Treasure Island Pedagogies: Episode 33, the one with the reunion

Posted on: 3 June 2024 by Dr Tunde Varga-Atkins in General

In Episode 33, we return to the original guests whose conversation helped inspire today’s format of the Treasure Island Pedagogies podcast series and revisit our treasure island pedagogies/props and luxury items, which included.

Speakers: Anna O’Connor, Diana Jeater, Stuart Wilks-Heeg (with James Gaynor in spirit)

Date: 3 June 2024

Treasure Island Pedagogies: Episode 33 podcast

(Treasure Island Pedagogies Episode 33 - Podcast Transcript)

Read or listen to find out our guests’ lightbulb moments, teaching props, pedagogies and luxury items that they would take to their Treasure Islands for precious contact time with students. 

During our special edition of the Treasure Island Pedagogy podcast we revisited our original guests—Diana Jeater, Stuart Wilks-Heeg, Anna O’Connor (with James Gaynor joining in spirit)—to see how their teaching practices have evolved since our first chat in April and June 2022. Back then, amidst the chaos of Covid, we discussed our remote teaching experiences, which gave the inspiration for the Treasure Island concept, where we imagined bringing essential teaching props and luxury items to enhance learning and our well-being as educators on our Islands of student experiences.

Fast forward to June 2024, we reflected on the changes we’ve embraced or discarded. These included a shift to online exams—no more deciphering bad handwriting! And, unsurprisingly, our conversation turned to the challenges posed by AI in education. The speed of AI’s evolution demands a fresh approach to teaching and assessment, prompting us to design ways for students to use AI critically. We also discussed the importance and benefits of co-creating our learning with our students, the changing demands and needs of our students, and the merits of transforming lectures into large-group sessions with active learning, and how we kept some good practices from Covid around chunked video recordings. Audio-only podcasts are becoming ever more popular with students and polls are found to have a lot of use not just with teaching but also on open-days. This multimodal trend is also utilised in offering authentic assessments with getting students to produce their assessments in various modes such as podcasts, videos, websites and blogs.

Our guests’ revised teaching props and pedagogies for the Island included:

Anna O'Connor, University of Liverpool

• Teaching Prop or Pedagogy: formative quizzes
• Luxury Item: dog for those rejuvenating walks

Diana Jeater, University of Liverpool

• Teaching Prop or Pedagogy: whiteboard upgraded to a smartboard that can capture annotation and discussion,
• Luxury Item: a garden of flowers.

Stuart Wilks-Heeg, University of Liverpool

• Teaching Prop or Pedagogy: sound capsules and podcasts.
• Luxury Item: football goals for a quick match game.

Facilitated by Dr Tünde Varga-Atkins, Sound: Chris Loxham/Sandra Samaca, Web design: Dennis Wong, Neil Murray @LivUniCIE