The other piece of advice which helped me was the fact that students approach curriculum in an extremely wide variety of ways and that well-designed curriculum provides organized means to have all learners contribute purposefully- not the one who already feels confident. I also agreed with what he said in terms of relating assessment to teaching and curriculum; it should not be placed in isolation but rather should support the main concepts that we want the students to learn.

In general, the discussion helped me realize the deliberateness with which we need to be, not only on the topics we cover but on the type of graduates our programs are intended to produce, and how our curriculum facilitates that process.

In the School of Medicine, we often work on defining and organising the numerous teaching sessions (CBLs, lectures, small group teaching, practicals etc) the students engage with and how they are labelled and presented. However, Ashwin’s suggestion that the meaning of a teaching session comes from how it is positioned in the curriculum was a useful reminder to consider the bigger picture.

Reminding yourself of what you are trying to do and ‘what kind of student you want to produce’ is helpful. My aim is to ensure our staff and students are digitally literate members of society that are able to apply their skills when working in the ever-changing digital healthcare environment to make a difference. Ensuring this ethos is embedded in the curriculum will help students to see the university as an educational experience thus changing their sense of self through their understanding of knowledge.

His thoughts on the pedagogic device and knowledge/curriculum being fluid and making transformations are interesting, but some might say it clashes with often rigid requirements of accreditation bodies.

His point on students needing to appreciate a university degree as an educational experience to undergo more of a personal transformation remind me of my own undergraduate experience. This coincided with the increase of tuition fees in 2013 and many of my friends felt it was mainly a transactional process needed to access career paths with higher salaries. It raises questions of whether this sentiment will increase with time, and whether universities can challenge it?

I'll draw out just two things that I found particularly useful. First, I liked his argument that different ways of delivering teaching - e.g. lectures, tutorials, seminars, self-directed study - should not be thought of in isolation, but only within the context of a whole curriculum. So, while a lecture might appear to some people as merely a way of passively recieving information, for others it could be a very active experience, if, for example, lectures were embedded alongside seminars in such a way that students brought developing questions and quantities to lectures. Related to this, he rightly noted that modes of delivery are experienced differently according to the modes of assessment that students know they will undergo.

Second, I liked the way in which he pushed back against purely vocational or narrowly skills based accounts of university learning. His empirical research showed how some students are able to conceive of their disciplinary knowledge and skills as something relatively fundamental to the ways in which they encounter the world and conceptualise their selves and environment. Of course, not every student will relate to disciplines in this way. But I think he did well at challenging the dichotomy between transactional and traditionally academic relationships to knowledge. Someone could be motivated primarily by professional ambitions, over the long term, but still be inspired to relate to their learning in a less transactional way in the short term. Indeed, this often happens.

Ashwin also highlighted an an issue that has not been explicitly addressed in the meetings: how the degree is framed to the students. The importance of presenting the degree as an educational and transformative process, rather than a means of just obtaining a qualification has not been emphasised enough. This reframing also made me reflect on how it might help challenge the perception of students being consumers and the university as just a transactional step towards getting a degree.

To add to Ashwin’s reflections in his sociology study, most students are also developing as individuals, at the same time that they are in higher education – just a matter of age and maturity. I wonder how much of the change found in their study is due to education vs maturity and life experience. What is the direction of the effect? Education enhances student maturity or do students embrace education as they mature?

However, I think the difficulty lies in resolving these questions satisfactorily whilst also meeting institutional requirements. The knowledge we impart has to be structured through credit weightings, assessment parameters, contact hours, and university-level decisions about the meaning of curriculum (which many individuals in the department simply passively receive as dictates to act upon). Especially as a relatively junior member of academic staff, I personally am only involved in discussions about curriculum changes once plans have already progressed fairly far down the road.

The watershed account recognises that students need guidance to engage with mathematical models through explanation, feedback, and gradual skill development. The most inclusive account goes further by connecting mathematics to students’ own purposes and to the wider world. Thinking about the relationship between self, world, and knowledge encourages me to design a curriculum that helps all students grasp essential concepts, build confidence, and see mathematics as meaningful, even if they do not intend to have a deep dive into mathematical research.

It also made me consider how much this depends on us working together. Curriculum can't really be built through lots of isolated decisions, even if each individual module looks good on paper. It needs shared thinking about what knowledge matters, how it is shaped for students, and what kind of graduates we are trying to produce. These days degrees seem to be talked about in transactional terms. If we design programmes with more attention to coherence, reflection and connection across modules, we give students a better chance of seeing university as more than a means to an end, and as something that genuinely changes how they see their subject.

We do not have lectures , so it is vital that the knowledge within the curriculum is transferred. How we scaffold the learning throughout and the talk really honed in on how we need to start with the curriculum and treat this as knowledge.