Rich Pickings : Creative Professional Development Activities for University Lecturers.

Print version record.

Rich Pickings: Creative Professional Development Activities for University Teachers offers both inspiration and practical advice for academics who want to develop their teaching in ways that go beyond the merely technical, and for the academic developers who support them. Advocating active engagement with literary and nonliterary texts as one way of prompting deep thinking about teaching practice and teacher identities, Daphne Loads shows how to read poems, stories, academic papers and policy documents in ways that stay with the physicality of words: how they sound, how they look on the page or the screen, how they feel in the mouth. She invites readers to bring into play associations, allusions, memories and insights, to examine their own ways of meaning making and to ask what all of this means for their development as teachers. Bringing together scholarship and experiential activities, the author challenges both academics and academic developers to reject narrowly instrumental approaches to professional development; bring teachers and teaching into view, in contrast with misguided interpretations of student-centredness that tend to erase them from the picture; claim back literary writings as a source of wisdom and insight; trust readers' responses; and reintroduce beauty and joy into university teaching that has come to be perceived as bleak and unfulfilling. This book does not attempt to construct a single, coherent argument but rather to indicate a range of good things to choose from. Readers are encouraged to explore the overlaps and the gaps.

Front Matter -- Copyright page -- Foreword / J. L. Williams -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Poetry and Policy -- A Stupid Way to Eat a Peach -- Close Reading -- Slow Reading -- What's the Use of Literature? -- What Do Academic Developers Do? -- You Gotta Have Soul -- Taming the Wild Profusion of Existing Things -- "Ankle-Deep in Aviation Fuel" or "More Than Violets Knee-Deep"? -- How to Make a Dadaist Poem: Method of Tristan Tzara -- Etymologies -- Moon -- Artefact -- The Possibilities of Human Misunderstanding -- Random -- Cut-up and Collage -- Kintsugi -- Trouble -- Aleatory Poetry -- Play at Work: On Arts-Enriched Reflection / Hazel Christie -- Threshold Concepts and the Student-as-Vampire / Amy Burge -- Revisiting Deep and Surface Reading -- The Power of Anecdotes -- A Symposium and a Song -- Envoi.

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