Although I have been teaching at various Universities since 2016 as a Visiting Lecturer, the way that I teach is not something that I have really thought much about in an academic way. My approach has very much been about responding to what is being asked of me by the institution and the brief of the course, and then tailoring what I do to fit in best with that as well as by what I feel that the students should be taught to further their work, as well as giving them a good grounding for employment once they finish… I must have been doing something right up until this point as I am continually asked back and am building up a larger portfolio of Universities that I have worked for.

So having to look into and read academic articles for Theories, Policy and Practice is all very new to me, and I wasn’t really sure where to start as the reading list is vast.

I sat down to think about the sessions that I run, specifically at CSM, and started to reflect on these to see if it gave me any thoughts on where I could start my reading.

The first thing that came to mind was that I started teaching at CSM in September 2020 when students were on site, but social distancing, face masks and other Covid measures were in full force. The rotation that I was teaching was handknitting. A craft that has very social connotations to me – I think about knitting circles and people getting together to socialise whilst helping each other with the pieces that they are working on. Covid meant that I couldn’t have groups of students sat elbow to elbow around a table, passing their needles back and forth to each other to helping each other learn this new skill. (It also meant that I couldn’t get close enough to take a students work off of them to help them learn the stitches).

I recorded a series of technical videos for the students so that they had all of the information that they needed at hand whilst in the sessions and also at home. This has worked as a great resource even now when social distancing isn’t being implemented as it allows students to work at their own pace, pause the videos and watch the techniques over and over to learn the technical stitches they need as a basis for taking through to their own projects. And it allows me to be on hand to support those who struggle a bit more with the techniques, whilst being able to support more competent students  with the development side of their project.

These videos are a great resource which we will continue to use for the reasons above, however for me these workshops are very quiet as students plug into their phones to watch the videos to work through. Which is an environment that is quite far removed from the image I have in my head of a social knitting group who help and support each other.

So for me the first thing I think I want to look into with me reading for TPP is ways to make my sessions more dynamic. I haven’t had negative feedback from the students (as far as I know) about the handknit rotations, but for me I feel that they could be more spirited. At this point in the course students are new and don’t know each other and I am concerned that at the moment the sessions are so quiet that it doesn’t encourage them to get to know each other.

Due to lockdown it also meant that some students opted to do the course but remotely which meant that they were doing the course fully online for that first year. Again the videos were great for this, but I found online tutorials quite difficult for various reasons. Firstly it was difficult to build up a rapport with the students online (language barriers with international students also played into this) and I often left tutorials feeling as though I wasn’t quite sure that students really understood what they were supposed to be doing and hadn’t asked the questions that they needed to be asking. Again the videos were a great resource for this, but even getting some students to locate the videos on Moodle was task enough in itself.

Student’s are no longer being given the option to do the course remotely which is great, but blended learning is much more prominent now post covid – again I think that this is a good thing, but for me I think that looking into blended learning could be a good area for me to read into to try and utilise the online ways of teaching better to enhance the student experience. Blended and online learning will be more integrated in courses from now on so I think this is an important one for me to read into.

I think that these are good start points for me for TPP as I have highlighted these areas as being relevant to my teaching practice.

I discussed with Linda in my first tutorial about wanting to look into making sessions more dynamic and asked if she had any recommendations for getting me started. She suggested looking into Gadmer’s Ethics of Play. This feels like a good piece of reading to get hold of so I shall order that now.