CASE STUDIES

This section includes a short overview of each of the case studies I will be presenting to my panel.

Case Study One: Course Development

A discussion of my planning for the paper 'Academic English for Engineers' and partial redevelopment of 'Technical Literacy'.

I developed the paper 'Academic Writing for Engineers' over the summer of 2013-2014 immediately after my graduation from Teachers' College. This paper is part of a new qualification and so I needed to develop the content, time table and assessment materials. I had to judge carefully the level of content my students would need and who they would be as learners, a difficult process as during the time of development they were an imaginary cohort and I had never solo taught a similar group.

My work on 'Technical Literacy' took place towards the end of the first semester and throughout the second semester in 2014. I was asked to deliver the course to two streams of students and co-ordinate the overall delivery to all four streams. This required careful timetabling and the implementation of a module system as not all staff involved could teach the drawing module. After breaking the content into different modules I worked to redevelop the existing resources and make them more professional and less personalised to the previous staff member who taught the paper. This meant the same resources could be used across the streams to ensure consistency, but still allowed individual lecturers to add their own personal experiences and insights while working with their classes.

Graduate attributes to be demonstrated in this case study

Personal theory of practice (1)
TTW (3)
Cultural competence (4)
Professional inclusive relationships (5)
Design facilitate guide learning foe success using wide range of strategies (7)
Evidence based practise (8)
Communities of practise (10)
Collaboration and collegiality (11)

Case Study Two: When things went terribly wrong

A discussion of my experiences (individual and joint) with a difficult stream of students and how it sparked research into positonality.

After experiencing a very difficult and upsetting session with a stream of students I discussed my session with my colleague, Hana Cadzow, who had taken the class earlier that day. After talking with her about both this stream and others we had taught we discovered that we were experiencing the same things. We took our situation to a senior member of our team who encountered the same students but none of the same problems. We began to critically evaluate our own and our colleagues relationships with students, what made us similar and what othered us? Why did we often feel more drained after teaching these students than many of our colleagues did? After considering this we began to research positionality and the idea of emotional labour, two things we found were the reasons why our experiences differed so widely from our colleagues.

After a period of research we wrote a proposal to speak about this at the 2014 TERNZ conference, our proposal was accepted. At the conference we ran a small workshop around these ideas and were interested to hear that most of those who were there had experienced similar situations. The point of the workshop was to see whether this was an issue specific to us, or a wider area of concern that merited more in depth research. After discussions with those in attendance, both during and after the workshop, we believe it merits further thought.

Graduate attributes to be demonstrated in this case study

Advance teaching and learning through research (2)
Promote professional relationships (5)
Analyse relevant educational theory and draw on this in practice (6)
Monitor developments and trends in tertiary education, technology and practice, adapt teaching and learning (9)
Communities of practice (10)
Foster collaborative collegialty (11)
Facilitate capable and sustainable graduates (12)