Category: Jeremy Moulton

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In defence of slides

Yesterday, James Fielder published a blog post here detailing his ‘hate/hate relationship with slides’. I had another piece that I wanted to share today but having read James’s impassioned post I felt an equal surge of emotion – but with a need to defend the slides that make up so much of my working life.

Sigh – life really comes at you fast. One day you’re young and cool and the next you’re dropping everything to write a 600 word blog post defending the use of slides…

But, in my mind at least, slides really are worth defending.

There is an old joke about the (very real) Swiss ‘Anti PowerPoint Party’ that goes something like “Switzerland’s Anti PowerPoint Party has got a cause that could convince millions… just as soon as they find an easy and clear way to communicate their message”. 

Of course, that such a party even exists shows that James is certainly not alone in his hatred of slides. I can see why one might take such offence to them. There are endless examples of people using slides in ways that are wildly off putting, both in terms of design and delivery.

I certainly wouldn’t claim that I am the rare third type of slide-user that James describes as one that ‘builds a New York gallery-esque deck and briefs confidently without superstitiously looking back at their deck like some sort of mythic totem’. I’m fine with the basic templates that come automatically with PowerPoint and don’t want to spend too much time on fancy production. Occasionally, if I feel the content really demands it, I might add a nicely chosen background image but that’s probably as good as it’s going to get.

So, what’s the ‘sell’ with slides? Simply, I think everyone benefits. 

For the instructor, spending time putting together slides for a course means that, next year, when it comes time to teach that course again, you can relax knowing there is something there to turn to and use. Sure, the slides might need a little updating but you are not back to square one. Slides are also a convenient way to pace and structure one’s lectures. It might be great to have the time to rehearse a lecture so slides aren’t necessary but it’s highly unlikely that space will be found in workload models for that.

For the students, the benefits are also clear. Students are often keen to stress some of these reasons – slides are good for taking notes around, they are good for revision, etc. But I also think that there is a benefit of slides that students might not want to fess up to – they are good when the audience stops paying attention. Now, obviously, one hopes that this never happens. But, if and when they do start to daydream about what they’ll be having for lunch, at least they will have the slides to quickly anchor their attention back onto once they’ve decided that it will be beans on toast again today. 

Controversially, I also like using slides in seminars. There aren’t a tonne of them and I don’t rely on them too much. But, again, I find that they are a useful anchor point for discussions. I’ve become even more certain in my use of them in recent years of teaching in mixed-language ability classrooms. I’ve seen that they can be a comfortable point of reference for those that might otherwise feel less confident in their ability to engage. 

So, I’ll put myself proudly in the other faction and declare that I am and shall remain an ardent slidist.

See, what’s not to love?

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Explain and justify

Students often think that there is a ‘right’ or a ‘wrong’ approach to every aspect of an assignment. This is a thought that can often lead to intense anxiety around an assessment period.

There are, of course, many areas in which this is correct. There are things that are simply ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, depending on the context and form of the assessment. If a department insists that a student submit with Harvard-style referencing, for example, it’s good practice for them to cite in Harvard, rather than footnotes.

However, students often take these concerns to a degree that might limit the potential for going out and exploring exciting and original cases or approaches, as they feel the need to double check every detail before committing – “is it right to use China as a case study for this essay question?”, “is it suitable to use liberal intergovernmentalism as a theory in my essay?”, etc. To students that are worrying about whether their approach, case, method, is the ‘right’ one to employ in completing an assessment, I usually reply with the simple advice to ‘explain and justify’.

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Thinking about the open exam

It’s assessment season (at least here at the University of York) and so our students will, one hopes anyway, be getting stuck into preparation for their upcoming summative assessments. For many students, this will mean getting ready to take open exams.

The open exam format is one that was a bit of an oddity before the pandemic. Students taking notes into an exam would have been something that was done on a tiny, rolled up piece of paper hidden in a sleeve. If that tiny piece of paper was ever discovered, the Academic Misconduct Authorities would be on the case in a flash. However, as the pandemic made it impossible to get dozens of students together in one place for an exam and to, therefore, police the behaviour of those students, the open exam format quickly came into vogue and became institutionalised. 

