April 11, 2013, by Teaching at Nottingham

Creating an academic community.

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Dr Gaby Neher and Dr Nick Thomas: “Both the Department of History and the Department of Art History have constructed curricula with the development of subject-specific skills built in to the progression process. Further, there is a recognition that students need to be socialised into both a University context and into their subjects at University level. This creation of a sense of belonging both within a particular department and a wider academic community is essential for the intellectual development of students but also for their experience of the degree. Both departments have worked to engender this sense of belonging in a variety of ways and have faced different challenges, with Art History recently moving to a new building along with a number of other departments, while History has merged with the School of Humanities and its size means that students can easily feel they are simply another face in the crowd. As well as skills-based modules for first years such as Learning History and Introduction to Art History, both departments have worked on the creation of mentoring schemes which provide a good example of sharing good practice.”

“This presentation describes the work undertaken, the progress made and what has been learned along the way.”

Dr Gaby Neher and Dr Nick Thomas
School of Humanities

This presentation was given at the Curriculum Review conference: creating coherent programmes. It was part of a session addressing models of curriculum coherence where colleagues offered examples of the implementation of a range of approaches to coherence, and shared their experience of the process of curriculum design at programme level. The full programme is available on the Curriculum Review conference page.

Produced April 2013

Posted in Students' academic developmentTransition into HE