Scaffolded with weekly learning activities, this task should be delivered as a final assessment item as it builds upon tutorial worksheets and activities undertaken throughout the teaching period. Students complete weekly worksheets during tutorials which they submit at the end of semester. To supplement this, students also write a 500 word critical reflection on their key learnings over the course of the semester, and commentary on how their disciplinary skills might have developed. Reflections should be individual, but should all emphasise reflexivity with regards to the various intellectual, professional and applied research skills developed throughout the course. For example, students might reflect on the specific ways in which they engaged with disciplinary processes contained in previous assessment items. In SOCY2019, this has meant considering various aspects of a major social research project, such as knowledge of a research topic; the refining of research questions; or how they obtained a deeper understanding of ethical issues related to a research topic. To receive full marks students must have participated in at least nine out of ten tutorials by completing worksheets for each. This technique is also useful for informing amendments to course content as part of engaging students as partners in curriculum design.
Details
- CLASS SIZE
- 60-80
- CLASS LEVEL
- Second year
- ASSESSMENT SECURITY
- Medium security
- TIME REQUIREMENTS
- Medium time
- CONDITIONS
- Sequence
- TAGS
- scaffolded, workbook, reflective/reflexive, critical reflection
Advantages
This task directly engages with students as potential partners in teaching and learning (a central part of UQ's Student Strategy) where students' reflections are invaluable to informing curriculum design and the improvement of course content. Fosters critical thinking through reflexivity as students actively draw upon experiential learning activities to form a unique sense of their achieved learning outcomes. Transfers to any HASS discipline – Reflexive skills are relevant and highly valued within all of these theoretical and/or applied areas.
Challenges
To score well students must a majority of worksheets completed in weekly tutorials. Whilst this task doesn't overtly provide for student flexibility in this sense, it does provide added incentive for students to thoroughly engage in course content.
Tips for implementation
Staff should sensibly consider students views as contained in reflections to inform updates to course content and assessment for future deliveries.
How it supports academic integrity
Reflexive exercises require students to actively draw upon their own unique experiences of teaching and learning, which cannot be readily copied or outsourced.
Professor Lynda Cheshire
l.cheshire@uq.edu.au
Lynda is the Head of School in the School of Social Science and an internationally renowned sociologist. She first studied sociology in the UK where she obtained her Bachelors degree from the University of Wales. After moving to Australia, she completed a PhD in sociology from Central Queensland University before taking up a position at The University of Queensland. From 2011-15 she was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow.
Lynda undertakes research in the areas of community, neighbourhoods and housing. More specifically, she examines how people live and interact in contemporary local communities; how structural and policy processes impact upon those communities and the relationships that play out within them; and the consequences of these changing social dynamics for well-being, feelings of attachment to home and place, conflict, social exclusion and cohesion. She has undertaken her research in a variety of settings including rural areas; remote fly-in, fly-out mining communities; outer-suburban master planned estates; inner-city gentrifying suburbs; low-income neighbourhoods; and new housing developments for older public housing tenants and people with severe and persistent mental health challenges.
Lynda is presently leading a programme of research on ‘un-neighbourliness’ which examines the nature, causes and outcomes of problems between neighbours and their effects on neighbouring more broadly. Funded by an ARC Discovery grant, she and colleagues are exploring how processes of urban change, such as urban consolidation and gentrification influence neighbour relations, and how neighbouring is enacted in different residential contexts. The results of this study have implications for councils trying to respond to rising neighbour complaints; social housing providers managing disputes between tenants; and for urban planning and community resilience policies. She is also an international partner on the ESRCs’ Connected Communities consortium (Crow et al) and the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERDII). Find out more