Corey's Teaching

Contextual Background

In this case study, I reflect on two Level 4 modules across UAL’s Computer Science degrees. The first module is the “Introducing Computer and Data Science module” (IC&DS), which teaches introductory programming skills. The second is “Introducing Human-Computer Interaction” (HCI) which is more design skills based. I reflect on two issues relating to student diversity in the classroom and consider ways to differentiate (Eikeland and Ohna, 2022) learning accordingly: diversity of technical skills and diversity in hyposensitivity.

Evaluation

:::DIVERSITY OF TECHNICAL SKILLS:::

In IC&DS, students join from a variety of backgrounds and have varying levels of starting programming skill. My pre-course survey captured in week 1, for example, shows that ~75% of the students were unfamiliar with the technology we were teaching, but ~25% very familiar. I observed that this impacted levels of engagement in the class. Course feedback from student reps also reflected discussions with stronger students wanting to engage in more complex programming tasks, already largely familiar with the basics.

::: DIVERSTIY IN HYPOSENSITIVITY :::

One of my HCI lectures focused on using sketching and low-fidelity prototyping skills to explore design. I had run several, fast-paced mini-tasks. For example, seeing an image of some software and having 1 min to sketch it, or to create a paper prototype of a watch in limited time. I even added music for them to create to and felt that the students overall demonstrated lots of energy, were in continually conversation, and overall had a fun learning experience. However, at the end of the session, one student came up to me saying that the found it difficult to focus during the lesson, that there was a lot going on, and that they preferred quiet time where they could look at materials in a more independent way to observe and take in the content.

Moving Forwards

Moving forwards, I want to employ more strategies for differentiating my teaching practice. On technical skills, I had offered more difficult extension tasks to students in the class but found that many students simply ignored the extension task – comfortable in having completed the minimum required for the course. In future, I believe that exploring more intrinsically motivating project-based tasks for students to continually build their own skills would be beneficial cf. Pucher et al. (2003). I also want to explore more individualistic approaches to supporting students, to ensure that students are rewarded for increments on their skills. I’ve been reading about ipsative learning approaches (Gwyneth Hughes and Kitagawa, 2014), where baselines for students are established and assessment builds on their current skills. In particular, I want to discuss this next time I meet with course leaders to ensure that ipsative learning could occur as student’s progress at each degree level – for first-year students it’s hard to establish the level of their prior learning (ibid.).  

Regarding diversity in hyposensitivity and hypersensitivity (Stevens and Stegemann, 2016), I tried to organise future sessions so that students could use both classroom and its communal areas. Students preferring a quieter atmosphere would be able to find a quiet space to nurture their learning, whilst students who need more stimulation could decide to stay in the busier environment. I plan to follow up with students later to identify whether this approach has been effective. Here, I also want to explore more sensory modes of learning e.g. (Sensory Studies, 2025).  

References

Gwyneth Hughes, E.W. and Kitagawa, K. (2014) ‘Use of self-referential (ipsative) feedback to motivate and guide distance learners’, Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 29(1), pp. 31–44. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2014.921612.

Pucher, R.K. et al. (2003) ‘Intrinsic motivation of students in project based learning’, Transactions of the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers, 94(3), pp. 6–9.

Sensory Studies (2025) ‘Sensory Studies’. Available at: https://www.sensorystudies.org/.

Stevens, N. and Stegemann, K.C. (2016) ‘Curriculum Planning: The Need for Sensory Regulation Methods in Initial Teacher Education Programs’, Teacher Capacities: Knowledge, Beliefs and Skills, p. 569.

Summary of Experience/Resource

“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.” (Audre Lorde – New York — 1980s)

In this post I’m reflecting on a quote presented in workshop two which sparked me to reflect on my teaching philosophy, and how my “persona” as a lecturer could be enhanced to provoke reflection in my own students.

I especially thought back to my experience teaching a ‘crit’ style module in Human-Computer Interaction (1^st Year BSc Computer Science students). Students had to present an interactive system to encourage people to think about decolonisation in their everyday life working at High Holborn.  Emphasis here was on everyday use of technology, which is unobtrusive. I recall one group who wanted to use virtual reality, and my feedback consistently in crits was that this required people to use the headsets, creating a barrier for every day, unobtrusive use. Their final report submission on this project did incredibly well: the VR was important to them; they had crafted strong arguments for its use; and pushed back on my expert critiques.

