In this episode I talk to the positively dynamic Miranda Melcher who has just submitted her PhD thesis. She chats about her research into learning differences and her important teaching primer. Her Three basic principles for all teaching are:
Be specific
Be transparent
Be mindful
An overview of Miranda's principles of inclusive teaching: https://accessibility.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2021/02/08/low-effort-high-impact-how-small-changes-to-your-teaching-can-create-a-more-inclusive-learning-environment/
The full inclusive teaching primer: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g-4uH_FyU5M5yX4DFUJVIJGKN1qwc9su81kLYgM64dE/edit#heading=h.2e24rti9ma4w
If you are interested in inclusive training workshops, there are more at King’s and maybe more to come elsewhere
A talk and discussion about disabilities and neurodiversities in UK higher education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqLprpMZnC4
The book Miranda's a co-author of: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030561079
In this episode I talk to the positively dynamic Miranda Melcher who has just submitted her PhD thesis. She chats about her research into learning differences and her important teaching primer. Her Three basic principles for all teaching are:
Be specific
Be transparent
Be mindful
An overview of Miranda's principles of inclusive teaching: https://accessibility.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2021/02/08/low-effort-high-impact-how-small-changes-to-your-teaching-can-create-a-more-inclusive-learning-environment/
The full inclusive teaching primer: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g-4uH_FyU5M5yX4DFUJVIJGKN1qwc9su81kLYgM64dE/edit#heading=h.2e24rti9ma4w
If you are interested in inclusive training workshops, there are more at King’s and maybe more to come elsewhere
A talk and discussion about disabilities and neurodiversities in UK higher education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqLprpMZnC4
The book Miranda's a co-author of: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030561079
Welcome to Enabled in Academia, my name is Lienkie Diedericks, your host creator, and hopefully not the only listener of this podcast about how to survive and thrive in academia as a disabled, chronically ill, and old neurodiverse individual. here with me today I have Miranda Melcher. Miranda is a teacher, researcher and author. She's pursuing a PhD on post conflict, military reconstruction at King's College, London's defense Studies Department. She's been a teacher at the secondary and university level for nearly 10 years in the UK, US and France with a particular teaching and research focus on students with learning differences. Throughout this conversation, Miranda refers to learning differences and disabilities for brevity with more detail and depth given on neurodiverse language and specifics in her writing, which you can access in the description box. Miranda, thank you so much for talking with me today.
Miranda Melcher:Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
Lienkie Diedericks:I was wondering if you could tell our listeners a little bit how you got involved with teaching and how this really led you down the road of the current research and work that you've been doing?
Miranda Melcher:Sure.So I absolutely love teaching I have since I sort of accidentally stumbled onto it as a teenager, I don't quite know why. But something about the challenge of having to take a set piece of knowledge and explain it in a way that makes sense to a particular person. And how that changes every time you explain it. Because everyone needs something different from you as a teacher, something about that challenge just never gets boring to me. And so I've kind of taken every chance I can get to be involved in teaching, which has often been perhaps through more unorthodox routes as 18 year olds are generally not sought after as official teachers. And this sort of continued through my undergraduate through my Masters through my PhD. And quite often what I found, particularly at the graduate level, was that the easiest way to get into teaching was through private tutoring, that was perhaps badly that's a relatively unregulated role teaching. And it was something I could do in addition to my studies. So I started tutoring, and again, perhaps badly, most of the students that both need tutoring, and who have parents who can afford it tend to be students who probably want to do well, but for some reason, whatever is happening in the classroom at school isn't quite enough for them. And for relatively obvious reasons, that means that a lot of these students have some kind of learning disability a lot of the time. And so without really meaning to, I ended up with an entire roster of clients who mostly had learning disabilities. And I've come across them before, but never in the sort of intensive one on one environment where I was the one responsible for trying to make something work. And what I found is that it actually heighten to this wonderful challenge that I love about teaching. And actually a really, really fun way for me, because you couldn't kind of rest on this idea of Oh, I'm just gonna replicate what they do in school, you had to be more creative. And that challenge is something that just absolutely fires me up. So I spent quite a few years doing this tutoring, and ended up sort of specializing in students with various learning disabilities, and then took that into the more formal opportunities of teaching that I was able to do as I got further along in my graduate research.
