Pedagogies for Sustainability, Responsible Enterprise and Innovation: 11th July 2018

On the 11^th July research group SEEG in partnership with Centre of Excellent in Learning and Teaching (CELT) are hosting a joint workshop: Pedagogies for Sustainability, Responsible Enterprise and Innovation.

The workshop draws together in-house MMU expertise, recent CELT-funded research , and good practice from external and international case studies to look at how new and innovative pedagogical approaches, including Problem and Enquiry Based Learning (PEBL) short training courses (Carbon Literacy) and online-technology facilitated learning can help us stay at the forefront of enhanced student experience and pedagogical innovation. We will hear about case examples from Nottingham Trent University, and internationally from colleagues from Arizona State (USA) and Aalborg (DK) Universities.

The whole schedule for the workshop is now fully confirmed, please click the Eventbrite link to book your place: https://pedagogy-mmu.eventbrite.co.uk

If you have any questions about the event, please direct them to Valeria Vargas (v.vargas@mmu.ac.uk) or Sally Randles (s.randles@mmu.ac.uk).

 

Using storytelling in education for sustainable development (ESD)

CALL FOR CHAPTER CONTRIBUTIONS

We are pleased to announce a forthcoming Routledge book on using storytelling in education for sustainable development (ESD). We anticipate that potential contributors will be colleagues with an interest/expertise in one or more of the following areas: Storytelling, ESD in Higher Education, Innovative Pedagogies. Book editors will be Heather Luna and Dr Petra Molthan-Hill  (both Nottingham Trent University), Dr Denise Baden (University of Southampton) and Professor Tony Wall (University of Chester). To facilitate the writing process, we are offering an initial webinar.

 

WHAT: Storytelling & Sustainability Webinar

WHEN: Wednesday 25th April 3-5pm BST (2-4pm UTC)

WHERE: on Zoom

HOW: You will receive a link prior to the webinar that you click to join. You will need a webcam and microphone (embedded ones are fine). If you are unfamiliar with Zoom, Heather will arrange a practice run to ensure the technology goes smoothly for all.

 

This webinar will consist of:

* An overview of what we would expect from a submitted chapter, with Q&A

* A small group activity with others in your discipline area

* A round of sharing ideas

* A small interdisciplinary group activity

* Time outside the webinar to develop ideas

* Another round with your interdisciplinary group to report back

* A round-up of ideas and further Q&A

 

To book onto the webinar, please email heather.luna@ntu.ac.uk. If you are not available for this webinar but would like to contribute to the book and/or participate in a future webinar, please contact Heather.

 

SUSTAINABLE STORY WRITING COMPETITION

On a related note, please find attached details of a writing competition for short stories (<3500 words) set within a sustainable society. Deadline for submissions is 19^th April 2018. Perfect to whet your appetite for the book! For more information visit: http://www.greenstories.org.uk

Creativity in practice project starts soon #creativeHE

An open conversation on the #creativeHE platform December 4^th-8^th To join in simply click on the link

https://plus.google.com/communities/110898703741307769041?hl=en

 

Being creative and producing a creative artefact or performance means different things in different practice settings as people interact with their environment and everything in it to achieve something of value. In some practice contexts the purpose of practice is to harness individuals’ creativity

By ‘practice’ we mean ‘action rather than [just] thought or ideas’1, ‘the application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to theories relating to it for example, the practice of teaching.’2 The term ‘practice’ does not have to be restricted to professional activity it can also be used to describe the actions and activities relating to a person’s hobbies and interests, being a parent and many other contexts.

 

But to perform and practice involves developing certain knowledge, skills, behaviours, self-awareness and ways of thinking and interpreting the world that are relevant to that particular area of practice. In order to practice well we have to practise ‘by performing (an activity) or exercise (a skill) repeatedly or regularly in order to acquire, improve or maintain proficiency in it.’² We are also interested in exploring how people develop themselves through practical experience, education and training and informal interactions with peers, to be able to practice in creative ways.

 

Invitation to #creativeHE community

 

This is an open conversation about the relationship of a person’s creativity to their everyday practices and we hope participants will share their stories and perspectives in ways that will help develop better understandings.

 

The conversation will be curated through Creative Academic Magazine and it will launch Creative Academic’s ‘Creativity in Practice’ project  http://www.creativeacademic.uk/creativity-in-practice.html

Norman Jackson and Chrissi Nerantzi

 

Sources

1 Cambridge Dictionary available at https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/practice

2 Oxford Dictionary available at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/practise

 

 

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!)

