Tuesday 17th December 2013 - How I teach

It's the time of the semester when we as lecturers get the feedback from our students on what they think of the courses we have been teaching.  I have had a class of 25 students this semester, taking a final year module entitled 'The Social Geography of Europe'.   I have an account with SurveyMonkey so I can instantly see how the evaluation responses are piling up: over two thirds have now filled in what is quite a long evaluation sheet.  So far it's all looking very positive.  But yesterday one of the students said to me "Your teaching is very contemporary.  You should tell others what you do."  I took 'contemporary' to mean that we dealt with contemporary issues, but he explaned that he meant that I used a variety of different teaching methods including some that he thought quite up-to-date (he was probably surprised given my age!).  Anyway, here's my response to his request for me to tell other people what I do, in the form of a diary.  For those who aren't interested in the ways I teach, stop now and wait for the next blog to come along!

Week minus 4.  I send all registered students a document identifying the major social science theories and concepts they should understand from previous years' work, with some comment on how these ideas will relate to the empirical material in the class.  I ask them to revise their understanding of these ideas because I will take for granted that they are up to speed on them.  I also recommend  a series of newspapers and web sites to monitor throughout the class, given that we will be looking at issues that appear daily in the newspapers.

Week minus 1. I send all the students a set of 21 personality questions.  This is not a full Myers-Briggs analysis or equivalent, but their answers enable me to discover something about their personalities on a number of different axes - innovation, self-confidence, task orientation etc.  I can then use the results to put them in groups for team work - varying the group compsoition and group leaders week by week.  In the early sessions the group leaders are always those who have scored high on leadership potential, but towards the end of the semester I ensure that others with lower scores take on the leader role as well.  In some weeks I need to spread those with high innovation scores around because I am asking them to do something particularly new.  Over the years I have found that allocating groups on this basis works very well. It also helps to integrate stduents who have 'different' backgrounds - this year there have been three of them, one visiting stduent and two others who spent last year on study abroad and who initially had no friends in the group.  It is only in the very last seminar that I allow students to make up their own groups.

Week 1. There are a couple of short ice-breakers - one of which involves students having to guess which languages I have used in putting 'welcome' up on the screen.   I give a short introductory lecture, but the bulk of the time is spent with students exploring the European Values Survey and producing a commentary on some aspect of the results they find interesting.  I have the use of a teaching room heavily resourced with IT for this class, and students sit round workstations.  I can call up the material from one screen to show to everyone.  Students are asked to submit their work, which is then integrated across all students (with comments from me) and placed on the VLE page for the module.  A further feature of this first session is that I present students with over 25 opinion questions about the issues we are going to tackle in the class and get their responses via 'clickers' using the TurningPoint variant of Powerpoint.  We come back to their answers in week 11.

Week 2.  A further short lecture from me, on the background to the assessed essay questions they will be undertaking.  But again the bulk of the class is taken up by students in pairs exploring data on social issues across Europe from Eurostat.  Work is submitted and placed on the VLE page, as in the previous week.

Week 3.  A final short lecture from me on the background to the essay.  But the main activity this week sees students doing guided research on the reporting and framing of issues around racism and Islamophobia in news media from a variety of European countries.  The resultant Powerpoint slides are then shown to the whole group.  This is the first time when students talk about their work to everyone else publicly.  Towards the end of the session (each is of 3 hours duration) I give a brief introductory lecture on the first seminar topic.

Week 4.  I hold a series of short tutorials on the essay questions. There are four offered, each of them asking students to use comparative methods in looking at a particular issue in two contrasted European countries.  They choose the pairs.  I have no agenda for these tutorials: it is up to students to come with their own essay plans and their questions which they can then share with others doing the same question.

Week 5.  The first of six seminar topics.  In each case the task is given to students two weeks earlier, along with the allocation to groups.  This first seminar is in many ways the most 'conventional'.  It is on changes in Central and Eastern European cities since the end of communism.  Eight sub-themes are allocated and students work in groups to create and make a Powepoint presentation on their sub-theme.  In the class they also do some guided research on specific cities using Google maps.  After the class the Powerpoints are collected and sewn together to create an integrated document (with some light editing from me).  In week 5 I also give a short lecture introducing the topic for week 7.

