I’ve been back on the Mahara podcast to discuss my work on relational grading. I am very happy with the title of the podcast.
Continue reading “A rebel with a cause!”Reflecting on this year’s UCL CPP events: ‘Relational Pedagogy Inside and Outside the Classroom’
This year, the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) continued its tradition of hosting a series of themed online panel events.
As we (or some of us, at least) move into a slower period of the academic year, I wanted to offer some reflections on this year’s events.
I must begin with a confession: for each of this year’s panels, I had a hidden agenda. I refer not to the printed running order (/script/emergency questions) that I kept handily out of view of my laptop camera when chairing. I mean to admit that the themes and participants for this year’s panels were selected with two goals in mind: first, the noble goal of discussing the latest ideas from some of the most influential and innovative researcher-practitioners in HE pedagogy; second, the – let’s say ‘prudent’ – goal of helping me advance my thinking on some embryonic SoTL research ideas.
With that in mind, my reflective posts (yes, that’s right – I just turned this into a series) will offer a summary of one of our panel events, followed by a brief account of how it has influenced a piece of SoTL research that I am in the process of developing. I would welcome feedback on either aspect.
To keep things complicated, this first post will focus on the second of this year’s two panel events, which took place in the spring on the theme of ‘Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom‘.
Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom
Our first presenter at this event was Karen Gravett (Associate Professor and Associate Head (Research) at the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey). Karen is among the leading researcher-practitioners of relational pedagogy in HE. She has written widely on relational pedagogies, including a recent monograph. Her presentation centred on the novel post-humanist strand of her conception of relational pedagogy and its potential benefits for addressing pressing questions around the role of digital tools in HE. In brief, she highlighted how much work on relational pedagogy is humanist in its focus and assumptions, e.g., focusing on staff-student relationships and student-student relationships. But a relational pedagogy can also be socio-material by taking into view our relations with environment and objects. This opens the way for a post-humanist strand of relational pedagogy that decentres the human subject and considers how we are constituted through our technologies and environments.
Karen highlighted two key benefits of her post-humanist conception of relational pedagogy. First, it can ground many familiar relational pedagogical practices, such as staff-student partnerships, co-creation, authentic assessments, and reflective writing. Second, it also provides us with theoretical tools to consider how to organize digital education to promote good pedagogical relations, rather than necessarily viewing the digital as a threat to the relational.
Next up were Kate Schick (Associate Professor of International Relations at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington) and Claire Timperley (Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington) co-presenting a selection of ideas from their recently published work on relational pedagogy.
To my mind, Kate and Claire are at the forefront of implementing innovative relational practices in PIR pedagogy. Their talk began with theory and moved on to practice, with each element corresponding to a recent, or upcoming, publication.
First, they explained their notion of ‘slow pedagogy’ understood as a relational form of subversive pedagogy. It is subversive in challenging the dominant ‘knowledge-transmission’ model of education, which emphasises efficiency and speed. It aims instead to create spaces for slowness, relationality, and care. This part of their talk built on their contribution to the 2024 Journal of International Political Theory special issue on ‘subversive pedagogies’ that they edited.
Next, they moved on to practical implications. First, they focused on classroom practices that invite students into slower spaces, offering three examples: micro-communities of learning, relational scaffolding for research projects, and creative writing. Here they drew on their 2025 article in Politics on ‘spacious learning’. As attentive ALPS readers will be aware, Kate and Claire previously published their own ALPS post on this work, so I will not do them the disservice of aiming to summarise it again here.
Finally, they focused on assessments, arguing that the goals of relational pedagogy are best served by a revised interpretation of ‘authentic assessment’ that reorients students to a different conception of learning through creative assessment practices. Here, they drew on ideas from their 2025 Teaching in Higher Education article on ‘assessment as pedagogy’.
UK-based readers will be pleased to hear that Kate and Claire are visiting in October with several events planned to discuss the conceptual foundations of their current book project. Keep an eye out for further details closer to the time.
The event then moved into the Q&A. Such was the richness of the discussion that I could not possibly aim to do it justice by way of providing a comprehensive summary. Also, it was a long time ago, and – cards on the table – I can’t read all of my notes. So, I shall instead highlight three questions that stuck in my mind as being especially incisive:
(1) Much research in this area is based on classroom experiences – can and should we aim to go beyond this to more general empirical research?
(2) Relational pedagogy can focus on micro-level practices, but do we also need greater attention to how universities can support these practices via macro-level systems?
