At the first unit workshop you will team up with other participants and discuss your responses to the different readings you have been given. You are advised to use the following questions to prompt your thinking and help you to structure your response:

1.If you had to summaries Dall’Alba’s article in three bullet points, what would they be?

• Theorizing teaching – focusing on transforming and enhancing ways of being university teachers, through integrating knowing, acting and being.

• The paper explores and illustrates how this focus on ontology is enacted on the course – ‘Epistemology is not seen as an end in its self, but rather it is in the service of ontology’.

• Several strategies of integration (knowing, acting, being) – eg promoting participants in a community, dialogue about educational practice, interrogating teaching with reference to educational literature, peer feedback/assessments – are outlined and analysed in the paper with the help of student feedback reports and literature references.

2. What connections can you make with this article and things you already know, have read before or experienced?

The connections I made are between the course we are currently about to undertake (UAL – PGCert) and the course mentioned in the article, there seems to be (from what I have read and heard) quite a few similarities in the strategies eg; promoting participants in a community, dialogue about educational practise, interrogating teaching with reference to educational literature, peer feedback/assessments.
3. How did the points raised in the article relate to your own thoughts and feelings about staff development in general, and your own forthcoming studies in particular?
A PGCert is something I very much wanted to do – to improve/develop/learn strategies to teach at this early stage in my career – and it is a benefit I can do it while working at UAL. While reading the article it occurred to me that people are doing it for a variety of reasons and are from a variety of backgrounds – which is interesting and will hopefully enrich the experience for all.
In relation to my own forthcoming studies, the article touched on some apprehension to online based activities and a colleague collaboration perspective to teaching rather than ‘the teacher as authority’ – this made me question my own attitude to this predominantly new way of learning for me. I am used to more contact with teachers in the past and this makes me slightly nervous – I think due to a slight lack of confidence (possibly from dyslexia) in my own ability and tendency to react well to encouragement – while I know may sound naïve there is an inherent fear of going ‘off track’ – and not knowing/having it realised until it is too late to recover.
In contrast I am also enthusiastic and excited to collaborate and build relationships with colleagues as I know that there is a wealth of knowledge, experience and creativity on the course and this could not only be beneficial for our current studies but possibly lead to exciting ventures in the future – which was mentioned as a positive by participants in the article, ‘participants as a source of knowledge’ and is something I could relate to.