Reflection on its Relevance and Application to Context

The notion of sparking learning like a riot reflects something important to my teaching – for students to think for themselves, identify their interests, and intelligently argue their point of view. A challenge of the crit method is that often my own expert design knowledge is given to students – power imbalances often lead to my own feedback being taken as always correct (McDonald and Michela, 2019). Furthermore, I felt as these crits were centred on considering decolonisation, that my own background as a White British male lacked insight from lived experience and more so my domain knowledge.

The quote made me consider a concept in the performing arts of Brechtian alienation – where audiences are exposed to the façade of on-stage action to spark their reflection. Considering lecturing as a type of performance (Street, 2006), I wondered whether there was opportunity to alienate myself, self-critique, and draw attention to the power imbalance. Would this encourage student’s critical thinking and provoke them to push back on my suggestions? Would this encourage student’s reflection on what they are being taught in the curriculum, and spark meta reflections on what they’re learning? To push back and create work they are truly interested in and proud of, instead of demonstrating performative learning without deeper insight (Draper and Waldman, 2013).

Next Steps

To explore the potential here, I will explore literature applying alienation techniques to education. For example, Demirdiş (2021) suggests that teachers could have students roleplay different perspectives to defamiliarize them and spark unique reflection, or to illuminate power imbalances by engaging students in discussion on this.

One simple first-step I will take in my next crits, discussed with colleges in the workshop, is to present my own background and biases before crit’s – to expose my own background, assumptions and influences. Students will then be more aware of my own positionality and might be able to consider and write about this more concretely when reading my feedback.

References

Demirdiş, M. (2021) ‘Bertolt Brecht’s Theatrical Techniques’ Connection with Critical Pedagogy and Their Usability in Learning Environments’, in. Available at: https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:252019494.

Draper, S. and Waldman, J. (2013) ‘Deep and Surface Learning: The Literature’. Available at: https://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/courses/archive/CERE12-13-safari-archive/topic9/webarchive-index.html.

McDonald, J.K. and Michela, E. (2019) ‘The design critique and the moral goods of studio pedagogy’, Design Studies, 62, pp. 1–35. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2019.02.001.

Street, P. (2006) What a performance! recognising performing arts skills in the delivery of lectures in higher education. PhD Thesis. University of Greenwich,.

Summary of Experience/Resource

In this post, I reflect on Addison (2014). Addison describes the history of learning objectives (LOs) and their goal of (supposedly) adding transparency in university teaching. In line with the framework of constructive alignment, LO “enables students not only to know what they have to achieve[…] but also how and when they are to be assessed.” (pg. 314).

The teaching context is preparation of a new Level 5 course for Computer Science students, titled “Global Perspectives on Computer Science’’. The module’s concept is to invite many guest lecturers to cover various computer science topics, fostering student’s curiosity across the subject, and to consider the variety of ways technology can shape the future. In designing the curriculum, I’m using LOs set by the course leader, two of which I reflect on below:

• LO1: Practice sociotechnical optimism in your work along with humility, vulnerability, and a sense of curiosity
• LO2: Evaluate the efficacy of historical, current and future international computing trends considering inequalities and diverse, complex practices, concepts and theories.

Reflection on its Relevance and Application to Context

Addison’s (2014) suggestion that “once published, it is almost impossible for teachers to revise outcomes to meet immediate needs militating against development” (pg. 317) resonates with my experience.

In workshop 3, we discussed how, as phrased, LO1 is challenging to assess: it focuses on personality characteristics and not student’s work (Furnham, Nuygards and Chamorro-Premuzic, 2013). As I can’t change LO1, I;ve asked students to blog for each guest talk, to steer assessment towards their reflection on moments they found meaningful in talks. How to connect this to the LO1’s emphasis on and curiosity whilst retaining inclusivity is an open challenge. Next Step: I plan to run an activity with the students to co-create the assessment rubric for LO1 cf. (Queen Mary Academy, 2025). I reason that a mutual understanding of what the criteria means across the class will help to ensure inclusivity in the assessment of this criteria, despite its focus on personality.

With LO1 aspiring to spark curiosity, I sourced several guest lectures: from space-craft design to robotics. Whilst I considered students interests, the talks were restricted to concepts I felt would spark thinking on LO1. Given the breadth, it is impossible that all the talks will spark student’s interests. How to retain student’s engagement across talks is an open challenge? Next Step: I plan to assess students for each blog post individually, so that posts which they are more naturally curious about will be balanced by the others where they might feel be less engaged. I will also steer the rubric design to allow for students to reflect on connections to their own interests, awarding them for reflection on their professional identities.

