Research reflections from the CALD PG Pre-sessional and IFP Text Response programmes

by Jo Kukuczka (Doctoral Student, Open University) & Donna MacLean (EAP Tutor, CALD, University of Bristol)

This blog post reflects on the fruits of our research and teaching collaboration across boundaries, and we don’t just mean institutional boundaries. The pedagogical research we report on here took place in the post-pandemic academic year of 2022/2023, the year disrupted by ongoing national HEI industrial action and the cost-of-living crisis affecting all involved. Only the support and dedication of CALD leadership and pre-sessional and IFP Text Response teams and students made this intervention possible under such circumstances, and ultimately enabled closer collaboration between the researcher (Jo) and the teacher (Donna) leading to this reflection. Read on to hear our story.  (more…)

Since 2021, I have collaborated with students to create four blog posts.  Collaborative blogging with students has since informed my Students as Partners research direction as part of the Centre’s Research and Publication project, led by Deputy Director, Kevin Haines. The first blog was titled ‘Gen Z,  Post-95ers/95后  satori generation さとり世代 and teachers’ use of emojis’ (2021).  It was written during lockdown in collaboration with Pre-sessional students, and identified that the connotation of the 🙂 emoji was no longer a positive one.  The second blog ‘Co-Creation of a Blog with CALD Pre-sessional Students’ (2022), was an opportunity for Pre-sessional students to interview an IFP student about her approach to a summative reflection task which the PS students had to complete themselves.  This resulted in a poster style ‘artefact’ which has since been incorporated into teaching materials at CALD.   

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by Deb Catavello

“Complete, relevant, fairly sophisticated response to task”. This is how the first descriptor in the 70s band of the International Foundation Programme (IFP) marking criteria reads. But what do these words – to which we could add “criticality”, “thorough” “in-depth” “systematic” analysis – mean to my students on the IFP? Although we’d discussed some of this language in class – sometimes using this visual of Bloom’s taxonomy – I wanted to provide my IFP students with a toolkit they could use to go about doing analysis. (more…)

by Donna Mac Lean

I joined CALD’s Research and Publications Project with the idea of co-creating a blog post with Pre-Sessional 10-week students for publication on the CALD blog. I was originally interested in “students as agentic actors rather than objects of research” (Charteris, 2020), so I hoped that meetings with the students would suggest the topic of the blog post and provide pedagogical insights to research further. This research idea evolved through a blog post I had co-authored with PS6 students in 2021, as well as in discussions with Kevin Haines around contextualising the idea broadly within Students as Partners research, among other critical perspectives. (more…)

by Kerry Boakes

A sociomaterial perspective views a ‘learning space’ as consisting of a range of actors that shape educational practices which are material and social. ‘Space’ is a social construction, according to French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1991); it is a product and a process defined by the power distribution of its social context. Therefore, rather than a static container to be filled, a ‘learning space’ can be considered a ‘sociomaterial’ process that exists through the interconnectivity of human and non-human actors. It allows us to see these different actors not in isolation but in the way they interact with one another. Digital platforms are often seen as tools that we utilise for a particular outcome, but learning space theorists claim that what is happening is more complex (Lamb et al. 2021). (more…)

by Anna Baker

As part of an Assessment and Feedback special interest group (SIG) session (26 October 2022) led by Maxine Gillway, participants read Can a rubric do more than be transparent? Invitation as a new metaphor for assessment criteria (Bearman and Ajjawi, 2021).

“Invitation as a new metaphor” reminded me of this poem by Oriah Mountain Dreamer and inspired me to re-work it as the invitation I extend to my students in the Maths classroom. (more…)

by Martha Partridge

Introduction 

Feedback is often identified by students as among the most important aspects of a course, and there is abundant literature showing the impact of quality feedback on student learning (see Hattie and Timperley, 2007, for a summary of meta-analyses on feedback). Most of this research is about the traditional written form of feedback, but I want to learn more about alternative modes such as audio and audio-visual. Surely some students would find these forms of feedback more effective than written, just as some people are better able to follow written instructions, while some need visuals and some prefer a spoken explanation. (more…)

by Martha Partridge and Agnieszka Tarnowska

Introduction

At the very beginning of the 2022 pre-sessional course, a colleague I had not previously worked with – Agnieszka Tarnowska – shared an idea for encouraging students to engage with reflection. She used Flipgrid – a free video-sharing platform – as a space in which students could record reflective videos throughout the course, to which the teacher would respond with written comments (read her explanation below. This had worked very effectively with her class last year, she explained, with her students choosing to regularly use it of their own accord. My own attempts at incorporating Flipgrid had consistently been far less successful; I was impressed, and curious. (more…)