Through my interactions with students I always try to engage on a personal level, letting them know that I recognise they have lives, responsibilities and challenges to balance, in addition to their studies. I try to consider these situations when students ask for extensions or struggle with specific assignments. This resonates with the sentiment of a humanizing pedagogy, where the student, and not the education, is considered to be central during interactions with lecturers, in support of developing the full human being (Zinn et al, 2016).

One of the results of enacting a humanizing pedagogy is an increased awareness of how students’ experiences and behaviours are linked to broader societal, cultural, economic and political issues. Through my interactions with project groups I have developed more cultural awareness, which has made me more sensitive towards group dynamics (Gleason, 2016).

Saying that, I have to keep my own balance in this approach as I don’t believe that following a humanizing approach means that anything goes. Students still need to take responsibility for their choices and actions as this is part of autonomous behaviour. Previous studies have shown that controlling environments where students perceived a decreased responsibility is counterproductive towards perceived competence or interest (Orsini et al., 2016).

Science in Context 178 is a compulsory module for all first-year BSc students, which is a cohort of about 800 each year. These students all study different courses and follow different timetables. They come from different cultural, social, economic, political and religious backgrounds and bring a whole range of expectations of what university and being a science student is all about (Image carousel 1: Images of past student project groups).

The one expectation most of them do not have is, as Science students, to end up in a language class where they learn how to reference properly. One of the challenges in the design of this module was thus to integrate the learning outcomes of writing skills, referencing skills, argumentation etc. in such a way that students can see and experience for themselves why they need these skills. This is precisely where the strength of the Autonomy dimension of LCT lies and why it was such a powerful tool in the design of this module. I thus decided that it will be good practice and supportive of autonomous behaviour, to explain the rationale behind the module’s (specifically the project) design to the students during the module’s introductory lecture. This to me is one of the most important lectures of the year as it sets the stage for the rest of the year. Unfortunately I soon realised that we miss a number of the students during those early days of lectures and thus I also created a very short and simple animated video, that is posted on the landing page of the SUNLearn module, at the start of each year to give students an overview of the rationale for the module (Video 1: Science in Context 178 welcome video)

Another factor, indicative of the diverse backgrounds of the students, is the wide range of computer literacies they display. Many students feel that they already know enough MS Office skills, while others are still unfamiliar with creating sheets in Excel, or pages in Word documents. This makes teaching such classes an extreme challenge and thus we incorporated a self-paced facilitated learning model, using SAM Cengage, a simulated MS Office environment. Students are given a set of practice activities with built in formative feedback, which they are encouraged to complete at their own pace. They have the option to attend facilitated tutorial sessions where the assigned lecturer and tutors are present to guide them through these activities. At pre-disclosed dates during the semester there are summative assessments that is compulsory for all the students to complete and the final assessment of Word and PowerPoint skills are incorporated into the project presentations. This model gives students the freedom of choice (autonomy-supportive) in how much time they invest in developing these skills, since it recognises and accommodates the students’ different levels of computer literacy (competence-supportive). There is a risk to implementing so much choice, especially at first year-level. And after the first year of implementation when we reflected on the success of the model, the lecturer and I realised that some students who think they are competent enough do not complete the practice exercises and then do very poorly in the summative assessments. In reaction we decided to scaffold the process a bit more. Each time a new set of skills are introduced students must attend that tutorial session. In addition, students are now required to all complete the practice exercises, although there is still much choice left as to how many times they go through the activities and whether they use all the training levels provided by the system or not.

After presenting our model and the use of the software to the Committee for Teaching and Learning some other faculties also showed their interest and early in 2020 academic IT purchased an institutional license so that the software can be available to all students across campus.

One of the insights I gained from being involved in the EDP programme and having follow-up visits from my old students as they progressed into the mainstream, was that the EDP students felt better equipped for coping with first-year than many of the struggling academic first-year students. The EDP students would share how the skills regarding time management and note-taking, which they were exposed to during EDP helped them to better cope with the workload of mainstream than some of the other first-year students. This is the reason we introduced aspects of the EDP University Practice module into the Science in Context 178 curriculum. We have had very positive feedback from students as well as from guest lecturers who have participated in these lectures (Addendum T: feedback from a guest lecturer).

References:

Gleason, B.W. (2016) The world of teenage Twitter: New literacies, identity work and humanizing pedagogy, Michigan State University. 

Orsini, C., Binnie, V.I., and Wilson, S.L. (2016) Determinants and outcomes of motivation in health professions education: a systematic review based on self-determination theory. Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions, 13(19), http://dx.doi.org/10.3352/jeehp.2016.13.19.

Zinn, D., Adam, K., Kurup, R. and du Plessis, A. (2016) Returning to the Source: Reflexivity and Transformation in Understanding a Humanising Pedagogy. Educational Research for Social Change, 5(1), pp.70-93.