Quality as relationship

The social complexity lens considers the interactions between people and how these are promoted to produce change. I identified five categories of interactions with this lens. Three of these focused on lecturers collaborating with other lecturers (9/18), other non-university staff (2/18) or external partners (9/18). The remaining two categories involved lecturers interacting personally with students (8/18), and lecturers promoting student learning through student-to-student interactions in small groups (8/18).

Next, I present the five main categories of social interactions.

Lecturers collaborating with teaching colleagues

Half of the lecturers (9/18) considered interactions with colleagues to be significant for quality teaching. This included collaborating with a range of colleagues, for example, technical staff, postdoctoral fellows and PhD students, to provide sufficient advisers for undergraduate students’ research projects. Some lecturers described being members of a teaching team where many or all aspects of a course were negotiated. Barry emphasised the joint decision-making of his teaching group:

I say “we” because I can't separate what I do from the rest of my teaching group . . . because we all make these decisions together . . . We often have discussions about what it is we're going to cut out and what we are going to focus on. (Barry, University A, earth sciences)

Lecturers teaching with external partners

Half of the lecturers (9/18) highlighted the value of involving community organisations or experts external to the University as partners in teaching. Mark described community-based projects where groups of students undertake projects with various community partners:

. . . we call community-based learning and it operates in the city with research groups of five students generally who negotiate a topic in a broad problem area that I pre-negotiated with a community partner . . . (Mark, University B, earth sciences)

Quentin highlighted the value perceived by students of having practising professionals involved in their teaching and learning:

This is a course which is done entirely with external lecturers, they come from the legal profession, they come from government, they come from industry . . . and it is actually a huge amount of information . . . The [students] love it. The reason they like it I think is that they get this feeling that everybody who is in front of them, that’s what they do. (Quentin, University G, physical sciences)

Student-student interactions

Many lecturers (8/18) viewed student-to-student interactions to be essential to quality teaching in science and students working in small groups was an integral part of their teaching and learning in laboratory classes, field work, and other classes. Lecturers varied from encouraging students to work together to implementing a structured team-based learning approach where teams of students are formed for the duration of the course. Naomi summarised the value of students learning from each other in small groups in her comment ‘because they learn from each other, they gain confidence . . . the best way to learn anything, to reinforce it and get it clear in your own mind, is to have to explain it to someone else.’

Olivia highlighted the value of social learning for Māori students:

The embarrassment of being in front of the class and getting stuff wrong or being singled out . . . remains kind of a barrier I think from talking to some of our

Māori students and talking to our Kaitiaki9 _{. . . There is also a much stronger . . .} a much more valued place for social learning and learning in groups. (Olivia, University D, life sciences)

Lecturer interacting personally with students

Many lecturers (8/18) viewed interacting with students on an individual basis as key to quality teaching. Keith described the benefits of building personal relationships with students early on in terms of student learning and success and the need for lecturers to have the communication skills to enable this:

I've put much more emphasis on building a personal relationship with students. I more strongly feel that we can only do that quality teaching if we first work on our communication. We need to make sure that students are . . . comfortable with trusting a person, so that if there's issues and things are not going so well with their studies, they feel free to come in for a chat and to ask for advice . . . and of course that mostly happens in the 100 level because if you get it down there, then you can benefit from it later on. (Keith, University B, life sciences)

Olivia raised the point that the nature of the lecturer-student relationship needed to be friendly yet professional:

To me, the relationships you build with your students are very, very important . . . the relationship students build with their teachers are a big influence on their success . . . And I have to explain to them periodically that I am not going to be their friend on facebook and they say, “But you are friendly”, and I say, “Yes, but there is a big difference between friendliness and being someone’s friend, I am never your friend but I like having a friendly open relationship with you.” (Olivia, University D, life sciences)

Lecturers interacting with other university staff

A couple of lecturers (2/18) viewed their interactions with other members of the university community as vital to quality teaching; for example, online learning support and Kaitiaki. Hannah highlighted the variety of help that was available when she started asking for it:

. . . and I also work with the Flexible Learning Team and . . . so to me it is all about the power of the collaboration and I found a lot of collaborators within the school and within the University and also internationally as well. And I think it is as soon as you start asking the questions, people pop out of the woodwork, they really do. (Hannah, University B, life sciences)

The categories identified with the social complexity lens, together with the number of lecturers referring to these (in order of number of lecturers) are summarised in Table 19. This table also shows the total frequency count of each category.

