Bronwyn Cole

Strategies for leading academics to rethink humanities and social sciences curricula in the context of discipline standards

Abstract The introduction of discipline standards in Australia has required a comprehensive rethinking of humanities and social science curricula from first year through to graduation. This paper proposes a model to facilitate academics’ engagement with discipline standards and their implication for first-year curricula. The model supports discipline-focussed professional development that integrates consideration of discipline threshold learning outcomes, first-year pedagogy principles, and discipline threshold concepts. The model is demonstrated using strategies that were applied, tested, and shown to be effective in workshops across five disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Using the Storypath Approach to Make Local Government Understandable

Learning about local government seems boring and irrelevant to most young people, particularly to students from high-poverty backgrounds. The authors explore a promising approach for solving this problem, Storypath, which engages students in authentic learning and active citizenship. The Storypath approach is based on a narrative in which students create the setting, become the characters, and then solve the problems presented through the storys plot. The authors describe how a group of students created a small town faced with a proposed shopping mall. Students, in their roles as townspeople—business owners, employees, and elected and appointed officials (mayor, city council members, and planning commission members)—participated in determining what was best for their town.

Teaching the history threshold learning outcomes to first-year students

Stakeholder ownership and implementation are crucial when applying the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to the development of curriculum. Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) are a case in point. While they might seem to be triumphs of managerialism over pedagogy, we argue that they can be used to build lecturers’ deep engagement with the teaching of their discipline and thus foster sustainable change. By extending the professional use of TLOs, beyond the stages of agreement, establishment and early dissemination, to the point of implementation, we offer a framework for how to elicit collegial conversations to improve teaching and learning practice in history. First, we combine ‘Decoding the Disciplines’ methods developed by historians at Indiana University. Second, we add key principles of first-year pedagogy, associated with Sally Kift. Third, we link to Threshold Learning Outcomes. The framework is supplemented by a good practice guide that translates our theoretical model into practical strategies in teaching and assessment.