Nothing particularly interesting

  I have been pondering of late my new venture into teaching Creative Writing - which I will be doing this semester. It comes at the same time that I have been expending considerable thought on how to embed employability more explicitly into the English modules which I teach, and one of the first things I have had to address is the issue of how useful a Creative Writing module will be for students? After all, the idea of Creative Writing on an English Literature and Language degree might at first seem a little incongruous. Even the images associated with 'Creative Writing' tend towards the archaic and the disconnected: Old type-writers, pencils and fountain pens scratching away on parchment-type paper.  Unlike linguistics or the theoretical and historical weight of Language and Literature, the idea of sitting around discussing our own jolly wee stories might seem a little irrelevant - like an short vacation from the critical rigours of academic study.  ...

 First blog of the year.  Although, let's be honest I have been somewhat lacking in blogging commitment over the last few months - something for which I am sure you have been extremely grateful. Of course the stimulus to start up again is - as is so often the case - marking.  When faced with a seemingly insurmountable pile of work, frankly any kind of displacement activity will do. There is another motivation though.  One of the reasons marking work can be such an arduous activity is that a great deal of effort tends to be exerted into finding the best way to provide summative feedback to students.  The feedback on essays has to serve three main functions: 1)   Justifying the grade to students: A grade should never be arbitrary. Often a marker might spend quite a lot of time determining what the most accurate grade is - distinguishing carefully down to the last %. The feedback is, in one sense, a record of that decision-making proc...

Here we are again with another assessment to post.  So far I have not had any bad feedback on the various draft things I have been planning to inflict on my students - which either means that they are not so bad after all, or that people are simply too polite to say anything. This one is for a final year module on Cultural Studies.  The aim of the module is to encourage students to apply the methods of textual and critical analysis used in the study of literature, to a broader range of 'texts' drawn from culture and society. This element of the assessment is an assessed discussion.  It has always seemed to me that a discussion is a more effective way of measuring a students' capacity to synthesise and evaluate ideas than a mere presentation.  It demands that students engage with a less fixed or planned set of ideas, and means that there is a focus placed on the interactive skills which students are encouraged to practice during normal seminar discussions. Here ...

Once again I have been wrestling with the difficulties of a module designed to introduce students to critical theory.  This is particularly difficult on the degree course I teach, because English only constitutes 50% of the course - so however I try to fit critical theory in, it needs to be done effectively enough so that students have a confident grasp of it before they hit their final year, where an understanding of the relationships between text and theory become pre-supposed. I have been trying to grapple with this challenge for many years now, and have variously gone through phases of: questioning the value of critical theory altogether, and asking whether we really need it? (I eventually came to the conclusion that we do ). embedding critical theory in modules, rather than having a dedicated standalone module (but this led to repetition and confusion).   trying to crow-bar critical thinking into Research Methods modules , as a research method (a nice ide...

For me, the first English module of the course is always the most difficult.  Introductory modules are often given the near-impossible task of providing students with everything they need in order to continue studying the subject at a higher level - but particularly in literature this seems to be an increasingly difficult task. There are two reasons for this.  Firstly, while there are countless Study Skills guides now available for students to use, there is very little in terms of clear guidelines and support for how to do English literature .  In particular, the idea of 'textual analysis' remains on the whole largely undefined.  I have posted about this issue a couple of times already , so won't go into it again here . The other issue relates to what Pierre Bourdieu referred to as ' cultural capital ' or 'habitas'.  This notion relates to the extent to which there are often broad assumptions made about the basic levels of education people have - and I ...

  I have been using online marking for a couple of years now, using Turnitin's 'Grademark' system. This system seems to be increasingly ubiquitous, and although it has certainly helped to reduce the marking time it has taken quite a long time to get the hang of it. Changing the way in which you mark can be rather traumatic.  Years of marking years that most teachers / lecturers will have a tried-and-tested system, and one of the first mistakes is in thinking that marking online involves having to develop an entirely new system, or dumping the ways in which you have worked in the past.  Of course one of the second mistakes is to then abandon those tried and trusted systems entirely, and think that they are no longer relevant. As with any instance where computers become the tool for certain established tasks, we need to remember that the computer is just that - a tool.  It is not a system.  The trick is in getting this tool to reproduce (often more effecti...

