Postgraduate Pedagogies

Introduction: Digital Learning Experiences and COVID-19: Insights and Perspectives from GTAs

2023-03-31T12:07:58+00:00

In June 2021, I agreed with the doctoral college at the University of Leeds to organise a day of professional development dedicated to postgraduate research students who teach (in this volume, Graduate Teaching Assistants or ‘GTAs’ will be used to refer to these students, although there is no unified terminology across the different institutions in the UK). The event ‘Postgraduate Teaching Experiences: What we can learn from them’, which was part of the Festival of the Doctoral College, took place online and was structured in the following way. In the first session, I presented the findings and insights gained from the project ‘Enhancing the engagement of postgraduate research students in teaching’.1 The presentation was followed by a roundtable discussion on the enhancement of the pedagogic practice at the University of Leeds, with the aim of sharing a diversity of perspectives on the following points:
 The experience of being a GTA at the University of Leeds, exploring the extent to which GTAs feel valued and supported in their teaching context, and the level of control they feel they have over their classes and the wider teaching context.
 The working relationships between staff and GTAs from a staff perspective, exploring staff attitudes to GTAs, and whether student teaching benefits from GTA involvement and how staff might respond to greater GTA input.
 Student attitudes to GTAs and professional teaching staff: do undergraduates respond to the two groups differently? Do they have different experiences of these two groups?

Field skills through a screen: Reflections on plant identification teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic

2023-03-31T12:06:17+00:00

Plant identification and ecology are often lacking in the curricula of life sciences programmes.
However, for our University of Leeds MSc Biodiversity and Conservation students, it is a vital skill
that industry holds in high regard due to the dearth of basic identification skills among many
graduates. The COVID-19 pandemic made the possibility of running this module in person
impossible. As such, I, as a graduate teaching assistant (GTA) developed an innovative and immersive
online module that met the module's fieldwork requirements and learning objectives. By using
online learning tools and activities such as interactive image boards, group workshops, and selfdirected
fieldwork, I led, designed, and delivered an online program of plant identification teaching.
Students were able to discuss and explore findings via several channels and seek guidance in tailored
small-group sessions with myself and a colleague as dedicated GTA tutors. I interviewed six students
who previously undertook the online plant identification module during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Using a series of Likert scale questions and deductive thematic analysis, I reflect on the challenges
and opportunities presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the novel utilisation of online
learning tools, this course can now better support our students in self-directed and peer-to-peer
learning in botanical fieldwork and identification both online and in person. For the teaching of plant
ecology, fieldwork will continue to be a staple in our educational toolbox. Results from interviews
demonstrated students improved their awareness of plants and have retained and continued to
develop plant knowledge. Novel tools such as distance learning technologies developed during the
pandemic offer opportunities to enhance our learners' experience. Specifically, materials produced
for online courses can be integrated into blended teaching approaches.

Inclusive teaching in a pandemic: The experience of an International Graduate Teaching Assistant

2023-07-27T09:11:37+00:00

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the unique contributions International Graduate Teaching Assistants (IGTAs) can make in improving inclusive teaching practices in UK Higher Education (UK HE). In addition, this paper identifies four unique challenges IGTAs face in taking up a teaching position in UK HE – the lack of support from their supervisors, limited subjects they can teach, problems with credibility, and language barrier. This paper will use the author’s personal experience of teaching an international politics module as an IGTA both during and after the COVID-19 pandemic related restrictions to analyse the unique contributions IGTAs may be able to offer in internationalising the curriculum. Through synthesising this experience with current literature on GTAs, this paper identifies the importance of supervisors and training in preparing IGTA for their role. This paper aims to encourage more international PGRs to become IGTAs.

The Interplay Between Science Engagement and Science Education

2023-05-10T13:06:11+00:00

Through my experience as a postgraduate demonstrator, I have seen that teaching and public engagement are very similar practices; both require the sharing of knowledge and experience and the realisation of benefit. These two practices are often treated as distinct, with little wisdom shared between different practitioners, despite the recent move in education towards engagement-based values. To address this, I focused on implementing pedagogical tools in a series of public engagement sessions that took place online due to COVID-19. These comprised of school talks to students considering studying science at university, with the aim of introducing them to lecture-style classes and active research. My perspectives as a postgraduate during the delivery of these sessions allowed me to identify important or obscure parts of these topics that would be relevant to my audience, and how best to introduce them. Additionally, as a postgraduate researcher, I was able to approach my audiences as a peer, rather than a ‘teacher’, and encourage more successful engagement. I used several tools such as the BOPPPS (bridge-in, objectives, pre-test, participatory learning activity, post-test, and summary) model for lesson design and took advantage of the online setting through quizzes. These were effective, resulting in an engaged audience and 94% of the students believing biophysics is an interesting area of research following the session when prior to the session 68% had not heard of it, as measured through quiz responses.

