Pedagogic innovators project (#pin) now live > join us

Open invitation

Participate in the Pedagogic Innovators study or short #pin.

This study will investigate

1) The beliefs, attitudes and values of higher education teachers as pedagogic innovators.

2) Conceptions of pedagogic innovation in the context of their practice, their curricular design and students’ development.

3) Enabling and prohibiting factors of becoming pedagogic innovators for academics and other professionals who teach or support learning in HE

Check out the survey at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdHLaXOs4xW55hFktGCu225x3LvcR_e-KcHQWaKGTWYIxBwYQ/viewform for information regarding this project, to provide your consent after reading the related documentation  carefully and to complete the #pin survey.

The project is supported by Barbara Thomas, HE Consultant and Prof. Norman Jackson, founder of the Creative Academic Network.

Since April 2017, we have started an informal collaborating with HEFCE (Dr Helen King and the Catalyst projects) and City University of London. Please let us know if you want your institution involved and we will add it to the survey, so that you can get institution specific data. A summary of a recent #pin workshop can be found here.

Outputs from this study will be openly licensed and shared with the wider academic community so that we can all benefit.

Please share this invitation with further colleagues teaching in higher education who might also be interested. Thank you very much.

Chrissi (Nerantzi) on behalf of the research team
National Teaching Fellow

FLEX 15/30 [Creativity for Learning] 2016/17 >>> join us! #creativeHE

This unit provides participants with a flexible, practice-based approach to teaching practice enhancement. A special version of FLEX with a focus on creativity will be offered by CELT in collaboration with London Metropolitan University during 2016/17. Colleagues from both institutions and elsewhere will have the opportunity to learn and develop together within a diverse and distributed community of higher education practitioners who are involved in teaching, supporting learning or development of others with an interest in creative teaching and learning, who would like to explore innovative learning and teaching.

Within this unit, enablers and barriers to creativity in higher education will be explored together with related pedagogical theory and literature. Participants will experience learning through play, games, models and stories and actively experiment with such approaches. This will help participants to further develop their understanding, knowledge, skills and practices in these areas and become more adventurous in their teaching. Participants will be able to critically reflect on their practice and identify opportunities to design, implement and evaluate an imaginative and creative innovation that fosters curiosity, maximises motivation and meaningful active engagement and discovery learning. The teacher is challenged to be creative in order for creativity to be developed in the students.

The unit will be offered online as a 5-day block using the Playground model (Nerantzi, 2015) with further support until the end of the term. All MMU participants will be invited to a portfolio building workshop before commencing the unit.

2 iterations in 2016/17

• Term 2 >>> 16 – 20 January 17
• Term 3 >>> 22- 26 May 17

Day 1: Introduction to creativity in HE, enablers and barriers, theory and practice
Day 2: Learning through play and making
Day 3: Using story for learning and teaching
Day 4 : Learning through making
Day 5: Sharing learning and next steps

Whilst these individual activities are to be assessed holistically through one mode of summative assessment, it is important that the activities are understood and reflected upon to ensure successful synthesis and incorporation into practice as they are experienced.

The summative assessment consists of a reflective narrative aligned with the UK/MMU Professional Standards Framework (MMU PSF), institutional drivers (such as the Strategy for Learning, Teaching and Assessment for example within MMU) where applicable and evidence engagement and impact of specific FLEX CPD activities on teaching practice.

On the 16th of May 2017 we are offering an introductory FLEX session which will also help you set-up your portfolio here at MMU for all those interested in joining us for FLEX [Creativity for Learning] in May. Register here.

The unit is available for free to all practitioners who would like to participate informally in the open online version of this course. You can join the #creativeHE community at https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/110898703741307769041/

If you work in another institution and are interested in studying towards academic credits FLEX15/30 [Creativity for Learning], please get in touch with CELT as there is a cost for this.

