teaching

The module has now had a complete run and I’m able to reflect on it, such that it can be ammended for the upcoming year.

The podcasts were seen as useful by students, particularly when it came to revision.  They weren’t much work to produce, but there were a few technical hitches (battery failure on the recorder; sound disappearing for some reason).  From my point of view I have a complete lecture run recorded, and will record again so will be able to see how the lectures evolve over time.  

100 word exercises - these were a lot of work to mark with such a large module.  Undoubtedly valuable to students, and many of them commented after the exam on how useful they had been in getting thought focused and communication of ideas succinct.

Content - see no need to change this.  The course is well structured and functions well.

Assessment - I split the exam into two sections - pre-1917 and post-1917 - and will split the essays in a similar manner next year.  This is the only real way I can ensure that students are assessed on the whole of the module, not just on a narrow field within it.

Reading lists - these could do with a little attention.  Students need to be pointed more in the direction of primary material.

I’m about to go to Joensuu in Karelia (Finland) on an Erasmus Teaching Mobility trip.  It seems that it’s going to be a good experience, and should be lots of fun.  I’m actually teaching an 8-hour lecture course (worth 2 ECTS credits) on Soviet Foreign Policy and the Comintern in the 1920s and 1930s.  The course will cover:

1. The Soviet takeover of diplomacy and the establishment of the Comintern
2. Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s: revolution or normalization
3. The Soviet stand against fascism: collective security, the popular front and the Spanish Civil War
4. The Soviet Union and its challengers: relations with Nazi Germany and Japan

Why do student’s feel the need to  repeatedly tell you things such as ‘the historian x’.  I know they’re a historian, it’s not a talking point, and is therefore a redundant phrase.

We get to the last week of term.  Students show up, but almost universally have done no reading whatsoever.  How do they think they will learn from this?  Why do we bother with the last week? Answers please. 

Lecture:  Went well, although a little short.  Possibly a little dense, but a difficult topic to deal with in a wildly different manner (Bismarck’s alliance system and Russia).  Would have benefited from me editing the graphical representation to English from German.   More students with powerpoint printoffs this week

Seminars:  Good disucssions, although possibly too large/conceptual a topic for students to get into in much depth in the time available (Anglo-Russian conflict in the second half of the 19th Century).  General haziness regarding geography.
One group had the first presentation which was fairly good.  From the peer assessment it is clear that not all students understand why a ceratin mark should be awarded - some very high marks were given that did not match with the critique well and one wasn quite harsh markwise although comments suggested that the opinion was higher.  In the end the student was awarded a mark which I would have given them anyway.

Podcasts: popular and not impacting on attendance

100 word exercises: going well.  Good response rate and helping seminar discussion.  Topic did lead to a focus on Afghanistan with the neglect of some other areas from some students.  Some students say they need to get into the habit of remembering they need to submit until very close to the deadline (an argument for introducing this earlier than levle 3)

Reading: some students say they are struggling to get hold of books in the library.  when probed further they were unaware of being able to use other libraries in Bristol or the inter-library loan system.  A few complained about the high price of textbooks, and slow lead times from Amazon.  I suggested strategies for dealing with this (such as buying books together, finding secondhand books etc), and pointed out that there are copies of the textbooks for this course available in several bookshops in Bristol (Blackwell’s at UWE Frenchay and Waterstone’s in The Galleries)

Lecture: Went well, although I nearly overran as a result of how long the computer took to start up. I shall have to get in earlier in future (I had naively assumed that it would only take forever the first time I had to log into a given machine). Students commented that it was interesting and informative.

Seminars: 100 word exercises clearly seen as useful by both me and the students. Some good discussion generated around the question and much better student participation than without them having been done (they know you know they have some thoughts, so don’t think so hard about trying to escape speaking). I tried using ‘buzz groups’ for the first time to get students to think about problems in groups of three or four with very good results. We had a much more fluid discussion, I had to interject less and we achieved the aims in a much better fashion. I also found it interesting to listen in and see what students were discussing amongst themsleves. I think I shall keep using this where appropriate as it seems to be a good tactic for interactivity in seminars.

100 word exercises: Still some issues with unattached students, but some have done their exercises some time in advance of the deadline. This is good and I hope it continues.

Podcasts: Working well. Student feedback positive.

