Fieldwork sucks!

Today my colleague, Julie Furnell, and I submitted a grant report. That is always a good feeling, particularly when you are ahead of deadline and you can confidently state that yes you have achieved your stated aims and no there were no budgetary variances to explain! The project, Fieldwork sucks (or to give it its full title – Fieldwork sucks: Identifying barriers and overcoming prejudices to enable engagement and enhance employability amongst reluctant biologists) was funded by the UK Higher Education Academy, under their Teaching Development Grants scheme. These grants are not large, but they are sufficient to enable jobbing academics like me to evaluate their practice in order that it might be enhanced in a way that has a positive impact upon aspects of the teaching and learning that takes place in their own department (and through subsequent dissemination hopefully at a wider level). The work we have completed is only the first stage of an ongoing body of work involving our group that will be evaluated and hopefully disseminated through publication during the next few years, but I thought it might be useful to blog about our main outcomes today.

Don’t get me wrong – I do not agree with the sentiment of our project title – quite the opposite. I wholeheartedly believe that fieldwork is great, particularly because it is an excellent vehicle for the delivery of employability enhancing skills. However, research supporting the value of fieldwork consistently identifies, but then ignores an important group: students who fail to engage effectively and who may therefore fail to benefit fully from fieldwork.  I just don’t think we can afford to ignore these non-engagers anymore.

An outcome of our project is that we have confirmed that in spite of our valuing fieldwork (as tutors and practising field biologists) it is crucial that we recognise and respect the broad range of views of our students.  This is a point that I made in my blog last week when I pointed out that it is important that we remember that the students we teach today should not be confused with the students we think we remember we were ourselves. In this context I think that we have to accept that not all students identify with fieldwork in the way that we do. Nor do they necessarily “hear us” when we explain to them that fieldwork is good for them.  Through discussion with past and present students we have achieved an increased understanding of the barriers to engagement with fieldwork that affect some members of our student body.  We have also realised that simply providing these students with a list of reasons to engage is insufficient. We need to provide these students with something tangible. From our discussions with graduates and students we have realised that helping students to look beyond the discipline towards transferable skills that are sought by employers might be the hook that we need. Having done so we have also realised that many of our students currently lack an ability to translate the things that they do in the field into the skills that they need to present in their CVs.  For example one student described himself as having "worked efficiently within his group to collect data in a timely fashion in unfamiliar surroundings and helped other members of the team to function effectively" (my emphasis). But he didn’t realise that this statement was evidence that he had demonstrated effective team working skills (and possibly in this case leadership), good time management, and adaptability.

So with a group of student interns we have developed an active strategy to enable students to gain an insight into the benefits they might derive from positive engagement with fieldwork beyond the acquisition of discipline skills (and associated grades).  Central to this strategy is a pdf/paper-based learning resource, conceived and authored by our student interns, that will be trialled across our department during our summer field courses. Once students have used the resource we will evaluate, and if necessary tweak, it. At that stage I’ll blog some more about it and we will make it available more widely.

Looking back, and looking forwards

This week I really enjoyed my job. I got to spend the best part of two days in conversation with a group of like minded individuals all keen to share their opinions on a topic that mattered to us all: becoming a better teacher.

I was working with friends and colleagues, Nathan Pike (the Higher Education Academy Biology lead), Lesley Morrell (@bioscience mum, a fellow Hull Biologist) and Neil Morris (@LT_tech_HE) to host an event on behalf of the HEA for 18 academics new to teaching. The event participants came from across the UK HE sector, and had had their own educations in a wide range of international settings (curiously the imminent Eurovision Song Contest was a key topic over dinner!). But they had at least one thing in common - they all to some extent described starting out in teaching as being difficult because it was sometimes terrifying, always involved too much to do in too little time, and was at times a pretty isolating experience. My favourite explanation of the feeling that being new can engender was that in the first year you work hard to get through it but don't realise you might not be getting it right. Then in the second year you know what you are doing isn't right but don't know what to do about it, and then in the third year it all falls into place! Beautifully encapsulated by one of the participants as being unknowingly incompetent; knowingly incompetent; and, knowingly competent (thanks for that Rachel).

And over the course of the conversations that we shared I began to realise that when I started out myself I would have probably thought and experienced the same things - but I needed this event to be reminded of that fact. 

