In this final post of the series ‘Learning how others learn’↗️, Minkyung Kwon reflects on being a research assistant in the PTAS project at the root of this series, which explored the diversity of learning practices. She ponders how the project helped her analyse her own teaching and learning approaches. Dr Minkyung Kwon recently defended her PhD, “Changing School from the Outside: Teenage Girl Feminist Activism in the South Korean School #MeToo Movement”.
When I first came across the advertisement for a research assistant position in the Principal’s Teaching Awards Scheme (PTAS) project, “Research staff: the missing link in teaching and learning?” I was excited. This research project aimed to reflect on the representation of teaching staff in classrooms through participatory workshops with undergraduate and postgraduate students from Geosciences at The University of Edinburgh. As an educator, I enjoy the reflexive process of developing my teaching experience based on my learning experience as a student. I am also passionate about enhancing equality, diversity, and inclusion in the classrooms. Most importantly, I value students’ participation in co-constructing the learning experiences. All in all, the project, which included all of the above, seemed to be a meaningful job to be done.
While preparing for the participatory workshops, I spent hours with Cecile, the principal investigator in this project, pondering teaching staff’s identities and characteristics to prompt discussions on our internalised biases. It helped me reflect on my learning experiences with diverse teachers. In retrospect, who teaches me did not matter much. Instead, how the teaching was delivered mattered. One of my favourite teachers was a high school maths teacher, a relatively young woman without any prior teaching experience. I liked maths class with her because she noticed that I was far behind in maths. After leading the lecture, she spent a few minutes, working on one lower-level maths problem with me. It was only a few minutes every week, but I felt that she cared about my improvement. That motivated me to become interested in maths and work harder. I also remember one lecturer in my undergraduate years who felt uncomfortable speaking in front of a big group of students because the lecture had to be delivered in English, and he was not fluent. To make sure that we learned and understood, he used a pad to illustrate concepts as he was explaining them. He could have delivered his lecture the more traditional way, but by being more creative, I felt he cared about our learning. In both cases, the teaching staff’s age, experience, position in school, fluency in the language, all of which have been reported in research as factors influencing students’ course evaluations, did not matter much to me.
What I observed and learned from facilitating the participatory workshops with students in Geoscience was not that different. We discussed diverse identities and characteristics of teaching staff, ranging from age, gender, position, neurodiversity, sexuality, to pedagogy. Participants shared that it would be okay to have a person who does not fit into our preconceived images of how a ‘teacher’ teaches. What they valued instead was the person’s engagement in classes, actively responding to the students’ questions, with care. Participants preferred to have lecturers who would be attentive to the critical questions raised by the students even if they could not immediately provide clear-cut answers rather than the lecturers who would simply dismiss their question. In their learning experiences, the identity and characteristics of the lecturers were not the critical factors that influenced their evaluation of the learning experience. Instead, what stood out to me as the ‘positive’ learning experience the participants reflected on was the lecturers’ acts that made the students feel they mattered. For example, a lecturer who opened up about their own sexuality and considered how it related to the topic helped LGBT+ students connect with the lecturer and the knowledge imparted. Another lecturer provided space for students to construct their learning by asking them to make decisions on the methods of assessments, which made the students feel more motivated to learn. One participant shared an experience where a lecturer paid attention to and commented on the personal improvements that student had made throughout the course. These were a few examples of participants’ experiences in classrooms where they felt they mattered.
Closing the participatory workshops in the research project and writing up this blog post, I get to think that what made me feel motivated to learn in those classrooms was my teachers’ attempts to approach teaching and learning differently. They were aware that everyone learns differently and aimed to teach accordingly by paying attention to what students expressed. These attempts made me feel that I, as a student, mattered, motivating me to pursue learning. In the workshops, I started as a teacher and ended as a learner. I learned that there might be no single criterion that decides ‘good’ learning. I learned that ‘good’ teaching starts with acknowledging that different students perceive learning differently. And most importantly, I learned that the ‘best’ way to teach and learn is when it is co-constructed with the students because what matters is that how students learn should guide how we teach.
Minkyung Kwon
Dr Minkyung Kwon is based at the Moray House School of Education and Sport, where she recently defended her PhD, “Changing School from the Outside: Teenage Girl Feminist Activism in the South Korean School #MeToo Movement”. She worked on the PTAS project as a research assistant, enjoying every moment to learn with the students and her colleague Cecile by reflecting on our experiences, positionalities, and aims regarding our previous and ongoing learning.