For LO2, students must think about each lecture in the context of computing history. LO2 is very broad: it is difficult to cover a complete history within the module’s scope. I’m concerned that students might spend time not reflecting or following their curiosities, instead continually revising their understanding of different areas of computing history. Next Step: I will run a student-led activity where students co-create a timeline of computing history (see Blog X). Viewing the timeline as an object-of-learning (Hardie, 2015), the students could references this in their blogs instead of having to conduct vast independent research.

References

Addison, N. (2014) ‘Doubting Learning Outcomes in Higher Education Contexts: from Performativity towards Emergence and Negotiation’, International Journal of Art & Design Education, 33(3), pp. 313–325. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12063.

Furnham, A., Nuygards, S. and Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2013) ‘Personality, assessment methods and academic performance’, Instructional Science, 41(5), pp. 975–987. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-012-9259-9.

Hardie, K. (2015) Innovative Pedagogies Series: Wow: The Power of Objects in Object-Based Learning and Teaching. York, UK: Higher Education Academy.

Queen Mary Academy (2025) ‘Co-creation in assessment and feedback’. Available at: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/queenmaryacademy/educators/resources/assessment-and-feedback/resources/co-creation-in-assessment-and-feedback/.

Contextual Background

In this blog, I focus on formative feedback I gave in crits for first-year computer science students on the Human-Computer Interaction module. The students were asked to design a system which sparks people to reflect on decolonisation. In weekly crits, each group of students presented at the front with all other groups watching, and I provided written feedback for each presentation, sent out to students by e-mail at the end of the crit. They directly respond to quotes from this feedback in the next crit presentation.

Evaluation

Based on the guidance discussed in the workshop, particularly the Arts SU guide for crits (Arts Students’ Union, 2024), an issue with my approach is that it emphasises my own thoughts as key assessment criteria. Many students might perform learning and simply agree to my suggestions, as opposed to developing critical thinking skills. Instead of “championing multiple ways of knowing” (Arts Students’ Union, 2024), the power-imbalance of myself as an expert in crits might lead to students “internalis[ing] the objective knowledge, routines, techniques and attitudes of the expert” (Rose, 1996, quoted in Barrow, 2005, pg. 260) as opposed to using the feedback as a structure to “negotiate with” (quote from Design Student Nicholas in Barrow, 2006, pg. 369).

Moving Forwards

An implication from this issue is that students need to be encouraged to exercise their own critical thinking skills – to reflect upon, and perhaps even argue, with my expert feedback.

One idea from the group discussion in class I will try is for myself as a lecturer to play a more passive, almost invisible role, with the students leading the writing and giving of feedback. Through doing, the students then start to build critical thinking skills and develop the craft skill of giving and receiving feedback – ‘reflecting-in-action’ on tacit knowledge built (Schön, 1983) whilst writing the critiques. By being able to steer their own design explorations towards their personal interests students might also “engag[e] in activities which… tell them something about themselves” (Mann, 2001, quoted in Barrow, 2006, pg. 358) and, in following their own interests, might be more intrinsically motivated (Pucher et al., 2003) to engage in critical thinking on their design process.

A challenge here – particularly, I think for first-year students – is that they might not yet developed the necessary design knowledge to be able to offer critiques on expert knowledge which they haven’t been exposed to. They might also not have the necessary vocabulary to be able to frame and offer constructive criticism.  Going forward, I will make my own expert feedback more differentiated (Eikeland and Ohna, 2022) by asking what student’s would find most useful in terms of feedback in advance of sessions. I can push them to then think critically about their own intrinsic motivations in relation to new ideas they may not have heard of – both exciting their intrinsic motivators whilst offering new opportunities for critical thought. I plan to adopt a more gradual approach across the crit iterations might also – from myself giving feedback in early iterations as an example for students to mimic themselves in later sessions – to strike a balance between student-led learning and the building of essential domain knowledge.

References

Arts Students’ Union (2024) ‘Crits and Inclusive Learning at UAL’. Available at: https://www.arts-su.com/news/article/6013/Crits-and-Inclusive-Learning-at-UAL/.

Barrow, M. (2006) ‘Assessment and student transformation: linking character and intellect’, Studies in Higher Education, 31(3), pp. 357–372. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600680869.

Eikeland, I. and Ohna, S.E. (2022) ‘Differentiation in education: a configurative review’, Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 8(3), pp. 157–170. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/20020317.2022.2039351.

Mann, S. (2001) ‘Alternative perspectives on the student experience: alienation and engagement’, Studies in Higher Education, 26(1), pp. 7–19.

Pucher, R.K. et al. (2003) ‘Intrinsic motivation of students in project based learning’, Transactions of the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers, 94(3), pp. 6–9.

Rose, N. (1996) Inventing ourselves: psychology, power and personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schön, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. London: Basic Books Inc.