This realisation that we need perhaps to reflect on where both we and our students are on our personal learning journey when we think about our teaching is one of the themes that I regularly include in workshops with new teachers. It is an important part of my own philosophy of teaching. Essentially I think that we have to realise that our 'expert status' today is different to that of the students that we work with. 

At one level that's easy because we can see the difference between ourselves as teachers and them as students very clearly. But that isn't the comparison that we need to make. Too often I think we are tempted to compare our students to what we imagine we were as students ourselves - and of course all too often we then bemoan the fact that things ain't what they used to be. I think though that it is essential that we remember that we were not average students (if we were we wouldn't be HE teachers now).

 Of course I realise that there is no such thing as the average student, all students are individuals, but the point I'm trying to make is that perhaps by comparing them to an idealised image of ourselves we may sometimes have an unrealistic expectation of our students.

 Can we really remember what we were like as students? Are we comparing like with like when we compare the 18 year old product of the current school system with ourselves (in my case the product of a system 25+ years ago). Things certainly aren't want they used to be, for many students I suspect they are a lot tougher than we realise. 

What is important surely isn't how students (and new teachers) compare to some rose tinted ideal of yesteryear, rather that we do our very best to use our experience and enthusiasm to learn in partnership with them to support their learning - wherever that might take them.

Mesolithic meanderings

This weekend was wildlife explorers weekend. The group was a little smaller than usual, but lack of numbers was compensated for by the increased enthusiasm a new site and a new local expert generated. We spent a morning in the company of Tim Burkinshaw (@carrswetland), the wetlands officer responsible for Cayton Carrs. The Carrs is a low lying agricultural landscape to the south of Scarborough- quite flat and I have to say based upon first impressions perhaps not the most exciting of places to visit, sandwiched as it is between the North Yorks Moors, The Yorkshire Wolds and the coast. But first impresses are wrong.

As we meandered across the landscape (noting Buzzards and Grey Partridge and stopping to discuss the arrival of spring migrants - Swift, Sedge Warbler, Whitethroat and Willow Warbler) Tim provided a wealth of information to bring the site to life. Tim is a natural outdoor educator - he didn't stand and lecture to the kids - he used the outdoors and their natural curiosity to engage them (and we accompanying adults) in an exploration of the site at a whole range of levels. 

So we started by talking about the networks of ditches that drain the landscape. We heard about peat deposits shrinking through drying and about the problems that causes for road buliders and for wildlife. Then we heard about the wetland project and how it was managing drainage and encouraging farmers to shift their agriculture (from arable to pasture) and how that linked to conservation because wet fields provided wintering habitat for waterfowl and waders, and breeding habitat for a whole range of farmland birds, while the ditches themselves harboured populations of otters and water voles.

Thinking more about the ditches Tim explained that the dead straight 9 mile course of the river Hertford had once meandered for 13 miles across the landscape - but had been straightened in the early 1800s by POWs from the Napoleonic wars. So now we were thinking about the past not the present - providing the kids with a sense of the changing nature of landscape. With that in mind Tim paused close to some mounds of earth - the site of an archaeological dig. Here the remains of the oldest know house in Europe have been found. This was used to raise several new issues, firstly current drying of the peat threatens the preservation of the site - so we are linked in a real way to our past. Second the soil we stood on was no longer peaty - it was grey, almost white, and powdery - sediments laid down in a Mesolithic lake. So this house was on the shores of a lake! After some impromptu face painting using a pigment made by mixing the clay with water Tim showed the kids some pictures of artefacts from the site - harpoons and a ceremonial headdress with Red Deer Antlers and we talked about how our stone age ancestors might have lived. This discussion was great. The children brought together their prior knowledge, the information that they had gained with Tim, and their imaginative inferences and together we "created" a new landscape around ourselves, we imagined a Mesolithic wetland and speculated that through sympathetic management a new rich wetland shared by people and wildlife a new wetland was an exciting possibility.

Here are a few pictures of the day:

Here Tim is helping us to identify stones in glacial till. We're thinking about the fact that the gabro we've found may well have been brought here from Northern Scotland by the ice sheet.

Visualising the extent of the lake with the dig behind Tim.

Face paints made from ancient lake mud!