Chrissi (Nerantzi) CELT, MMU and Sandra (Sinfield), LMU

#creativeHE will be part of the year long Creativity in Higher Education Project. For more information regarding this, please see http://www.creativeacademic.uk/2016-17-programme.html

European First Year Experience Conference at Birmingham City University

On Wednesday the 28^th of June, I presented a show and tell session to a full house at the European First Year Experience Conference. This is the first time the research has been presented outside of MMU and we were really pleased to get some early feedback on the resources, which were well received.

The research I have been working on with my supervisor Rachel Forsyth focuses on the transition from further education to higher education, specifically for ‘non-traditional’ students. Transition to higher education is a complex area with a large body of literature. The findings from this project so far, has not pulled up anything particularly different from the literature, with the same issues in transition as was being written twenty years ago. However, we have used the data collected in this study to refocus our resources. Staff and students at MMU were interviewed who had either recent first hand or professional experience of transition.

At MMU, there is a drive to attract young people in further education to higher education who may not have considered the institution before. More information can be found here: https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/giving/firstgeneration/. I hope that the resources developed from this research will help staff to acknowledge the background of their students and consider what can be done to enhance student experience.

In collaboration with our colleague Liz Walshaw, we designed some resources to be used in the session. This included a poster, role-play exercises, a case study scenario and some illustrations based on the issues first year students may face such as making friends or work-life balance. The resources will be developed into a webpage on the CELT website that is going live in September and a full report following thereafter. Over the next two months, I will be running sessions to trail the resources further. Please get in touch if you would like to be involved with the resource trials and development.

Contact: Henry Coleman – h.coleman@mmu.ac.uk

 

Exploring the Idea of Personal Pedagogies #creativeHE conversation 27-31 March 2017

All higher education teachers are unique: in their formation and development as a teacher each has followed a different pathway involving different experiences and influences. The way they think about learning and teaching (pedagogical thinking) has been derived from many sources and in this conversation we want to explore, through the multiple perspectives of  participants, what a ‘personal pedagogy’ might mean.

 

Over 5 days participants will be encouraged to reflect on their formation as a teacher and how they came to hold the knowledge, beliefs, interests and values they now hold as a teacher and how this pedagogical thinking influences their practices. The pedagogical narratives we share will help test, develop and give meaning to the idea of a personal pedagogy.

 

You can join the #creativeHE conversation at: https://plus.google.com/communities/110898703741307769041

 

The conversation which begins at 08.00(UK) on March 27, is our contribution to

World Open Education Week https://www.openeducationweek.org/

Prof. Norman Jackson and the #creativeHE team

ICED Conference 2016: Purposeful Play workshop followup

This post is intended mainly for those people who attended Claire Hamshire and my pre-conference workshop at ICED 2016. The workshop aim was “To explore the potential of using games and scenarios to provoke and support discussion about quality assurance and quality enhancement”. Thanks to everyone who attended and made it so much fun: we hope you did also achieve the intended learning outcomes, which was “at the end of this session you will be able to use game theory to develop your own simple board games or scenarios to explore potentially challenging topics with staff and students”

To help with this, we have put together some further information about some of the games and activities on this page. Please don’t hesitate to contact either of us to ask questions, tell us how you might use the activities, or propose collaborations.

Claire Hamshire  @clairehamshire

Rachel Forsyth  @rmforsyth

Clinical Reasoning Activities:

Business card suppliers Moo (used for the clinical reasoning activities)

Medical images from the Wellcome Collection (used on the cards) – you need to ask for permission for re-use but it is very likely to be given, in our experience.

Staying the Course

You can find out more about the data used in this game at the Staying the Course website

Accreditation!

You can download the game board and editable versions of the cards, together with some suggested rules, at the JISC DesignStudio site. The game was developed as part of a larger Curriculum Design and Delivery project, partially funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Council. The game pieces were bought very cheaply from eBay. The game is CC licensed and you are free to adapt it with acknowledgement.

Curriculum Planning Cards

These course planning cards can be downloaded in PDF format – they are very simple and the idea could be adapted to use names of activities more commonly in use in your own institution.  There are also ideas for their use on this page.

