{"id":959,"date":"2015-07-21T10:13:20","date_gmt":"2015-07-21T10:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/eltt\/?p=959"},"modified":"2022-04-13T15:46:56","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T15:46:56","slug":"curiosity-revived-the-catherine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/curiosity-revived-the-catherine\/","title":{"rendered":"Curiosity revived the Catherine: reflections on PCUTL"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Catherine Emmett<\/a>\u00a0(LTET)<\/p>\n

\"Learning<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the paths of staff development possible\u00a0to teaching staff, and teaching-related staff such as learning technologists, at Cardiff is the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning<\/a> (PCUTL). I’ve been doing PCUTL myself and found out last week that I’ve passed. Having received the good news, it seemed like a good time to write about my personal experiences of doing PCUTL.<\/p>\n


\nWhat is PCUTL?<\/strong><\/p>\n

“<\/em>PCUTL is one of the ways in which the University supports staff to develop and reflect upon their teaching and support of learning. The programme provides an opportunity for personal development through critical, scholarship-underpinned exploration of teaching and learning support for all staff across their career span.”<\/em> (from the PCUTL website)<\/span><\/p>\n

Taking up PCUTL gives you the tools to help you reflect on\u00a0and improve your knowledge, experience and thinking\u00a0about what pedagogy means in the context of higher education. Developing those skills is important. As any good teacher will tell you, there’s no such thing as an instruction manual for how to teach; there’s a reason it’s sometimes described as both an art and a science!<\/p>\n

What did PCUTL mean to me?<\/strong><\/p>\n

For me the PCUTL journey has been one of revivification, of a deepening interest in the pedagogical underpinning of\u00a0learning technologies. PCUTL inspires sustained\u00a0inquiry and\u00a0relates it to\u00a0the depth of human experience in\u00a0learning and in learners (in all their glorious individuality and diversity) in HE.\u00a0I’ve certainly\u00a0made\u00a0<\/span>choices in the past in relation to\u00a0training<\/span>\u00a0about learning technologies<\/span>\u00a0that\u00a0are based on what others have done before. I know I’m not alone in this, but without seeing\u00a0and reflecting on the evidence (or lack of evidence) of the success of learning, how can we know what the <\/span>most effective strategies and\u00a0<\/span>choices are?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Part of this means recognising when something is wrong; at least having an initial perception about whether our strategies are effective, ideas that we can then work on, research and experiment with. What I know is that we can’t\u00a0continue making the same choices and expecting different outcomes\u00a0simply because the learner group might have changed; it’s never that simple.<\/p>\n

If you let it, PCUTL\u00a0can open\u00a0your mind to the possibilities of learning and teaching, when it’s usually all too easy to get bogged down in the practicalities and constraints. This is not to say we can ignore those practicalities and constraints, but it does means we can (and should) challenge them.\u00a0For me, this means challenging\u00a0myself more (and my colleagues) to think much more critically about teaching and learning in relation to\u00a0the use of technology.<\/p>\n

What are the benefits to doing PCUTL?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are the obvious extrinsic motivators for doing PgCUTL – it allows you to get a postgraduate certificate in teaching. It’s\u00a0also one way to gain\u00a0Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA)<\/a>, a\u00a0widely\u00a0recognised indication of professional development in learning and teaching in UK HE.\u00a0These are both useful for the\u00a0learning technologist’s CV.<\/p>\n

But I also found some other benefits. PCUTL gives you the tools to develop the ideas and\u00a0skills I described\u00a0above, and to actively demonstrate them.\u00a0This is something I think is valuable for every learning technologist; to feel confident to fully support (and if necessary challenge) colleagues’ ideas and perceptions about the use of technology in learning and teaching.<\/p>\n

PCUTL is carried out in a supportive environment in which every participant\u00a0has flexibility in the path you choose to take. Doing so can improve your\u00a0confidence in your own ideas in a way that’s directly relevant to you, and which you can then take forward into your own practices.<\/p>\n

Unexpected\u00a0bonus<\/strong><\/p>\n

To add a very personal note to this post, I also formed friendships amongst my PCUTL peer group, one good friend in particular (you know who you are!)\u00a0who has since introduced me to a new hobby. So\u00a0as an indirect result of PCUTL, I can also now say I’ve started learning to sing, a hobby which brings me much happiness\u00a0\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"by Catherine Emmett\u00a0(LTET) One of the paths of staff development possible\u00a0to teaching staff, and teaching-related staff such as learning technologists, at Cardiff is the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning […]","protected":false},"author":404,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[371],"tags":[183,152,200,14,5],"custom_author":[],"class_list":["post-959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-education","tag-community-of-practice","tag-development","tag-innovative-teaching","tag-learning","tag-learning-technologists"],"lang":"en","translations":{"en":959},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4KqgK-ft","meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","pll_sync_post":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/404"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=959"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2662,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions\/2662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=959"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}