Fiona Burrows

For a first-year student, university can seem like a foreign country with different expectations, customs, and language. As educators we sometimes make assumptions about the kind of knowledge commencing students have, but these assumptions can be obstructive, especially for students from diverse or non-traditional backgrounds. Rather than viewing transitioning students who struggle to adapt to university life as being resistant to learning, we should see them as operating within an environment which they may need help navigating in order to succeed. Some of the barriers these students face relate to Meyer and Land’s  notion of ‘threshold concepts’: knowledge that learners must grasp before their learning can progress. Just as there are threshold concepts within discipline knowledge, transitioning to university learning requires specific knowledge or skills which students may lack. At UWA we have responded to the need to translate these academic threshold concepts with a method that we playfully term “Sock-Puppet Pedagogy”. This doesn’t involve talking down to students, but finding conceptual, metaphorical and experiential common ground upon which to scaffold and reconstruct new ways of understanding. In this paper we will discuss our use of metaphors in ‘translating’ academic threshold concepts, both through a multi-sensorial approach to face-to-face teaching and through the development of the ‘30-Second Academy’ and ‘Research Bites’ series: short, shareable and visually-engaging online video resources.

  Meyer J H F and Land R (2003) ‘Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge – Linkages to Ways
of Thinking and Practising’, in Improving Student Learning – Ten Years On. C.Rust (Ed), OCSLD, Oxford

As current shifts in tertiary education encourage greater focus on the provision of online and digital resources, the need for short, accessible and engaging video content around transition and academic skills is growing. This paper looks at how UWA’s Academic Support unit, STUDYSmarter, responded to the need for digital video content by creating a range of short, shareable and visually-engaging online study skill videos called the 30-Second Academy. Since these videos were created in April 2014 they have had over 5500 views on YouTube, and have been shared on Facebook and used in different presentations around the university. Each video is under two minutes, and presents a useful or practical study skill or tip, sometimes tying in to different events such as Science Week, Careers Week and Study Break.  Simple software, including Powerpoint, Camtasia Studio and VideoScribe have been used, as well as experimentation with different techniques such as stop-motion photography, live filming, simple animation, and time-lapse. This presentation will outline how these resources were developed and show some examples of the techniques used, as well as discussing some of the pedagogical issues around the creation of digital video content for tertiary teaching and learning.

Keywords: online learning, digital resources, videos, YouTube, UWA, academic skills

In this paper I will discuss the inherent links between synaesthetic metaphor and tertiary education, drawing on both my doctoral research in synaesthesia and poetics, and my experience as an academic adviser at the University of Western Australia. Synaesthesia is defined by the OED as “the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.” While synaesthesia as a condition is not overly common, recent research on the subject suggests that all humans have a universal synaesthetic capacity which begins at birth, when perception is thought to be synaesthetic in nature. The idea of a universal synaesthetic capacity is certainly not implausible; synaesthetic metaphors such as 'sharp cheese' and 'warm colour' appear widely in English. The concept has ramifications for development and learning, not only in early childhood but continuing into adolescence and adulthood.
In this paper I will highlight the relevance of this universal synaesthetic capacity to some of the issues that we are currently facing in higher education, particularly the shift toward digital and online communication, and the growing popularity of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and online learning. I will show how a consideration of the synaesthetic metaphors which structure our everyday experiences can help to us to find creative ways of approaching these issues. Technologies such as touch-screens and sensory substitution devices are highlighting the inter-sensorial nature of our experience. Similarly, the language we use for digital and online navigation is grounded in haptic and kinaesthetic metaphors (visiting a website, surfing the web), which emphasise the centrality of the senses as a mechanism for exploring and knowing. By understanding learning as a sensory and inter-sensory experience, and investigating creative and interactive methods of teaching which cater to this, we will be able to actively engage and inspire students in an increasingly technology-driven academic world.


Key words: Synaesthesia, metaphor, technology, multisensory, interdisciplinary, tertiary education, learning