Personal Blogs

I read an interesting article last week Why We Learn Better From People We Like - Neuroscience News based on the Nature paper: Ingroup sources enhance associative inference | Communications Psychology (nature.com)

The idea being that people are open to influence and learn better from those they like. The paper (and the popular write-up) are concerned with undue influence from polarising groups (e.g. terrorist organisations). But of course, as an educator they are also applicable to me and other tutors. Not that I have much power over whether any particular individual perceives me as likeable - as the saying goes: you can't please all of the people all of the time. Still, I think it's helpful to be reminded to 'not be a jerk', because it turns out the performance of your students depends upon it.

There are multiple different groups within the OU that seek to provide professional development opportunities to other staff. Last year I put together a workshop on autism for the STEM AL group. There is also a group that help ALs use our web conferencing software. There's a group that runs sessions on supporting student mental health and they have just put out a call for presenters. That's what I've been mulling over for the past week.

I don't have enough for a talk - certainly not one that's useful to other people. All I have is my lived experience. That list in my bio, the laundry list, as I refer to it, aside from autism, I didn't have any of that at 15. That's the natural consequence of poorly handled adolescent mental ill health. That's why the NHS has CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services).

I now, post autism diagnosis, realise that I suffered from autistic burnout in the first term of my lower sixth. I was going to bed, exhausted, at 7pm, only to wake up, exhausted, at 7am every day. Along with studying A levels in Maths, Physics and Chemistry I was studying GCSE Statistics, volunteering with my local Red Cross branch and training multiple times a week at my local karate dojo - I had the belt below a brown belt and can still give you a swift roundhouse kick to the head if I want - do not mess with me 😉 I had a part-time job I hated at a supermarket called Food Giant (the budget end of Somerfield). It was a bit like Kwik Save but we were charging for carrier bags before it was eco-friendly. Our customers were invariably angry at us checkout operators for our charging them 4p a bag and delighted in telling us that they were better than us. But the customer was always right.

In summary, my candle was being burnt at both ends and melted in the middle. I spent much of the year I was 17 feeling depressed (but fortunately only mildly so). I obviously had no idea I was suffering from an autistic burnout, but cut back on everything that wasn't essential and eventually got better.

When, like many autistic university students, I became mentally ill I had already learned the hard way that there was little point in bothering my GP and that 'friends' were prone to distance themselves from anyone perceived to be a Debbie Downer lest they catch the depression too. It doesn't help that one of the symptoms for depression is withdrawal from others and that autistics are less able to engage in what psychologists call 'help-seeking' behaviour. I was on my own and I was going to get better on my own just as I had at 17. Except of course I didn't. I got worse. Much, much worse. And there is a very real sense in which I'm still not recovered yet. I have agoraphobia because I have panic disorder. I have panic disorder because I have suffered from panic attacks since I was 22. I developed panic attacks due to the trauma of my university experience - an experience I very nearly didn't survive.

So what do I possibly have to offer my fellow ALs? What helped me? 

Time, patience and a massively supportive network of family and friends.

Those aren't things that ALs can provide honestly.

I do my best. I don't tell my students my laundry list. I don't want to scare them off. But I allude to it. I'm completely honest that my first experience of university was so bad that it took me 20 years to come back and get the master's I had always intended to graduate with. I know that the students of mine that are struggling appreciate that. They know that I will have sympathy for them. They admit that they confide in me precisely because I am open about my past experience. But I don't know how to help them. I can't wave a magic wand and make their homelives happier, their housing less precarious, their friends and family more supportive. And I don't know what to tell other ALS to help their students. Because they almost invariably don't have an experience anywhere like mine. Very few people who have been left broken by higher education will come back and try again.

My official certificate for my Postgraduate Certificate in Online Teaching arrived this morning, which is very nice especially since half-way through I decided to keep my options open and asked to be upgraded to the master's. This way I get an official piece of paper even if I don't complete that master's. 

