Personal Blogs

Been a busy week and will continue to be a busy week.

Attended a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning workshop on Monday afternoon as I have an idea for a potential eSTEeM project. I have a name of a person I can contact. Planning to do that next week probably. Need to kick things off as the pre-proposal submission time for the next round of projects opens around Christmas time and finishes in February and I won't have an awful lot of time then. If allowed to do my project I would need to be granted an Additional Duties Contract, which will be competitive - I get the impression every single HE institution is tightening its belt, and whilst the OU (to my untrained eye) seems to be doing OK, it does mean they're not going to splash the cash willy-nilly, so it's by no means certain that I would be green-lighted to run an eSTEeM project. The smaller (and cheaper) the better apparently.

Tuesday morning I had a talk with the FHEA person (whose precise job role escapes me). Apparently my husband is correct and my autistic catastrophisation and black-and-white thinking is in error here. My application is very strong actually. There is actually very little I need to do. An FHEA 'revise and resumbit' is very much the similar to a 'revise and resubmit' for an academic paper. But I had plenty of questions about the resubmission process and how to go about the mechanics of resubmitting and now I understand.

And then straight after that I attended the OU's Equitable Outcomes and Challenge Day. Which is main reason for this blog post. I attended a bunch of sessions and wanted to get my thoughts down while I remember.

There was a session on passive withdrawal - the OU is open to anyone regardless of prior experience, which is great, but we're also a distance learning institution. So if a student starts struggling it may not be obvious. I also have some of my students that never interact with me. I can refer them to SST all I like - but if a student really doesn't want to interact with me or the OU there is very little I can do. They made some suggestions, many of which I am trying to do - particularly around the start of term, but it emphasised the importance of continuing to be proactive in interactions with students.

Then there was a session on the OU's student interns and all the value they bring to creating and improving courses. It was mentioned that there is an power imbalance between students and staff and many students come to the OU with negative experiences of education. I find it too easy to forget that I'm in a position of power. I mean the title of this blog is The Accidental Associate Lecturer. That isn't imposter syndrome. People who have imposter syndrome are highly qualified and are expecting to be found out as fraudulent. My peers all have PhDs or are studying for PhDs or dropped out of PhDs - like, the FHEA advisor I spoke to said doing this revision work on my application was just like finishing of your PhD, doing that last push to complete. And I understand the analogy logically, but not experientially. And everyone around me acts like doing a PhD is normal and expected. Or at least you have a PGCE - and I don't have one of those either. No, I don't have imposter syndrome. I am fully aware that I am not like my peers at the OU.

Anyway I have digressed massively. The academic leading the talk mentioned that tutor vulnerability was known to be important and a rich area for study, so that was interesting. And validates my massive oversharing. Ho hum.

There was a really useful talk on getting more students to read their TMA feedback. I like to share about how I hate it too when I get feedback on pieces of assessment or am monitored as an AL. But you can't improve if you don't read it. And I give detailed instructions in the forum on how to access the feedback, because as I found out when doing H880, it isn't particularly obvious where TMA feedback is found. They showed us how to find out if students had read their feedback. So I shall now be able to chase up students who haven't checked their feedback yet.

And last but by no means least was a session given a very click-baity title of Snog, Marry, Avoid. I'm not sure what relevance that had to the sexy topic area of student checklists, but there you go. Turns out that about half of the attendees in the session were called Kate so there's that too. I'm inferring nothing.

Yeah, so a couple of academics siad we should really provide checklists for students to use just before submitting TMAs. Things like have you included units for your calculations, have you run spell check, are you actually including your SM123 file (because so, so many try to send me their maths TMA instead). Strikes me as no-brainer stuff and I'm actually surprised this isn't already provided as standard - you know, along with all the booklets on disability and study skills that we have available on the website.

Interesting article on Wonkhe this morning about getting a better understanding on students' sense of belonging and how to understand it. Several useful articles linked for me to follow up when I'm not so busy marking regarding qualitative research methods and their use in assessing students' wellbeing and belonging.

For me, a massive light bulb moment was hearing Dr Brene Brown (of the vulnerability TED talk fame) explain that belonging is the exact opposite of fitting in. Belonging requires transparency and authenticity and vulnerability. Which are the antithesis of the things we do when we are seeking to fit in with those around us. When we belong we are free to seek to find common ground, when we are trying to fit in we are hiding those parts of ourselves that we fear won't be accepted. 

And I keep thinking about the need to encourage belongingness as opposed to fitting in when it comes to my students. I'm thinking about the intersection of belonging and trauma-informed practice. About the need to promote safety and trustworthiness and empowerment and collaboration. Over the 3 and a bit years I've been here I've had many students who have disclosed PTSD and complex PTSD, autism (which as I mentioned before is highly associated with PTSD) and depression and anxiety. Given that a significant proportion of my students have some level of trauma before they begin with the OU, and those are just the ones that reveal that to me implementing better trauma-informed practices into my teaching and interaction with my students has got to be the right thing to do.

