An audience with...

We learn best when we are fully involved in the process. John Dewey advocated 'learning by doing' and Seymour Papert called it 'learning by making'. These are theories that guide many educators today. Mindful of these theories, I have recently been working alongside students to encourage them to write for an audience. Nothing new in that, you may think. Normally, in higher education, students write for an audience of one. They write essays, projects and dissertations that will be read only by their tutor or marker. What would happen, I wondered, if I gave my students an audience of hundreds or even thousands? I did some early studies into the effects of this when I implemented a programme wide use of wikis in 2006. I published the results of the study in 2009, revealing that when they were aware of an audience, students raised their game. They improved their academic writing skills by concentrating on better sentence construction, grammatical accuracy, critical articulation of theory, ensuring that their referencing was accurate and the avoidance of plagiarism.

Earlier, in a 2008 article 'The Good, the Bad and the Wiki', my colleagues and I had reported that students became very protective over 'their content' in collaborative spaces such as wikis and took pride in presenting their ideas to a wider public audience. Subsequent implementation of blogging across whole classes revealed that students could find new ways of expressing their knowledge, and that audience dialogue was important for their development of further academic skills such as making arguments, engaging critically with theory and defending their position against attack. Clearly these are all very desirable graduate attributes, and needless to say, wikis and blogs now feature as essential 'learning by doing' tools in many of my undergraduate programmes.

I decided to take this concept a step further. Following the submission of some high quality third year degree projects, I approached students who had been graded at 80 per cent or higher, and encouraged them to develop their assignments for publication. I worked alongside them and we soon had our first success, when one of my BA students, Dan Kennedy was successful in publishing his work in an online open access journal called The Student Educator. The journal had been previously set up as a showcase for the best student writing in Plymouth University. Dan's piece was a well written, insightful article on the future of virtual learning environments and is well worth a read.

The next step was to push the idea further and encourage students to present their work in front of large live audiences such as conferences and symposia. The feedback and questions from audiences often add an extra dimension to the learning experience, because they highlight questions and issues the presenter may not previously have considered. I invited Dan to co-present with me at the ALT-C Conference in Manchester in 2009. He presented in front of almost 100 people, by far the largest audience he had spoken in front of at that time. I believe it was a transformational experience for him. It was at that point I decided I needed to find ways of encouraging more students to do similar things. I received some funding from a European project which enabled me to take students on overseas trips to work with our partner university students in Germany, Poland and Ireland. Over the three years of the Atlantis Project, 12 of my B.Ed students took part in presenting at research seminars in Darmstadt, Warsaw and Cork. Subsequently, each of them presented their work at the Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conferences in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

With the encouragement of my colleagues Peter Yeomans, Oliver Quinlan and myself, students also presented at a variety of Teachmeets, both in the South West, and further afield at large events such as the BETT Show in London. At Pelecon 2013 five more students presented their work. Two of those students - Becky Harcombe and Lucy Kitching - are currently working with me to prepare their assignments for submission to peer reviewed academic journals, with me acting as their second author. Lucy has also been successful in having her paper on Games Based Learning accepted for presentation at the EDEN Conference in Oslo, this coming June. I plan to support other students to achieve successful publication and conference presentations in the coming years.

You can imagine what such exposure can do to build students' confidence and how it can raise their professional profiles. Being able to include peer reviewed publications and international conference presentations on your CV when you apply for your first teaching job has to be a real advantage. Being able to evidence critical thinking, academic engagement at the highest level looks impressive on anyone's resume. It is also superb preparation for anyone who is about to embark on a career in education.

Photo by ClintJCL


An audience with... by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.