Week 6.  This week is a reading week for students to work on their essays, which will be submitted at the start of week 7.  For some years now I have arranged students in groups of 3 to exchange their own draft essays amongst themselves, to comment on those they receive, and to receive comments on their own.  When I started doing this I thought students would find the comments they receive to be the most helpful aspect of the exercise.  In fact they generally report that it is being asked to use the assessemnt criteria against someone else's work that they find most useful.

Week 7.  The essays come in.  This year I have gone completely paperless.  The essays were submitted electronically, via Turnitin, as Word documents.  They were then converted to pdfs and moved, via Dropbox, to an app called 'Notability' that I have on my iPad. In this app one can write on documents on screeen, and one can also type longer comments onto the document.  I can therefore mark wherever and whenever I have the time and space.  A sample of marked essays was sent to my second marker for confirmation.  Once all the essays were marked - anonymously - the exams officer in the department broke the code and each essay was sent back to its writer but with one crucial element missing.  I had removed the final numerical mark.  Students could only get their mark by reading through all the comments I had liberally scattered across their text and the summative comments at the end, and writing a reflective paragraph or two for me on what they had learned from these comments. I also asked them to estiamte the mark they would receive.  Only when I had received such an email from a student did I divulge the mark.  Almost all students estimated within 3-4 marks of what the actual mark was - although I couldn't persuade the student who got 82 to push her (I found out later that it was a 'her') estimate above 68 or, at most, 70.

Week 7.  The second seminar.  This is on minority languages in Europe and the Council of Europe Convention on Indigenous Minorities (Catalans, Basques, Welsh and so on).  For this seminar I ask students to prepare 'slide packs' on their allotted language situation.  I learned about slide packs from my daughters in the civil service (see my previous blog).  They are constructed in Powerpoint but in normal font sizes and involve blocks of texts on particular aspects of the issue, interspersed with linking arrows, diagrams etc.  They are used in ministerial briefings and unlike normal Powerpoints they do not need to be read sequentially.  The students first efforts at these were excellent and, from the later evaluation, I know they found them extremely effective in presenting material.  In this seminar, groups studying three or four languages were put together to report to each other on the adherence of governments to the Minorities Convention, and were asked to interrogate the 'others' in their set, very much in the style of inspectors. (I once played the role of rapporteur for such an inspection of Russia's adherence to the covnention.)  We then had a general discsusion about the sustainability of minority languages into the future, with a vote on the strength of each considered. This year it was good news for Catalan and Welsh - and Ladin in northern Italy - but not so good for Frisian and Galician!  As in other seminars, the materials created by the stduents were sewn together to go on the VLE.

Week 8.  This is a role play on the reasons why Yugoslavia broke up, and the unfinished business since then.  Students are divided into delegations representing each of the factions involved (also including Albania, Bulgaria and Greece which have some interests in the whole topic).  The main preparation material students are given is in the form of the web addresses of some of the most nationalist web sites.  But this year I also had assistance from our International Faculty in Thessaloniki and was able to link up Sheffield students with students from various parts of the Balkan Region.  The scenario set is based in early 2014 when a number of events in the Balkans have led to a flare up of tensions again.  On the day of the seminar a colleague plays the part of President Obama and each national group has to explain to him what happened, from their point of view, over the last 25 years or so, and what the outstanding issues are.  Groups are encouraged to challenge each other - which, once they get going, they do with gusto.  They are each given the relevant flag to wave, which helps set the tone.  I sit at the back with a shell presentation I have developed over the years, and I enlarge on this in relation to the points the students make.  When they have finished I then present this as an academic commentary on the whole set of issues, and they are then (and only then) given a series of academic readings to follow up with.  My Powerpoint goes on the VLE.

