Johanna Payton, Kira Richards and India Rose
After the disruption of the early 2020s, students have struggled to engage with in-person study. Attendance is an issue across universities, reportedly ‘plummeting’ post-Covid (Williams, 2022). The cost of living crisis exacerbates the problem, particularly for students who commute. Anecdotally, students say that if a lecture can be recorded and shared online, there is no compelling reason to attend.
Belonging to a learning community encourages student engagement, but students do not automatically feel part of one, particularly in the post-pandemic era. Learning spaces in HE may feel intimidating and isolating (Chrysikos & Catterall, 2020), but educators can employ pedagogical approaches, in partnership with students, to encourage engagement and build community.
This workshop will highlight a student-centred (Lea, Stephenson & Troy, 2003) approach that encourages in-person attendance and engagement through classroom-based opportunities to create and collaborate. Moving away from a lecture-based mode of delivery, this approach is underpinned by Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning, Curzon-Hobson’s (2002) ‘pedagogy of trust’, and Barnett’s (2009) ‘becoming’ in HE.
Aiming to facilitate trust and build creative confidence, activities demonstrated and discussed are informed by the work of Csikszentmihalyi (1997) and Robinson (2017) on creativity, and a teaching style promoting creative, playful and holistic learning (Brown, 1997; Nerantzi & James, 2019; Warren & Payton, 2021).
The academic and student perspective presented in this workshop supports a creative and collaborative approach in the HE classroom to enhance learning experiences, build confidence and develop trust between students and academics, leading to an enriched sense of learning community where staff and students feel an authentic sense of belonging. We will share our own experiences of how this creative and collaborative approach led to satisfaction, positive learning outcomes, and increased confidence for the students, as well as providing a rewarding experience of enhanced teaching practice and bonding with the students.
In this session attendees will:
· Experience creative activities led by an academic and students in partnership;
· Be inspired by practical creative approaches to learning and teaching that can be used across disciplines;
· Explore how applying these approaches to teaching practice can enhance student learning, increase trust, contribute to student employability and create assessment opportunities that cannot be replicated by AI programmes;
· Reflect on the benefit of these approaches in building learning communities across module, year groups and programmes.
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Brown, S. (2010) Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. London: Penguin.
Chrysikos, A. & Catterall, S. (2020) Identifying student retention factors of a UK university using the concept of a learning community: a qualitative approach. Higher Education Pedagogies, 5:1, pp. 90-109.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997) Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Collins.
Curzon-Hobson, A. (2002) A pedagogy of trust in higher learning. Teaching in Higher Education, 7 (3), pp. 266-276.
Kolb, D. (1984) Experiential Learning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Lea, S.J., Stephenson, D. & Troy, J. (2003) Higher education students’ attitudes to student-centred learning: beyond ‘educational bulimia’. Studies in Higher Education, 28 (3), pp. 321-334.
Nerantzi, C. & James, A. (eds.) (2019) The Power of Play in Higher Education. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Robinson, K. (2017) Out of Our Minds: The Power of Being Creative. Third edition. West Sussex: Capstone.
Warren, D. & Payton, J. (2021) Holistic and creative pedagogies, in Pokorny, H. & Warren, D. (eds.) Enhancing Teaching Practice in Higher Education. Second edition. London: Sage, pp. 269-296.
Williams, T. (2022). Class attendance plummets post-Covid. Available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/class-attendance-plummets-post-covid (Accessed: 31.03.2023).