Lienkie Diedericks:That is just fantastic. And I know you have released that inclusive teaching primer at Kings, and I was hoping you could tell us a bit more about that, why it's important, and how we can really make sure that everyone knows about it at Kings.
Miranda Melcher:Yeah, so I'm actually going to backtrack just a little bit. Because I think it's important to understand the research side, as well as in addition to the kind of practical aspect, which is that because I ended up with all this experience practically teaching students with learning disabilities, I started doing actual research on it. It has nothing to do with my PhD research. But I still have all the skills like how to look things up. And so quickly, kind of joined up with some researchers in America, who were doing research about quite an understudied learning disability, nonverbal learning disorder, or developmental visual spatial disorder. But nevertheless, they could show affected three to 4% of the population globally, which is quite significant. And it quite commonly shows up as a maths issue, but can also impact writing or socialization. And so they wanted to create kind of a book about how to look at this from a clinical perspective from a therapeutic perspective. But there really wasn't a lot of other researched books in this field. And so I was like, well, you really need something about education, because if most of these issues show up in an educational setting, it's not enough to just look at clinicians and therapists, we also need to be giving guidance for teachers, because they're sort of on the front lines of this kind of thing. And so they brought me into the book project as kind of the education person using a lot of this experience but also research that I developed through her Example, being a fellow of the higher education Academy and things like that. So lockdown actually worked in our favor, we managed to get the book published faster than we had planned as it came out in November with Springer. And that's been an important basis, as well as my own development of teaching practice, not just from anecdotal personal experience, but also join the sort of wider Research Network and understanding of the more psychological and clinical aspects of learning disabilities.
Lienkie Diedericks:Thank you for that background, I think that was absolutely essential.
Miranda Melcher:So I took these two things together, and came up with the inclusive teaching primer. Now, we all know that we mostly moved to online teaching quite quickly, in spring of 2020, a lot of us had not had experience with this before. And quite rightly, a lot of the training offered to us by our various universities focus quite immediately on the technical side, right? If you're recording lectures, for the first time, if you're doing a seminar on zoom, like, technically, how do you do that. And I certainly signed up for all of those classes, too, I had, I'd use zoom before, but the specifics of all the different functionalities of a breakout room or cultura or pole everywhere, I mean, these were not things that were kind of daily use tools for me before the pandemic. So I signed up for all of these, as well, and, you know, took lots of notes and got very confused and shut down my computer accident a few times. But as I was going through all of these courses, I realized that they were all really technical. It was click on this, move this here, and none of them really addressed the sort of teaching behavior aspect. How do you include people online? And these were the sorts of things that I'd obviously already been thinking a lot about with my normal teaching, how do you include students who maybe don't fit the mainstream, but I sort of saw that this online teaching environment actually gave us a lot of opportunity. Because some of the things that are barriers to students with learning disabilities in face to face teaching, kind of go away a little bit in the online environment. So really important one to highlight is the sensory aspect. So there's a range of learning disabilities and physical disabilities, that impact your sensory experience. So perhaps lights are brighter to you than they are to other people, or filtering out background noise is harder for you than for other people. And in a face to face learning environment, you're not in control of the physical space that you're in. And because of that, that physical space may not be actually a super helpful one to you. And maybe even if it is, the physical space that you have to move through to get to that learning environment, might have already stopped a lot of your energy that you then cannot use to learn once you're in class. In an online learning environment, a lot of those aspects are removed, right, you're sat at your own desk, and you can set that up how you need to you can deal with your own lighting, and sound and all these other aspects. And in fact, things like sound can actually be improved, because everyone has to speak one at a time, because we don't have any way of figuring out whose turn it is to speak online. So there's a lot of ways in which I saw that the online learning environment actually might make things easier for students with disabilities or learning differences. Yet, I didn't see any sort of training or information available that not only didn't talk about this, but also offered ways for teachers to expand their teaching, practice, and address the behavioral side of teaching beyond which buttons to click web.