My line manager wants me to go for Fellowship of AdvanceHE (he first mentioned it two years ago - which is quite early but I think it's because I came here from school teaching). I attended a session this lunchtime on applying for the OU's Applaud programme that takes you through the process. The first step is to go to the AdvanceHE website and do the Categorization tool. I don't know if it's my autism (but am assuming it is) but often there will be two options that say the same things but using different words, to me they may as well say the exact same thing but I can only select one. Hence the categorization tool is impenetrable to me and then I think, well if I can't even work out how am I supposed to use this tool, maybe I'm not ready for it. But ALs aren't allowed to apply for Associate Fellowship, so I just end up putting it off again. Besides it's not like I'm going to go elsewhere.

Anyway I can't just apply for Applaud. I have to send an expression of interest and then be invited to apply. The opening date for expressions of interest is end of February so we'll see how I feel then.

In other news I've found a history of mathematics PhD that I've managed to get myself encouraged to apply for. PhDs are incredibly competitive, so am not expecting to be interviewed let alone awarded a place. But I figure it's good practice to try. Besides rejection is character building.

It's been a rough couple of weeks for me for the dumbest of reasons, but hey I'm an autistic human so that's par for the course.

In October I finally got my feedback for a paper I submitted over the summer. It's been accepted subject to some changes and I read through the comments and promptly burst into tears. The reviewer suggested the authors should do X. Authors plural. And I lost it. The automatic assumption that I would have a colleague to help me with editing the task hurt me. It was like I was back at school being last to be picked for anything all over again. I wish I could say it got better at university, but of course it got worse. I was always the leftover student. The billy-no-mates who had to be assigned by the lecturer because no one who knew me wanted to be paired with me.

So I have endless sympathy with the students who hate group projects because of painful prior experience. And I try really, really hard to try to make the SM123 group project work for everyone. There is more I can do, there was an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about socialization being a key to student success and I have some thoughts I'm mulling over that. I'll write them up another day.

But damn it. It's been a rough day in a rough month. I know I shouldn't but when students vent and take it out on me when they have a difficult experience it hurts me. I don't have a thick skin. Realistically I guess I should be unsurprised that 100 students in I finally have one that is grouchy with me. I can't expect to be everyone's cup of tea. So I'm taking tomorrow off to get some perspective and do something else completely.

So I recently finished H880 Technology-enhanced learning and one of the things we talked about was teacher presence and being open and honest with our students.

I post my introduction thread before term starts on the tutor-group forums and while I don't share my laundry list of issues I am honest about my autism diagnosis and the issues that created for succeeding at university the first time around. To 'celebrate' World Mental Health Day on 10 October I always share some mental health resources for students and mention that I have personal experience of poor mental health derailing my studies.

There's always a danger that being that open is going to cause students to be dismissive of me as a teacher ("those who can't, teach", right?). But to be honest, those sort of students generally have the benefit of an unhindered education and they probably don't need me much except as someone to mark their TMAs. Certainly some students don't seem to want to interact with me much, and that's fine.

What is interesting is some of the conversations I am having in private. I noticed at the beginning of the term that for the first time since starting at the OU I had no autistic students.

I now know that to not be the case. I have a number of students who are diagnosed with autism or waiting for an autism diagnosis. But they hadn't disclosed it to the university. Some of them have disclosed a disability but haven't said what that is, others haven't mentioned that they even have a disability (you can disclose having a disability without mentioning what it is or having DSA).

And I don't know, but I wonder if this doesn't feed into some of the group work issues that we tutors find on SM123. I know that lots of my AL peers have issues with getting groups going. In my emails and my introductory tutorial I always mention that there is group work in week 3. And here's where I diverge a little from the 'suggested plan' provided by the module team in-house. The suggested format is that I assign students to group from before the course, so they have time to get to know each other. It makes perfect sense. For a neurotypical.

I openly discuss my late diagnosis. And I tell them that because of my own experience I now treat every student as a potential undiagnosed autistic.

There is actually an alternative activity for students with anxiety or autism, etc. But it's not made clear on the module materials. So I tell them that there is alternative available. Most students want to do the group project, but there are always a few with perfectly valid reasons who don't. 

