commercialisation and managerial approaches upon academic work. It focuses upon the teaching and learning activities that academics undertake in the service of the university, including the research that adds to and updates their own knowledge, and hence underpins their teaching, so as to enable and enrich the learning journeys of their students. This paper has been written as a personal narrative, as what I have come to call a ‘subjective academic narrative’. The ‘subjective’ refers to acknowledgement of the inevitability of the personal being an integral part of research; the ‘academic’ refers to the analytical and the intellectual ambience in which university research takes place; and the ‘narrative’ refers to the story, that is, the way in which we re-tell all of our research. Above all, this paper contributes to a sense of understanding some of the elements of teaching that are involved in student engagement.

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  • Digital Technology Education and its Impact on Traditional Academic Roles and Practice

    Jennifer Sappey, Stephen Relf

    This paper explores the interface between digital technologies and the teaching labour process in Australian higher education. We develop an adaptation of the seminal Clark (1983, 1994, 2001) and Kozma (1991, 1994) debate about whether technology merely delivers educational content unchanged – technology as the ‘delivery truck’ – or whether education is changed as a result of using different technologies – education as ‘groceries’. Our adaptation is an extension of this metaphor to include the academic teacher as the driver of the grocery truck. With the implementation of new educational technologies, the human resource management aspects of job design, motivation, skilling and work identity are often overlooked, with critical debate about the impact on the teaching labour process seldom considered. In this argument, we will unpack the Clark-Kozma dichotomy of the education/technology interface by looking beyond the embedding of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Australian higher education to examine more broadly the changes to the traditional academic role as the creator, developer and delivery agent of the educational groceries. This has been reinforced by the marketisation of the sector and the concomitant reconfiguration of the traditional teaching process. All this has led to changes in the sense of work identity for academics (McShane, 2006). While we embrace ICT as a potential benefit for both students and academic teachers, we seek to ensure that the ‘truck driver’s’ evolving role is acknowledged in scholarly debates and included in models of learning and teaching if long-term sustainable work practices are to be achieved. One such model is offered.

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  • Addressing student cynicism through transformative learning

    Fernanda Duarte

    This paper reflects on insights that emerged from the findings of a qualitative study conducted by the author in 2007 with third year management students from an Australian university on their perceptions in relation to business ethics. The findings revealed an attitude of cynicism with regard to the application of ethical principles beyond university years – in “the real world of business'. This led the author to engage in more systematic efforts to address this problem, and to this end, she found Mezirow's notion of transformative learning inspiring and valuable. It is contended that reflection and critical thinking are crucially important skills to enable consciousness shifts that will lead to a deeper understanding and greater appreciation of the importance of ethical conduct in management. They can act as antidotes to attitudes of cynicism which make students feel powerless and dejected, disinclined to apply the knowledge gained during their training beyond university years. A selection of examples of class activities and assessments to foster transformative learning is provided.

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  • The Experience of Implementing an Interprofessional First Year Course for Undergraduate Health Science Students: The Value of Acting on Student Feedback

    Yolanda Surjan, Pauline Chiarelli, Shane Dempsey, David Lyall, Gjyn O'Toole, Suzanne Snodgrass, John Tessier

    This paper reports on the experiences gathered as a result of the foundation, implementation and on-going development of an interprofessional course for undergraduate health science students in The School of Health Sciences (SHS) at The University of Newcastle. The purpose of the course was to provide commencing students (n=600) with a transitional period, inclusive of academic, social and administrative support. The course also provided fundamental health related content relevant to all health science professions. Data in the form of student evaluations was collected over the three years of implementation through questionnaires, focus groups, university based student evaluations and unsolicited student feedback. A feedback loop was implemented annually and evaluations of the data applied upon reflection of student perceptions of the course. Findings suggest that despite some initial difficulties, the majority of students reported the provision of basic course and program specific information coupled with course coordinator support through immediate responses to questions assisted them to reduce their initial first year experience anxieties. Furthermore, students suggested that the student-centred changes made within this course be applied to other university courses. In conclusion, it is evident that the value of student feedback and the implementation of adaptations and rigorous change as a result of the feedback is highly significant in the improvement of courses and the ultimate satisfaction of student cohorts.

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  • Is this the past? The place of role-play exercises in undergraduate history teaching

    Cedric Beidatsch, Susan Broomhall

    Increasingly, academic teachers are exploring the learning opportunities offered by student-centred participatory classroom and web-supported exercises. Role-play and gaming activities have been highlighted as fora which provide development of a range of personal and social skill sets in students, as well as understanding of subject content. This paper reports on research exploring how such exercises in an undergraduate history unit can be used to deliver core historical content and generic skills, and to develop students’ knowledge of the professional historian’s craft and historiographical practice.

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  • Innovations in Co-ordinating Undergraduate Students’ Oral Tutorial Presentations

    Kristyn E Harman

    Individual oral tutorial presentations have been utilised in numerous undergraduate courses to develop and assess students’ skills in organising and communicating ideas and information to a select audience. However, evidence from the literature, interviews with academics (n=5), and the author’s own experiences have demonstrated that these presentations have been plagued with issues ranging from poor quality presentations to non-attendance on the part of students and boredom for both academics and undergraduates alike. This article highlights these issues, then details a variety of successful ways in which academics have innovated to improve the level of student engagement and facilitate a higher achievement of learning outcomes. Some of these innovations pertain to individual presentations, yet interview data gathered indicated a strong trend towards replacing these with small group and whole group exercises, models for which are also explicated in this article. These models have been drawn from the Social Sciences and Humanities and provide templates that may be adapted for use in a range of different contexts. The resultant improvements in co-ordinating undergraduate students’ tutorial presentations may contribute towards a more satisfying experience for lecturers, tutors, and students, and improved learning outcomes.

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  • Undertaking the Journey Together: Peer Learning for a Successful and Enjoyable PhD Experience

    Elke Stracke

    This paper deals with the challenge of supervising PhD students. Any supervision is likely to constitute a challenging experience for the supervisor, even more so when they are a new academic staff member with little experience in PhD supervision in the Australasian context. This paper shows how one supervisor addressed the challenge by fostering a more collaborative research culture in her programme (Applied Linguistics) through peer group work, and can serve as a starting point for action for supervisors who are looking for possibilities to integrate their students into learning communities. The paper provides the theoretical rationale for peer learning in doctoral education and emphasizes the desirability for its implementation into supervisory practice from an educational perspective. The description of practice of one particular peer group allows for interesting insights into the genesis, activities, and self-evaluation of this group that emphasized the value of learning with and from each other through exchange, insight into the PhD process, feedback, moral support in a friendly, supportive environment, and research training. The paper concludes by discussing implications, and challenges of this study for practice, policy, and research, as well its limitations.

    Read article: Undertaking the Journey Together: Peer Learning for a Successful and Enjoyable PhD Experience