Glyn Williams
As a department, we’ve done more talking about study skills, and making the expectations and norms of our programme or UK master study more explicit. But it’s going beyond the basic stuff on how to avoid plagiarism and so on. It sets expectations early on of engaging critically with work, that it’s okay to take a contrary view from what is written.
We have a set of workshops and tutorials as an introductory module in intro week. It’s not assessed, as it’s non-credit bearing, but it’s a short module where they do group work, some primary research, they have to present and everyone’s thrown together to do that over a really compressed period.
It’s the programme directors who provide the substantive content, but the focus is mainly on the process of going through your first bit of group work. How do you coordinate as a group, particularly an international and intercultural one. So we actually try and kind of bring some of those to the surface, really early on in the programme.
The programme takes place during Week 1 and aims to support appreciation of wider context and an introduction to terminology and meanings. The programme seeks to foster a relaxed and supportive atmosphere, and consists mostly of self-directed group work.
It’s important because it sets a collective baseline, and says, this is something about the culture of this department. It’s their programme directors of each of what was half a dozen different masters programmes, all showing their face to all of the students in those sessions.It sets a collective ethos, which then clears out some of the work of doing that norm setting from individual module modules. But there’s still scope for variation. And obviously, you know, at the start of that module, you still got to say, Well, okay, this module is structured in this way, because we’re quite explicit now in how we link learning outcomes, employability and why teaching methods are being used. So we do actually tell students why we’re doing things the way we’re doing them, as well as just telling them what we’re doing.
internationalpedagogies.home.blog 