Too many papers

#Becomingeducational It’s Week 3 of our academic year

And what better time to celebrate THE SLOW ACADEMIC BLOG – and the idea of slow academia?

As our workloads get heavier and heavier – as they fill with more and more administrative tasks and less space for thinking and being an academic… HOW do we slow things down – to think – to feel – to be???

The Slow Academic

This is the final post in a trilogy following the 6th International Academic Identities Conference at the University of Hiroshima. In my first post, I described the conference, its location, theme and keynote presentations. In the second, I highlighted four presentations that stretched my thinking. In this post, I want to share the four papers I presented with colleagues, and issue a stern warning to myself to present fewer papers at future conferences.

Four papers is too many. Having co-authors made it possible (enjoyable even), but  I talked too much, and listened too little. When I was listening, I was too keyed up about my next paper to listen well. One of my papers was on slow academia; practice what you preach and other idioms apply.

• The solace of slow academia (or breathing room)

This paper was a blend of theory, autoethnography and practical advice.

Theory: Judith Butler…

View original post 655 more words

The Three Domains of Critical Reading

#Becomingeducational It’s teaching week one!! It’s Academic Reading Time!

Yes – welcome back to the teaching!

What better time than this to explore the teaching of academic reading?

In this thoughtful post Helen Webster sketches in the issues that our students tend to have with academic reading…

And she discusses her ‘Three Domains of Academic Reading’ strategy…

If you’ve used this strategy yourself – do share with us how it went.

If you have other and also successful reading strategies – would you share them with us?

All best wishes – and good luck for a great year,

Sandra & Tom

rattus scholasticus

A couple of people have recently asked about a tool I developed to teach critical reading, so I thought I’d blog about it to add a bit of context to what is basically a workshop handout.

Working in a one to one context as a Learning Developer with students on assignments like literature reviews has allowed me to see behind the scenes of how students approach this task. What I’ve noticed is a mismatch between some of the feedback on the written product “Unfocussed! Doesn’t flow! Needs to be structured better! Too descriptive!” can actually be traced back to issues around reading and note-taking, not writing.

Students understandably find critiquing the work of far more experienced and authoritative scholars very daunting, and that’s the first thing I address. I fear sometimes that the message that students should only use ‘quality, peer-reviewed sources” is over-egged, and can disempower students – if…

View original post 1,067 more words