I am writing this blog post in hindsight it was many months ago in a panic state of frenzy that I submitted my action plan. At the time I didn’t know what I wanted to focus on so kept delaying this, I kept going between different ideas ‘should I just do my Intervention from the previous unit or something completely different?’ I felt as though there was a lot of pressure on the significance of this final unit ( could it make or break my career as a newish lecturer? What if it didn’t work? What would my students think of the action I would have to do? Would they get it?)
In some ways studying on the PGCert reminded me about all the hopes and fears I felt as a student as well as what it must be like to be in a students shoes taking part in deadlines, tutorials, workshops etc. We always tell them about best practises, but sometimes we don’t practise this ourselves!
My Ethical Action Plan is attached at the end, let’s analyse my process a bit closer.
- Reflecting back on my research question, I find this to be too broad, my reasoning behind this was to keep it quite open because I had quite a lot of ideas at the time but didn’t know which one to choose, there was an idea about non verbal forms of communication that came out of an early tutorial session and creating a new language with my students.
- I split the readings up into three sections, covering methods, language and small group learning since some of the activities were planned for group tutorial sessions.
- I came across the lost and found in translation paper in the Decolonising Language and the Multilingual University roundtable video a peer in my tutorial group mentioned to me. This was a key moment in my process, as I learnt about the ways translation enhances learning through the translation of the design school manifesto Ingham (2021 p.3952) which creates a sense of belonging for students who came from diverse backgrounds and cultures Ingham (2021, p.3956) as well as how the dominance of English has become a barrier for many students and their learning Ingham (2021, p.3958).
- I looked back on some of the readings in the TPP unit and remembered how Lindsey had described Phil Race’s work, there were some useful tips here on tutorials from high learning payoff activities such as solving problems to apply assessment criteria to their own or each others work Race (2006, p.21), some of these tips proved useful when developing my actions.
- My quite ambitious list of actions (4 in total) were pointed out by my tutor to be perhaps too many, which I agreed with. My reasoning was that I looked at all the sessions I had left in the term and just plotted them down. I only ended up doing actions 1A and 1B during two group tutorials. It is interesting how I have ended back full circle as tutorial sessions were the ones I had my teaching observations done about, https://joncflint.myblog.arts.ac.uk/category/observations/ some of the the feedback I received from those observations would be useful when designing my actions.
References:
Ingham, M. (2021) ‘Becoming Lost and Found in Translation’, In: Cumulus Conference Proceedings Roma 2021, Track: Design Culture (of) REVOLUTION. Cumulus, pp. 17-34.
Race, P. (2006) The Lecturer’s Toolkit. 3rd Edition. London: Routledge.