Saturday 3 December 2016

TERNZ 2015 & HERDSA 2016

A belated update on two education based conferences I attended as part of professional development and ongoing research interests, in this case where teaching practice and curriculum design intersect with industry experience. These events are useful for providing insight and inspiration for new approaches to learning and teaching, especially because coming from industry into tertiary teaching presents challenges as well as solutions. 

Poster of Project-Based Integrated Learning approach.


 The first conference, TERNZ, was held at AUT in Auckland in November 2015. TERNZ focuses on “teaching and learning research in higher and tertiary education that is open to academics from all disciplines. The theme of every TERNZ conference is learning in higher education: our learning, our students' learning, our colleagues' learning.” The session at TERNZ were practical, very hands on and interactive in this regard. My colleague Nick Konings and I co-presented both a presentation and poster based on his work in designing the curriculum for a new Bachelor of Animation, and bringing together Project Based Learning and Integrated Learning under a term he coined: Project Based Integrated Learning (PBIL). Nick focused on the approach and I presented case studies of student work arising from this methodology. 


Poster of 'Making by Doing' approach to curriculum design.

The second conference, HERDSA, was held at Fremantle, Australia, with the theme for the conference being The Shape of Higher Education. Once again, myself and Nick appeared there co-presenting a presentation, and I presented a poster (co-designed with my colleague Lena Yaroshenko). This time the topic concerned a methodology of curriculum design employed by a number of staff in the animation faculty, in which lecturers work on projects in a similar fashion to students, as a means of testing the efficacy of the programmes being designed – which I referred to as Making by Doing. HERDSA was an interesting experience, since many of the topics that were raised by various institutions are things relevant and already being approached inside the philosophy and curriculum we were developing. The abstract can be viewed here.