Recently I have discovered what I hope will be the solution to my wish that student can book tutorials with me online, and for those tutorial bookings to be available for me to check wherever I am. One of the problems of being an academic tutor, is that the amount of time you have for students is always infinitely less than the amount of time students would like from you. I do not say this as a complaint.  Indeed, one of my biggest frustrations is failing to meet with students who could really benefit from some tutorial time, or from going through a draft essay with someone before submission.  The trouble is, when it gets nearer to submission time the demand for tutorials often outweighs the time I have to provide them, and this causes several problems:

Today I am on my way to a meeting with the Higher Education Academy about their Paul Hamlyn Foundation -funded ‘ Change Programme ’. This programme is a response to the ‘What Works?’ report, that highlighted the centrality of student engagement and belonging to student retention and achievement. The premise of the project, as far as I can make out, is to support and coordinate institutional research which could lead to interventions addressing the issues highlighted by the report.  These issues highlight the importance of increasing student 'belonging' to student success and retention.  They further highlight the need to identify effective strategies for increasing student engagement.  You can read a summary of the report findings here . My institution is the only Further Education College involved in the project, despite the sector being a major provider of Higher Education in the UK. As Eve Rapley (2012) has shown : HE in FE is a burgeoning sub-secto...

This is one of those mornings.  I suppose every morning has to be a morning of some kind of another - but this is one of the ones which tends to exist in a kind of no-mans-land.  It is a morning like the calm in the centre of a hurricane.  It is a morning which is that moment of weightless peace which exists just before you land either in the fire or in the frying pan. For several nights I have been working on project plans, reading draft dissertations and preparing lectures until the wee small hours - and this all just a week or so before marking even begins.  It is not healthy, and the older I become the harder it gets.

There is a point in each semester - always the same point - where I seem to be suddenly hit by a sense of hopelessness.  Ok, that is maybe exaggerating a little - but there are things which tend to happen in the final third of a module which are depressingly predictable, and which seem to happen to many of the lecturers I have talked to.

Since I had a very good response to my previous post about creating dynamic reading lists in a VLE course page, I thought it might be worth following up with another little thing which I have just been working on: Image-mapped menus.  An image map, in case you don't know, is a picture in which there are certain areas which act as 'hotspots', and can take you to different links.  It can be a rather neat way of just making your own course stand out a little, and of making it perhaps even a little more fun to use for students who may well be getting bored of standardised and often rather dull templates. There are some specialist tools, which do this job very well - but they are not always the easiest to work out.  More recently, I have starting using a free online resource called image-maps.com - which frankly makes the whole thing as simple as it can get.

The other night, and in view of the fact that my students were facing an imminent submission deadline, I tweeted a number of hints and tips for polishing up essay drafts prior to submission. In all honest most of those suggestions were nothing more than the standard liturgy of procedures which any Stella Cottrell reader would doubtless be familiar with. The one exception was my suggestion that if a students first language was not English, and they were struggling to express an idea clearly, that they could try writing in their first language and then running it through Google Translate. There were some incredulous responses, which quickly made me realise that adding such a tip was probably unwise. Not because such a suggestion might not benefit students in such a position but because the use of such resources really needs to be accompanied by some sort of explanation. Like a government health warning on a packet of cigarettes. First of all, after a fair number of years tea...

  Today was my first day back at work, and I have to be honest I came with something of a spring in my step.  Despite the break I had managed to get some good work done so had little to fear from my email's inbox, and even better I had downloaded some of the cheerier songs from The Muppets soundtrack that had me fair skipping through the Stratford centre. Of course, arriving at work to discover that a colleague had passed away the day before makes it difficult to sustain that level of enthusiasm, and as the day progressed my mood darkened and a more philosophic bent took its place.  Although it seems horrendously self-interested, the death of a colleague not much older than yourself makes you suddenly very aware of your own mortality.  I will not bore you with some of the more miserable and nihilistic thoughts which have revolved around my skull, but instead inform you that I have decided to do something I have never done before.  I have decided to mak...

When I was starting out in education, I really longed for an exciting range of technological solutions that could engage students from a distance, and encourage online interaction - or what we now refer to as MOOCs. It never seemed to come though, and as the years went by I found myself becoming disillusioned, and later disappointed. My faith in MOOCs as an educational solution wilted. I had believed that online courses could provide a level social playing field for students in a way that no other educational forum could - but when eventually the technology did start to be readily available, it didn’t seem to achieve what it promised. No matter what I did, I could not seem to get students to engage with it. They seemed fixed, rigidly, in a distrust of educational technology, and unwilling to take that leap of faith into the world of discussion forums and online chats. As the years went by, I began to understand why. These students were able to achieve everything tha...

Psychoanalysis on Prezi Freud – the interpretation of dreams in 1901 The importance of the unconscious instinctive urges Question – why did this new emphasis on the unconscious place greater significance on literature? Freud expounded a theory that human instincts, yearnings, desires, etc. are so powerful that they often find ways of expressing themselves outside of the control of the ego, or of social prohibitions. “ The super-ego is the moral component of the psyche, which takes into account no special circumstances in which the morally right thing may not be right for a given situation. The rational ego attempts to exact a balance between the impractical hedonism of the id and the equally impractical moralism of the super-ego; it is the part of the psyche that is usually reflected most directly in a person's actions. When overburdened or threatened by its tasks, it may employ defense mechanisms including denial , repression , and dis...