Table 19. Quality as relationship: the categories related to social interactions identified with the social complexity lens.

Category No. of sources

(interviewees) referring to category

Total frequency count of category

Lecturers collaborating with colleagues 9 23 Lecturers teaching with external stakeholders 9 17

Student-student interactions 8 17

Lecturer interacting personally with students 8 14

Lecturers and other university staff 2 3

6.4

What are the main influences on lecturers’ teaching and

learning?

6.4.1 Quality as change

The nonlinearity lens looks at agents changing through multiple local interactions. I identified two categories of local (i.e. lecturer-based) interactions with this lens. Most lecturers viewed feedback on teaching (11/18) and self-reflection (10/18) as significant for changing their teaching.

Next, I present illustrative examples of lecturers’ views on feedback and self-reflection that describe how these changed their teaching in undergraduate science.

Feedback on teaching for change

Most lecturers (11/18) viewed student feedback as a major influence for changing their teaching and used formal and informal feedback mechanisms for this. Most of these lecturers (10/18) stated that their teaching had changed in response to students’ feedback but did not specify how; time constraints prevented further exploration in these cases. Only one lecturer reported changing their teaching in response to collegial feedback.

Barry noted the powerful nature of student feedback when he changed his teaching following feedback from informal discussions with students in a practical class:

I remember talking to students last year in this practical . . . and asking them what they thought about the paper and I learnt that a lot of them resented having to do the paper as a pre-requisite for their . . . agricultural degrees . . . So this year . . . I gave some examples of why agricultural students need to . . . know something about soil development, erosion and so on . . . and why it's useful . . . [they said] “Oh it's really useful. I can really see how it's useful to agriscience” . . . having their feedback is really quite powerful. (Barry, University A, earth

sciences)

Barry also gave an example of the value of providing time for students to consider questions in enhancing the quality of feedback:

Actually, something that we did this year . . . in the van on the way back from the field trip [was] we asked everyone what they thought and . . . the whole van was silent for 10 minutes and . . . then one person opened their mouths and they said, “Well, actually, I think this.” And then there was about 15 minutes of feedback coming to us . . . But it made me realise, I think often with those [online surveys] they do them in a hurry and they don't put sufficient time into actually thinking about constructive feedback. (Barry, University A, earth sciences)

Self-reflection for change

Most lecturers (10/18) viewed self-reflection on their teaching as significant for changing their teaching and enhancing quality in teaching and learning. Lisa illustrated how self- reflection led to his/her reducing material and being very selective by refocusing on what was important:

I thought, “well, they don’t need to know every single phylum, how to identify these things . . . they need to learn the key ones, the most important ones, for example, the ones that they might encounter the most or have the most relevance . . .” And so I found that then instead of trying to rush through an entire, maybe two year curriculum in a semester of all the palaeontology you can learn, we’re very selective, but the idea is they can then go anywhere and apply this and they’ve really used different tools. (Lisa, University C, earth sciences)

Hannah highlighted how the process of self-reflection on an online activity, together with the confidence to try something new, transformed a large lecture class:

I think something happened . . . I was just reflecting on the fact that there had been a question that was posted on our student forum . . . no-one had answered it. . .[and] that you telling someone they have a misconception and telling them what the right answer is not a way for them to unlearn the misconception. They need to discover the misconception on their own . . . and [the lecture] turned into a 30 minute tutorial with 200 students, and I had probably about 8-10 different questions from 8-10 different students throughout the entire lecture theatre. For me it was amazing . . . and I think it was just my having the confidence to go in and see where this goes. (Hannah, University B, life sciences)

The categories and themes identified with the non-linearity lens, together with the number of lecturers referring to each of these (in order of number of lecturers) are summarised in Table 20. This table also shows the total frequency count of each category and theme.

Table 20. Quality as change: the categories and themes related to agents changing through local interactions identified with the nonlinearity lens.

Category and theme* No. of sources

(interviewees) referring to category/theme* Total frequency count of category/theme*

Feedback on teaching for change 11 17

Student 11 16

Peer (colleague) 1 1

Self-reflection for change 10 18

Note. *Categories are inclusive of themes (indented).