Anyway, on following up the references in a previously read paper, I've found a publication called Trauma-Informed Practices for Postsecondary Education: A Guide so lots for me to think about and act on.

I'm marking my students' first TMA this week. There's a group project really early on in SM123 and I decided to 'force' them into groups right from the start with the hope of getting them engaged and on-board and (if I'm honest) being a little manipulative and hoping that their sense of responsibility to their team members would give them the oomph to keep going and do the project and not drop out early on. That seems to have worked well, I have lots to mark.

I offered students the option right from week 1 - group or alternative activity (for those whose social anxiety was an impediment). The students were supposed to reply to my personalised email stating which they preferred. Well some of them are not talking to me. So for those I just decided to send them the alternative activity anyway. And you know what, some of them did it.

You see I decided to try it this way, this year, as I'd been thinking about the possible reason for students not interacting with me. I'd assumed that students who were not comfortable working in a group would be comfortable directly contacting me and saying they wanted to do the alternative. I assumed because I don't think of myself as scary that they wouldn't either. But I'm their tutor. I mark their work. I already have the qualification they're working for. Perhaps I am scary after all.

And this idea that maybe I am scary to a proportion of my students has really crystallized for me this week. Especially since I learned of my being blocked. I mean, it doesn't matter what the reason is - it's not the first time I've been unfriended and blocked on social media. I've known people who have lost jobs or whose marriages have broken down who have included me in a mass unfriending. When I announced my autism diagnosis on social media, a woman who had come to my wedding immediately blocked me. Humans rarely make sense, especially to autistics. What matters is our reactions to these events. Autistics feel the sting of social rejection much, much more fiercely and for much, much longer. Somebody else may have been blocked by the same person and just shrugged their shoulders. But I was already relunctant to reach out to people I actually know and hope don't hate me on social media sites before all this happened, so my reaction to that rejection was to just withdraw completely from LinkedIn. 

So I've been thinking I did the right thing in not assuming a lack of interaction from my students was due to a lack of interest. And the extra TMAs this time speak for themselves.

I've spent the morning following up all the references to the Opera Omnia that I found in the papers I've been reading and in A History of Magic and Experimental Science. Google Translate is remarkedly helpful as a quick and dirty tool to get a quick, skim read of content. Some of the areas I followed up weren't actually useful for the idea I currently have floating around in my head. Some subject areas are far too complicated. I mean, 15 volumes of Latin is enough to keep one academic busy for a couple of lives and a dozen PhDs.

My next task is to read through Dreyer's biography of Tycho: Tycho Brahe: A picture of scientific life and work in the sixteenth century (another book from the Internet Archive, I was not happy when that site was hacked) as I read that it gives a good overview of the Opera Omnia.

I finished 'reading' volume 6 of A History of Magic and Experimental Science - which is to say I read the entirety of the most important chapters and then used to search functionality of the Internet Archive to skim over other relevant passages in the rest of the book.

The next step is to take what I've read in HMES and look up the references in a primary (or at least closer to primary) source and for this I need J.L.E. Dreyer's help.

Dreyer is usually best known to astronomers as the compiler of the New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, so whenever you see a galaxy or nebula with a name that starts with NGC (such as NGC 2359, Thor's Helmet nebula), you can thank Dreyer.

Dreyer is useful to me as he also compiled a 15-volume set called Opera Omnia (also available in the Internet Archive) which contains all of Tycho Brahe's correspondence and publications that Dreyer was able to source. Beyond the HUGE length of the work, another massive obstacle is that it is (as far as I can tell) entirely in Tycho's original Latin. Now I studied Latin for the first 5 years of my secondary schooling - I very nearly opted to study A level Latin, but picked Chemistry instead. And I've been revising and regularly practising my Latin with the intention of pursuing this investigation into Tycho Brahe. But I'm nowhere near good enough to translate a 15-volume set from Latin into English within a reasonable timescale. But what HMES and the other papers I've been reading have given me are starting points and ideas for directions to go in.

I've been in a real low mood for months now. I don't think spending the whole of the summer bursting into tears over my daughter going to university has done me many favours mental-health wise.

I'm still waiting to hear the outcome of my FHEA application. I know that others have already had their (positive) results, so the delay in mine has me fearing the worse. Because the ones they're certain have passed have their FHEA awarded first and then the ones that they're less sure of or reject hear later.

I haven't been able to take on an extra module.

I just can't get motivated about my Tycho Brahe project idea.

I mean what is the point of all this?

I just feel thoroughly demotivated at this point. I have the words of that Radiohead song going around in my head, "What the hell am I doing here, I don't belong here".

