Lessons for Everyone – Reflections on Research in Teaching at TVU

The chief argument pitched against research by tutors is: ‘I do not have time for research as I am too busy teaching students’. This paper draws on interviews to examine the varied philosophies and perceptions currently held amongst staff at TVU regarding scholarship and research. It reflects on these varying viewpoints in the light of the author’s own experience on the RiTE scheme and the university’s avowed new strategy to increase research and link it to teaching.

Initial findings indicate that many tutors hold a narrow definition of what teaching is. The paper seeks to argue that teaching should also include:
 Teaching peers and other parties than students
 Developing courses, modules and teaching materials
 Teaching by example
It argues that these areas of teaching are at least as important as imparting knowledge in tutor/student contact time and examines whether the current structure at TVU supports such teaching. Preliminary findings indicate that the current structure is failing to aid research with chief reasons being short term goals, lack of transparent reward, budgetary restrictions, poor dissemination, and non-collegiate attitudes.

The implications inherent in this paper are that if TVU wishes to change its strategy to include research as an aspiration there are repercussions for all its staff. This paper aims to help redress some of the current inequity.

The Academic Essay – Bedrock or Stumbling Block of Modern Learning?

It is impossible to open an Education supplement without coming across Academics lamenting the standard of student  writing in essays and dissertations; teachers in Higher Education bemoan that they have to teach students the basics in essay skills before students can engage with writing in their subject. This paper seeks to re-examine the academic essay in the light of modern methods of learning and teaching. Is it a relevant and useful assignment for the modern student and where does it fit into our modern learning environment of wider participation?

‘Teaching Key Skills through Educational Sleight of Hand’

Action Workshop

Teaching Key Skills through Educational Sleight of Hand or how to engineer win-win situations from combining problems and taking risks.

Whether teaching in HE or FE, a major challenge in education is to pass on Key Skills to Learners.

This workshop advocates taking a fresh approach to solving multiple teaching goals such as teaching group work, critical reflection, oral and written communication skills to students.

Bolt

Exhibited a Kinetica Art Fair, London Feb 2010

The artwork combines the idea of tiny increments of change on the 3 pivots of the human leg and the theory of non-linear dynamics. In dynamical systems theory, the term chaos is applied to deterministic systems that exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions. This sensitivity means that a small change in the initial state will lead to progressively larger changes in later states. Tiny increments in non-linear dynamics lets in Chaos: a system that is predictable in principle but unpredictable in practice.

A major influence in this artwork is Marcel Duchamp’s 1913-14 work Three Standard Stoppages.  The new perspective of non-Euclidean geometry in Duchamp's experiment, demonstrates (as the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry actually did) that the shortest route from one point to another in curved space is not a line. Ubermensche Bolt plays with the interchangeability between the human and the mechanical and builds on the Futurist investigations by Boccioni and Ouspensky that emphasise time and motion or dynamism as being crucial to our comprehension of how to sense of four-dimensionality.