Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE

Reflections on Collaborating with SEN Experts

Author: Keith Crome

Journal Title: Discourse

ISSN: 2040-3674

ISSN-L: 1741-4164

Volume: 6

Number: 1

Start page: 51

End page: 61

Return to vol. 6 no. 1 index page

Introduction

At the beginning of the 2005/6 academic year I was invited by the Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies to participate in a focus group considering the possibility of running a project that would look at developing and implementing a range of pedagogic strategies that would help to meet the needs of students with special educational needs (SEN) studying philosophy in higher education. As it was initially conceived, the idea of the proposed project was to specifically address the issues involved in teaching dyslexic students. The aim was to allow philosophy lecturers and SEN experts to collaborate in developing and implementing dedicated pedagogic strategies that would both enrich SEN students' educational experience and enhance their academic performance.

The initial focus group meeting was held at the University of Manchester in November 2005. It was agreed that the proposed project should be taken forward. The educationalists who were part of the focus group would work with academics from the lead institutions, myself included, in developing and putting into practice a variety of methods of teaching aimed at enhancing academic achievement. In addition, it was agreed that we would attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of the methods we devised in achieving this goal.

The experience of working closely with an educationalist was new to me, and from discussions I have had with colleagues, I believe it is not a common practice among academics. In what follows I offer some reflections on the process, which for this reason I hope will be of some interest and that will complement the report 'Enriching Academic Achievement among Philosophy Students with Diverse Learning Needs' also included in this edition of Discourse.

1. My interest in the project

My initial interest in the project and motivation for attending the focus group stemmed from the concern that my own teaching could better address the needs of dyslexic students. Moreover, I felt that were it to do so, this would not detract from, but rather improve, the experience of all students.

Certainly, like all universities, my university offers dyslexic students a comprehensive range of support. It has a Student Learning Support Unit that is able to assess the type and degree of dyslexia that an individual student diagnosed with the condition has, and that gives advice both to the student concerned and the academics who teach him or her. In addition, each faculty has a dedicated Student Support Officer who is available to help all students manage their learning.

Whenever a student is diagnosed as dyslexic the academics that teach them are provided with a report, which advises on the best practice for teaching and assessing the student's work. However, whilst I have never discounted such advice, I frequently have the feeling that the advice is not subject specific but generic, since it is not specifically addressed to philosophy lecturers, but to all lecturers whom the student will be taught by. For example, the advice will frequently stipulate that it is necessary to place less emphasis on correct spelling, punctuation and the articulation of an argument when assessing the student's work than would otherwise be the case. Whilst it is obviously possible to disregard the former elements when marking a philosophy essay, the organisation of an argument is an integral element of doing philosophy, and it is difficult to see with any ease how to place less emphasis on this aspect of a philosophy assignment and still make a fair judgement of the work's merit.

The same can be said of the positive advice that is frequently made concerning teaching and learning strategies. These too are often generic in nature and my concern as a philosophy teacher is to implement strategies that are tailored to teaching philosophy. Again, the university frequently offers academics a number of courses which aim to promulgate best practice in teaching students with special educational needs. It is probably best not to generalise here, but I have not attended such courses in the past since at the time my part-time contract with the university effectively precluded me from attending, as it was necessary for me to meet other obligations outside of my academic work.

What was different about this project, and what led me to want to attend the initial meeting and then to participate in the project itself, was that it offered both the opportunity to work with a SEN expert to develop subject-specific learning and teaching strategies and with other academics working in philosophy at different institutions, sharing their own experience and best practices.

2.The focus group meeting

The focus group meeting took place at the University of Manchester and was attended by myself, lecturers from the University of Central Lancaster and Lancaster University, two SEN specialists and two members of the Subject Centre for PRS. Underpinning the day's activities and discussions were a number of key principles, detailed in the companion article to this, concerning the definition of dyslexia, the understanding of teaching and learning as a process with various component aspects that should be utilised in pedagogic practice, and the recognition that, as practising academics, we have an acquired range of learning skills, which, because they are deeply sedimented, we are prone to take for granted. As a result, it was generally agreed by all those present what we should seek to do was develop ways of improving dyslexic students' reading and writing skills. In this section, I want to reflect on two aspects of the meeting that I found particularly instructive, one practical and one theoretical.

