Tales from a Teacher's life

 Here I am reflecting on differences between coaching and what we understand as tutoring in universities. 

As dancer, I was coached. I was guided and supported to achieve a certain goal, to do a certain step or trick. It was of course a learning experience, but it was very confined as I had to match expectations. Well, ballet for sure has them. And then again, yes there was spaces for interpretation opening up. 

Coaching is very much an approach where there is a goal and I work with someone to achieve the goal. I repeat steps or sequences endlessly. I get more feedback and improve. I like learning this way as I am used to it from my entire childhood and teenage years. Anything to do with movement or requiring rote learning, this is where I go back to that style. 

 And yet, tutoring at university was amazing and eye opening. It did not repeatedly give me feedback on the same bit of work. It did not let me repeatedly go round and round with the same thing. I got what I needed - actually far more than that, but I will talk about that later. What I want to focus on is that I was not spoon fed. I could find my own solution to something. I felt free. 

Tutoring - especially with dissertations and the thesis - was a conversation with an experienced person who gave me riddles to solve. In the moment, I could not, but I loved running off and finding MY way to solve them, having MY ideas expressed and not having to fit a mould. 

 When I think back at situations of learning, I have to also admit that yes, I did the proper student thing too.  I wanted the tutor to give me the solution without me doing the work. Whenever that happened, it was frustrating. I was grumpy. When I finally took initiative of my own learning of my own approaches to it, then it all got interesting. 

So, when you now embark on this journey, bear in mind that we tutor you. We will not give you the answer, we will let you find yours. 

We hope you will enjoy the freedom and fascination of exploring knowledge fascinating.

LIbrary Advice - Logging into Koretext

 Message from our Librarian to support you into getting access to Koretext 

Students will not see their Kortexts until 24-48 hours after they have successfully enrolled.

 

Once enrolled, students should be able to access Kortext in 2 ways:

 

• Through My Learning – on their module page, on the right hand side of the screen (they may have to click a little arrow at the top) there is the ‘Personal etextbooks’ box. They should be able to ‘click here for your books’ and access the Kortext dashboard that way.

 

 

 

• Through the Kortext login page: https://app.kortext.com/identity/signin for this they will need their university email address and the password sent to their email address from Kortext (this will be different to their university password). The process is as follows:
• go to the login page https://app.kortext.com/identity/signin (and best to do this in a different browser or incognito window)
• sign in with their university email address
• click next 
• DO NOT sign in through your institution, rather, ‘sign in with a different account’
• sign in with email
• enter university email address and your Kortext password – this will have been sent to their university email address (if they don’t know this click forgot password and go through that process)

 

Welcome to the New BAPAP Cohort 2024/25

 Welcome to the new cohort.

I am so excited for you all to start on the programme and what a lovely diverse group you are. In the coming weeks, we will delve into reflections about our practice and how we can connect it to academic discourses. 

For now, start to explore the virtual learning environment. 

Try to find the Programme Handbook and the ACI3001 Module Handbook (colloquially Module 1) 

Another thing to look at it trying to find materials in the library through Library search. 

We embark soon on a journey of discovery and I hope you will thoroughly enjoy it.