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Calling Students to Adventure

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April 19, 2021
Conferences, Experience Design, Uncategorized
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Designing learning opportunities (also known as planning teaching) can be a tricky business. And it is often all too easy to focus on the content of a session, module, year or course, rather than on the people who we actually want to go on the learning journey.

If you have followed me to my Academic Afternoon Tea (quite some time ago now), you will know that I have been toying with the Hero’s Journey (a concept in scriptwriting) as a template (you can remind yourself in this post). But you might not know that I found Robert Farmer, learning developer at the University of Northampton, a likeminded colleague and that we have been working on this for a while now, culminating in a website that breaks the learning journey into equivalents of the Hero’s Journey and suggests some diagnostic questions that can help us consider these stages when designing student-centred sessions. You can access this website here (it also has a great resources page if you are hungry for more research in this area).

a hero meets a helpful owl that shares resources in a fantasy/library landscape
Like in Stage 6 we had all sorts of Allies (well resources) and Tests lined up (no enemies, though) (image by Amy Rose @AmyR_Animates and Adam Watkins @theadamwat)

We had been planning to take this to the ALDinHE conference in 2020, and had planned an exciting journey for the conference delegates themselves – part reflective walk, part treasure hunt around the Waterside campus of the University of Northampton, that was to trace the stages by making links to the built environment, with hidden passwords and puzzles that were to unlock the diagnostic questions on the website and would culminate in discovering the location of an in-person discussion on the subject. Alas, it was not meant to be, because the conference that year was, of course, cancelled due to Covid-19. It felt like while we hadn’t refused the call, we were refused an adventure!

the hero imagines being obliterated by a dragon's fiery breath
It felt like Stage 3 – WE didn’t refuse the call, but our plans were scuppered nonetheless! (image by Amy Rose @AmyR_Animates and Adam Watkins @theadamwat)

This year the conference went ahead, albeit in a virtual format. Which, of course, had a huge effect on our initially planned ‘wildcard’ session, because how to do a reflective walk within an hour session in people’s own homes? So we had to re-plan this from scratch. And we wanted to make sure we didn’t just focus on the content, but also on the participant’s experience. Could we send them all on their own little adventure, while also managing to tell them how we would map the student journey onto the Hero’s journey? In the end we went for a hybrid, telling our audience about the stages first, and then sending them on a little scavenger hunt around their homes with the brief to find objects and images that somehow represent parts of the adventure of learning. And we got some wonderful objects, pictures and stories back! I believe a great help for the success of the session were the beautiful illustrations we had commissioned from Amy Rose and Adam Watkins, two of my final year students, that did a great job at making the links between a traditional hero (armour, sword, dragon, etc.) and a student (library, whiteboard, mortar board).

our hero is removing treasure from a treasure chest (located in a library)
Like in Stage 9 hopefully all the participants seized the reward (the link to our website with all the diagnostic questions)! (image by Amy Rose @AmyR_Animates and Adam Watkins @theadamwat)

We are now trying to figure out where to take this next. At a time when learning developers will be called on to review and re-plan sessions of all shapes and sizes, to decide how much it is appropriate to go back to the old normal or what of the online delivery aspects would be useful to keep, we probably all could do with taking a critical look at the teaching we have planned for September 2021. So this might be a good time to take this project further. We could see an in-person workshop (maybe half day?) that explores the structure and archetypes within the Hero’s Journey as mapped onto the learning journey. Or an on-line course that delves more into the stages and diagnostic questions, either stand-alone or run over 12 short sessions.

What do you think? Would one of these be interesting? Or a different format altogether? Please let us know in the comments!

Should Educators learn from Experience Design?