To take the latter first; one of the most important insights was furnished by what the SEN experts referred to as the shift from a descriptive definition to an operational definition of dyslexia and the consequent change in the approach to the condition on the part of educationalists. The shift is important and instructive, in as much as it entails a corresponding shift in the approach to teaching dyslexic students. As I understand it, although descriptive definitions of dyslexia have been of many different varieties, classically, common to all such descriptions was the attribution to the individual of a learning deficiency. Beginning from this definition, these deficiencies have been seen as the root cause of inhibited learning and failure of achievement. An operational definition of dyslexia, however, focuses on 'the operations or procedures by which the construct of learning disabilities can be recognised and measured'.1 Adopting an operational definition of dyslexia has, consequently, encouraged educationalists to look at the way in which dyslexic students are taught, and identify specific pedagogic practices and strategies that will improve the educational experience for such students. Moreover — and this is why I personally find the shift important — by focusing on effective teaching strategies, e.g. providing a clear statement of the objectives of a lesson, setting guided reading tasks for short extracts from texts, using visual supports in lectures to provide orientation and memory triggers, it is not just dyslexic students who stand to benefit, but all students.

Certainly, as I remarked above, there is perhaps little question as to the benefits provided by such an approach in terms of improving the learning and teaching experience for students. However, if there is a problem, in the first instance it is in the perhaps implicit supposition that an improvement in this area will be met by a corresponding improvement in performance in typical philosophy assessments, such as the essay or written exam, on the part of students. To put this another way, such measures may indeed help to encourage all students to prepare for lectures and seminars and participate in seminar work, and I doubt that there is any academic who would not welcome this. However, whilst such preparation and participation may indeed form a precondition to the student performing successfully in assessments, in so far as they will have a better understanding of material they have read before and discussed in a seminar than material they have not, it was not so clear to me at the time of the meeting, how such a precondition would be translated into success.

Of course, this is not meant as a fatal criticism, and not only because I recognise the intrinsic value of adopting and continually refining such pedagogic strategies. However, in so far as I am concerned to help my students realise their academic potential, then it was this potential problem that interested me. Accordingly, it was just this matter that I hoped would be clarified in practice by the collaborative project that emerged from the initial focus group meeting.

The second aspect of the meeting that was of interest is connected with one of the first practical exercises that we were asked to undertake by the SEN experts who also attended the meeting. For this exercise we were asked to partner one other person. One of the team was provided with a set of written instructions that he or she read to the other, directing them to move in a certain way, e.g. 1) turn to your right and take two steps forward; 2) turn anti-clockwise 90 degrees and take two steps in the direction you were initially facing at the start; and soon. The person reading the instructions was also provided with a map, illustrating the movements the other person should be making. It was necessary to complete the whole exercise within a fixed period of time; let us say two minutes. The aim of the exercise, I take it, was to draw our attention to the difficulty, in certain contexts, of understanding information and instruction relayed in auditory form, as, for example, it might be in a philosophy lecture.

If that were indeed the purpose of the exercise, it worked, and I think everyone who was present gained a concrete appreciation of the point. However, beyond that, what struck me was that among people I did not know, the task was made much more challenging. I was nervous and felt inhibited in case I made a mistake, particularly since as an academic — and a philosophy academic at that — I supposed that the expectation generally would be that I should be able to quickly comprehend abstract instructions. Whether or not it was also an aim of the exercise, it led me to appreciate that as teachers, we not only have to attempt the difficult task of either recalling the difficulty we had engaging with the same material ourselves when we were undergraduates or, if not, imagining what the difficulties might be of encountering such material with little or no knowledge of philosophy. We also have to appreciate that often we are in a familiar environment and surrounded by colleagues we know well, and even if that is not the case, we have been in education for a long time, and are familiar with the ways and demands of higher education. For me, in this instance, the displacement was slight, but in itself that was enough to make the task more difficult for me than it would otherwise have been. For new students, the displacement is much greater, and it is necessary to keep that in mind not only when planning lessons and activities, but generally when we ask or expect students to talk in seminars.