You can also download additional cards, which we didn’t use in the session, to add a bit more challenge to the planners – to consider how the proposed course might address employability and sustainability issues, or be adapted to be more inclusive. The assessment descriptions can be downloaded in PDF format here. All of these resources are  licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Check my Specs

This game is still under development, but if you email me, I can send you the Game board, as well as the Excel file with the examples in it, which we mail merged into a file to make the stack of cards.

Slides from the session  to download (sorry, large file!)

12 Apps of Christmas 2016 #12AoC

Are you interested in exploring which free mobile apps could help you in your teaching or supporting your students?

Would you like to take part in a fun, free, practical online course this December?

Then the 12 Apps of Christmas could be for you.

Last year, over 1000 participants from around the world took part in a new open course hosted by Regent’s University London – the 12 Apps of Christmas.  In just a few minutes a day, they learned about and tried out a range of free mobile apps with potential classroom use, built a community of practice, and had fun doing so.

The course was a success, winning the Credo Digital Information Literacy Award and inspiring people to run versions at other institutions.

Now, the original is back – better than ever! From 1st to 16th December 2016.

The 12 Apps of Christmas 2016 will offer a completely new range of carefully selected apps, while keeping to the same simple, entertaining formula which made it so successful last year. Expect guest posts, engaging hands-on activities, and a chance to be part of a friendly, enquiring community of educators worldwide.

And for those of you who took part last year – yes, we’re afraid the Christmas cracker jokes will be back…

To enrol on the 12 Apps of Christmas 2016, go to:

http://tinyurl.com/12AoC16

Watch the video here:

http://helixmedia.regents.ac.uk/Play/3360

Twitter: @12AoC #12AoC

101 Creative Ideas

In September we launched the 101 Creative Ideas project to curate and share ideas for creativity in learning and teaching in Higher Education. We’ve been really impressed by the contribution that have come in since!

We’ve have ideas for novel approaches to common academic activities, such as academic reading. For example, Sandra Sinfield of London Met University contributed an idea for creating ‘Scrolls’ as a way to tackle course texts with students.

Some ideas have looked at different or additional ways to demonstrate learning. For example, Juliette Wilson-Thomas, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education here at Manchester Metropolitan University, suggested asking peer reviewers to respond to work with colleges or poem instead of the ordinary written text (see Creative Peer Reviewers).

Several of the contributions have been about techniques for encouraging creative thinking in both staff and students. Teryl Cartwright, a writer and education from the USA, contributed one of each: for students, you could try running a session where they can only answer questions with questions; and for staff, try creating analogies from within your discipline to use as teaching aids.

We welcome further contributions to the project! To do this, you just need to fill in this short form: 101creativeideas.wordpress.com/contribute

#101creativeideas is a #greenhouse contribution and part of the year long Creativity in Higher Education Project led by Creative Academic. To find out more, please check out www.creativeacademic.uk/2016-17-programme

#greenhouse with Dr Helena Kettleborough > 23 Nov at 12pm! Join us to discuss Action Research

Dear Gardeners and Greenhouse friends,

We hope you are well and keeping warm. Our next Greenhouse gathering is on the 23rd of November at 12pm in SB G07. We hope you can join us at 12pm.

 

 

 

Dr Helena Kettleborough, Associate Lecturer (Department of Management) is the Greenhouse gardener of the month. This is how Helena introduces her gathering:

Jump into winter

As the nights draw in and the majestic skies of winter open before us, come and explore participative action research:

Living life as inquiry: what is happening to the animals?

Explore extended ways of knowing as a response to ‘wicked challenges’.

Co-operative learning between students and lecturers? Our way into hopeful futures? Mini second person action research inquiry

“College students should feel that they are participating in one of the most significant ventures ever to take place in the entire history of the planet.” (Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth, 1988: 97).

“…it is the time for universities to rethink themselves and what they are doing.” (Thomas Berry, “The University,” in The Great Work, 199:85).

We are looking forward to seeing you!

Helena and Chrissi
ps. If you would like to facilitate a Greenhouse gathering this year, please get in touch with Chrissi at c.nerantzi @ mmu . ac . uk (without the spaces)