Centre for Academic & Professional Development

This is an academic review of a research report by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) published in November 2014, which focuses on peer-led learning (PLL) in Higher Education (HE). The review argues that although the report is relevant for those who want to set up and/or support peer-led learning in their institution, course and/or teaching, it lacks reference to the “real-life messiness” of peer-led learning and teaching – experienced particularly in institutions with a large non-traditional student body.

In Hartley, Sinfield et al (Eds) (2011) Learning Development in Higher Education London; PalgraveMacMillan Summary This chapter offers a socio-political context for e-learning, mapping an emergent pedagogy and offering insights into the tensions of pedagogic practice in the digital age. Paradoxically, whilst the student has the illusion of 24/7 access to 'the mind of the tutor' via hyperspace, the reality of HE is a world of diminishing resources, larger classrooms and increasing central control.

Widening Participation is the next big thing in the government's education, education, education juggernaut. Demonised in the popular press, with debates on the value of a particular university or degree or of a particular student, the post-1992 university has responded to the challenge of increasing student diversity and numbers via the mechanisms of marketisation, commodification and new managerialism.

As soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult and quite possible (Foucault, 1980:154). This paper explores the role that notemaking strategies can play as part of an emancipatory pedagogy designed to empower students. We will argue that being taught active notemaking is fundamental in enabling students to use information with confidence and thus that notemaking allows students to gain a voice within their own education. Rather than taking a psychological approach to notemaking, we suggest that notemaking allows students to take ownership of ideas and concepts in powerful ways , ways that reinforce understanding and build knowledge. These processes and practices can essentially help students to learn what they want to learn -and, pragmatically, to write essays that are adequately researched and correctly referenced . The final focus will be on the collaborative development of NoteMaker, a Reusable Learning Object (RLO) designed for use across the university -and across the sector.

In cyberspace, one's body can be represented by one's own description, reality can be disrupted and the plain made beautiful or '… the beautiful plain', (Turkle1999: 643).Our case study (cf Stake 1995) sought to explore the opportunities offered to students when they come to class in a virtual world and a differently created learning space. We consider Bullinghurst and Dünser's(2012) work on augmenting reality for learners to combine the 'real and the virtual' to enable students to deal with the abstract. This paper explores student representations in Second Life, a 3D immersive world (www.secondlife.com), and as we engage, we see that the virtual not only enhances both curriculum and practice, but also an emergent scope for visual hermeneutics as both a digital literacy and analytical research tool. The focus of the case is a first year FoLSC group of students, based in Computing, and a first year module with embedded study and academic skills. Our conclusions suggest that offering learning opportunities in different spaces, can, indeed, disrupt -but in a powerful and positive way.

The present paper explores the pairing of a second year Peer Mentoring in Practice with a first year Becoming an Educationalist module and the role that reflective writing – in logs and blogs – plays in encouraging our students to engage with the material, to write to learn and to produce narratives of the self in times of transition.

Keywords: Non-traditional students, reflective practice, quasi-academic writing, Blogs and logs, becoming academic

As education undergoes a process of rapid change, impelled by government intervention and market forces, collegiality has for us generated an increased sense of purpose amidst these pressures and a positive way of harnessing new technologies for enhancing our students’ learning.
The ‘widening participation’ student in particular tends to experience higher education as a series of ‘struggles’ in the face of discourses of derision, overassessment, participation in paid employment and, perhaps, those e-learning initiatives designed to rationalise resources rather than support staff or empower
students.
This paper reviews the ‘Write to Learn’ (W2L) resource that was produced by collaboration between academic, learning development and learning technology staff
to support students in their real-life situations – with their actual academic writing tasks.

This paper explores how to facilitate the ‘bedding in’ and ‘becoming of’ undergraduate students who come from non-traditional backgrounds and struggle with what is, for them, the often alien world of academic writing and assessment. To achieve their aims, the authors set up a partnership between the students of a second-year Peer Mentoring module and those of a first-year Becoming an Educationalist one. By means of this creative partnering, and via reflective blog entries, they worked to harness quasi-academic writing to help such first-year students to become familiar with, and powerful within, the exclusionary practices (in particular, the written conventions of academic essays) of Higher Education. They argue that this innovative ‘teaming-up’ of second- and first-year students not only models collaborative learning and writing practice, but also facilitates the ‘bedding-in’ of newcomers. The paper itself models the partnership and creative writing methods used to help students find their ‘voice’ by being ‘co-produced’ by the people teaching across the two modules concerned.

This reflection discusses the opportunities that emerged with the inter-twining of #creativeHE (1) and Becoming an Educationalist; a module taught at London Metropolitan University, focussing on the emancipatory and social justice work of creative practices especially when utilised with ‘non-traditional’ students in higher education (HE).

This chapter contributes to the emerging discussion around student writing through its focus on writing for Business for first-year students at the London Metropolitan University Business School.  We focus on the student writing experience in one compulsory Management module, which was introduced as part of a broader revision of the first year Business syllabus designed to make transparent to students the discourse of Business studies and of Higher Education more generally. The London Met student body is remarkably diverse in nature and the university has a long history of welcoming non-traditional and more recently Widening Participation students.  The Academic Literacies approach pioneered by Lea and Street (1998) and others (e.g. Lillis, 2001 and 2004) has reminded us that writing cannot be detached from the social contexts in which it takes place.  Therefore, integral to our approach has been the examination of the student voice in order to gain a wider understanding of the strengths and weaknesses associated with students’ academic writing and how any weaknesses might be resolved.