To quickly specify the differences in format, I think it’s worth highlighting three different types of exams:

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Participatory research, calls for participants, and ‘the usual suspects’

In my post on ALPS last week, I wrote about how participatory research can be a beneficial active learning experience for students. In a recent project that I ran at the University of York, student partners came away from the research process reporting that they had a much stronger knowledge of research methods and delivery than they had before. However, as I also noted in that post, this is, for both methodological and practical reasons, an exclusive form of learning.

Nicole Brown (an Associate Professor at UCL’s Institute of Education) has made the case that student partnership research is vital in developing and delivering innovations in teaching, which in turn can boost student engagement and satisfaction. Brown is not alone in this assertion – a quick Google Scholar search will return a wealth of literature that details the benefits of student partnership research. Importantly, this literature also shows that, largely, students simply enjoy getting to be involved in the research process.

From this, an important question emerges – which students get to be involved in participatory research? Answering this question is important both to the students that get to be involved and to the conclusions that will result from the research. 

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Participatory research as active learning

Over the last semester, I have been running a research project, funded by the University of York’s Learning and Teaching Fund, exploring assessment norms and innovations utilised on Politics and International Relations degrees.

The project has been my first foray into participatory research with students. Throughout the project, six students took on the role of ‘Student Partners’ to help design, deliver, and conclude the research activities – activities that included running focus groups with other students. It made sense from a methodological standpoint to have this level of student involvement – after all, I was hoping to gain a student-centred understanding of the challenges and opportunities with innovating assessment practices.

Last week, we had our final research activity – a half-day workshop with the Student Partners to discuss research findings and to conclude the project. We also had some time to discuss the experiences of the students in collaborating with staff and each other on the research project. That discussion was an eye-opening one and made me keenly aware of how beneficial this kind of hands-on research experience can be for students as a form of active learning.

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When the table turns: Experiencing active learning from the other side

In between a day packed with meetings, I had an enjoyable break booked in yesterday – Prof. Violeta Orlovic Lovren, from the University of Belgrade, was at the University of York to deliver a workshop entitled ‘Designing Ideal Learning Spaces with Sustainability in Mind’. It was a session pitched as using ideas of utopia and sustainable development to explore what it is that we desire from our learning environments – which sounded fantastic. All good so far.

However, fifteen minutes into the workshop, something surprising happened. Violeta invited us, the attendees, to take some drawing paper and a fineliner pen and to draw what we pictured as our ideal, sustainable learning space. This itself wasn’t the surprise. What surprised me was the sudden pang of resistance I felt to this idea.

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Welcoming New Regular Columnist, Dr. Jeremy Moulton!

Jeremy has contributed so many guest posts that we invited him to join us as a regular columnist!

Dr. Moulton has been working at the University of York since 2017. He has previously taught at York’s Department of Environment & Geography and at the University of Hull’s School of Politics and International Studies. His teaching practice centres on comparative politics, environmental politics, European Union studies, and the politics of the UK, across Undergraduate and Postgraduate programmes in the Department of Politics and International Relations. He has published peer-reviewed work on EU climate action, urban ecological modernisation, political myth, UK politics and renewables policy, and teaching and learning in Politics and International Relations.

Jeremy is deeply involved in enhancing the teaching and learning environment at York University. He has been awarded funding for and completed research projects on first-generation students’ experiences within Higher Education, student conceptions of teaching innovation, and the experiences of students that study abroad or undertake a year-in-industry placement. He is currently undertaking funded work on the identification of achievement gaps in the Department, the pedagogy of degrowth, and assessment optionality. As well as undertaking teaching and research, Jeremy currently works as the Department’s Admissions Tutor, a role in which he has centred widening participation into Higher Education. In 2020, Jeremy received the ‘Supporting the Student Voice’ award at the University.

Jeremy holds a PhD from the University of Hull, supervised by Prof. Rüdiger Wurzel (School of Politics and International Studies) and Prof. David Gibbs (School of Environmental Sciences), for a thesis entitled ‘A Tale of Two Cities: Climate Action and Political Myth in the European Union.’

In 2023, Jeremy became a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE).

Welcome, Jeremy!