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October 22, 2018
Conferences, Experience Design, Workshops
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This is a preamble to a forthcoming occasional series of posts on whether and what educators can learn from experience design, explaining how I got here…

I have been fascinated with Experience Design ever since I studied the related discipline of Theatre Design as an undergrad and I went on to do my Masters thesis on what museums can learn from Theme Park Design. My PhD ended up on the role of writing in design education (although that is not quite how it started out… as is so often the case with research), so it seems that I got a bit distracted for a while. However, when I was looking for a new direction for my research, this interest came back to me and I thought it would be worth exploring for a few months to see where it could take me and whether it would be worth pursuing.

Starting at the beginning of the year I delved into an exploratory research project, taking the starting point of my previous work on genre and regenring and the importance of storytelling that comes with it. I presented a related paper in February and in rather fast succession found a collaborator in Dr Jenny Kidd, we worked on and submitted a book proposal, had it accepted and wrote a book over the summer. This book, Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling, has just gone to typesetting and will hopefully be available in all good bookshops soon, even the online ones. I have also just come back from a week at the College of Extraordinary Experiences, a five-day event that is hard to explain to people who weren’t there, let’s say it combined the principles of a conference, symposium and course in an immersive and playful way. So, it has been a whirlwind few months – and I have realised (and of course with hindsight this is obvious), that I have not just (re-)found a research subject that I want to pursue further, but also that here is a discipline that is really worth knowing a bit about if you are an educator.

Experience Design is a relatively new discipline and it overlaps and draws on a number of other disciplines. One of them, of course, is Event Design, which when we think about it, is something that we do as teachers. When people ask me why I am not a designer anymore, I usually reply that I still am, that I currently design learning opportunities. While somebody else usually organises in what time slot I teach and where, it is mainly me who decides what happens within these slots. I design these teaching events, the experiences I want my students to have. Some of my colleagues design educational escape rooms (and I have dabbled in that), but even if you do not prepare anything as elaborate, thinking of the student experience when we design can surely help us clarify our strategies.

Funnily enough what started me out on my road to becoming a National Teaching Fellow was a workshop by NTF Dr Colin Beard that was about Experiential Learning (and his and John P Wilson’s book Experiential Learning is definitely one I would recommend). Experiential Learning and Experience Design again are disciplines that overlap – and this overlap I think is fascinating and that I am hoping to consider in a bit more detail over the next few months. Should educators learn from Experience Design? I think most definitely and I will share my musings here on WHAT I think we can learn from this discipline and hope that you will find them useful.

To Slide or not to Slide (Part 2)

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June 28, 2018
Conferences, Workshops
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After the workshop at #Undisciplining had gone rather well, I finally had some time to actually focus on the second session I needed to prepare for a conference in June. And initially I had been thinking of focusing this on an overview. If you are interested in how things fit together and/or on different levels contained within them, a tool like a prezi presentation that allows you to zoom in can be used to great effect.

However, as I reflected on what I wanted to do in the context of the conference I decided against the prezi and went with the traditional slides instead. The point of this particular talk was to present three different analogies I use within teaching and show some examples of how they work in practice. That could have been an overview, first framing the problem and then delving into the layers of how to solve it. The crucial thing, however, is that these analogies are not really linked to each other. They are all stand-alone, and the only thing they have in common is that they are all ‘everyday’ analogies, quite mundane things that my students will be familiar with (board games, clothes, sea creatures). As there is no real link between the analogies, I felt that the overview would not work, and on the contrary, that it might rather confuse. Slides are great when you want to walk people through something step-by-step. When moving on to the next slide, you can change the subject, mood and – most important – the focus of what you are saying, and of what your audience is thinking about (if they are listening, that is…).So in this case, I decided ‘to slide’.

I think this is also the reason I often use slides for my lectures. They allow me to boil down what I am saying into the most pertinent points to give a visual cue to remind me of what I wanted to talk about; for example they allow me to put up a quotation and then talk about just this, without distraction from anything else, before we move on. Ideally I then also have a whiteboard to further develop some of the point and sometimes I develop the overview on that – but this is development that happens in class, and is not pre-prepared – as it might come across when using a prezi.

