A one minute video is created using PowerPoint with attention to colour, text, animation, and music. This video is shared with students to update them on new resources available on Moodle as well as upcoming teaching sessions. The intention of the video is to provide important information in a lively way, therefore working as an alternative to email. The videos are also personalised to include featured messages to encourage our students.

To support students when reviewing material, presentations are accompanied with an audio recording and transcript. During the pandemic, when video recording became more common, these were also accompanied with a transcript of the presentation. A transcript is important for inclusive and accessible learning as it allows students to read the presentation.

Dr Bryan Brazeau has a background in various cultural and linguistic academic settings, which has helped him devise this concept and subsequent pedagogical practise. The idea seeks to encourage learning across ‘neighbourhoods’ or linguistic boundaries. In an academic setting, this looks at tapping and utilising the existing pool of linguistic and cultural variation within the classroom on a given topic. Interdisciplinarity is at the heart of this practice tied with the idea of linguistic hospitality, coined by Paul Ricoeur, the notion of welcoming foreign cultures and languages into one’s own. This practice is very much in the embryonic stages, but presents the opportunity to take a different perspective on language in western education while merging the borders of subject-based teaching.

This is a very straightforward and easy practice: stay behind for a few minutes at the end of a lecture in case any students have any questions they’d like to ask individually.

Promoting student societies to help build a culture of student collaborative learning.

Students from a wide range of different backgrounds come together once a week to learn and/or practice different languages and partake in activities. This is an example of a session run by the Study Happy Team in the library.

This practice is aimed at using the natural resources that are provided within a classroom. The format of a classroom has a large contribution towards the culture and dynamic of the learning environment. Appropriate management of how staff and students interact in a given educational “place” – composed of physical space and its constructed meaning – is of great importance of both pedagogical efficacy, as well as student and staff wellbeing, including for the management of “social risks” such as professionally inappropriate interactions. Teachers should learn to think actively, though naturally, about how places will be used as they transition from one context to another. Attention should be given to reading the opportunities, limitations and risks that a given physical space and arrangement presents, with pre-emptive planning on how to maximise positive and minimise risk of negative experiences and outcomes. Particular consideration should be given to how power dynamics might playout in a given space, between staff and students, and students with one another. Practically, this pedagogy could be viewed by avoiding negative or unconstructive classroom set-ups.

Providing the choice of different kinds of assessments on different modules to enable students to choose a path that most suits them but also gives them variety. This can additionally involve creating assignments different from the traditional essay or exam. It hopes to relieve stress by spreading assignments throughout the year rather than having them all at the end.