A quick check through the vellum parchments indicates that I’m now teaching second-year undergraduates for the first time in nearly a decade.
It turns out they are like any other group of students, albeit with the relatively fresh memory of taking my flipped module last semester.
More interestingly, I’m also teaching my first new module in a similarly long time: on European integration and disintegration.
This has posed two immediate challenges.
Firstly, that first year module was an introduction to the European Union, so how do I differentiate the two for my students?
Secondly, deliver the module at all?
My answer has been to work with what I’ve got. And what I’ve got are many of the raw materials that the previous instructor on the module very kindly left me (thank you, Roberta).
Rather than try to build up a module from scratch, I’m going to follow the existing model relatively closely this time around.
Partly that’s expediency but much more it’s because it’s not the way I would have tackled the subject.
If that sounds odd, then consider that much of the module deals with critical perspectives on the subject matter and I want students to see that I am tackling what might be nominally the same material in a fundamentally different way.
Yes, I could have wheeled out a bunch of classes that were essentially ‘more of the same’ as last semester, but I very much don’t want to do that.
Moreover, because it’s not my structure or activities, it forces me to engage more fully with the material, because I have to be confident enough to be able to help students learn it.
Again, the irony is that it’s exactly because I wouldn’t teach this way normally that I want to teach this way: I will learn something from the experience, both substantively and pedagogically.
As I seem to be saying to a lot of people recently, I have no monopoly on good practice, and there is always something new to be learnt.
Quite how that plays out remains to be seen.