Browsing Chalmers & Hunt (2021) “University teaching in focus: A learning-centred approach” as potential course literature

I’m browsing Chalmers & Hunt (2021) “University teaching in focus: A learning-centred approach” to explore it as one possible text book to give to participants in our “Introduction to teaching and learning at LTH” course, and here are some notes.

First: I do like the structure with four parts that focus on important themes: First on subject and curriculum design, then on subject teaching and learning, then the student, and lastly “your career”. But I am wondering how well a textbook (and that is how we would want to use it) works when all chapters are written by different authors. Will it be a coherent read or would you pick and choose the topics that are most relevant?

One example of where it is not as coherent as I would have liked is when talking about Bloom’s taxonomy, which is mentioned (but neither explained nor shown in any kind of graphic) in the first chapter, but then later in chapter 10, it is assumed that readers are familiar with Bloom and a simplified version is introduced. Also at least two different chapters work with lists of different C-words to structure their arguments, one with seven, one with four others.

What I do like about this first chapter, though, is that after giving an overview over a lot of theories, Figure 1.2 shows how we can use ideas from different theories together and use them as inspiration for designing instruction. And I really like the second chapter, “Designing subjects for deeper learning: practical research-based principles and guidelines“, it is super actionable in a pragmatic way. And I like that all chapters have “your thoughts” reflection questions sprinkled throughout.

One thing that is noticeable in many places is the focus on Australia. For example, chapter 12 is in “indigenous knowers and knowledge in university teaching”. It is super interesting to read, and a lot of it is transferable, for example the recommendation to co-teach to bring in multiple perspectives and create meaning shared between teachers (and students). But then a lot of it is also highly contextual, and I wonder if it is useful in our introductory course, or if it would be better to focus on the Swedish context first. On the other hand, it might be easier to read about something a bit further away from home and then make the transfer yourself?

In the last part of the book, “focus on your career“, we are introduced to SoTL (which is quite useful in the context of our introductory course, where students are supposed to do a SoTL project themselves), then the idea of quality teaching, and of building a career through teaching. I think that is an angle that is quite useful to our introductory course, both as a recruiting mechanism for later courses, and as motivation. But the last two chapters are, as many before, very much written from the Australian context and thus require some transfer for our participants in Sweden.

Browsing through the book, I am more and more wondering how we would want course participants to read the book. Currently, they receive a book as a gift, but apart from one or two activities where they are encouraged to look into the book along with reading other resources they can find on the internet, there is no instruction of what they should do with it, and no explanation for why we are giving them a book in the first place. I’ve been told that they can use it to look up concepts, but then wouldn’t most people do an internet search (or AI these days) before consulting a book? I really like the idea of giving them some object that carries meaning and reminds them of the course, but that might just as well be a nice folder to collect their pedagogical development certificates or other meaningful papers related to their teaching, or a mug with some important message. Why a book, and why a specific book? How about the choice of one out of several?

I was (still am!) quite critical of the book we are currently using, so let’s see what happens when I look for the parts (here with a document search rather than using the index — such is the advantage of having access to an pdf version of the book!) that I missed in that one.

• Learning styles — this book talks about them both in the introductory chapter on “understanding learning” and mentions them in the chapter on UDL. The introductory chapter mentions that there is criticism of the field because it is fragmented and of its usefulness for teaching, but not that they have been pretty much debunked.
• GenAI is obviously not included in this one (artificial intelligence is, though!), since it was published in 2021, so before the launch of ChatGPT. Maybe that is not such a big deal these days since we have many good (and constantly updated in reaction to new developments and teacher questions, which of course a book wouldn’t be able to do) resources available, for example on AiGORA? But still, this is an important gap to keep in mind.
• democracy/democratic — these terms appear in several places, both as a vision for education in general and specifically as motivation for co-creation of learning
• equity — equity is explored both in the context of digital equity and in that of inclusive teaching
• responsibility — mostly explored in relation to co-creation
• sustainability — appears in case examples and as an example for why we need to use more than one disciplinary lens to address problems of our time
• competency — word is used, but not explained or explored
• ethics — used in the context of academic and research integrity
• academic freedom — this is actually interesting: Academic freedom is never really introduced, but it is discussed in the context of academic integrity: “Within a discipline, there can be discussions and debates about how academic integrity is enacted. For example, one professor of world languages might prohibit the use of translation tools entirely, while another might encourage their use. Although considerations for academic freedom are part of the embedded fabric of higher education, these must be balanced with student learning needs. It can be confusing for students to hear from one professor that using particular approaches or tools is unethical, only to be told by another professor in the same discipline that using them is innovative and encouraged.” Of course it depends on what level students we are talking about, but at a university level (which this book has in the title), I believe that students should absolutely be confronted with different ways of enacting academic integrity and that that IS exactly meeting their learning needs!

So in a nutshell: While I really enjoyed browsing this book, I don’t think I would recommend it as textbook for our introductory course. And I think we need to figure out why we even want to give out a textbook before we decide on which one…

Chalmers, D., & Hunt, L. (Eds.). (2021). University teaching in focus: A learning-centred approach. Routledge. (LU employees have access to the electronic version here)