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Centre for Bioscience and Psychology Education

Invited speaker: Emily Nordmann (University of Glasgow)

Today we were visited by Emily Nordmann who founded the Pedagogy and Education Research Unit (PERU) in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow. 

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While visiting Queen Mary, Dr Nordmann delivered two sessions, one with SBBS’s scholars on lessons learned while conducting and leading scholarship, and a seminar on lecture capture, study skills and belonging.

During her session on enabling and conducting scholarship, Emily gave practical advice on how to fit scholarship into already packed academic workloads. For example, she advocated “double dipping” – aligning scholarship interests and projects with teaching and work you’re committed to in other aspects of your role.

We were inspired by hearing her talk about protecting time for scholarship. She emphasised that, when scholarship has a specific number of hours dedicated to it, then it is our job to find and protect that time.  While it may not be possible to always protect, for example, half a day a week, the fluctuating nature of the academic year means that there will be weeks (or summer months) when it’s possible to block out longer periods in the diary for scholarship, to compensate for the hours committed to teaching, assessment and administration during the taught semesters. She’s written a blog on her invaluable advice and experience

In her talk entitled “Embedding inclusivity in learning and teaching: lecture capture, study skills and belonging”, Emily spoke passionately about how lecture capture can be one aspect of enabling all students to fully engage with their studies. While acknowledging the importance of attending lectures in person, and equipping students with the study skills that enable them to do so, lecture capture can be an invaluable tool for students with complex life patterns that can prevent them from being in the room.  These include students for whom English is not their first language, students with learning disabilities or neurodiversity, and students with caring commitments.  Ultimately, lecture capture itself is not “bad” – bad teaching is bad.

And with that, we return to our work as Scholars and educators at Queen Mary, striving to ensure that all of our students flourish!

 

 

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