Successful University Teaching in Times of Diversity

This book is for anyone with the ambition to teach well at degree level. University teaching has never offered greater scope for creativity or for collaboration with like-minded colleagues, but at the same time it has never been more challenging or more pressurized. Students come from increasingly diverse cultural and language backgrounds and arrive with diverse levels of academic achievement. The curriculum continually changes; modularized courses target transferrable skills; technology revolutionizes, or even replaces, the classroom. Meanwhile, resource-squeezed universities demand good results from all students like never before. Is it possible for university teachers to meet all these demands? The book offers a lively, engaging and potentially transformative introduction to the ideas, insights and practical know-how that a modern university teacher requires. Bringing together contributors with extensive practical teaching experience as well as pedagogical expertise, it uses accessible language and real cases to explore everyday teaching challenges and provide strategies and techniques for stimulating deep and satisfying learning. Throughout it emphasizes the centrality of language to effective learning, outlining teaching techniques that promote and sustain communication. It also discusses how to build effective teaching-learning relationships, how to teach online, how to use assessment to promote learning and ultimately how to develop and deliver student-friendly courses. Nicola Rolls is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Academic Language and Learning at Charles Darwin University, Australia Andrew Northedge is Emeritus Professor of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education at The Open University, UK. Ellie Chambers is Emeritus Professor of Humanities Higher Education at The Open University, UK.