Journal of PGR Pedagogic Practice

Journal of PGR Pedagogic Practice: Breaking Barriers and Embracing Voices; Advancing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in Postgraduate Pedagogies

2023-11-23

The third issue of the Journal of PGR Pedagogic Practice, published for the academic year 2023-24, is a celebration of our authors’ commitment to reflecting critically on their pedagogies and creating more inclusive educational settings that embrace diversity in all its forms. We hope this issue helps our readers thoughtfully adapt their pedagogies to better serve diverse student populations. Many articles in this issue address how we can effectively break down barriers to establish educational environments that not only recognise diversity but actively nurture inclusion. Another focus of this issue is navigating intercultural communication, a practical application of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), focusing on the complexities of intercultural interactions in educational settings. This year’s issue, with international submissions, is a testament JPPP has established itself as a platform for championing GTAs work beyond Warwick, and we hope that future issues continue to do so, whether it is providing a voice to unsung PGR champions or challenging the status quo in higher education on difficult topics.

Editorial: PGR Teachers and the advancement of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)

Anton Cleverley — 2023-11-23

This year’s editorial team is comprised of six individuals (From left to right: Cherisse, Youn, Imogen, Anton, Bhushan, and Yiduo) from across five departments at the University of Warwick. The diversity within the team goes well beyond research disciplines, with four continents represented within this international cast. The team’s ethos is to strive in championing postgraduate students’ work, in their roles as Graduate Teaching Assistants.

Exploring Inclusive Practices in Schools: A Systems Thinking Perspective

Reymark Isar — 2023-11-23

This reflective paper delves into the examination of inclusive practices in schools through the lens of systems thinking, a conceptual framework. Inclusive education aims to provide equitable educational opportunities for all students, regardless of their abilities or backgrounds. However, the intricate nature of educational systems often poses challenges to effective implementation. This paper advocates for the application of systems thinking as a valuable perspective to understand and improve the implementation of inclusive practices in schools. By conceptualizing schools as dynamic systems and considering the interconnectedness of various elements within them, educators and policymakers can gain deeper insights into the factors that influence inclusivity. The paper outlines the fundamental principles of systems thinking, demonstrates its application in the field of inclusive education, and highlights the potential benefits it offers for enhancing inclusive practices.

STEMinism in the classroom: Reflections from a female GTA

Sophie Kempston — 2023-11-23

The need for professionals with a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) background is higher than ever before, and this need will continue to rise in future years, particularly for those with a university degree. Applications for STEM degrees in the UK are at an all-time high; however, women are significantly underrepresented in STEM courses at university, have higher dropout rates from these courses than their male counterparts, and even when they obtain a STEM degree, are less likely to choose a career in this field. These issues have been well-documented in the literature for over a decade, yet these issues still persist in the present day.

This is a reflective piece from my perspective as a female graduate teaching assistant (GTA) teaching in STEM, highlighting the tools I use in the classroom to try and empower particularly female students and equip them for success. It also reflects on my own experiences, both as student and teacher, and discusses how GTAs working in STEM subjects can be pivotal in addressing some of the gender gaps outlined above.

Designing and evaluating the Supervision workshop series – embracing overlapping and contradictory views

Bing Lu — 2023-11-23

This reflective piece focuses on the workshops of the Superb-Vision Network: a series of student-led workshops to support doctoral students’ learning of their supervision experiences. As a continuation account of the writing in the previous volume of this journal, this piece introduces how the development and evaluation of the workshops has been informed by the principles of educational design research (McKenney & Reeves, 2018) throughout. As a co-created work between three authors, who acted as facilitators and participant in the workshop, this writing discusses how the multiple evaluation/reflection cycles break down facilitator-participant barriers and contribute to methodological inclusion in terms of improving the future workshops. This writing recognises various challenges in incorporating various feedback when evaluating the workshops and centralises inclusivity when facilitating innovation, such as how to embrace participants’ contradictory views and critical feedback. In the spirit of educational design research, the other goal of this piece is to balance the need to develop a quality ‘product’ whilst simultaneously formulating broader design principles to contribute to ‘scientific understanding’, benefiting the development and evaluation of other peer-based learning initiatives.

From Learning to Teaching: Incorporating Cultural Familiarity to Enhance GTA Support for International Students' Learning

Hong Song — 2023-11-23

The Inclusive Education Model (IEM) is stated as one of the priorities of the Education Strategy at the University of Warwick, and is aimed at enhancing students’ learning experience. Although significant progress has been made in the development of inclusion in education, there are still challenges to overcome to ensure that all students, regardless of their diverse backgrounds, abilities, or circumstances, have equitable access to quality education and are fully included in the learning environment.