I have heard people sneer at slide presentations and then present prezis that were basically just zooming from slide-like frame to slide-like frame. I think there is little point in doing that, if what you are saying is linear, you might as well use a slide format! A prezi makes most sense if you are exploring layers, not a standard sequence. The bad rep that slide presentations often get (Death by Powerpoint, etc.) isn’t due to the nature of them being a slide presentation, but rather down to bad design of the individual slides!

I guess my point is this: whether preparing a workshop, a conference presentation or a lecture, the tools we choose to use frame what it is possible to do. That’s what Fiona (2012) talks about when she talks about the ‘affordances’ of a genre. The traditional or conventional genre – in this case (PowerPoint) slides – might be exactly the right tool for the job. But it also might not be. It really depends on what you are trying to do. And that is well worth reflecting on before you choose what tools to use, rather than just go with the standard option.

Workshop Prep

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June 18, 2018
Conferences, Workshops
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As mentioned in my last post, I am currently preparing for a workshop with my friend and colleague Katy Vigurs. Before this is happening (tomorrow to be exact), I wanted to share some of the prep work that has gone into this once the abstract had been accepted. As it will be a workshop where participants will be encouraged to think about (their ?) research in a visual way (in form of a board game, to be exact), this blog post will be in a more visual form than the posts I usually put together for you…

An afternoon of try-outs, brainstorming and tea

The handout – from sketch to coloured in version

The custom made handout for the Undisciplining conference
Make your own Sociological Research Board Game handout, coloured in

Scaling it up – an outline ready for the workshop

… as you can see we are well prepared. More details on how the workshop went in the next few days!

Using Feedback Bunting

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July 22, 2017
Conferences, Uncategorized, Workshops
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Here the 2nd promised addendum to the write-up of #ReGenring17

Collecting delegate feedback after or during an event can always be a bit challenging. There are standard feedback forms around, of course, but they might not actually capture the information you are most interested in. I, for example, am usually more interested in delegates’ responses to the content of the event than in their thoughts on the organisation of the buffet (not that this is not important, but if something was fundamentally wrong with that, I probably already know). So I leave the formal feedback forms for collecting metrics for the venue or the funders.

Feedback Bunting in action

But I do want to know what people actually thought about and during the event and since my events are usually quite creative, I like to find ways of tying this in. Apart from the maybe ubiquitous post-its, I have in the past used postcards and luggage tags to get delegates to leave some impressions of the event with me – and their thoughts on how to improve it for next time round. And then somebody at one of the Writing-PAD East Midlands meetings mentioned ‘feedback bunting’. I was immediately attracted to the idea. Could we somehow give delegates little ‘flags’ in different colours for their comments and invite them to populate a string as the event progressed?

Using relatively small flags has the advantage that delegates can add comments in bite-sized pieces as they occur, so instead of having to do a summary of feedback of the day towards the end, it can grow organically.

Ready to try this out for the recent ReGenring conference, I first looked into pre-produced bunting but decided against that as it would have been difficult to add comments once this was hanging – and I didn’t want to end up with un-displayed but filled in bunting at the end of the event. Rather, I wanted to find a way to allow delegates to secure their flags on the string without needing clips or a stapler, so tried out a folded version with a slot cut into both sides from opposite ends, so they could be slotted together (see the second way on the drawing below). In theory this worked well, but in practice this turned out to be over-designed, most people ended up just folding their flags over the string which worked just as well if not better than a complicated slotting maneouvre. (Although if the event had been outdoors that might have been a different matter.)

a very basic drawn instruction on how to make feedback bunting work

Having explained the idea during my part of the Welcome, I left flags on the tables for people to start filling up (which started pretty much immediately). During the Sharing Session in the afternoon I could be found walking around pressing some more onto people while asking “Have you left some feedback yet?” Maybe I was slightly too pushy, but it was really lovely to see the bunting chain grow over the course of the day.

I will definitely be using this simple, but effective, way of collecting feedback again and would recommend it for events big and small.

