Tag: engaging learners

Respecting and Responding to the International Student Experience (RISE)

Posted on by kevin.haines

by Kevin Haines

One of the ways in which CALD makes itself visible across the institution is by sharing its expertise on Teaching international students. For several years we have done this by delivering workshops on Learning and Teaching in the International Classroom for BILT as part of the CREATE scheme. During the past academic year, we have also worked with colleagues across the university to develop guidance for academics on their teaching of groups consisting of both international and home students. The findings of the RISE project have been written up as a Guide and represented as a Poster. My blog post for BILT brings together these components and describes how I have been able to incorporate the RISE material into the workshop. Click here to read on.  (more…)

Depth of Understanding

Posted on by Julia Schwarz

by Julia Schwarz

I had a bit of an epiphany earlier this year when I was observing some of the subject tutors on our International Foundation Programme. I was trying to conduct some research into engagement, scaffolding and Bloom’s Taxonomy when I realised that I was asking the wrong questions. While I was looking at how subject tutors used scaffolding in line with Bloom’s Taxonomy, the tutors scaffolded for depth and complexity of understanding.

It is a subtle difference, perhaps best explained by Daisy Christodoulou (2024), a former secondary school teacher who has written widely about education and whose critique of the progression statement (what we’d call Intended Learning Outcome) discusses how being able to “infer characters’ emotions from explicit details in the text” is a different skill when the text under consideration is Winnie the Pooh rather than Pride and Prejudice. Both tasks might sit on the same level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, but one is considerably more complex than the other. (more…)

Perceptions of Autonomy

Posted on by Rachel Wall

by Rachel Wall

Last year, I embarked on a series of research projects which led me on a merry dance through the avenues and rabbit holes of autonomy. They led me to question my own practice and the precarious balance of appropriate scaffolding; dive into the baffling world of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT); experiment with coding; observe the language choices of my fellow tutors; design surveys and observation instruments and fundamentally left me wondering if autonomy can ever really exist. I’m not going to lie: the process ‘flawed’ me on many occasions – in both senses of the homophone – and forced me to rethink my own approach to life, as both a tutor and a citizen of this luscious planet. (more…)

East meets West: an international student’s observations of Confucian values within western teaching contexts

Posted on by Yen-En Kuo

by Yen-En Kuo

Introduction

This blog was inspired by the writer’s observations of Eastern and Western students studying on her post-graduate course, focusing particularly on the experiences of Asian students within the UK higher education (HE) system. The author is an international student from Taiwan pursuing an MSc Management at the University of Bristol. (more…)

Data Science students in pursuit of an imperfect dream

Posted on by Mike Phipps

by Mike Phipps

For students on our International Foundation Programme (IFP), technology and artificial intelligence (AI) have transformed their learning experiences. Translation tools can reduce language barriers, web programmes can provide worked solutions to maths problems, and for those who might flirt with academic misconduct, ChatGPT can even write whole assignments. For some, though, AI and the related domain of Data Science are not just a study tool but also an increasingly popular degree choice. We have seen this on our IFP, and in part to support them, we are developing a foundation module in Python programming. (more…)