(3) Many of the practical recommendations made by relational pedagogues are appealing, but do we need to sign up to the ‘theory’ to endorse them?
The third question chimed with a SoTL research idea that I had been toying with prior to organizing the panel and gave me the confidence to pursue it further. This culminated with a presentation of my work-in-progress on ‘Relational Pedagogy Without the Baggage’ at the recent CPP-ASPIRE conference on ‘The Education Track and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in PIR’, to which I shall turn in the next post in this series.
Best Coffee in Town: Update 2
Another progress report on my Best Coffee in Town research project . . .
Whereas seven students chose not to complete the first StoryMap assignment, all seventeen did so for the second. Yay, scaffolding works for formative assessment! Well, no, not in this case. The URLs that seven students uploaded to the LMS didn’t work, which meant I saw the message below instead of their StoryMaps.
The instructions on the LMS for all of the StoryMap assignments contain the following statement:
You will need to submit the link to your BCiT StoryMap here. Your StoryMap must be set to share/public when published for this link to work. Review the Digital Literacy section of the syllabus. Work that I am unable to access will earn a grade of zero.
So, seven zeros, because these students didn’t bother test whether the links they uploaded actually worked.
The remaining ten students earned an average score of 12.8 out of a possible 25 points; i.e., they all failed.
The final StoryMap assignment is worth 100 points, the equivalent of a full letter grade. Will it be an exercise in learned helplessness? I hope not.
A System for Assessing Classroom Simulations
Francesco Navarrini holds a PhD in Contemporary Studies from the University of Coimbra, where he teaches Introduction to Political Science and European Union Negotiation at the bachelor’s level in European Studies at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. He also lectures on Professional Skills in the Master’s program for European Studies at the same university and at the LLM in Global Food Law program at the University of Parma. Additionally, he is a tutor and project supervisor for the Master’s program in Technology and Public Policy at the International Labour Organization’s Training Centre in Turin, Italy. His research interests focus on the intersection of technology and political science, particularly how Generative Intelligence influences the way users retrieve political information and how this, in turn, may inform their political decisions. Francesco has completed GPTZero’s course on Teaching Responsibly with AI. If you would like to reach out to Francesco, you can find him on his LinkedIn page.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Congrats to Dr. Navarrini for receiving his PhD on 15 December, 2025!
In my previous posts, I talked a little about some of the simulations I used, and I will share more with you in the future. For now, the simulation period is over, so we can already start reflecting on how this experience went: it was the first time I had used simulation as an analysis tool, and I must say that the most difficult thing for me was finding assessment criteria that were fair (equitable and transparent for everyone) and scalable (given that I had over 100 students on two courses, and I will have just as many in the next semester).
In fact, it is difficult to overcome a certain bias regarding fairness in the assessment process. In particular, I am a big fan of written examinations because they are completely fair for everyone. In the sense that they are examinations everyone takes at the same time, with the same questions.
However, this fairness comes at a trade-off, given that these written exams do not actually allow us to assess, or help students develop, not only content skills (i.e., not just memory), but also skills that are more related to the ability to apply the theories and systems we study in real life.
Continue reading “A System for Assessing Classroom Simulations”Learning from your own work: A metacognitive approach
I recently ran some assessment literacy workshops for first-year undergrads, to help them acclimatise (if that’s the right word?) to life in our Department. One of the themes was ‘working with feedback’, and one my co-facilitators, Sacha (a third-year politics and IR student) explained the approach he has honed over his time with us. I persuaded him to write it up into a guest blog …
For a long time, I didn’t understand how I was supposed to get better at academic work: I’d get feedback, read it, feel something about it, and then just move on. Sometimes I’d do better, sometimes worse, but I couldn’t tell you why.
What changed wasn’t some sudden revelation — I just got … annoyed. I kept seeing the same criticisms, so I started writing down what I was doing and comparing it against feedback. That’s when I realized: my idea of “good work” often didn’t match what my professors meant by “good.”
But before I share any advice, it’s so important to remember (or finally accept?) that we really can’t make self-learning approaches about grades. Chasing grades, in my experience, means working twice as hard, while learning half as much. Optimizing for showing understanding rather than actually understanding will exhaust you.
What we should acknowledge when reading feedback about graded work
Your professors can only comment on what you submit. They don’t know if you started two weeks early or the night before, whether you felt confident or panicked, whether you actually understood the material or were just hoping for the best. They’re evaluating a product (your work) that does not indicate the process that created it (how you did it).
