Students entering Higher Education are coming into a new and unfamiliar environment, and many do not yet know what it means to be a University student. With increasingly large class sizes, it may not be possible for a lecturer to tailor material to a diverse audience, where each individual has their own prior experiences of learning and their own assumptions about what it means to be a student in Higher Education. But it might be possible for lecturers to consider ways of inducting students into programmes by:
"In the first year, I got information from books and then dictated essays to my wife. But then we had a baby, and there was no way of keeping that going! I had to stop dictating!"
"You get good lecturers who are dead keen for students. But some of them won't even give you help with which bits are relevant and which bits are not."
It could help staff during the induction period to find out what students' conceptions and experiences of learning are. It could also help to know what their conceptions about the particular discipline are. Devising activities to draw out this information early in the course could be time well spent. However, induction into a subject is not something that happens in the first few days at University. As the programme of study develops, students may benefit from the ongoing attention of teaching staff to the above list of considerations, as students engage with different subjects within the programme and with different activities within one subject. Students who are well inducted into the process of maximising their participation in lectures may need new and different induction into the different learning environment of a placement.
Clear pre-entry information on how learning and teaching will be organised can help students to develop new strategies for tackling the range of tasks appropriate for different methods. The induction period can provide useful opportunities for all students to test out their existing strategies, some of which are likely to need refinement in some teaching settings. By attending to the above list of ways of inducting students, many students, including those with impairments, are likely to be helped into the new environment of teaching.
An induction process which clarifies for all students the relative responsibilities of teacher and student, which creates an atmosphere of open experimentation where all students can be open about what they see as barriers to their learning, and which begins the work of helping students to develop effective learning strategies, is likely to go far towards helping all students.
While many students with impairments may well need no induction additional to what is generally helpful for all students, for others there are different considerations.
"I remember when I first arrived. Being in a hearing environment, it is very difficult."
Some students who have impairments will need assistive technology or the services of an educational support worker to help them access the curriculum. There may be a complexity about the interplay of individuals' teaching styles, new subject matter, physical characteristics of rooms and the use of equipment or educational support which combine to make the induction process even more experimental than it will be for all students.
Staff can help greatly by spending time with students in order to gain an understanding of the need and role of the student's equipment or educational support worker in their proposed study strategy. Students will benefit from help in relating their study strategies to the known demands of the course or discipline as it is delivered. Staff and student will need to collaborate over techniques, which require staff to learn new ways of teaching, as students learn new ways of learning.
"I took copious notes on my computer, but I wasn't sure if I would ever go back to them or not. The good thing is that once you have made these notes, you can search for a key word. I remember a lecturer going through a past paper and saying he hadn't done much on civic virtue. I went home and did a search and found four or five points on civic virtue. We all have coping strategies."
Staff as well as students would have to learn how to use a sign language interpreter in lectures; staff and student would jointly need to agree on what is to happen if lip-reading becomes impossible.
"Dr ... has a beard and moustache. But the very first lecture I went to, I introduced myself, and said, 'You know, I'm deaf. Would you remember to look at the class?' ... and he remembered that, because the next day he came up to me and gave me some notes. So that was really helpful."Staff who use visual material or demonstrations in lectures would need advice from a student who is blind on how they can verbalise that information, or make it available in some other way.
Next: Lectures
Copyright: The University of Strathclyde 2000
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