3.The watch and learn visits

After the initial focus group meeting the two educationalists involved in the project visited MMU and observed teaching in a lecture and seminar on a first year course, 'Existentialism, Literature and Style'. The purpose of the visit was to recommend possible strategies to improve teaching and learning, including the structure and format of both lectures and seminar as well refinements to the supporting information such as the unit document supplied to students.

I met with both educationalists prior to the lecture and provided them with the unit documentation, discussed the overall aims of the unit, the type and extent of the material taught and outlined what I thought were some of the demands that the course made on students. In particular, the course requires students to read a relatively large number of texts in the first term, although the reading is staged in terms of length and complexity, beginning with a short, introductory essay on existentialism by the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y. Gasset and concluding with three weeks spent studying Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea.

After our discussion, the educationalists sat in on a lecture and two seminars. As an aside, it is perhaps worth remarking that in contrast to other times when my teaching has been observed, I did not find their presence particularly inhibitive, since I did not feel as if I were being assessed or judged in terms of my competence. Rather, what was at issue was the actual process of teaching and learning and how it might be improved, and this was something that was to be arrived at by a process of discussion between myself and them. Following the observational sessions it was decided that the most radical improvement in teaching for dyslexic students would be to adopt the use of PowerPoint in lectures, with the aim of making the structure of the lecture itself more transparent to students and to introduce pictures and diagrams in addition to written slides. In seminars, it was suggested that the use of a scribe would help dyslexic students, who sometimes find it difficult to follow a discussion and take notes simultaneously.

Despite discussion about these recommendations, I was initially sceptical about employing PowerPoint in lectures. Certainly, like most, if not all academics, I have long been aware that lectures have the potential to be somewhat boring. In January of this year the Guardian reported that Oxford University was considering requiring students to sign a legally binding contract that would compel them to attend lectures,2 and followed this news by asking notable academics what they thought of lectures. As I recall, the responses were, if not of one voice, at least nearly so, most of the respondents recalling with dismay their own experiences. And it is not that I regard the traditional lecture format of one person discoursing on a particular topic for an hour, leavened only by him or her occasionally turning to the board to write in not always legible script the name of a particular philosopher or philosophical text, as a rite of passage, a torture that I had to endure and that my students should endure in their turn. If I had doubts about using PowerPoint it was principally because I had: a) never attended a lecture in which I found its use to be of any benefit to me and b) as a consequence I had, in fact, always found it to be extraneous to the process of following the lecture and thus at best a bit of nuisance and at worst a complete distraction.

However, the experience of using PowerPoint confounded my expectations. That is not to say that my PowerPoint lectures were particularly expert; quite the opposite was the case. Nevertheless, I followed the educationalists' advice and prepared slides which made explicit the structure of the lectures, which incorporated pictures or photographs of the philosophers I was discussing, and used visual images to illustrate points I wanted to make. The majority of students on the course responded favourably to the use of PowerPoint, saying that it facilitated their appreciation of the lecture. Moreover, I was able to observe how the slides would act as a trigger, encouraging students to make notes of what they now saw to be key points (that is not to say that they did not write down what I would have written on the board, but that I had no way of seeing whether they were doing so or not). Furthermore, using PowerPoint gave me greater flexibility to develop points, since as the structure of the lecture was clearly set by the slides, I felt that I could elaborate when I needed to, without losing track of where I was.

I have concentrated on reporting my experience of using PowerPoint not because I have suffered a Damascene conversion, renouncing my former hostility to technology in order to embrace it with a corresponding zeal; rather, I have had to do so, because at the time, of all the recommendations that we agreed should be tried, this was the one that at the time was practical to implement and which did have a quite dramatic effect on teaching and learning. Certainly, before the project, I would have striven to avoid telling students about the biographies of the philosophers they were required to study, limiting myself to mentioning their dates of birth and death and the names and dates of their important work, lest I was overwhelmed by essays that began by relating the same biographies back to me. I am still reluctant to indulge in biographical excursions, but I do see the benefit in showing students a PowerPoint slide of a portrait of Descartes. This is not only because such a picture may act a visual reference point for those who find it easier to learn through a mix of visual and auditory stimuli, but also because seeing a portrait of Descartes is a relatively quick and striking way of bringing home the historical distance between him and us, a difference which, in my view, it is necessary to appreciate in order to understand parts, if not all, of The Meditations.

