The Freedom to Learn

Our final event during our Ditching Deficit Thinking Day was a session showcasing Cathy’s work on collaborative grading, featuring testimony from her students on what it means to them. You can find out more about ‘freedom to learn’ and collaborative grading here:

Making Journal Articles Accessible

It was great to hear from Dr Seebal Aboudounya, Associate Lecturer in the Political Science Department at UCL, who talked to us about why we shouldn’t assume that students who struggle with reading journal articles are at fault and suggested an innovative solution!

Time to make journal articles accessible for students and end ‘deficit thinking’: The challenges students face when reading academic articles and the ‘Sketch’ as a proposed solution

University students are frequently assigned journal articles to read. A typical university module requires students to read 2 or 3 journal articles per week. Multiply the modules by 4 (modules taken per semester) and that makes it between 8 to 12 journal articles per week. However, as many educators have probably noticed, journal articles are usually a difficult read for students. Many students find them a challenging read and here are three reasons why:

Not intended for a student audience

Journal articles are not written for university students. In fact, they are written for academics and experts in the field. Nevertheless, students end up reading much of the published articles because they form a central part of their modules and independent learning. However, because the student audience is not considered in the ‘making of’ journal articles, much of the foundational material required for understanding the rationale behind the article is omitted or briefly mentioned. For the academic or the expert, this is not an issue; they already know the literature and the field very well. For the student, this is usually a problem. How will they grasp what the article is about when they are unfamiliar with its building blocks or foundational material?

Information overload!

Academic journal articles provide a lot of information. In around 8,000 words, readers are exposed to an ocean on information. For the academic and expert audience, this is usually not an issue. Indeed, they would have come across a significant proportion of the content elsewhere. Moreover, because they already know the topic, they will be able to devote most of their attention to the new content; the contribution of the article. However, for the student, the story is different. From page 1, they are presented with new information. Add to this the theoretical framework, the discussion of numerous arguments in the literature, the (sophisticated) method(s) applied, the analysis and discussion of results etc. and you get a student facing difficulty in capturing the main key points in the article.

Text-heavy pages

Another issue with academic articles comes not from their content, but from their presentation. Journal articles are very text-heavy and rarely present information in other formats. Occasionally, a graph, a diagram or a table may feature in the article, but apart from

that, the reader is presented with strings of text. Moreover, the text itself is rarely presented in diversified formats. Coloured, underlined or italicised texts are hardly used despite the gained utility from doing so. Presenting text in a monotonous way can hinder the transmission of the key ideas to the reader.

Deficit thinking

When students express their concerns over the articles they read, ‘deficit thinking’ can unfortunately take place. The blame is easily placed on the student for not grasping the main points or not putting in the required time to read the article. Rather than recognising the structural problems inherent in academic article presentation, deficit thinking ignores those problems and instead seeks short-term solutions. When students express doubt over their understanding of an article, one quick solution is for the instructor to explain the article during seminars or office hours. However, the problem does not go away because in the next week, the same scenario repeats. Clearly something needs to be done to make articles accessible for students on a permanent basis and end ‘deficit thinking’.

What can be done?

One possible solution is the ‘Sketch’; an attachment of around 500 words to academic articles specifically designed for students. The ‘Sketch’ can have 2 main sections: a ‘background’ section and an ‘outline’. The Sketch is intended to be literally a sketch of the main points made in the article to aid its understanding. It can also include diagrams and visual or audio material (multimedia) to supplement it, along with the use of colour and diversified ways of presenting text. Because the Sketch really serves as a sketch of the article, it should not include the fine details one would expect in a complete painting, but rather, it should include the backbone or the foundations of the article.

The Sketch: Background and Outline

The ‘background’ section in the Sketch can contain the essential contextual information that are necessary for understanding where the article is situation in the academic literature and any necessary theoretical or methodological clarifications. The ‘outline’ section can then include a summary of the argument and the main points made in the article. This outline would therefore serve as a map for the students to help them navigate through the article and not get lost in its details. Together, those two sections of the Sketch would respond to the three issues identified with journal articles presentation. It’s important to note that the Sketch goes beyond the ‘abstract’ presented at the start of articles. In 150 words, an abstract cannot fulfil the functions of the Sketch; it is too brief to support students when they approach academic articles.

The way forward

It is recommended that scholars worldwide start ‘Sketching’ their articles. When they submit their articles, they should also attach a ‘Sketch’. As for the existing published articles, their authors or possibly a group of academic volunteers may come together and work on a grand ‘Sketching’ project to sketch existing academic articles worldwide. Editors of journals should also implement policies requiring the Sketch in order to make the published article accessible for a student audience.

The implications for enhancing student learning would be huge! Not only would the Sketch help students build more confidence as they approach their readings, it would also bring an end to the ‘deficit thinking’ arising when students face difficulties in engaging with journal articles. The Sketch also holds great potential for encouraging cross-disciplinary interactions amongst the academic community. With the Sketch, knowledge transmission and processing would be greatly enhanced, both across students and the scholarly community as whole. So what are we waiting for, let’s get sketching!