I am also thinking that this might be a fun way to organise a to-do list. I always have a number of projects on the go, and having one per flag would remind me of those projects and give me some space to add notes (and if I run out of space on one flag, I can always add another one). Plus as urgencies and priorities change, the order of these flags could be easily switched around. Something to try out in the next few days, I think 🙂

Call for Papers for Genring and Regenring Special Issue

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July 16, 2017
Conferences, Workshops
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(Last) Call for Papers – final deadline 15th August 2017
For a special issue of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice guest edited by Dr Fiona English and Dr Alke Groppel-Wegener, we are currently looking for submissions that celebrate the practice of genring and regenring. Even though the journal title includes ‘creative practice’, these examples do not have to come from a creative practice background (as we would argue that genring and regenring could be seen as a creative practice by itself). You also do not have to have been present at the workshop and conference we have been running on this subject – if you are doing any sort of genring and/or regenring we would love to hear from you!
We would suggest the following formats:
Examples focusing on the process of (re)genring
We want to showcase a selection of genring and regenring practice, based on a template – see my recent post on this blog giving a bit more information on the template here (and email me (Alke) on tactileacademia[at]gmail.com for what information is needed if you want to contribut an example).
The examples should be focused on the process of (re)genring and should concentrate on one outcome genre only. They are not about the assessment, module or unit, but about the genre itself.
Case Studies
Between 2000 and 3000 words, these should be description and analysis of examples of your practice. These should be wider in scope than the examples.
Full Papers
Between 5000 and 7000 words, these should contain theoretical discussions that take the subject beyond the examples and case studies.
Reviews
Have been to an event linked to genre, genring or regenring recently? Want to review an outstanding example you have come across? These are usually between 500 and 2000 words.
As this issue is celebrating reGenring we are, of course, open to genres other than the academic paper. However, please keep in mind when planning your submission that we are constrained by the format of the journal, and the JoWiCP in particular.
This means:
  • landscape orientation of pages (we can probably somewhat play with their standard layout, but only with good reason)
  • pictures need to work in black and white as we cannot guarantee them being printed in colour (although in the online version they would be in colour). Please ensure that you have ownership, or have obtained copyright clearance for any image submitted.
We would suggest that submissions that don’t follow the traditional academic paper genre are bookended by an academic abstract (about 150 words) that explains the chosen genre and the reasons for choosing it and a conventional bibliography. We will be using Intellect publishers style guide, which you can download here.
We will also need an author biography of 50-100 words with all submissions.
All articles submitted should be original work and must not be under consideration by other publications.
Journal contributors will receive a free PDF copy of their final work upon publication. Print copies of the journal may also be purchased by contributors at half price.
Final deadline for submissions (via tactileacademia[at]gmail.com) is 15th August 2017.

Sharing ReGenring – with a little help from my template

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July 7, 2017
Conferences, Uncategorized
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Here the first follow-up post promised in my write up of the #ReGenring17 conference.

For the afternoon we had scheduled a ‘Sharing Session’ – essentially some time for people to just talk to each other. In order to give some broader starting points than just the keynotes, I had put out a Call for Practice as a first announcement of the conference, and quite a few people had responded to that.

The idea was that people would pick an example of their genring practice to show off, so that delegates could have a look at this. I had decided to give a structure to this by asking the sharers to fill in a very basic questionnaire about their projects to send to me the week previously, which I then fitted into a basic template. So everybody who shared their work had a poster that was following the same format.

here one example of those posters, this was the example I sent around to the sharers

One of the feedback comments stated

The posters are informative but all have the same format (template), Maybe delegates could present their work/research in chosen individual ways?