I've been reading one of the papers that will be discussed in Online Journal Club: 

How PhD students and other academics are fighting the mental-health crisis in science 

At first glance it doesn't look particularly relevant to me - realistically my poor social skills, negligible network and poor performance in interview-type situations mean I'm unlikely to become a PhD student (and I mean that in all seriousness, I graduated in December 2019 with a Distinction in my Astronomy master's - my not already being a PhD student isn't for lack of trying on my part). So the experience of poor mental health due to research pressures are unlikely to ever affect me - in much the same way that I will never have to worry about my being overlooked for an Oscar or missing out on an Olympic Gold.

But a lot of what is mentioned is useful and relevant.

The article talks about yoga, meditation, mindfulness and journalling. Some of these make me wary - I'm a Chrsitian I'm never going to be overly enthusiastic about doing Buddhist practices. Mindfulness is interesting - there have been a number of reports about links to depersonalization and psychosis - basically being 'at one with the universe' sounds great to a hippy but can cause some people to have a breakdown: The Potential Dangers of Mindfulness | Psychology Today

But there is some sense here. Psychologically, christian prayer probably has much in common with secular meditation (of course I would add there's actually a whole lot more going on). Physical exercise helps to regulate the stress hormone cortisol. Journalling helps you reflect on how things make you feel and what is blogging if not a form of journalling.

My paper is in the final stages of being prepared and I was asked to check the proofs. I've had to use an affiliation. I'm sure that in the journal I submitted to, the older papers I've read didn't include affiliations. So of course I have had to ask to be an independent scholar. Am I allowed to feel weird about this?

Like, it was peer-reviewed. I didn't just make the whole thing up. The journal I submitted it to is in the blinking OU library. My students know this paper is coming and they're absolutely going to be like, wait, but you work for the OU. Like.... 

Well them's the rules. My research is appreciated by the OU but please use one of my other affiliations...

I talked about this at length elsewhere. I won't repeat it here.

I've seen other academics at the OU put their recent papers in their email signatures and I thought I might like to do that with a link to the article in the OU library 😉 

I googled the best way to do that and Harzing.com has a nice example, which I am totally going to steal and rework. In terms of the other things Anne-Wil mentions in the blog, well I'll mention it in Academia.edu, ResearchGate and ORCID, but there's a two year embargo so I can't post a version until that has passed. I don't mind talking vaguely about it here I guess although despite huge numbers of readers (24,000 views) I don't know the proportions of bots vs. hackers trying to guess my password vs. people who are here because they have even the vaguest interest in my ramblings. 

Social media doesn't seem relevant to me. I don't do twix anymore. I've been on LinkedIn since 2010 or 2011. When I first joined I really rated it. But that was because I was coming from IT book editing and LinkedIn was populated almost entirely by programmers. I used to get a lot of work through IT book publishers finding my profile. I don't rate LinkedIn anymore and thanks to being a freelancer/working remotely as an AL/autism my number of connections hasn't really grown much since about 2015. The other thing is, as I understand it, the algorithm punishes you for posting content that people don't interact with. Well no one in my connection list is going to be remotely interested in my paper. So it would be wrong to share it. It would actually do me damage.

I've been reading through a fairly recent paper on Australian autistic university students' experiences (URL works for logged-in OU library access only): ‘It’s a symbolic violence’: Autistic people’s experiences of discrimination at universities in Australia - Diana Weiting Tan, Marion Rabuka, Tori Haar, Elizabeth Pellicano, 2024 (open.ac.uk)

Reading the Discussion, several things jump out at me. The mention of the necessity (unsurprisingly) for Universal Design for Learning, which for autistic students seems largely to consist of making lecture and tutorial notes available beforehand and recording lectures/tutorials and providing transcripts. This is already done at the OU for many tutorials.

Another thing mentioned was the importance of using trauma-informed practice and that negating this approach led to academic staff that were lacking in empathy and, ultimately, breaking the law. By using trauma-informed practices lecturerers can support autistic students' empowerment and self-advocacy (things that are hindered in autistic people through no fault of their own).

Anyway, I have not come across the idea of trauma-informed practice when it comes to teaching at any level - although I am painfully aware that many of my behaviours are the inevitable result of unresolved PTSD. (Did you know that it is 'common knowledge' in the psychological profession that 45% of autistics have PTSD? So many papers, so many..) So in the spirit of trying to be the undergraduate tutor I needed but never got, my next job is to find out what the heck trauma-informed practice is so I can ensure a) I'm doing it and b) set up an eSTEeM project to investigate its value as a teaching practice.

I've been catching up on my 'to be read' pile and have been reading Lived Experiences of Ableism in Academia. It's a book about ableism as experienced by disabled academics, as apposed to students. But the insights regarding the mitigation of unintentionally ableist institutional practices are still useful to me in my work.