To better support inclusive education, the Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) scheme at Warwick was implemented with the aim of providing various types of teaching support to postgraduate taught (PGT) students. While carrying out our GTA jobs, the authors noticed that the international postgraduate taught (PGT) students in Education Studies were experiencing some challenges during their studies, often caused by the mismatch/incompatibility between students’ previous education experiences in their home countries and the pedagogical approaches adopted in the UK context. Arguably, these challenges could lead to various barriers that might hinder the students from the current educational environment.

Through this critical reflection, we aim to raise awareness of hidden/invisible challenges that may have been overlooked. As international students are among those who may not feel fully included when pursuing studies in a host country, our objective is to raise awareness of hidden or invisible challenges that might have been overlooked through critical reflection. Our intention is to contribute to establishing an equitable and supportive educational experience for international students with diverse needs and backgrounds. We intend to contribute to the establishment of an equitable and supportive educational experience for international students with diverse needs and backgrounds.

Creating a third cultural space: What role does intercultural communication play in PGR teaching?

Zhaohui Tian — 2023-11-23

As an internationalised space, the University of Warwick has over 9500 international students and more than 40% international academic staff. Thus, intercultural encounters are ubiquitous on campus, including teaching spaces. Among all the international student groups, the Chinese student community emerges as one of the largest at Warwick. This offers a unique teaching experience for those who are involved in teaching this group at Warwick. Therefore, in this reflective piece, we draw on our own cultural experiences as Chinese PGRs teaching Chinese PGTs in a UK-based university, with the aim to reflect on the different cultural values underlying our teaching practices influenced by both Chinese and British education cultures. We also reflect on Chinese students’ learning behaviours based on our observations and how those are formed and negotiated by us as Chinese teachers/students in a multicultural communication space at Warwick. We propose the adoption of the concept of third culture teaching, a teaching practice that goes beyond either Chinese education culture or British education culture. In particular, we use two examples to discuss the relevance of intercultural considerations in PGRs’ teaching practices, one targeting the perceptions of student-teacher relationships in supervision and the other on the concept of classroom engagement. With this discussion, we make suggestions for the intercultural-related areas for PGRs to ponder upon and prepare for better teaching practices encompassing a wide range of learning needs.

Unveiling the Crossroads: Reflections on Teaching Chinese Master’s Students in Chemical Engineering Labs

Ya He — 2023-11-23

In recent years, the number of Chinese students enrolled in one-year postgraduate taught (PGT) programmes in UK universities has continued to increase, making graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) need to teach in a more international and diverse classroom environment. Such changes have impacted students' learning expectations and the GTAs’ teaching experiences. Therefore, this reflection paper is based on my personal experience as a GTA to discuss the current situations and problems of teaching PGT students in engineering and provides insights for PGR teachers involved in teaching based on classroom observations and teaching reflection.

Co-creative teaching practice and active learning: the opportunity of small group teaching in philosophy

Giulia Lorenzi — 2023-11-23

Co-creative pedagogy practices, where the students occupy a central role in shaping the sessions acting as partners in teaching, have an enormous potential in fostering inclusiveness and equality in the academic setting. Giving the students a voice and a role to play in designing and delivering teaching interventions, indeed, ensures that their unique interests and their needs as learners are taken on board, valued, and acted upon. Yet, it is challenging to implement co-creative practice while also following principles of active learning. Engaging students in deep learning through activities and “doing” tasks usually requires a certain degree of preparation which ends up creating a structure for the sessions that is less flexible than hoped, and more difficult to be permeated by and open to students’ individual needs and interests.

In teaching seminars in philosophy, I have found myself juggling the challenge of combining co-creative practice and active learning principles. Considering philosophy more as a practice rather than a discipline, I have always thought to my seminars as the ideal space for my students to exercise philosophical skills whose development, strength and autonomy constitute a core element of the learning expected from a philosophy graduate. For this reason, active learning has always been a pillar of my teaching practice. Yet, I was finding difficult to connect it to a co-creative approach to teaching.

In this piece, I am going to explain how establishing an ongoing, honest dialogue with my students has revealed to be the solution to my problem.

Navigating Challenges in Postgraduate Pedagogy: An EDI Consideration to Preparing, Designing, and Delivering Teaching by PGRs

Deqing Rong — 2023-11-23

Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs) play an integral role in shaping the pedagogical landscape within Higher Education despite encountering several challenges as they prepare, design, and deliver their teaching. This paper explores these challenges, focusing on the advantages of advancing Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in postgraduate pedagogies. Except for barriers from literature, this paper will also include authors’ personal teaching experiences in the module Technology Management for one and a half years.