Let me explain that decision…  I decided on using a template on purpose, for a number of reasons:

  • This needed to work as a stand-alone piece of work, so even if the sharer didn’t bring any other artefacts or documents to show and wasn’t present (due to talking to somebody else at that time), this still needed to make sense. Current poster practice (see my recent blog post on this – told you it made sense to have it as an interlude before this post) shows that stand-alone posters often use what I call a ‘Spineless Report’ or ‘Box Set’ approach. I really didn’t want any of the former, because people get either bored by too much text or frustrated when not having the time to read it all. But a ‘Box Set’ like approach I thought was much better – ask the sharers about something specific.
  • When everybody uses the same template what you end up with are posters that are much easier to compare.
  • I wanted to steer the sharing session towards the process of genring and regenring, so the template was designed to prompt the sharers into that, rather than just show off the fabulous outcomes that they achieved.
  • And I was also already thinking of the special edition of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice that we are putting together on the back of this. For that we had been talking about a section that shows off examples, like a catalogue in a way, so I actually designed a format with that in mind. I think I can pull the posters into spreads for the journal pretty easily to achieve this catalogue section, making little extra work for the sharers. So it is a multi-genre performing template.

In short, while choosing a template format for the sharing session loses the individuality of expression from the sharers, it gains the easier comparability. As sharers were encouraged to bring extra materials, the format of which they were free to choose themselves, I think they had the opportunity to still customise what they were showing sufficiently.

So why this template?

one previous workshop participants found that a mankini represents the genre of ‘Tweet’

I have designed and worked with a template/format that looks at genre before: the Dress-Up Doll of Formality. In a nutshell this is an activity I designed for my students to become more aware of the ‘rules’ of a genre, by likening writing for a specific audience to dressing for a specific occassion. So what I ask them to do is to design an outfit for a Gingerbreadperson that is like a genre they explore (tweet, academic essay, billboard poster, etc.) and then also add why they chose this outfit. It gets the students to pay attention to the rules in a visual and fun way (and I have also run this as a workshop for staff and management, which can be much fun). This works fine in the context it was designed for, but seemed too simple in the context of this conference. And, of course, it puts the focus on the established rules of one genre, but not on the process of genring or regenring.

a visual representation of Fiona’s theoretical genre framework

Of course there is a theoretical framework custom-made for this, Fiona English’s work, which looks at genre in the context of two orientations, the social and the material, breaking these down further into contextual and discursive as well as thematic and semiotic aspects respectively, to then break these down even further. This one seemed at the other end of the spectrum, a bit too complex. I didn’t want to scare the potential sharers away by sending them a template that basically meant they would first have to read a chapter or book in order to understand it.

So I needed to find a middle ground. Fairly simple to break down, but giving pertinent information. And it needed a simple visual as well, something that could be customised to show a flavour of the individual projects, but still somewhat uniform. And it needed to make sense as a visual metaphor for the process of genring and regenring.

I decided to ask people to focus on the gains and losses that the ‘new’ genre has opposed to the ‘old’ genres it is inspired by or based on. I thought that was probably the most crucial concept, information that people new to genring would need (or want to have) when considering their own projects for the future. And I stumbled across the Venn Diagram as a visual that shows the idea of two different ‘pools’ of genre that overlap – and this overlap is what we are interested in.

template example from Welcome Presentation discussing the outcomes of the Make-Your-Own-Nametag activity

So we first identify the genres the ‘new’ genre is based on. In our context this is often a traditional academic genre (which I put on the left) and a non-academic genre (which I put on the right) – although of course in a different context these might not be linked to academic genres at all, or could all be academic genres. The ‘new’, or featured, genre is in the middle – an ideal place to put an image giving a sense of an example of that genre. And then it is simply a matter of identifying the gains and losses of that genre in the overlap. Of course you ‘lose’ and ‘gain’ things from both sides of the Venn Diagram. For this exercise it is important to try and list all the gains and losses; identifying losses in particular is hard, because usually these are things you are happy to lose, otherwise you wouldn’t decide to try this new genre. But listing it all is really helpful in allowing you to make an informed decision.

