‘It’s one of the first times I’ve felt fully engaged’: developing student engagement using blogging as a form of assessment

Abstract

There is widespread debate in higher education about how best to support students in becoming more active and engaged learners. Geographers have occupied a central position in these debates having long been concerned with understanding and creating teaching spaces that encourage active and experiential learning. Recent pedagogical innovations have seen a movement away from a reliance on lecturing as the key pedagogical method and a redefinition of the roles of both teacher and learner. In this paper, we look at the role that assessment, specifically assessed blogs, can play in enhancing student engagement. Drawing on interviews with Course Organisers from two case study courses, student focus groups, and course evaluation surveys we show the various ways in which blogs enhance engagement. We draw attention to how blogging enabled students to personalise their learning and make it more meaningful to them, as well as to foster greater engagement with the course materials including making connections across the course as a whole. Further, we show how blogging enabled students to develop transferable skills that would stand them in good stead for the rest of their time at university and in their future professional lives.

Utilizing teaching technologies for higher education in a post‐COVID‐19 environment

“…The majority of students liked that it helped them to organize their thoughts (65%), improve their ability to communicate about agriculture (61%), made them think about their interests in agriculture (59%), and were able to write in a non-technical way about agriculture (55%) ( Table 2). Others have identified the potential for self-reflection within blogging (Deng and Yuen, 2011) and that they can be used to assist with writing, particularly with informal, or non-technical, writing (Morris et al, 2019) which was also found in our research.…”

“…This is similar to Sullivan and Longnecker (2014) where 95% of students believed that blogging helped them to improve their writing skills. Others also identified increases in student communication skills with specific mention of these being transferable skills that can be used in their future careers (Morris et al, 2019). As there are many careers within agriculture where communication to the public is important, nurturing writing skills beyond simply technical writing would be a great advantage for the future of agriculture.…”

GeogEd: A new research group founded on the reciprocal relationship between geography education and the geographies of education

“…We are particularly conscious of the importance of decolonising curricula and internationalising our practice (Esson, 2018;Haigh, 2014;Simm & Marvell, 2017). As geographers we teach and assess using innovative formats (Hill & West, 2020;Marvell & Simm, 2018;Morris et al, 2019;Van Loon, 2019) and technologies (Detyna & Kadiri, 2019;Soltis et al, 2020). We encourage our students to act as scholars (Marvell et al, 2013), to undertake and publish research (Hill et al, 2018a(Hill et al, , 2018bWalkington, 2012), and to co-create new learning resources (Healey & Hill, 2019;West et al, 2017).…”

Teaching sensory geographies in practice: transforming students’ awareness and understanding through playful experimentation

“…Certainly, the blog poses technical and writing challenges for which many of the students, at least initially, feel they are ill-equipped (Summerby-Murray, 2010). Although assessed blogs have multiple benefits (Morris, Christie & Barber, 2019), it is well known that they can increase student anxiety if they already find writing difficult (Smith, 2010;Pursel & Xie, 2014), and that students write more conservatively and/or self-censor if they fear negative judgement (Kidwell, Northcott & Paterson, 2012;Hansen, 2015) or struggle to express their emotions (Golubchikov, 2015). In SPSP I use 'scaffolding' (Coulson & Harvey, 2013) in order to develop the students' capacity for reflection and boost their confidence and expectations of success (Biggs & Tang, 2011).…”