Dr Bryan Brazeau (SFHEA) Senior Teaching Fellow in Liberal Arts, has recently been successful in securing funding from the Warwick International Higher Education Academy (WIHEA).

The funding will enable the creation of bridging materials to support students with the transition from first year to second year. These materials will be used in the upcoming academic year and in future years too.

Bryan will be leading a team of Liberal Arts students—Sara Mahmud-Marshall, Paula Strubel, Magdalena Breyer, and Hannah Davenport— to co-create online bridging materials. The team will also be in consultation with staff in the Liberal Arts Department to see the sorts of bridging materials that will be most useful between first and second year.

“The step from first to second year is already a challenging one under normal circumstances, and this transition has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. Many of our first-year students will not have engaged in academic activities since the end of Term 2 (mid-March). The prospect of returning to full engagement in the new academic year may well be daunting to them.

The bridging materials we create will thus have two key aims: to consolidate the many skills that students have developed in year one of their Liberal Arts course and to empower them to deploy these skills effectively as they enter their second year of study. We also hope that the project will showcase the encouraging academic and pastoral support that is available for rising first-year students from our wonderful Liberal Arts community."

Dr Bryan Brazeau

Bryan is a current fellow of WIHEA and was selected based on his commitment to contributing to teaching and learning at Warwick. To date, he has been involved in sharing teaching practices and pedagogy through WIHEA workshops. You can find out about Bryan’s most recent workshop on transviciniar learning, based on the intersections of multilingual and interdisciplinary teaching, here. 

Bryan is also co-directing another funded WIHEA project with Dr Rebecca Stone around student perceptions of digital assessment in the Faculty of Arts at Warwick. This project (which also involves a student co-creation team) aims to create resource materials for both students and staff as part of the Digital Arts Lab.

In his role as Co-Lead of the WIHEA Internationalisation Learning Circle, Bryan is also working with colleagues from across the University to compile a guidance document for staff around the ongoing challenges faced by international students during this crisis.