JOELLE​PETERS

Attribute Five

 

Graduates must develop and promote professional, inclusive relationships with all learners in their care, relevant employers and the wider community.

 

As a tertiary educator I work hard to develop professional and inclusive relationships with my learners. As I am of a similar age with most of my students this is an area that I am very aware of, as I need to make sure I am maintaining a sense of approachability without coming across as overly peerish or particularly 'chummy'. I do this by being quite firm around my expectations of behavior and the use of language in a formal classroom or learning environment, but being more relaxed and open in my office, which students often pop into to ask questions or for additional content support. I make it clear at the end of every lesson that students are welcome to drop by at any time for support or to ask questions. I also make an effort early on to learn the names and some basic interests of my students so I can have discussions and chat to them about things beyond the Polytechnic. 

 

My role as a teacher for bridging and lower level diploma papers means I am not in a position to put students in touch with potential employers. I do however encourage them to develop relationships within their wider learning communities and the wider community in general. I achieve this by taking my students to the student success team at the start of each semester so they can learn about what support and avenues they have available to them. I have also had Bridging classes sit in on presentations being made by diploma and degree level groups so they can see where the different courses available to them may take them. I try to encourage connections to the wider community through learning experiences outside of the classroom, primarily based around the Otago Museum during our sessions on giving and receiving instructions. 

 

I have experienced distance teaching for the first time in the past semester and found it much harder to develop the same sort of relationships as I have with my local students. Part of this difficulty may have been due to the lack of attendance for our Adobe Connect sessions, so the only way I had contact with these students was through email, making it hard to put names to faces and develop a better understanding of the learner. During the semester I helped instigate the filming of local classes to be edited and put online as a way for our distance learners to see their lecturers interacting with other students and to make them feel more included in the course overall. I don't think this approach was successful and I will think critically about how to engage distance learners in the future. 

 

The PDF 'Semester Two Student Feedback on Joelle Peters' has information which shows how students feel about the relationship between me as a lecturer and them as students. It is encouraging that the results were positive and I'm pleased that getting student feedback at least once a year is a Polytechnic policy.