Lienkie Diedericks:That's really important. And that's fascinating, and how wonderful that you were able to see that gap and immediately respond to it. Can you tell me like, you know, maybe give us some I know, your wonderful primer, I can really recommend everyone read it, I have included the link to it in the description box. So please do go and have a look. But I was wondering if you could maybe chat through some of your case studies and examples that you have in your primer, particularly around language use and how that can be a more accessible and inclusive teaching.
Unknown:Sure, so the primer, I call it a primer, because it really is specific. And it really is practical. It's not an academic article. It's not meant to be it is meant to be a Oh, I'm leading a seminar in 10 minutes, what are some top tips I can think about? And that's very much how it's structured. So there are three big principles that I firmly believe, should be top of mind anytime you're dealing with students full stop, especially because we don't always know what kinds of backgrounds or need students have. And so these are just generally good practice. First of all, anything you communicate, Be specific. If you think it's specific enough to most people who have learned differences, it probably isn't. So even simple things like today, we're all going to have a discussion. Okay, great. But what does that actually mean? Does that mean that everyone is expected to contribute one by one? Does that mean that there's going to be guiding questions as a facilitator that you're leading throughout? Or does it actually mean that you're going to have a big question, throw it open to the floor and it sort of students, it's up to them to figure out what to do. Those are all quite different lessons. learning experiences. And just simply saying we're going to have a discussion doesn't actually clarify which of those you're going to be doing. So any student who maybe is not super comfortable in a social environment, or has difficulty thinking through their thoughts really quickly, or sometimes articulating their thoughts out loud, puts them at an immediate disadvantage, just because they don't know what to prepare for. So the first principle is Be specific. The second is be transparent. academia, as we know, is a very strange system. We all come into it, thinking maybe we know what we're doing, especially if we've chosen to pursue a graduate degree. But I certainly am not the only one I hope, who has come in being like, this is how it works. And then you increasingly find out. There's all sorts of layers that you are not aware of, and even quite simple things that, you know, maybe the undergraduate level, they're not paying attention to like the politics of staff committees. Yeah, power to them. But things for example, like what is a marking criteria? All right, maybe they should know that. But have you ever actually read the marking criteria? They're not clear.
Lienkie Diedericks:No, there used to be really confusing.
Miranda Melcher:particular department at Kings that is maybe especially vague, but generally, they'll say things like good depth of knowledge you have with me, by the time you get to a point where you're marking, you actually probably do know what that means. Maybe you've sat through training, maybe you just know through experience, but we often forget that our students don't know what these things mean. And so a key principle of teaching is just being transparent. It's not about telling them the answers. It's about explaining the sort of academic rules that are actually written down anywhere.
Lienkie Diedericks:That's so true. And I'm just thinkin of my own PhD, I read this bo k called "the unwritten rules f the PhD". And they talk about the upgrade there, which we wi l have to do in the UK, when t was spoken from a sort of mo e like, almost like the real olitic of academia and this cademic explaining it, it made lot more sense to me, I was l ke, Oh, that's what they want o see. They want to be able o see, you know, for insta ce, that you're part of the a ademic club, you know, you have, you've cited all the peopl within the first however many ages, and that gives you a reall concrete idea about what to do And it takes a lot of the sting out. And I mean, if that can h ppen in a PhD, how much more o is that important for under raduate students and taugh students?