Continue reading “Learning from your own work: A metacognitive approach”A Degrading Experiment – Preliminary Results
In my last post, I pondered whether eliminating coercive elements of assessment changed student behavior. Would students complete assignments that had no direct effect on their grades?
So far, it looks like the answer is “no.” I’m teaching my usual autumn term course on economic development and environmental change. In previous years, I assigned a graded evaluation for each of the five games that students played in class. This time I assigned three evaluations. The first two were ungraded, but I provided students with feedback that they could apply to the third, graded evaluation, which is due next week.
In a class of twenty-five students, five completed the first evaluation. No students completed the second evaluation.
These numbers lead me to suspect that many of my students do what they do to avoid punishment, not because of intrinsic motivation or interest.
Perhaps I should investigate assessment optionality . . .
Online event: ‘Giving choice a chance: Assessment optionality in political studies education’
Next Wednesday, from 1:30-2:3pm, I’ll be delivering a webinar for the Political Studies Association’s Teaching and Learning Network. If you’re free and your interested, it would be great to see some ALPS readers there. You can register here.
This practice-sharing webinar will present the results of participatory research with political studies students that explored whether a subject-specific case could be made for the use of assessment optionality in the discipline. The webinar will explore political studies students’ understandings of costs and benefits of assessment optionality and share co-created recommendations for the potential application of the practice, as well as my own experience in introducing assessment optionality to the University of York’s Department of Politics and International Relations for the first time. This webinar will be an expansion of the write-up of my research into optionality that was published earlier this year in PS: Political Science and Politics.
Continue reading “Online event: ‘Giving choice a chance: Assessment optionality in political studies education’”Encouraging student engagement with feedback: a student-staff partnership approach
This guest post is by Dr. Sara van Goozen, lecturer at the University of York’s Department of Politics and International Relations. As well as teaching and researching political theory, Sara has pursued research on inclusive assessment and feedback practices, and is one of the founding members of the Teaching Political Theory Network.
If you use Turnitin to provide feedback on student work, the image on the right may be sadly familiar to you: it shows which students have viewed the feedback they received. In this case, it’s a random sample of essays submitted by first-year students in January 2025. The screenshot was taken around 6 months after the release of the mark and shows that in the given sample, only about 50% of students viewed their feedback.
Although it’s fairly widely accepted that good quality feedback is important for student learning, writing good feedback is only part of the work: students also need to engage with the feedback they receive (not just give it a cursory glance!). And ideally, they need to engage with it over a period of time. However, there’s a good amount of research on the various factors which affect a student’s ability to benefit from feedback: on the teacher’s side, feedback may be vague, unhelpful, alienating, too detailed or not detailed enough. On the student’s side, they may not fully appreciate the importance of engaging with feedback, they may not recognize the information they receive as feedback, or they may find it difficult to extract lessons (and act on them) from the feedback they receive.
Continue reading “Encouraging student engagement with feedback: a student-staff partnership approach”Flipped Learning
Some of my students mentioned to me after I gave a public lecture earlier in the year that they’d never seen me lecture before! I am very proud of this and although a lecture can be a fun and lovely thing, I think my students benefit a lot from my alternative approach, flipped learning.
The other day I answered a call to provide a case study for a book on flipped learning by Robert Talbert and ended up writing loads. I understand that you are now marking the days on your calendar, waiting, waiting, waiting for this book to be published, longing for the moment that you can read about my flipped classroom! Don’t worry! I have empathy for you and I will here give you the full answers to all his questions so after you’ve read it, you can get on and live your lives after all…..
In seriousness, this post is a lightly edited version of a questionnaire that I answered on my longstanding flipped learning practice (with a few examples and some advice towards the end). If there’s anything you’d like to know more about, just hit me in the comments.
Continue reading “Flipped Learning”Teaching Narratives: The Salt Path, Nature Cures and the Politics of Story
I could not have enjoyed Jennifer’s story of taking students to see a bonkers film more. However, even this totally wild story was upstaged by Susan’s comment which I am still laughing about. Stories tend to have a moral and a meaning and it is very clear what we need to take from these two hilarious tales. Then again, you can also always read texts against themselves, so perhaps the main take-away is that we could all have more fun and laughter by preparing for class a bit less….
Meanwhile, I’ve also been thinking about teaching with popular culture. In the wake of the recent scandal about the bestseller, The Salt Path (a book that has been on my ‘further reading’ for my Politics of Nature class from the start), I’ve been thinking about whether it might be interesting to address the controversy in class, and, if so, how. This blog is a slightly experimental attempt to think it through.