Open Access Textbooks

We were grateful to Andy Ware from UCL Press for joining us to share his advice about Open Access Textbooks: why to write them, why to use them and how to get them published. You can find a great summary of his talk here: https://reflect.ucl.ac.uk/education-conference-2023/2023/03/31/open-access-textbooks-how-to-get-the-most-from-them-in-your-teaching/

Ditching Deficit Thinking

We were delighted to welcome Dr Victoria Honeyman from the University of Leeds. She summarises here thoughts here.

The University sector is changing quickly. Not all institutions are changing at the same pace, and not all of them started in the same place, but the institutions we currently see and the experiences our students have at university are notably different to those who taught them, regardless of their age. ‘Ditching the Deficit’ was a conference which largely discussed how teaching, learning, assessment and other aspects of university education could be moulded, shaped and reformed to aid students to get the most out of their education and from themselves. In my short presentation, I wanted to explore what had changed within the university sector, what the likely impact of that was and how we could engage with it going forward to create a lively, constructive, comfortable environment for our students to thrive.

While recognising the opportunities in universities, we also need to be aware of the difficulties. Perhaps the biggest issue is staff fatigue and workload. All of us are working harder, longer and in more expansive ways than we have before. The campus has now extended into our homes with the extension of TEAMS and ZOOM and the expansive use of email, and while that has brought amazing benefits, it also means we suffer from burnout. We are often trying to do more with less and that is not sustainable. Academics have also changed. There is a much wider group of individuals working at universities, with very diverse views, priorities and backgrounds. In addition to these wide range of interests and issues, universities have an increasing amount of metrics which they need to speak to. This means universities are required to focus on more issues with more oversight from external bodies. This can be wonderful – it can draw attention to discrepancies in the system, structural issues and create fairer educational spaces more adept at working with different groups to create excellence. It can also create paperwork, irrelevant processes and meaningless tasks which suck up our time and focus.

There are ways of dealing with this, although they are not always successful. We are beginning to recognise that different people have different skills. The best researchers aren’t always the best teachers and vice versa. In our sector, we need both and we need to stop pretending that all researchers can provide world-class teaching and all teachers can produce world-class research. We also need to value both of those things equally. We need to recognise that our staff and our students are different. We are a diverse community and that is our strength, but we cannot try to force people – students or staff – into a straitjacket, driving the creativity we value out of them so they can deliver exactly what we want rather than being allowed to excel and create innovating teaching and research which we weren’t expecting. As a sector, we are getting a bit better at that, but for many of us, we still feel that our best attributes are sometimes the things we have to hide rather than embrace them to their full potential.

Ultimately, all of us involved in university teaching and learning want to help our students to develop their skills, learn amazing and interesting things and be able to use those skills when they leave university, in whichever field they move into. We want them to be successful, to be independent thinkers, to disagree with us if they want, to be able to pull apart arguments and create better ideas and approaches. We want to hear about their experiences and how they think about something, what they read and what they thought of it. That requires students to have space to think, confidence to believe their own voice and to express their own opinions and the skills to analyse arguments and viewpoints in an appropriate way, rather than name calling on Twitter. Some of the biggest challenges in academia are in this area. Recognising that all students don’t have the same ability to sit certain types of assessment doesn’t mean they don’t have the skills or the knowledge we want them to have. Sometimes, it means they simply can’t pass the artificial task we have created for them. They could demonstrate their knowledge and skills in other ways, but often computer systems and routine mean we expect students to bend to our will rather than trying to consider how we can help them. This is changing, but it isn’t just about effort on the part of academics. It often takes time and money to create a more level playing field, and it isn’t easy. However, it is worth it and we know that when we see our students excel and become confident in their own abilities.

While we continue to try and deal with long-standing issues such as inclusiveness and fairness, we have new battles to fight. So, what are the new battlegrounds? While there are some that are genuinely new, such as the implications of artificial intelligence on assessment, sadly many are not new. We continue to discover ways in which we need to expand our horizons and think differently. Staff wellbeing is not a new issue. We work in a competitive field where we are judged, often on a daily basis, on our work and how innovative or intelligent we are. That can be punishing, and it always has been. However, the circumstances we find ourselves in currently are making that situation unbearable for valued members of our profession, and we need to recognise that and remedy it to ensure we don’t drive people away from academic life.

We need to recognise it for our students, so that their degree doesn’t become an endurance test. We are expanding our horizons beyond the English-speaking world, which is a challenge for many who are not well-versed in other languages. We are trying to decolonize our curriculums but how we do that and to what end-point is unclear currently. When will we know if we have been successful? We are also trying to work with industry and employers to ensure our students can explain their skills in a language which employers understand – a language which is often very different to ours. Academic life is always challenging, and there are battles to be fought on how we achieve our aims, but the aims themselves are usually worth fighting for.