Content uploaded by Abdulla Sodiq
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Abdulla Sodiq on Nov 19, 2021
Content may be subject to copyright.
Birmingham City University: Annual Education CSPACE Conference 2021
7 June 2021
Title: Joined-Up University Services in Seminar Teaching During the Lockdown
Keywords:
Seminar teaching; co-teaching; HE curriculum; academic study skills; Pandemic
Short Description: In this article, I share with you my largely positive experience of working with
different academic services to support students in seminar teaching
Lead Author: Dr. Abdulla Sodiq
Author title: Lecturer in Education Studies
Link to Conference Post: Click
The phenomena that I share with you here related to an issue that stemmed from pre-Covid times – the
issue of supporting first year students’ academic study skills needs while delivering subject content during
the seminars that you deliver. It’s an issue many HE lecturers are familiar with and not just with first year
students as the issue stays alive throughout the students’ degree.
The first year students’ needs are particularly relevant as in this case. I have been delivering an introductory
module to the course (BA – Hons - Education Studies) that the course team has been trying to turn into a
sort of an opportunity for students to evaluate and work on their academic study needs to facilitate their
progress during the rest of the course. What the experience reveals is that university-based support is not
necessarily designed to be a linear or hierarchical type of education (Meyerhoff, 2019). What may make our
service so is the way we might deliver education and how it may be evaluated and planned at a local level,
especially if our pedagogical reactions to management practices lead to a self-inflicted hierarchical and
hegemonic approach to teaching and learning.
When Covid-19 and the associated restrictions hit us, as a team we had planned to integrate academic skills
support within the module content. The increased and inevitable reliance on digital and online services
enabled us to integrate university’s services that align well with the kind of a radically modified pedagogy that
Meyerhoff (2019) calls for which the post-pandemic university could rely on.
To deliver the impending content and mode of support for during the module, we relied on the university’s
Personal Development Department, the Library and the IT Services staff, both of who were absolutely
fantastic, to create and deliver content using a mixture of face-t-face, asynchronous, synchronous seminars.
We had sessions covering module content and skills such as academic writing, reading, presenting to an
audience or planning and time-management.
At that early point in the pandemic we were still able to have some face-to-face sessions. There were
sessions where the PDD staff or the Library Staff would connect to us live while we were in four seminar
rooms on campus; our module group had to be split into smaller groups in separate rooms due to social
distancing. Some students joined us from their home (UK and abroad) and the IT services would contact
them directly to resolve technical issues and sometimes met us physically in our seminar rooms to resolve
issues that we faced. Sometimes we would play a recorded video from PDD, or an interactive exercise they
had designed and they would join us live via MS Teams to answer questions students had. So what we had
going was certainly non-linear and very often messy but I’d argue an integrated joined-up approach that
made the complex network of services work together to address meet students’ needs – needs that we had
been working on for a couple of years.
Figure 1: A model for a Join-Up pedagogy in a Post-Pandemic University (Copyright - @DrAbdullaSodiq)
In this set up, what we achieved and the impact was clear. One student highlighted that “the interactive
support from teachers” and the mixture of “doing group work, discussions in breakout rooms (MS Teams), in
class discussions, etc.” worked well for them. These students are now in their second semester and I
certainly feel they, in comparisons to previous cohorts, have a clearer idea of university education, the kind
of evidence they rely on when supporting their arguments and how best to approach module assignments
and tasks.
The experiment has highlighted the need to find ways to the online and digital services to adapt a joined-
approach in pedagogy and I can see a purposeful place for such an approach in the post-pandemic
university.
Reference:
Meyerhoff, E. (2019). Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World. Minneapolis; London: University of
Minnesota Press. doi:10.5749/j.ctvpb3vm2
Library Staff
PDD Staff
4 seminar rooms
Students joining the
seminar from home (UK)
Students joining the
seminar from overseas
A model for a Joined-Up pedagogy in a Post-Pandemic University
(Copyright: @DrAbdullaSodiq)