I think ideally the students would be brave enough to declare their disabilities, especially since I suspect that the average AL is not autistic themselves (or at least they all seemed to be extremely loud and sociable at the STEM AL development day I attended) and hence not able to coax a private confession out of them as I can. I don't know what the answer to that is.

Yesterday was all about Managing Challenging Behaviour. There isn't much to say, I've taught cocky teenagers in a comprehensive well-known locally for being "tough". Full-grown adults do not frighten me. Not online anyway. That's what the mute button is for.

It did encourage us to think about how to get students to be more willing to interact with us in an online tutorial. I do think norms get set about how a tutorial is going to run. So like, in a cluster tutorial (a huge event with upwards of 50 students - barely a "tutorial" really), my own tutor group will interact with me more than other students - I'm guessing because I'm a known quantity to them. Other students may be more wary - I know I'm wary of tutors in my own studies. There are some who seem much less approachable than others. Funnily enough it appears to be unrelated to academic prestige/experience/knowledge. Some senior staff members seem approachable, and some junior ones don't. Ah we're back to social presence.  

One of the readings today is: Margaret Edwards, Beth Perry & Katherine Janzen (2011) The making of an exemplary online educator, Distance Education, 32:1, 101-118, DOI: 10.1080/01587919.2011.565499

Lots of food for thought in this paper. There are lots of things that the OU provides that would help to increase my students' engagement with both me and the course material such as the Early Alert Indicators tool. I'm still new to using it, having only really found out about it about mid-way through last year.

Given how stressful getting my brand new students into groups was last year I jumped at the chance to do a short course on Facilitating online groups, which runs this week. Sadly this course comes too late to put into practice on my group project students this year as well, but I'm planning to note down all the many things I learn here so I can come back next October.

First activity: reading through Michalinos Zembylas (2008) Adult learners’ emotions in online learning, Distance Education, 29:1, 71-87, DOI: 10.1080/01587910802004852

As I read through the assigned text I was reminded of my own emotions on doing my MSc in an entirely online course - my university was in Australia and most of my classmates resided in North America. Given a rocky educational background I was overjoyed to be accepted on to the programme for a start. I spent all of my twenties and most of my thirties believing that "university wasn't for people like me" - a fact I tell my students so that they realise they are not alone in feeling that way.

Furthermore, I was actually relieved that it was entirely online - which I now realise is due to my autism. I cannot feel FOMO and the sting of exclusion if no one is the class has ever met anybody else in real life. Online learning puts autistics like myself on a level playing field with neurotypical students. Ironically I have developed much better relationships with people I met through my MSc than I ever did with my in-person BSc. Which feeds into the reported 'unexpected emotional climate of learning'. I see this with my own students, some of which reported that they had 'felt they let me down' if they struggled with a question. I was surprised by how much they were 'attached' to me and each other. But I guess given my own experience on the other side I guess I really shouldn't.

The students also expressed negative emotions such as fear about dealing with the unknown. I was struck by something said in the section on alienation:

 In communicating with people, I pay great attention to facial expressions, bodily posture and mannerisms. 

I have to say, this is not something that I worry about - the lack of non-verbal cues (again, I am waiting for an autism diagnosis and one of the symptoms is difficulty with social communication including non-verbal cues). I don't really know how to help neurotypical students get that kind of input - they wouldn't get the stuff they wanted from me in that way if I was stood in the room with them. It will be interesting to read the reflections of neurotypical ALs on dealing with this. I always put my camera on in online tutorials - and allow them to do so in the beginning (before bandwidth becomes an issue). I give them my phone number should they want to discuss issues with me. I don't know... I think it would be interesting to see what the emotional needs of my students are and if an eSTEeM- project has been done into supporting students with their sense of isolation.

The third negative feeling was due to struggling to combine multiple roles at home: wife, mother, professional, student. The paper says that it was only women who felt that way and they viewed their studies as imposing on their private time. The group is small, largely female and they are primary school teachers - very different from my tutor groups - larger numbers, mostly male and (because I teach physics and space) most of them are here for personal pleasure, as a chance to do something that they thought wasn't sensible and vocational when they were younger. There does seem to be an issue with the supportiveness of spouses between the genders...

