Abstract
In Australia, students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds are persistently underrepresented across higher education and within the discipline of English. How do we harness our expertise as teachers and as students of narrative – the art of storytelling – to reverse a tendency for our discipline to enforce the narrowing of the cohort of students that decide to study at our university?
This paper describes the work done since 2012 by colleagues in the English Department of The University of Sydney to change the profile of its undergraduate student body. It presents a case study learning module (on To Kill a Mockingbird) delivered to a highly diverse classroom within an ‘outreach’ program that aims to create links with diverse sets of students through the texts we teach or study in our classrooms.
The paper considers what it means to conduct ‘effective teaching’ and ‘effective engagement’ in this context of cultural and institutional incongruence (Devlin 2013). It reflects the program's successful strategies for engagement that recommend the seeking of “spaces where multiple knowledges can coexist” (Sefa Dei 2008) and puts forth a potential framework through which to approach such spaces: Jacques Rancière’s (1987) "the minimal link of a thing in common".
This paper describes the work done since 2012 by colleagues in the English Department of The University of Sydney to change the profile of its undergraduate student body. It presents a case study learning module (on To Kill a Mockingbird) delivered to a highly diverse classroom within an ‘outreach’ program that aims to create links with diverse sets of students through the texts we teach or study in our classrooms.
The paper considers what it means to conduct ‘effective teaching’ and ‘effective engagement’ in this context of cultural and institutional incongruence (Devlin 2013). It reflects the program's successful strategies for engagement that recommend the seeking of “spaces where multiple knowledges can coexist” (Sefa Dei 2008) and puts forth a potential framework through which to approach such spaces: Jacques Rancière’s (1987) "the minimal link of a thing in common".
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | International Society for the Scholarsip of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) 2016 |
| Subtitle of host publication | Telling the Story of Teaching and Learning: Exploring What Works, When, How and Why |
| Place of Publication | Los Angeles, CA |
| Publisher | Loyola Marymount University |
| Pages | 15 |
| Number of pages | 1 |
| Publication status | Published - 13 Oct 2016 |