Maps: A few students asked where I source my maps as they feel they are useful, but don’t necessarily know how to find them. I pointed out that good search skills are useful here, but that frequently good maps can be found in Wikipedia. Maps have been included in powerpoint slides, but these probably are only large enough to be useful when projected on a large screen. I have also used maps on ohp in seminars, but these aren’t distributed. In future runs of the module I might, as one colleague suggested, put some maps in the handbook.

Yesterday I ran into the problem of students talking about Britain’s actions in the past using the word ‘we’. This is a particular bugbear of mine, but some students couldn’t see why it’s a problem. Primarliy it is an issue of accuracy and objectivity. What do you mean we? Were you actually involved? Are you counting me in with that?

Students also seemed to struggle with the notion of the implication of ‘we’ to indicate a collective identity, which I find problematic. The class was discussing British war aims in Africa and the Middle East during the First World War. An earlier class had two African students. I asked the student who used ‘we’ how he thought they might feel being lumped in with the use of ‘we’. This got misconstrued as me telling the student challenging their political correctness, when what I was driving at was that the use of the pronoun ‘we’ is wholly inappropriate in historical discourse. We then unpicked the differnece between what you might say down the pub and what is appropriate in class. It would seem tha we still have some way to go with students in communicating to them that they are supposed to be historians, not pundits, and that they need to be clear.

Clarity is another point - what would ‘we’ mean of it came from a non-British student when the underlying assumption of the room seemed to be that because this was a UK university then ‘we’ means Britain.

I also tried to point out that the use of ‘we’ in history is a tool of nationalism. The notion that ‘we won the war’ is a tool used to create a focus both on the home nation and to demonise an enemy.

As historians ‘we’ is a slippery and dangerous term. I will not stand for its use in my classes.

In the past plenty of students have downloaded my powerpoint slides in advance of lectures.  According to the statistics, and from what I can see in lectures this isn’t happening much on Tsars and Commissars at the moment.  I did make it clear that slides are available in advance (last week they were available by Friday, this week by Wednesday with the lecture on the following Monday), and what the purpose of making them available was - i.e. so that students could spend more time actively listening to me rather than looking down and scribbling away as they try to copy what’s on the screen.  It is possible that the podcasting of lectures has had an impact - students know they can recap - but I suspect I need to point out that slides are available for them to use in advance.  As they should all be entering Blackboard to do their 100 word exercise, they might also like to grab slides at the same time.

Students have started to give some feedback on the podcast of lecture 1 from Tsars and Commissars.  Several students commented that they had found it useful as a means of recapping and filling in gaps from things they had missed in the lecture.  Some commented that they had started to listen, but had not yet had time to re-listen to the whole lecture (it was only uploaded last Friday).

Certainly from the attendance in lecture 2 yesterday, the podcasts have not been seen as an alterative to attending the lecture.

Student familiarity with the format does not seem to be a great problem - even those that have not previous experience have found the Wimba platform fairly self-explanatory and easy to use. A few have even worked out that they can use iTunes to catch the feed.

40 students posted to the boards for this week, with only a few late. This is almost all of the students who actually came to the introductory sessions of which there were 44 (90% response rate and I have since had 2 more late submissions bring me up to 42/44 or 95%).  On further investigation reasosn for not having done the exercise were that the student was unattached to Blackboard and did not know the question, and in one instance that they plain forgot.  The ‘forgetting to do it’ issue will become less of an issue as this goes on and the exercise becomes a regular fixture, and hopefully I will manage to get all students attached soon.

I shall also need to clarfiy to a few of them that 100 words is the target length. Some wrote considerably more and some wrote on the seminar question, rather than the question for the exercise.

From student feedback the exercise is seen to be valuable, although only a small number of students returned to the discussion boards after they had posted their answers. When quizzed on whether they had looked at other posts before writing their own some said they did not as tghey did not want to be influenced unduly by what others had written (avoidance of plagiarism), while others said that they had looked to see how others had structured their answer and found some reassurance that other answers agreed loosely with what the student thought.

From my point of view as the tutor, it was clear that this exercise had a positive impact on student preparation, understanding and willingness to contribute. There were also a number of questions asking me to clarify points from the reading which indicate that students have thought about matters in advance of coming to class.

In summary - a good and worthwhile exercise. Let’s hope the quality and volume of contributions continues!