Activity A: social presence. So I'm supposed to reflect on a photograph of four students in a library working on a group project, including 'how did these people develop social presence?' Um by being neurotypical. Seriously, there's a wealth of papers about how people make thin slice judgements about us because we seem 'not real' to them and hence inhabit the uncanny valley and therefore it's OK to bully us and exclude us and ignore us. I can see already this course is going to be massively triggering to me...

OK leaving all that aside for a moment - I think I'm doing my best with my tutor groups. I have a photo for my profile and I put in an explanation about who I am and I've encouraged lots of them to post about themselves. Not as many as I would like have done that but I can't force them to use that tool.

Something occurs to me from secondary teaching - that you need to explain to the students about cognitive science, you need to tell them why we do things, why revision is good for you (I'm thinking I need to seriously revise the Intro talk I inherited from my mentor, who got it from his mentor, etc. to include some discussion of learning research and Ebbinghaus and his forgetting curve - students believe they're sponges and with the right teacher they'll learn what they need by osmosis, but that simply isn't true. I need to talk about Danica McKellar's cheat sheets too).

OK so I digressed - next year I need to explain to them that posting about themselves helps to create a cohesive community and they will feel more plugged in and supported if they do this. Because this year, I would say only about half of them have posted - I don't know why it is lower than last year, perhaps because last year was my first year and I was new and I told them so... Like they were being helpful to the newbie or something...

Not posted for a while - been taking on additional duties.

Attended a really good development event in May where the standout sessions for me were the ones on the library and neurodiversity.

The library's Being Digital website is a treasure trove of activities to support learners: I used their plagiarism activities in a tutorial I organised in May. And the others look like they will be extremely useful to refer students to when their reflective exercises have shown up weaknesses that I cannot simply direct them to module resources to support - things like writing effectively and finding information.

The neurodiversity session was more useful to me as a "finding people like me" exercise - many of the suggestions were things like using suitable fonts and pastel/grey backgrounds for slides and were important and good to know - but I'd already picked them up from teaching in secondary schools during Covid.

One thing that I watched a session leader do at the start of a seminar (I think it was a recorded session now I come to think of it) was to load the learning objectives slide with the drawing tool. Then she dropped loads of stars onto the slide and made the drawing tool accessible to all the attendees. This allowed the attendees to highlight which learning objective they were most interested in finding out about during the session and allowed her to take the audience into account when deciding how much detail to go into.

Just attended a Teams meeting presenting some STEM pedagogy research on improving the students' experience of learning Python on my module (SM123). 

SM123 is first-year undergraduate equivalent and is often the first "proper" physics module they'll take, after the generic everyone-in-science module. So about half the students have never programmed before and many of them find it really tough - they find it time consuming and it knocks their confidence. 

Things to consider going forward:

• Refer students to the new Programming for Physical Sciences website (I already do this anyway).
• Personally, I was honest with my students right from the start. I told them that Fortran 77 in UNIX used to reduce me to tears ALL.THE.TIME. I told them it is hard. Even my friends and relatives who work in programming find it hard, my children who are studying GCSE and A level Computer Science find it hard. Sometimes computers make you want to scream. I told them about my first job out of university as a technical editor of programming books, checking that the code ran - and if it didn't, which to be honest was 75% of the time for some books, making the blasted thing work. The key to programming is to stick at it and do your best. They seemed to respond well to that. I've seen this with A level students too, that because I just know more and have more experience, it's easy for them to assume that I've always been brilliant or learned everything by osmosis, when actually I often struggled to learn just as they are.
• One of things that came up was that the students often got help from each other (and tutors) on the tutor group forum. I've not seen them use it for that, so for Python 3 in a couple of weeks time, I think I might start a new thread and suggest they discuss what they're struggling with there (they can also use the dedicated module-wide Python forum, but that can be intimidating if your confidence is dropping).
• There was lots of discussion about how the Python segment of SM123 may not be taught in the best way. But that's something for the module team to consider at revision stage.