4. Follow-up

In preparation for this academic year, I have, however, been able to introduce more of the changes that the two educationalists and I discussed during their visits. I have decided to make mention of this here because not only does it indicate that I found participating in the project to be of value, but also because some of these changes touch upon a matter that I was not really able to address through the changes I made last year.

As I said above (see section 1), one of my initial motivations for participating in the project was to investigate the ways in which subject-specific initiatives could be developed to help dyslexic students not only in teaching and learning but also in writing essays. As I have also said (see section 2) whilst attention to the various methods of teaching and learning may indeed form a condition for an improvement in students' performance in written assessments, it was not clear to me that it would of itself lead automatically to such an end. In addition, what I felt was needed was the development of more direct ways of teaching reading and in particular writing skills. I have always maintained that teaching such skills requires practice, for just as one does not learn to swim except by swimming, one learns to read by reading and to write by writing. At MMU we have always placed great emphasis on reading texts with students, and this is something that I do spend time doing in seminars as a matter of course. Teaching writing skills, however, seems to be much harder, at least at a practical level. The problem is that unless seminar groups are small, doing this would appear to be a particularly time-consuming task and would lead to yet further increases in work loads for lecturers.

This year, I have developed WebCT areas supporting the courses that I teach. This is, in part, a result of the discussions that I had with the educationalists. However, it is also in part a consequence of the success that I have had using PowerPoint, since I am now more confident in the pedagogic value of IT based resources. In addition to presenting unit information, a list of reading sources and web-based materials on the WebCT course areas, I have composed a number of model essays, which are accompanied by a plan and commentary explaining how I have structured the essay and built up an argument, selected quotes and made use of secondary sources. This I hope will provide students with a resource that they will be able to use, and not copy, to develop their own writing skills. In addition to this, I now require one student from each seminar to keep a record of the seminar, which I then post on the WebCT site. This exercise is not assessed, and in addition to forming a record of what was said in the seminars, it allows me to look at a small example of a student's writing on an individual basis, week by week, and advise them on how to improve the structure of their work.

I have yet to determine whether and to what degree this will impact positively not only on students' experience but on their level of attainment. However, I intend to monitor and compare attainment this year on all the courses that I teach against attainment last year on the same courses, in order to develop some idea of the impact these developments have. Doing this is facilitated by the ability to see which sites students use on a WebCT area. Thus, in addition to the usual surveys monitoring student satisfaction, I hope to be able to gain a reasonable indication of the impact of these measures on student performance.

5. Conclusion

Undoubtedly for me the process of working with SEN experts has been informative and beneficial. It is something that I doubt I would have undertaken on my own, for despite the fact that the university at which I teach frequently offers such help, given the constraints on my time, I was sceptical as to the value of what I supposed would be generic advice for tackling the difficulties specific to the discipline of philosophy. Certainly, some of the advice offered by the educationalists attached to the project was generic, and amounted simply to a reminder of what constituted good teaching practice. However, beyond that the process of working closely with them has allowed me to think about the way in which I teach in different ways and made me aware of the value of using different approaches. Whilst I was not able to address directly the specific problem which underlay my initial interest in the project concerning the development of writing skills within the time frame of the project itself, it was nevertheless an issue that was recognised as important by all those who attended the final feedback meeting and one which I hope I have begun to address through the changes I have introduced into courses this year.

Bibliography

Endnotes

  1. H. Lee Swanson, 'Operational Definitions and Learning Disabilities: An Overview' in Learning Disability Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 4, Operational Definitions and Learning Disabilities (Autumn, 1991), pp. 242-254, p. 242.
  2. See The Guardian, 31st January 2006, 'Oxford Lecture Attendance Could Become Legal Requirement'.

Return to vol. 6 no. 1 index page

This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.

-
The British Association for the Study of Religions
The Religious Studies Project