The picture of me above was 'kindly' drawn by my daughter when she was 8 yrs old (she is now 20)- you get the drift!
Welcome to my Covid-19 Learning and Teaching Journey
In this blog, I want to let you know what makes me who I am and how that impacts on my professional work as a leader of law teaching at The University of Manchester.
A bit about me.. feel free to skip-no offence taken!
I have worked at Manchester for just over three years. I am a National and Principal Fellow of the HEA. Currently my leadership role in the School of Social Sciences is Director of External Relations. Before moving to Manchester, I worked at The University of Sheffield for 17 years. When I left Sheffield, I was the Faculty Director of Teaching Enhancement working closely with my partner in crime Claire Allam. At Manchester, I teach Legal Skills, Miscarriages of Justice and Criminal Evidence. I work in the Justice Hub and co-direct, the Manchester Innocence Project alongside Fintan Walker. I am also an academic lead on the Manchester Legal Tech Initiative.
This is me 👇
My passion for social justice and learning and teaching has directed my career and the way I teach. I create projects and civil engagement initiatives involving students. I am devoted to student engagement in education, ensuring that academia and education expands beyond the classroom environment into wider society. Throughout my career I have redesigned modules and introduced innovative teaching practices, enabling students to actively engage in their education. Students engage as independent and enterprising learners and also as creators of knowledge, who are able to contribute important, critical and innovative input into their studies. Basically, I love building stuff. When I have a new idea my starting question is always: how can we put our students at the heart of this project?
Our students presenting to School Board in 2019
Outside of work, I walk corgis, have two children (20 and 16) I swim, like gin, wine, cheese, crisps and food generally. I love New Zealand, El Nido, California, The Gower and Pembrokeshire.
This blog is very much focused on the challenges of Covid-19 at the moment, and how these challenges are changing the way I think about learning and teaching. I hope you enjoy reading it, and maybe recognise some of the challenges you are also facing on a day to day basis. All feedback welcome, especially if you spot a spelling mistake! To quote Winnie the Pooh: ' My spelling is a bit wobbly. It's good spelling but it wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong place'.
Like a Ton of Bricks.....
When lockdown hit I was pretty confident, some might say cocky, that I could cope with online blended learning. I have been doing things 'differently' for about 12 years, I am a national teaching fellow, I think I am a good teacher and get on well with students. So, what could go wrong? After all, this is what I have embodied and championed in my work, delivering student focused and student empowered lessons. Lessons which are regularly cited and rewarded for their innovation and effectiveness by those who matter the most – the students themselves.
If you know me, you will know that I am a very sociable person, I like meeting people, seeing people, interacting with people and lock-down hit my personality and way of working hard. It was also exhausting. Hour after hour staring at a screen, teaching to a wall of empty boxes and not to a room of friendly faces, interacting and having conversations with students. This might be the norm for some people, they might have always taught online, but this was not the norm for me, and it was a hard one to get used to! I found it hard to get perspective, to think ahead, to make plans.
But I did it, we all did it-but for me, it wasn’t enough. We had to do things fast and I knew I could do it better, we could do it better. The university acted very quickly to give us guidance on e-learning, some things I was already using, some not.
Asynchronous and synchronous became commonplace words that everyone was using at meetings and not just words you heard at conferences! Communities of learning (I always smile when I hear this because Claire Allan and I spent years at Sheffield (my previous stomping ground) talking about it, and trying to get staff to create COL with students and with other staff!), constructive alignment, learning outcomes, assessable learning etc. All now things that really had to be dissected by everyone, talked about-by everyone. Learning and teaching was having its moment, and not before time, I might add. So I then started asking myself, what could I do that would make the student experience better in semester 1?
Anyway, to cut a long story short I started to learn how to create things in Adobe Spark and Voice thread. I know, I know, ‘you only just got round to that’? Yes, I know!
This is the main crux of this blog. My fear, my lock-down isolation, my fear of not learning with others and my frustration of not having people in a room with me who I could bounce ideas off and learn from my errors. It was terrifying! Almost the same fear as when I first sky dived. I can draw an analogy with this experience. The first time my family went sky diving I thought they were nuts, I didn’t go. After the dive I saw the photos and I thought, damn I missed out, I should have gone. I played it safe and missed out on a fantastic opportunity. The next time they went, I did it, I jumped and it was amazing. So, I did it again and again. It was the same feeling when I saw Becki Bennett’s online learning course! I watched it and thought – I love it, but I will file adobe spark and voice thread, under too complicated.
In fact, I didn’t want to stop creating my new course handbook. I had a few glitches, e.g. you must publish before you can share, the menu bar slides to the side as well as a drop down box, this is where you can find upload a photo… I spent a good 30 minutes mumbling to myself about how stupid it was that you couldn’t upload your own photos before I found it (I know, don't sigh, its intuitive!!). The other thing is, I hate reading long guides, TV guide, how to use your microwave guides etc. but I really must read the guides properly as it would have saved me time. The flip side of this is that you learn how it doesn’t work........she says! I wanted an instant pretty looking handbook and I learnt that I needed more patience! If you want a premium licence for adobe spark, which includes your institutions branding etc and have access to more fun things -you can apply at the link below.
If you want to know more about voice thread:
I also learnt that it is OK to fail (practice what I preach to my students) and get it wrong-I created a type of sandbox area for me to try things out-I did have a moment when I thought I had published the practice template on twitter, but it was OK, I hadn't. There is also a university yammer group you can join.
I also take some comfort from knowing I have colleagues who are keen to help out on that platform and I have my National Teaching Fellow colleagues as well, they are simply wonderful and share their vast knowledge freely with people who need help.
We are more than ever before, in this together. We need to share, collaborate and be honest and open about how we are dealing with this new way of working, and what support we need to give our amazing students the experience they deserve. I looked back at my national teaching fellowship application when writing this and it then dawned on me that I had been dealing with change (not as big as this one, but change nonetheless) throughout my career and I had introduced many different things -some disasters, some amazing and I learnt from them all.
So, my takeaway from this is, be brave, be prepared to fail, relax (just like my two dogs seem to be good at below) but it is so much fun and so rewarding when you get there. You can see what you create, what you CAN do. Yes, I would like to be with other people creating it, but my colleague Fintan is adding to the handbook and we are in this together -so to speak! I am now thinking of creating a UCIL module (University College for Interdisciplinary Learning-http://www.college.manchester.ac.uk/), I think I have the BUG! Watch out it might be contagious!