Steve Rooney
Subscribe to Steve Rooney's postsSupporting student transition: mid-term personal tutor meeting
This is a draft preview version of a resource currently in production. Below are some questions and prompts designed to help study-related discussions with students during their first semester. More extensive, thematic question sets and activities are available in the Transitions Toolkit (www.le.ac.uk/transitions-toolkit) How has studying at university compared with what you were […]
Inclusivity in higher education: a learning developer’s perspective
It’s been really encouraging to see the renewed focus on inclusivity in recent weeks and months, and hopefully this will lead to real positive changes in the way we teach, assess and support learning. Here I want to outline, from a learning development perspective, what I think are important, but sometimes somewhat neglected, questions when […]
“So, can we say ‘skills’?”
As those whose unhappy lot in life it is to have to listen to me moaning on about matters educational will know, I’m not a big fan of the term ‘skills’. Or, more precisely, I’m not a big fan about how this term is often used. I’m even less keen when it’s preceded by […]
The Knowledge ‘versus’ Skills Debate, Part 1: forgetting what we know about knowledge.
One of the many poorly-framed, point-missing ‘debates’ that regularly plague contemporary education goes something like this: ‘should education be focused primarily on teaching knowledge, or on developing students’ skills?’ Even attempts to reconcile the (apparent) ‘knowledge .v. skills’ opposition with reasonable-sounding appeals to its being ‘a bit of both’ miss the main point – namely, […]
The Knowledge ‘versus’ Skills Debate, Part 2: What about ‘transferable skills’?
In the first part of this post, I discussed the need to develop more broad and inclusive understandings of knowledge and to move away from unhelpfully simplistic and reductive notions like ‘study skills’ which, it is wrongly assumed, stand somehow outside the realm of what we call ‘knowledge’. Here, I want to interrogate more closely […]
Tango for beginners
While waiting to be admitted to the room for their first ‘Tango for beginners’ class, participants chatted about their reasons for being there. Some were very keen to learn the dance and were genuinely enthused by what they believed lay ahead in the next couple of hours or so. Others had been ‘dragged’ along, more […]
Supporting student learning: the limits of genericism
‘Learning in higher education involves adapting to new ways of knowing: new ways of understanding, interpreting and organising knowledge. Academic literacy practices… constitute central processes through which students learn new subjects and develop their knowledge about new areas of study. A practices approach to literacy takes account of the cultural and contextual component of writing […]
Criticality, objectivity and values-neutrality
‘While it is advisable to interrogate our research to see if we’re not engaging in wishful thinking and to make sure it is capable of acknowledging possible circumstances of which we disapprove, our values need not be a problem. Sometimes… values may even have a positive effect by directing us to issues and aspects of […]
‘Belonging’ and ‘Resilience’ in Higher Education
Back in July, I gave a brief presentation at the University of Leicester’s Annual Learning and Teaching Conference. Based on some stuff I’d been reading and had been on my mind for a while, the presentation sought to problematise notions of ‘belonging’ and ‘resilience’ in contemporary higher education (HE). This was in response to […]
Working with schools, supporting transtions
On Tuesday 20th June, a group of colleagues from a range of disciplines got together with members of the LLI and the Library to discuss the role of schools liaison work in helping inform how we support student transitions to HE study. I kicked things off by setting some context – in particular the […]
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