Teaching Research Skills from a distance – reflections of an international student and PGR

2023-03-31T11:31:43+00:00

Research Skills are a core module in the undergraduate psychology curriculum at the University of Leeds. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, all teaching sessions took place on campus, from big groups for lectures to small groups (up to 12 students) for seminars. With the outbreak of the coronavirus, these moved online and I, as a seminar leader, found myself facilitating learning sessions in research skills from a distance. In this article, I will reflect on my experience of delivering these seminars online as both an international student and a postgraduate researcher. With this double lens in mind, I will consider interactions between students and myself, the sense of belonging and the role of feedback in the online learning process. While facilitating the ‘Research Skills’ small-group sessions did not leave me a lot of freedom in designing my own seminar, I managed to get students to collaborate on specific tasks, give comprehensive feedback on their assignments and provide them with material they could work through in their own time. In a time where students were physically distanced, my approach helped to create a sense of community to enhance students’ learning experience.

‘Give me a minute, I just need to put you into your groups’: transferring group activities to the online space using breakout rooms

2023-03-31T11:35:15+00:00

Transitions to online learning as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic challenged how group-based activities were delivered. This paper explores how a quantitative social research design project allowed insights into digital pedagogy. Transition to group working in breakout rooms required planning to be centred on an imagined student learning experience. As a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA), this included understanding the dynamics by group, supporting learning in the digital space, presenting accessible materials, facilitating the learning process across multiple groups, and (re)planning teaching sessions successfully for the online milieu. Breakout rooms are dispersed digital learning spaces and were in use at a time when students were experiencing significant declines in mental health, challenges with digital exclusion, disengagement, and a lack of online confidence in peer-to-peer relationships (Peper et al., 2021; Savage et al., 2020). Addressing these key factors required a more student-centred planning approach, based on individual and group needs, in ways which were not seen within face-to-face delivery. Drawing on experiences of the potential for isolation and uncertainty for students in breakout room spaces, I reimagined the digital space in terms of material presentation, facilitating student empowerment, and communicating and managing across multiple breakout rooms concurrently. These strategies contributed towards positive student experiences, providing pedagogical insights into newer online teaching practices for GTAs.

Fine Art as a Life Practice: Lessons from PGR teaching under COVID-19

2023-03-31T11:24:44+00:00

During the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, Higher Education fine art arts educators were compelled to re-think their studio teaching methods. As a PGR instructor new to teaching, I took this as an opportunity to enter into a curious and creative inquiry with my first-year students into the pandemic situation itself, through a project titled: ‘Engaging, Encountering, and Distancing: Masks, Masking, Masquerading’. This article draws on my reflexive research conducted throughout my first term teaching in the School of Fine Art, Art History and Cultural and Media Studies, at the University of Leeds. My students were supported to think of themselves as context-specific artist researchers, gaining experience of social and visual research, to engage in haptic experiments with materials, to investigate their immediate habitat, and to make new work mediated by the online environment. The project encouraged students to attend to the affective, making conscious modes of relating and having presence online, searching for new ways to create a sense of being with and relating to each other. As a consequence of teaching online, I came to question what is specific about the pedagogical premise and methods of fine art teaching, with an emphasis on ‘the studio’ as a making and relational space, and the importance placed on embodiment in the student/lecturer relationship and learning experience of 1-2-1 tutor/student tutorials, and studio group crits. Whilst fine art lecturers are relieved to be back in the physical studio, teaching under COVID-19 has enabled us to appreciate the specificities of a fine art pedagogy and its social importance, and to value a fine art education as a life practice.

My article concludes with thoughts on the significance of ‘the studio’ as a pedagogical tool of fine art, and the importance of embodiment in the student/lecturer relationship and learning experience overall.