I think this template might actually become a simple way to familiarise people with the concept of genring and would also work as an activity sheet to think through potential gains and losses when switching from one genre to the next, so I also made them as a handout with simple instructions that you can download here (including the space we had on the poster for a description of the new genre): Genring Handout blank

From Nametags to Feedback Bunting

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June 25, 2017
Conferences
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Last week was a crazy week for me, but the highlight undoubtedly was the ReGenring Academic Writing and Assessment conference I co-organised at Nottingham Trent University.  (And as co-organiser I might be slightly biased as to how fabulous an event it was…) I promised to write this up quickly for some people who couldn’t join us, so here are my impressions of the day:

The Trent Institute for Learning and Teaching that was hosting us had booked us into a great lecture theatre in their conference centre in the Newton Building. This location worked really well, apart from the fact that they don’t allow you to put up your own signage. Official signage apparently has to be ordered weeks in advance, and we didn’t quite make that deadline, so in a way the day must have started for many people with the challenge to find the room…

But find it they did and then delegates were immediately set the task of making their own name tags, my favourite way to start a workshop. Turns out it also works for a conference. With more delegates than I had previously worked with coming, I had been a bit worried whether we would have enough ‘making’ space, but people seemed to make good use of the set up table and then drift over to continue started conversations on the other tables once their name tag was finished.

some of the things I cam home with

After a brief welcome by my co-organiser Lisa Clughen and myself, we started off with a talk by Julia Molinari about what makes our writing academic. This was a great start to the formal part of the day, as it set out a theoretical background for the question of where academic writing sits within the production, reflection and dissemination of knowledge – and whether it is the only way of doing these things. Julia argued for diversity within work with examples from long ago (Galileo argued his findings as a conversation) and from right now (and one of her examples, Nick Sousanis, we would hear from directly later on). What I took from her talk was questioning the contexts of ‘theory’ and ‘academia’ – and becoming more aware of the differences of these contexts (which might in turn help to break down the traditions of the latter).

After this theoretical grounding, we moved into the practice when David Hindley and Lisa Clughen talked about student perceptions and experiences of academic blogging. This was a reflection on the evaluation of one of Dave’s modules that asks students to write an academic blog post of 600 words as an assessment instead of an essay – plus making 3 informed comments on posts their peers put up. I was really interested in this, as it is a very different way of using blogging than I use (I use it to formatively prepare research for an essay at the end). Introducing the comments as a way of engaging the students beyond their own research seemed to work very well, and what also was interesting was that all students contribute to the same blog, hosted by Dave, so he is the person that posts the contribution, so he de facto becomes the editor, which allows to cut out concerns about students posting inappropriate material. While these practical aspects were interesting, the findings from the evaluation, which included questionnaires and focus groups, really were the star of this talk. They showed how students were not only feeling empowered by this way of contributing to debates in their field, but also how they found the joy in the research and writing. Clearly this works!

Nick talking about his first comic ‘Lockerman’

Our third keynote speaker, Nick Sousanis, gave a very eloquent and entertaining whistle-stop tour of his work, with specific focus on Unflattening. I have mentioned this book on this blog before, and if you haven’t looked at it yet, you should really get it! Nick’s subtitle for his talk was ‘reimagining scholarship through comics’ and he also talked about some work he does with students who are not confident when it comes to drawing, but that the format of comics – the combination of text and images, but particularly layout of pages within and around the boxes and the gutter – is a rich environment to explore when you are exploring what you are trying to “say”.

After all this food for thought, we needed some actual food and therefore relocated to a room a floor above to have lunch. I wasn’t really at lunch, as I was setting up the afternoon session, but when I popped up to grab a sandwich it was great to see how many people were sitting together and talking with each other.

