Introduction
The title here has been chosen carefully. Learning is concerned with changing, with adapting and with accepting that there is not one right way of doing things, but any number of perfectly valid ways of doing them. It is important to remember, that just as students have preferences in terms of how they learn, so too do teachers in how they teach. Teaching styles differ and like study approaches any one approach is not better or worse than another, but different. One important outcome of a university education is the development of a tolerance of difference and the ability to adapt to different approaches and situations.
Different teaching styles
Whilst some broad generalisations about teaching within different disciplines can be made as a result of the types of activities undertaken in those areas, it is well known that even within the same disciplinary field two teachers might take very different approaches to teaching as PK outlines early on in this interview. At first glance the teacher who uses clear presentations, often on PowerPoint with accompanying handouts, may appear better than the female who enters the classroom and starts speaking irrespective of whether or not the students are ready to listen. However as the subsequent discussion continues we see that the second teacher is stimulating the students to think and to consider what they believe. Each in their own way is setting a context for learning and managing what happens in their classes.
Group work
There is perhaps nothing that arouses such fierce passions in learning and teaching in higher education than the use of group work. Advocates claim that working in groups obliges students to co-operate, learn skills of negotiation and discussion, to make clear what they understand and believe, as well as to challenge different views and reach a working consensus. Working in groups simulates what you will be required to do once you have graduated and are in employment. Detractors of group work claim that too often the operation of groups is ill-thought through, that individuals tend to work with the same people to the exclusion of others and that a perennial issue is that of the ‘passenger’ – someone who relies on the rest of the group to do the work.
There is extensive literature on the use of group work which reflects the two extremes outlined above. What emerges from these studies is that both students and teachers need to be aware of what is happening when groups are formed. Friendship groups, or groups based on individuals who live or travel together can operate effectively, but tend to limit what can be achieved, after all, few people are willing to challenge a friend about not taking a project seriously, or completing the work on time. The most effective groups appear to be those who are aware of the requirements of the task set, as well as what different individuals have to offer in terms of experience and/or expertise. In terms of the roles of team members, Belbin’s Team Roles Inventory is an extremely useful and simple tool. There is evidence to demonstrate that individuals who are aware of the roles that they can bring to a group can achieve more than those who remain unaware.
At the same time two other points need to be made about group work. The first is concerned with gender; females working in male dominated groups tend to be disadvantaged – as things stand currently, the research seems to indicate that single sex groups operate more beneficially, though there is evidence that this situation is changing in a positive direction. The second point is that groups formed from within larger social groupings have the advantages of knowing each other and a degree of mutual respect and trust and that such groups, diagnosing the task and identifying the skills required to achieve that task, can select members from the larger group and achieve significant results.
‘Academic Language’ (Graff, G. (2002))
Not only specialist terminology – jargon – gets in the way of students relating to disciplinary subject matter, but the tendency of academics to render everything problematic – the ‘problem problem’ as Graff puts it. One of the hurdles which undergraduates find difficulty with is the continual questioning by academics of what seem to be perfectly reason and commonsense. As PB says ‘Academics make everything into a problem.’ Whilst students are looking for something tangible, something certain and factual, their teachers are forever ‘intellectualising’ things and making them into problems, asking for evidence to support the claims that students are making.
Treating knowledge and understanding as uncertain and provision – the best we know so far – is at the heart of the academic enterprise. It requires students not only to grapple with specialist terminology – the ‘jargon’ of the discipline, - (what is jargon for one person is the disciplinary language for another), but it also requires them not to take things for granted.