When PGRs prepare and design for the session, they should be aware of EDI issues since students may have different cultures, knowledge, and personalities. Therefore, it is a challenge to prepare and design the teaching to ensure all students can easily understand, participate equally in the session, and have an equal chance to express or share their thoughts and ideas with others after the session. By addressing this issue, this paper will explain things that PGRs should be concerned about and the challenges they face, such as how they would split students into each group, how they support different students with different characteristics, such as disabilities and how to innovate in the method of teaching, etc.

PGRs should also consider EDI in their teaching practices, which can be more complex than preparing due to unexpected situations that arise during actual practice. Therefore, PGRs should seek to learn from others’ teaching experiences and seek support when needed. This paper will illustrate challenges aligned with EDI issues that have been faced, such as arguments between students, sensitive questions asked by students and reports from students, and, more importantly, how to perfectly deliver the knowledge that has been prepared and designed to ensure that students can feel that EDI is also a challenge that PGRs faced.

What ‘Teeny’ Group Seminar Teach Us: Enhancing Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in Small Group Seminar through Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) and Anecdotal Pedagogy

Li Liu — 2023-11-24

This reflective study delves into the nuanced impact of varying class sizes on the pedagogy of teaching literary theories and explores the ways of improving diversity in different classroom settings. It is based on my comparative analysis of the outcomes from teaching two different sizes of small seminar groups previously: one with eleven students and one that had between two and four students in regular attendance (what I term as a ‘teeny group’). To empower students to better empathise with the racial and gender inequalities portrayed in theoretical texts, and to facilitate a friendly and open dialogue for students to share their own perspectives and experiences, I employ technological tools such as Padlet and Vevox as well as my own perspective as anecdotal pedagogy, namely, the inclusion of personal experience into teaching methods and contents. In doing so, I create an online platform to allow my students to share their opinions anonymously and visually and make use of my identity as an Asian woman to encourage underrepresented marginalised groups to get involved in discussions. This reflective piece draws on the article ‘‘Violating Pedagogy’ by Heather G. S. Johnson (2015) as a theoretical framework to demonstrate both the strengths and limitations of the teeny group in comparison with the normally small group and further to evaluate different pedagogic methods in advancing Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) from a unique perspective. In doing so, this article contemplates the optimal classroom sizes for effective teaching and examines how various pedagogical approaches counteract the differences in class sizes.

Advocating for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Postgraduate Pedagogies

Emmanuel Nwachukwu — 2023-11-23

I have come to the realization that equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) are critical components of a good postgraduate education. However, EDI can be difficult to achieve, especially in postgraduate pedagogies that are frequently characterized by hierarchies and power asymmetries. This review paper explores some strategies and practices that can be employed by postgraduate teachers to advance EDI in postgraduate pedagogies. These include: confronting unconscious bias, privilege, promoting representation and embracing students’ voices, and implementing support structures to address the unique challenges faced by students in postgraduate pedagogies. Furthermore, I will discuss the benefits of implementing an EDI-focused approach in postgraduate education. This will highlight how EDI can foster interdisciplinary collaboration and inclusive education system that will consequently lead to a more diverse and representative academic community, contributing to the development of inclusive practices in various professional fields beyond their institutions. The study uses secondary sources, such as journal articles and focused research findings on the topic. The sources used aim to highlight existing issues in postgraduate pedagogies as related to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion-EDI. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need for concerted efforts from postgraduate teachers to prioritize and advocate for EDI in postgraduate pedagogies, because an EDI-focused postgraduate education can become a catalyst for producing graduates that will contribute to the development of inclusive practices in various professional fields beyond their institutions, and this will truly reflect our diverse and multi-cultural society through the ideals of education.

Afterword: EDI and the PGR teacher experience: issues, opportunities and aspiring to an inclusive future in Higher Education

Sara Hattersley — 2023-11-23

PGR teacher ‘liminality’ is well documented, but when seen through the lens of equality, diversity and inclusion, the story becomes more nuanced. This Afterword looks through this lens, considering affordances, opportunities and issues arising for PGR teachers, thinking about their place in a sector which increasingly seeks inclusion. The author makes observations relating to recent institutional evidence and published literature, as well as considering how EDI can be most meaningfully understood in professional learning. She concludes with a celebration of PGR contributions to EDI and a stance that PGRs need to be central to the ambitions of inclusive University futures.

It is a privilege to be invited to write the Afterword for the JPPP, the third issue of this journal and, therefore, the third year of the Warwick Postgraduate Teaching Community (WPTC). Building on the eloquent contributions of our PGR authors in this issue, I would like to conclude with some thoughts about the wider context, the issues related to PGRs and equality, diversity and inclusion and how this fits with my own work, in professional learning.