The pressure on universities to move content online has initiated conversation about the purpose and value of the lecture theatre as a teaching ‘space’. Central to the defence of the lecture theatre is its social nature; students physically gather together to learn from, and with, one another, as a collective. Nevertheless, teaching strategies applied in these settings can still have a tendency to underplay or underutilise, the combined knowledge and expertise of the student audience.
In this month’s ILT seminar, I discussed the provision of active learning techniques in social spaces. In particular, the seminar focused on teaching strategies which make a point of embracing the social nature of the medium-to-large lecture format, and which attempt to ‘tap’ the collective knowledge and wisdom held within the resident student audience.
Dr Rhiannon Lloyd is a Professional Teaching Fellow in the Business School, with experience teaching across various management subjects in MIB and the GSM. Her areas of academic expertise include organisational behaviour, critical management studies, and leadership. She has been working at the University of Auckland for just over two years and currently runs the GSM consultancy projects. Her PhD was on institutionalism and the nuclear power industry, which she undertook at Cardiff University and completed in 2014.
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