Education for Sustainable Development workshops

CELT in collaboration with Special Collections and Science and the Environment  are offering a number of workshops on key themes relating to Education for Sustainable Development. Please click on the link to see the sessions on offer and to book a place http://www.celt.mmu.ac.uk/cpd/eventsbytopic.php?topic=ESD. They are open to any academic, professional and technical services staff in student facing roles.

For information here is the link to the entire workshop programme, in case other sessions are of interest http://www.celt.mmu.ac.uk/tale/index.php .

#Greenhouse – 20th Oct – #101creativeideas project with Ellie @ehannan14

Dear Gardeners and Greenhouse friends,

We hope you had a lovely summer and the new academic year started well for you.

We are currently putting together the programme for this academic year and our Ellie (Hannan) is organising the very first gathering on the 20th of October, 12-2pm in John Dalton E0.05. 

Ellie is leading a new OER project called #101creativeideas. We are very excited about this as it gives us loads of opportunities to share what we do with each other and also involve the wider academic community.

This greenhouse session will be an introduction to the project and how we can all get involved to generate and share novel ideas around learning and teaching and to contribute to this exciting OER project.

If you are looking to make your teaching more creative, or want to share and develop creative ideas for your role, come along and feel free to bring a colleague and/or students with you as well.

We really are looking forward to seeing you on the 20th!

Ellie 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)

101 Creative Ideas project

We are about to bring to life the 101 Creative Ideas project. This is a fantastic opportunity for YOU to share your creative ideas on how to encourage, support and/or assess students’ creativity in higher education. Ideas can be big or small but we are looking for concise descriptions of no more than 50-80 words.

So if you are doing something that is interesting or novel in your practice, please click here and share your idea.

All ideas will be credited and made available through an online OER collection under a  CC BY NC 4.0 licence.

A panel consisting of students and practitioners in higher education will decide on the 101 most interesting ideas which will be turned into a published resource. These will be a valuable resource to refresh teaching and support further creative projects.

You can start submitting your ideas now and they will be collated and reviewed in January. The 101 ideas that are selected will be shared via Twitter 1 idea per day up to the start of the World Creativity and Innovation Week in April 2017.

#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 http://www.creativeacademic.uk/2016-17-programme.html

Thank you in advance for your contributions,
Eleanor Hannan and Chrissi Nerantzi
#101creativeideas

Audiovisual material in teaching – ESD-

You are warmly invited to attend the next Sustainability in the Curriculum meeting  (Manchester Met in collaboration with UoM)

on 

Wednesday, 22nd June,  2 to 4pm Manchester Metropolitan University, John Dalton Building, Room JD E419

 

 

We will be exploring with Dr Vitalia Kinakh (School of Dentistry)  how audiovisual material (video clips, films and images) can be used to present/engage students with sustainability issues. Dr Kinakh will  discuss how she  is using audio visual materials to present sustainability related issues  in dentistry.

You are invited to ‘bring’ to this meeting any audiovisual materials you (staff and students)  use for the purpose of engaging others with sustainability issues. These will form a part of our explorations.

 

Discussion questions may include the following (alongside any questions/related topics that you would like to discuss in relation to this topic):

•       Do educators from different faculties/schools make use of audiovisual resources in their teaching to illustrate issues of sustainability?
•       Does the use of audiovisual resources help students to make emotional connection to sustainability?
•    Who should be responsible for selecting audiovisual resources for use in lectures/ seminars?

 

Hope to see you there. All welcome, staff and students

Creativity for Learning unit and open learning ecology starting in January

The brand new unit Creativity for Learning part of the PgCert and the MA in Academic Practice (also available as a stand-alone CPD unit) will be offered for the very first time in January 2015. This is an excellent opportunity to explore and experiment with more novel pedagogical approaches, theories and practices, fully tailored to your professional needs and aspirations. You will be able to discuss creativity for higher education learning and teaching with colleagues from across the university, reflect on your current practice and identify opportunities to become more creative and adventurous in your  teaching to create stimulating learning experiences for and with your students.

We have joined up with Prof. Norman Jackson who has done extensive work in this area. See also the Creative Academic site at http://www.creativeacademic.uk/.

The unit is also available as an open learning ecology (see https://p2pu.org/en/courses/2615/creativity-for-learning-in-higher-education/) and signalises the start of the longitudinal and multi-institutional research project ‘Creative Academics‘ in which we are exploring conceptions of personal creativity and how they change through purposeful professional development.

Warning! A wide open mind is needed!

To find out more about the Creativity for Learning unit and to register, please access  http://www.celt.mmu.ac.uk/cpd/accredited/unit_details.php?unit_id=93

If you have any questions linked to this unit or the open learning ecology, please get in touch with Chrissi at c.nerantzi@mmu.ac.uk