Minutes of the Sustainable Development 2A Tutorial Representatives
Meeting
nd
2 of November 2012 at 12 noon
Meeting Room 3, CMB
Present:
Elizabeth Bomberg - Course Organiser and Co-Chair
Radhika Govinda - Course Organiser and Co-Chair
Sarah Lang - Group One Rep
Rebecca Bamlett - Group Two Rep
Chiara Zaccheo - Group Three Rep
Roisin O’Fee - Course Secretary (minutes)
Introduction and Welcome
Feedback:
- Sarah and Chiara: Reported that none of the students completed the feedback survey
they issued.
- Chiara: Got some feedback from her group but feels it was slightly rushed.
- Sarah and Rebecca: Report good amount of feedback from their groups, people had
stayed behind after the class to discuss points.
Tutorials:
- Rebecca: Group thinks that tutorials could be used to pull together and assess theory
from lectures, rather than new case studies. There are not clear links between the case
studies and the theories, and some students feel they are missing the general priorities
or points.
- Sarah: Group was very positive about the tutorial format and liked the case studies.
- Chiara: Positive feedback. Group felt comfortable with each other and there was a
good atmosphere in tutorials.
- All Reps: Agreed Gill was popular and a good tutor and tutorials got positive
feedback.
- Rebecca: It also worked very well when Elizabeth and Radhika took over tutoring
for a week. Students in her group felt Radhika had encouraged critical thinking very
well.
- Sarah: Agrees. They pushed people to elaborate on comments.
- Chiara: Agrees. Students are in second year now and so should be pushed to go in
to more detail.
- Sarah: Elizabeth summarised the main points at the end of the tutorial, which
worked very well.
- Elizabeth: It is very useful to summarise and draw out the conclusions or main
points of the discussion at the end. Course is very wide ranging and needs to be
linked up. The tutor or the students can do this.
- All Reps: Agree. Would help to get into the habit of pulling everything together.
- Elizabeth and Radhika: Told the Reps they had been very impressed with the
students in the tutorials. They both enjoyed tutoring very much and thought it had
helped them to connect with the students.
- All Reps: Agree. Everyone enjoyed the change in style.
- Elizabeth: Will try to ensure the underlying principles of the case studies in tutorials
and lectures are made clear. Will ask other lecturers to do this.
Course Content:
- Chiara: SUDs lecture was not very popular with students. It was too case study
heavy and they would have liked a lecture on Natural Science, considering it is such
an important part of the course. This would be especially important for the
Geography track students.
- Sarah: Suggest it would be better to have more lectures per perspective addressed,
but says there were no perspectives that her group had felt could be cut to allow time
for this. The lecture on religion was not quite as popular as the others.
- Chiara: Disagrees, her group enjoyed the religious lecture.
- Elizabeth: Agrees with Reps that the balance between perspectives and issues could
work better. Convenors will reflect on this and try to reorganise. Several ideas
include separating perspectives and issues in to separate courses, or an alternating
lecture structure with perspective followed by issues followed by perspective, etc.
- Radhika: Agrees. Both are open to a restructure and would like more feedback on
this. Points out there is already a big change from last year as lectures are now
grouped in to units according to identified key themes, rather than all lectures being
separate.
- Sarah: Group suggested a year long course to accommodate all perspectives and
issues.
- Elizabeth: Unfortunately not possible – students still need to do the compulsory
Semester 2 courses.
- Sarah: Thinks the compulsory courses for the Sustainable Development program are
very broad
- Elizabeth: This would be good to bring up at the degree program meeting at the end
of November.
- Elizabeth: Many people are late to the classes. Will also ask for this to be brought
up in tutorials.
- All Reps: Agree, not sure why but think people are maybe coming from other
classes.
- Chiara: Lecture on Food Culture was very popular.
- Sarah and Rebecca: Agree. Dr Knight explicitly tied the content of her lecture to
the previous perspectives and lectures. Made it very relevant to their understanding of
the course.
- Elizabeth: Lecture themes are decided before hand, and some are better than others
at tying in their themes with the rest of the course. Says convenors can encourage this
much more and will use the Food Culture example. Will ask lecturers to include
slides outlining their main points and showing how they link up with everything else.
Assessment:
- Chiara: Group thought the essay questions were good.
- Sarah: Her group didn’t like the questions. They felt they were too broad.
- Rebecca: Agrees with Sarah; she felt her answer was too general because of the
question.
- Sarah: Some students liked the idea of contrasting and comparing two different
perspectives but some felt they could have written the whole essay on one perspective
and found the word count did not allow them enough room.
- Rebecca: Agrees.
- Elizabeth: Agrees that some combinations of perspectives are easier to synthesise
than others.
- Rebecca: Essay pulls the course together very well and students are encouraged to
read more widely because they know it is needed for the essay.
However, thought it would have helped to have more readings listed for the Rio +20
question, just as a guideline of where to start.
- Sarah and Chiara: Agree.
- Sarah: Thinks there is a good amount of readings for SD2A. 1A had too many
readings listed and they never managed to work through them all.
- Elizabeth: Can make sure that key readings are linked with lecture topics and essay
questions. However, students must be aware that they need to go beyond these
readings. In other courses that do this there can be very little variation in the essays
because everyone is reading the same things.
- Sarah: Suggests that even just one background reading for each would help,
especially for new topics such as Rio +20.
- Rebecca: Suggests that students could do case studies in readings instead of
lectures, which would also help tie ideas together.
- Elizabeth: Agrees. Will consider this.
- Elizabeth: Do the Reps feel there would be a better kind of assessment?
- Chiara: Students would like a tutorial participation mark.
- Sarah and Rebecca: Agree. Students do a lot of extra work and have presentations
in tutorials and they would like their efforts reflected in their grades.
- Radhika: Says she saw this when she tutored for a week. She was very impressed
with how interactive the tutorials were, even without students being marked on it!
- Chiara: There is a tutorial participation mark in Geography and this encourages
people to get involved and speak more.
- Elizabeth: There is a concern that people will be more careful about what they say if
they are being marked and the discussion won’t be as free.
- All Reps: Think students should be graded on speaking, but not on what they say,
just on taking part.
Timing of Assessments:
- Sarah: Suggested course organisers could ask students at the start of the semester
when they would like the essay deadline to be.
- Elizabeth: This would be very difficult to do as preparations need to be made in
advance; the start of semester is too late to be deciding this. It also might be difficult
to get everyone to agree.
Suggests that if students have three essay deadlines at once, just make one a week
earlier.
- Sarah: Then material may be missed out of the essay.
- Radhika: Agrees but points out that the readings can be done in advance of classes
being held.
- Elizabeth: Most people seemed to manage to meet the deadline this time, so not too
much of an issue.
Other Comments:
- Radhika: LEARN discussion forums are not really being used.
- Rebecca: Agrees. Hasn’t really seen it being used on any courses.
- Radhika: Reminds students it doesn’t need to be a ‘discussion’ as such – it can be
used to post links or information about events that others might find useful.
- Elizabeth: Use of the forums needs to be established early – perhaps a compulsory
exercise could be introduced at the beginning to teach and encourage people to use it.
- Sarah: This could be part of the tutorial assessment.
- Elizabeth: Agrees. This has worked well in other courses. Will consider it.
- Elizabeth: Exam will be on the 14th of December. Questions are still to be finalised
but will be on perspectives and issues. The final lecture will go over this and the
tutorial groups will take part in an interactive review of the course to aid revision.
Conclusion and Thanks
Meeting closed at 1pm.