I thought I should report on some of my work so far, as I wouldn’t want any of you to think that it’s all extracurricular activity that I’m taking part in! I’m working on quite a number of things.

I’ve agreed to give a workshop for the Center for Teaching and Learning (CATL) in just over a week focused on co-created assignments, so I’ve been meeting with Deandra Little, Director of CATL (and also my driver to Charlotte for those keeping up with the blogs), to discuss the best approach to take to the workshop. Apparently 40 faculty have signed up, which is pretty healthy numbers for a professional development workshop, so I look forward to that. Just a day later, I’m leading a colloquium on ‘How to enhance a sense of belonging at university’ for the Masters in Higher Education students and faculty, so I’ve been corresponding with Smith Jackson (he has a lot of titles – he’s Assistant to the President, Associate Professor of Education, and Vice President Emeritus for Student Life and Dean of Students), who leads the MHE colloquia and I’m excited to explore different approaches to ensuring students develop a sense of belonging at university, particularly black and minority ethnic students.

I’ve been meeting with Jessie Moore, Director of the Center for Engaged Learning and Professor of English and with Peter Felten (who has already starred in previous blogs) as we will be co-teaching a course on student engagement and high impact practices in January. This should be great fun. Jessie and Peter are fantastic individuals and they ran this course for the first time last year. This year we’re tweaking the course a bit to improve on their first version and to include me in the teaching. I know I will learn as much as I’ll be able to contribute teaching this. We’re teaching it in January, in Elon’s ‘January semester’ – that’s right – they have a one month semester in January when many students study abroad. It’s also a chance for students who stay on campus to take quite intensive courses, like our course, which will involve teaching three full mornings a week throughout January.

I am also planning for the second course I’ll be teaching, which is one I’ll be running on my own from the start of February through until mid March. This course is entitled ‘Co-Creation of Learning Environments: Partnerships in and Beyond the Classroom’, and will draw on quite a bit of my own research. It’s being offered to both first and second year students on the Masters programme and it looks like I should have 8-10 students – a lovely number to teach! It’s actually quite encouraging to have this number of students sign up because this is additional credit for these students over and above the required credits they need to complete. I am delighted these students are motivated to do the course, and I’m planning a lot of opportunities for co-creation. So I’m excited to meet the students and see how the course will go.

Some of you know I have a deadline of mid December for a draft of a book I’m writing which has a working title of ‘Co-creating learning and teaching: towards relational pedagogy in higher education’. Because of the deadline, I’ve been taking some time to make progress on the book, and it’s coming along. This means however, I’ve not pressed forward with my Fulbright research project much yet. I’ve been developing some of my ideas, but I’m taking my time to develop them as I plan all the other teaching work and as I’m writing my book – I’m finding my research ideas have been adapting over the time I’ve been here. So I’m treating it as a slow burn of ideas, but I hope to start to draft my firm plan in the coming month, so I can ensure I make good progress with this as well as everything else.

In just over a week I’m off on some more travels – to Pittsburgh to the Professional and Organisational Development (POD) Conference, and then Peter Felten and I have both been invited to Brigham Young University in Utah to speak. That should be an exciting trip to Provo and Salt Lake City, but we need to do some more planning for our workshops before we go! One thing we do know is that we’ll use the new EngagEd in… research led learning and teaching guide that we’ve just released from the IAD in Edinburgh as a key part of our workshops on undergraduate research. Then after Salt Lake City I’m heading to Philadelphia to visit Alison Cook-Sather, a colleague I co-wrote a book with (along with Peter Felten) and who is based at Bryn Mawr College…I’m keeping busy!

A bit of work / Star spangled banter by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0