Designing active pedagogies

"Designing active pedagogies" is a 10-credit course delivered as part of the PGCAP/MEd in Academic Practice. In designing this course, we [Sheridan and Dale] took a creative approach, enabling learners to experiment with notions of place, space and active learning. Using a narrative framework for course design (the five steps of Freytag’s (1894) pyramid), we created activities to: 1. Establish a starting point (‘exposition’) for exploration by introducing the learners to our underpinning theoretical framework, which examines the intersections (1st, 2nd and 3rd spaces) between student, teacher and place domains; 2. Create the potential for cognitive dissonance (‘rising action’) by introducing participants to the theory and practice of digital storytelling (Bernard, 2008), object-based learning (Chatterjee, 2011) and learning landscapes (Löw and Goodwin, 2016), with the potential to apply these to their own teaching practice; 3. Enable learners to create and get peer feedback on their formative artefacts (‘climax’); 4. Encourage learners to showcase their learning from previous sessions, inside and outside the classroom (‘falling action’); and 5. Empower learners to integrate the active pedagogies into their own teaching practice as a result of their reflections and scholarly engagement through the summative assessment (‘denouement’). Learners brought with them their own prior understanding of active learning from their own disciplines, which was a resource we were able to draw on in terms of co-constructing elements of the course. Learners will share their experiences of what the course meant for them in terms of further developing their teaching practice, illustrated through multimedia course artefacts.