In pursuit of excellence: inspiring achievement through transformative pedagogy.
Professor Debbie Holley, David Hunt and Stephen Pyne attended and delivered sessions at the Solent Learning and Teaching Community Conference at Southampton Solent University on Friday 23rd June 2017. The aim of the conference was to promote excellence in learning and teaching by providing a forum for exploring innovative opportunities and sharing of best practice.
To that end, there were two keynotes and 18 parallel sessions, covering a range of subjects, and the day was finished off by a round table discussion.
The first keynote from Dr Eylem Atakav of University of East Anglia (UEA) was a light hearted and humorous talk about her work on Middle Eastern Media and in particular women and Islam in the media. Dr Atakav described her fascinating journey through academia from being a student to her current position of Senior Lecturer. A significant element of Dr Atakav research has focused around forced marriages and child brides in Turkey and her talk concluded on a more sober note by broadcasting a short video introduction into her research. Click here for more information.
The second talk was by Prof Julie Hall who will be joining Solent as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) in August 2017. Pro Julie believes in a holistic approach to student and external engagement and explained how she will be working with the local community in Southampton to promote the outstanding contribution the university makes locally and wider afield. Pro Julie delivered a short talk followed by a lively Q&A session.
With so many parallel sessions it was impossible to attend everything, but there were interesting sessions on gamification in teaching, the use of blogs for student engagement and playful learning to incorporate play into the classroom to encourage group work and reflection. Anne Davey, Senior Librarian at BU delivered an interesting introduction to using technology innovations in library and learning. The PercaKucha session was also very popular, covering a number of topics and ideas at 6 minutes per topic.
As part of these sessions, the CEL team presented a workshop on introducing augmented reality into the teaching arena using Aurasma which was informative, fun and well received by those attending. The session led to some very interesting discussions around applying augmented reality into teaching practices. This was not only a fantastic platform to promote the innovative work we are doing here at BU but also a great opportunity to network with colleagues from other regional HEI’s and colleges. The session concluded with positive feedback from attendees and potential for future cross-institutional collaboration projects.
The round table discussion, in reality rectangular, with a panel of six academics, including the two keynote speakers and our own Prof Debbie Holley, generated a number of interesting questions from the audience.
Overall this was a very valuable and successful event; there was a multifarious mix of innovation and pedagogic themed underpinning and we are already looking forward to next year’s conference.
Visit the SLTCC2017 Website for more information on the event.