Week 9.  The topic is on policies to combat social exclusion, particularly affecting ethnic minorities, in European cities.  One group is asked to tease out some of the definitional issues.  One group plays the role of a European Parliamemtary Committee enquiring into the efficacy of policies.  All the other students are in national groups which have been asked to pre-circulate a briefing paper on the approach to social inclusion policies in 'their' country, and then to present a formal policy 'pitch' to the parliamentarians, highlighting a policy they think should be adopted more widely across Europe.  There is a risk that each national group will choose a similar policy, but fortunately this year that did not happen.  I have up my sleeve a Portuguese policy that I can always add to the mix (there is virtually no literature on it in English).  

Week 10.  The topic is the spatial manifestation of historic antagonism to gypsies and Jewish populations across Europe.  This is done through the construction of a wiki, with each group of students initially allocated one section to research and write, and all then to collaborate in writing two final sections and editing the whole.  Most groups work from academic literature, but four used other sources.  One used the list of all traveller sites in the UK to do some analysis of their locational characteristics (for example next to motorways, factories etc.); one researched the recent media coverage of Slovak gypsies in Sheffield and visited Page Hall where the community is concentrated; and two went to London to undertake some observational work in the Jewish neighbourhoods of Golders Green and Stamford Hill.  The wiki to date is over 8000 words long and is still being actively edited.

Week 11. The final topic is on high status migrants in European cities - British in Paris, Japanese in London and so on.  Some of the tasks set here were 'conventional' but others invited the creation of a business plan for the setting up of an expatriate web site, or for an HR Directors' agenda for the establishment of community support for those sent abroad on relocation packages.  One student emailed me to say that she couldn't find any academic reading on her task (how expatriates make use of expatriate web sites) and I responded that it wasn't academic reading I was looking for but academic thinking.  She needed to look at the message boards, blogs and so on and analyse their content from a social scientific perspective.  That is actually very much my philosophy for the whole course - these are third year students who ought to be able to think as social scientists about everyday issues and events.  At the end of the presentation sessions we did two further things.  Firstly I went back to the document I had sent out before the class started, and we identified how the material we had since covered related to those big ideas.  And secondly we repeated the opinion survey from week 1 to see how much students' opinions had shifted, and in some case how much they now knew about things they had had little understanding of 11 weeks earlier.

There remain a series of 'tutorials' that I am running this week and in early January whereby students can come to my room in groups of 4 to go over the approach to the use of the big ideas as keys to understanding the empirical topics we have covered in the course.  What has been particularly exciting this year is that many of those topics have been strongly in the news of late - Slovak Roma issues in Sheffield, the current political protests in the Ukraine, continuing issues over local elections in northern Kosovo.

So that's it.  It's been a long blog - but it had been suggested that I should produce one on this topic.

Monday 9th December 2013 - Universities' attitudes to policy impact

I have two daughters, both of whom work in strategy and policy-creating areas of government ministries in Westminster.  They have a lot of interactions with academics, commissioning research reports and making use of academic opinions and project findings. 

I had dinner with one of my daughters a couple of days ago and she was saying that she had recently received a commissioned research report that was so good that she stayed at her desk until 10 p.m. reading it, making notes on it, and identifying where its conclusions could be used to influence policy directions.  She was clearly bowled over by what the academic colleague had produced - "real policy-relevant research", she said.  And some of it was not based on original material but was more like the synthesis of views that a good etacher produces.

At one time my other daughter was commissioning research regularly from a very well-respected unit at a senior university.  She was frequently reduced to rage by their attitude.  They were constantly missing deadlines, re-directing the research brief so they could get a journal publication out of the work rather than prioritising the needs of the research funder.  They also had little idea of what could be put into practice in a policy context.

I will shortly be involved in the annual round of consideration of possible promotions to readerships and professorships.  For each candidate who is judged to have a reasonable case we seek a number of external referees.  If past experience is anything to go by the referees put forward will all be academics who will make comments on the size of the research grants obtained, the difficulty of winning them, and the quality of the resultant research papers published in major journals.  But in this era when research impact is a significant element of the Research Evaluation Framework I wonder whether it should really be people like my daughters who should be writing references instead.  Their views on the merits of particular individuals might be an interesting corrective to views elsewhere within the university world.