Research workshop and cake, anyone?

Published on 03.04.16

I’m sending out an open invitation to tea for all students enrolled on HE courses at HCA this week. Here’s the draft: The tea party has three aims: To see how students might want to use our lovely research space To invite students to work as project teams to realise some of the ideas from our earlier workshop To

I’m sending out an open invitation to tea for all students enrolled on HE courses at HCA this week. Here’s the draft:

Aliceinvite.png

The tea party has three aims:

  • To see how students might want to use our lovely research space
  • To invite students to work as project teams to realise some of the ideas from our earlier workshop
  • To introduce the idea behind #CClasses, and collaborate with me to determine the contents of three optional workshops

This last project is really exciting and has the potential to be of social value in many contexts. I heard Jonathan Worth’s keynote at the HEA ‘Inspire’ Conference, where he gave out an open invitation to those present to collaborate on this ‘teaching and research’ project. You can read more about the project here.

The format uses twitter, storify and blogging platforms to support online and offline discussion, collaboration and reflection. I’m excited by the potential depth of experience it could provide, which also meets some of the goals our students identified in our earlier workshop as this could be an opportunity to collaborate with learners in different contexts and institutions.Providing I can work my head around the apps (that is not a given) and enough of our lovely students are happy to work with me, of course.

Why ask students to help develop the workshops?  Well, my holiday reading included Neary’s work on Student as Producer , Eaton’s (2016) work on Partnership Learning Communities and, last but not least –  Cullen, Harris and Hill’s (2012)  The Learner-Centred Curriculum: Design and Implementation. The ideas in all three are clearly worth pursuing, and tally with information from many of the presentations I’ve heard recently, at GLAD, HEA ‘Inspire’ and ‘NEXUS’. These ideas also thread through the work we are involved in as part of the Scholarship Project.

Of equal importance, I remembered the feedback from our optional L4 workshops last year, where students called for more ‘high-level discussion groups’ and the clear need to develop some creative inquiry regarding the link between theory and practice that came from feedback during our scholarship workshop. And (shhh) if this works, it lets me keep a toe still in the classroom, and a connected classroom at that.