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Linda Westphalen, an Education Specialist and teacher with the School of Education spoke to us about the inventive method she used to teach pedagogy to offshore students.

Tell us about one of the courses you teach?

 I teach a course in the Masters of Education called Pedagogical Engagement for Learning which is about how to teach – the nuts and bolts – groups, ICTs, learning design, constructive alignment, assessment – but mostly pedagogy.

Some of your courses have large numbers of online students, what challenge did this pose to you?

In the second half of 2020 I was stuck – how do I teach pedagogy to students who are accessing the course remotely? 

This challenge has continued this year as I have students overseas who I can’t move around as part of a group.  I can’t demonstrate a jigsaw or a think-pair-share or a doughnut… I could demonstrate with chairs or with actual humans, but the barrier is social distancing and scale.  Students don’t want to be shunted around a room when they’re supposed to be socially distancing.   I feared that, for the students who are in a room by themselves in China, watching me move 30 reluctant people around a very large room would be an exercise in those twin anti-educative circumstances: chaos and confusion.  

You have designed an interesting solution to this situation.  Please tell us more.

Pondering this problem in mid-2020, I had to pause when my 17 year old kid got a cold while we were in lockdown.  I took him off for a COVID test, but the nurses found no gold in his canals, although they practically popped out an eyeball.  ‘Lego people have no noses,’ he remarked sniffily. ‘Lucky buggers.’

Ah HA  - These are good moments!

My son, who used to be a real Lego nut in his much youthier youth, put together 40 Lego people: no skeletons or monsters; everyone with hats or hair; no helmets or weapons.  I didn’t have enough women or people of colour, but I was begging not choosing at the time.  I also had two Captain Jack Sparrows, a bloke with sunglasses and Gandalf.  These became twins, a student with a visual impairment (I have to show inclusion) and the teacher in charge.  Gandalf had a bigger chair.