The Challenges of Studying Joint Honours
I have encountered many different types of educative practice throughout my time at the University of Exeter. Being a joint honours student has widened this experience even more as each subject and lecturer has a different way of doing things. This is certainly an advantage of being part of two departments but sometimes it does make things more difficult, a lack of communication between departments has meant sometimes my learning is impacted in modules that are meant to encompass history and politics.
Looking back over my university experience these departments have different structures in how they conduct their teaching. For my history modules lectures and seminars are separate to provide key content before we become involved in discussing it later in the week in a seminar. From second year my politics modules had a different structure, lectures and a seminars were combined in a two hour session. This meant modules had smaller class sizes and are were a lot more personal but also had the downside of less time to process information before discussing it. I preferred this type of session, it was far easier to express an opinion and generally was a more relaxed environment.
Two different teaching methods that I have experienced in third year stand out in my memories, these teaching methods stood out to me as they both involved the use of questioning. The use of questions in learning is very important, they stimulate the recall of prior knowledge, promote comprehension and build critical-thinking skills. The first seminar structure is within a history seminar, for this students have one different question to answer every week, the second method of teaching took place in a politics seminar in which students lead one seminar across the whole term and have to produce questions on the specific topic of that week. All of the questions that were used were open questions, this is important because this opens up a discussion rather than people responding with simply a yes or no answer.
The key reason these modules and the way their seminars were structured stood out to me was that I enjoyed them.
As expected, these ways of structuring seminars had both positives and negatives. I knew a lot in the areas that I had to research in order to be able to present in both of these modules. This did increase the pressure within these classes, I enjoyed this knowing that the more work that I did the better this would be for my classmates. However, there is another side to this, for students that did not include much information in their answers to questions or their leading of the seminar this was damaging to mine and my classmates learning which was disappointing. For the history module for example there were multiple occasions where people didn’t turn up and we did not get the answer to a question, I never got the answer to question five on any week. This may not have majorly impacted my grade for the module, but it was annoying to say the least. For the politics module as participation was assessed everyone did turn up to their weeks leading seminars but I found it very easy to pay less attention when it was not your turn to lead.
The way questions were used differed between each module. In my history module we had to answer questions given to us whilst in my politics module we had to come up with the questions ourselves and ask the class. This was often a case of working backwards, knowing the content that should be discussed and coming up with a question to prompt discussion about it. Using open questions like this helped me to discuss ideas more openly with other students in my seminars, this was important because I remember in previous modules finding it difficult to totally engage in sessions where lecturers just talked. The student engagement in my sessions varied between modules but both had it to a degree than ensured knowledge and understanding of the content.
I wouldn’t say I really disliked either of the ways these seminars were structured, I found I knew more about my history module as I had one specific part of the content each week that I knew a lot about whilst for politics I was very knowledgeable on one week but knew less for the others. For those that dislike having to speak aloud neither of these teaching methods would be very successful, the politics module I took would be better for people like this as they would only have to speak aloud for one week rather than saying a little bit every week.
The key reason these modules and the way their seminars were structured stood out to me was that I enjoyed them. It could just be the level of detail necessary in third year but I knew more about these modules than any others I have taken in my three years of university, I was engaged and interested in the content and I think a great deal of this comes from the way in which open questions were used effectively.