While the morning had been carefully scheduled, we had planned the afternoon as a ‘Sharing Session’. Whenever I am going to events like this, it often seems like there is too little time to think and talk through the presented ideas. So instead of planning more formal presentations, we had put out a ‘Call for Practice’ so that people who are using alternative genre as assessments or in teaching could self-nominate and bring some materials to share with interested delegates. As we were particularly interested in the process of (re)genring, I had designed a simple template that I fed the information I had from people into, so that everybody who had responded to the Call for Practice could have a poster made that showed off ‘their’ genre within a very simple theoretical framework (looking at the gains and losses – I think I’ll blog about the details of this separately in the next few days). So when people drifted back into the room after lunch (or after going for a walk, or visiting the local comic book store), we had the posters set up and the people who had brought examples, etc. started to show off their practice. This worked really well, there was a lot of conversation around the room, clustered around posters as well as continuing conversations around the tables. We didn’t just have tea, coffee and cake, TILT had also sprung for some prosecco (particular thanks to Lisa for this brilliant idea!), so it really felt like a celebration.

Nick then led us in his Grids and Gestures drawing exercise. This was something he had mentioned in the morning, when we didn’t have the time for it. And it turned out to be the perfect thing for the afternoon, drawing together the sharing session with an activity (must remember that for the next conference!). If you want to know more about Grids and Gestures – and maybe do your own -, check out Nick’s blog here or his write-up of the activity in the SANE journal here.

We ended the day with Fiona English drawing the different strands together in a plenary. She reflected on the richness that using different genres allow to communicate (and produce) research, and that maybe investigating genring and regenring within a theoretical framework will allow us to convince the sceptics about the usefulness of this as a process.

I wanted to end this post by telling you about feedback bunting, but I’m already over 1000 words, so will leave that, too, for another post on another day. But I do want to say thank you to all the people who came to this day and made it so successful, and particularly to Lisa, my co-organiser! One of the feedback comments ended with “more please!!!” – we will try our best!

 

another reGenring conference update

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April 7, 2017
Conferences
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We have now confirmed our other speakers for the morning of the reGenring conference.

Julia Molinari will ask ‘What Makes our writing academic?’

In this talk, I would like to explore in what sense a text that does not follow established conventions of English Academic Discourse (EAD) can be considered ‘academic’? I will argue that such a text can be academic not in virtue of its textual features or of its modes, but in virtue of the extent to which it fulfils an academic purpose and practice. I will draw on theories of multimodality (A. Archer & E. Breuer, 2016), of higher education (Barnett, 1990, 2012, 2013; Besley & Peters, 2013) but also of the philosophy of sociology (Winch, 1990) to argue that since creativity, imagination and argumentation are amongst the purposes and practices of a higher education, then we need to look beyond language – understood as just one of many modes – to more fully fulfil the range of our academic aims.

David Hindley and Lisa Clughen will present on ‘Student perceptions and experiences of academic blogging: some reflections on the use of blogs as a way of fostering greater student engagement, collaboration, and ownership of learning’

This paper takes the standpoint that academic blogging offers precisely the type of inclusive writing genre and inclusive environment for writing development that Elbow (2014) advocates. It is informed by a mixed-method research project which analyses the use of blogs as a formative part of the assessment within a final year undergraduate module, Contemporary Issues in Sports Practice.

Finalised programme to follow soon, in the meantime, don’t forget to check out our other speaker here and the Call for Practice here (which is still open). Book your place here before it is too late!

reGenring conference 2 – who’ll be there

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April 3, 2017
Conferences
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Cover of Unflattening

I am happy to announce that Dr Nick Sousanis, author of the wonderful Unflattening, is going to be one of our invited speakers in the morning of the ReGenring conference at Nottingham Trent (see here for the Call for Practice). The title of his talk will be ‘Unflattening: reimagining scholarship through comics’ . Instead of an abstract, have a look at this page of Unflattening…

Page 64 of Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Also joining us will be Dr Fiona English, author of Student Writing and Genre, who will facilitate the end of day discussion. There have been some really interesting responses to the Call for Practice, and we can expect examples of genred and regenred work in form of comic books, radio plays, posters, poems, blogs, exhibitions, magazines and videos – don’t forget to let me know if you want to share some practice in the afternoon session yourself!

More info on our other speakers coming soon, don’t forget to book your (free) place here.