I also attended an OU event on supporting neurodiversity last week. One of the talks was regarding a recent project investigating the transition of neurodivergent students from Access courses to level one courses (Exploring the Transitions of Neurodivergent Access Students to Level One Study: Narratives of Study Skills and Support | International Journal of Educational and Life Transitions (dundee.ac.uk)). The paper mentions plans for future study - much needed for a variety of reasons, but not least because this project was only able to include one STEM student. It transpires I happen to know someone involved in launching the bigger project and have let it be known that I would be interested in taking part. However, nothing may come of it. Funding constraints, yadda, yadda. So we'll see.

My FHEA application was submitted at the end of August. I'm not sure exactly how long I have to wait to hear the outcome - it seems to be many weeks if not several months. I'll also get detailed feedback regarding the outcome whatever the outcome - outlining strengths amd weaknesses and, if I need to revise and resubmit (it's not a given I'll be awrded FHEA status), what I need to do to meet the required standard.

I still haven't heard back about my journal paper - I was expecting to hear back about the copy-editing process. I'm getting anxious and have started spiralling. Have I missed an email? Have I deleted something? Autism is a mixed bag - I produced a journal article because I have excellent obsession skills, I am now spiralling precisely because of those advanced fixation skills.

Anyway we are now in September. I'm going to be given a list of my students soon. I've also been given a shed-load of tutorials. I was expecting to do fewer normal tutorials and take on at least one of the new 'study skills' tutorials, but it doesn't look like that is going to happen now. It looks like I've been given only regular tutorials. Whatever. At least I have so many tutorials I can only assume that I will get all the tutor groups I was expecting.

I'm thinking about how I onboard my students this month. I'm particularly concerned about what happened last year. Having two groups for SM123 it's really clear to me when differences between the two groups arise as I am the common denominator. Last year I had one group that seemed very much like my previous groups, but my other group was much, much less engaged. They didn't want to engage with each other in the forum, they didn't want to engage with the group work project, they didn't want to attend the tutorials. Which would have been fine, but their average score was significantly lower than my more average group. Of course there were outstanding individuals in both groups, but the overall dynamic was very different and the overall outcome was disappointing.

Now of course students have any number of legitimate reasons to not do these things and success is possible without doing any of these things. My best ever student never did any of those things either. I only knew of her what could be gleaned from her TMAs. But while exceptional students can thrive in isolation, I'm not sure it's best for the typical student. Heck, I'm not sure even with my autism I would thrive working in such a way. 

There's research finding that undergraduate grades are directly related to the volume of reading materials read by the student. Older readers of this blog may remember that students on University Challenge would introduce themselves: My name is Kate and I'm reading .... Not studying, reading. 

I'm just wondering how to communicate with the students the importance of really engaging with materials to get the best results. I'm thinking I have to communicate this early on, but I'm also worried about info dumping all over them so they permanently turn off from me and don't bother to read my emails and other reminders. Gosh are my weekly/fortnightly emails even worth it. Perhaps they're overwhelming and I should put everything in the tutor groups.

I have pretty much finished my FHEA application. I've uploaded my reference and my monitoring reports and reflection. My 3000-word reflective statement has been edited according to the recommendations of my mentor and staff tutor and then my mapping document is complete apart from the final wordcount of the statement. I've asked for a final read-through and then those two files will be uploaded and I'll be all done and waiting for the assessment.

I still haven't heard about the outcome of the copyediting process on my journal paper - I don't know if that's because it's not been done yet or because it's been done and doesn't need my OK for minimal changes (don't forget I'm an ex-editor).

I've got a couple of books I want to get through in preparation for my work next year - some cosmology textbooks and some feminism books.

When I was 17/18 I had a conversation with an ex-boyfriend. He was a English A-level student. Part of what English students do is learn to analyse texts from different perspectives. One of those perspectives is feminist. I mentioned something one day about being a feminist, thinking it a not very contraversial statement. My ex-boyfriend smiled derisively at me and said "Oh really, which books have you read then?" I was appalled, if the academic field of feminism wasn't concerned with the lived experiences of actual women but only with which books one read, it struck me as a worthless diversion. 

As an adult in my mid-twenties I became a Christian and hence an adherent of a patriarchial faith. Because of this, some of what passes for third wave feminsim makes me want to roll my eyes so hard it hurts.

So despite regularly enduring personal misogynistic attacks from men and other women throughout my life (and with hindsight my ex was himself displaying his own misogyny while claiming feminism for his own), I've not felt that feminism was relevant to my life since I was a teenager.

But recently, I've been reading about the early feminists and the fight for female participation in the sciences and I've realised that it would benefit for me to get a better grounding in early feminism to understand the history of science better.