Miranda Melcher:Exactly, and it's very much something that I think those of us who teach, you know, it's quite, it's quite common to talk about, oh, the rise of anxious students, and so many more students are anxious now, and especially from the older professors who maybe their university experience was quite different from those of us who went through not that long ago. And I think there's often a misunderstanding that kind of this anxiety is, oh, it's the 21st century Oh, it's Gen Z. Oh, it's social media. Sure, those are probably included. But I think a lot of it is also students feel more able to vocalize their confusion coming into this like suddenly very strange world. And that's not a bad thing. In fact, I think we should kind of be using that expressed anxiety to examine what we're not being transparent about. And I think that that's something really important for the Academy in general to have a think about because fine barriers to entry to a particular profession, not saying get rid of it. But let's be choice full about the things that we're using as barriers to entry, rather than just kind of, Oh, we never actually thought about the fact that marking criteria makes no sense.
Lienkie Diedericks:Absolutely, absolutely. And, and everyone is just blundering along with this, right? So we all go to the training, we all sitting there secretly, as tutors wondering, how are we going to make sense of this, and no one really, you know, speaks up and really worked through it, you know, and I think that's a pedagogical imperative. And it links nicely to what you were saying about research we as How can I say, university tutors, or research, teaching assistants, and also our professors and lecturers, you know, we don't really have formal pedagogical training or research background. And yet, you would not let your young child or teenager sit in front of someone who hasn't got the requisite training. And it's interesting to us that we seem to think that's not necessary. And then we wonder, like you say about student anxieties and student dissatisfaction, you know, perhaps I should really go and look more critically, and actually, intellectually and research our practice better yet why? And
Miranda Melcher:I'm not saying that, you know, we all have different research interests. I'm not saying that we all need to go become education specialists. But I do think that there are some basic good practices that would just help. So the first one is Be specific. The second is be transparent. And the third is Be mindful. And this is following quite a strong tradition at this point that is battling against this idea of the assumed student. So anyone who's familiar with gender studies, disability studies, you'll be quite familiar with this concept, which is that the university is still in a lot of ways designed for a white man with no care herself. abilities to succeed it. And that has traditionally been the case, but is obviously in today's world, not at all what most of our students are. And so simply the principle is Be mindful, right is you may not know what your students are coming into the room with. In fact, that's perhaps one of the disadvantages of online learning is that it might make it even harder for you to know what sorts of backgrounds or disadvantages your students are coming in with. On the other hand, you shouldn't have to know every detail about their background, to teach to a broad audience. So the third principle is simply just to be mindful. And that's one of the things that this primer is hoping to do is, as we'll talk about in a minute, going through specific examples, good practice, but also explaining why it makes a difference. I'm hoping to contribute to this idea of being mindful, just by raising a bit of awareness about what different things different students might be going through that maybe you as a teacher haven't encountered before. Fair enough, you're not expected to be omniscient. But this primer is meant to sort of help you and provide you with some tools to actually enact this principle of being mindful in a practical way to benefit your teaching.
Lienkie Diedericks:Miranda, cou d you talk us through one of the e specific examples? I know y u give various examples in t e prime
Miranda Melcher:sure. So one of them, that's I'll just kind of choose at random. But there's a particular one that is feels important to me. So I've got a bunch of Teaching Tips there are sorted into where you might encounter them. So general ones, ones that will come up more in synchronous teaching one that will come up more in asynchronous teaching, etc. So and they're all structured in the same way, I give a recommendation about what I want you to do a baseline example of how this can look how, what this could look like, for example, what might you actually say, an aspirational example. So maybe an even better thing that you could say, and the short paragraph underneath that just explains why this makes a difference to what kind of students? So let me take you through one of those now. So this is one of my general recommendations, which is that, I would suggest that you if you're going to mention it, discuss the move to online teaching and learning in a balanced manner without assuming that it's a uniformly negative experience. So what could this look like it was probably going to be at the beginning of a synchronous session. So maybe it's a zoom call seminar. And you're sort of welcoming students into the room. And you might say something like, I know, moving to everything, being online is an unexpected adjustment for many of us, but I'm sure we'll make it work. That would be sort of a baseline inclusive method of acknowledging that there are challenges, but keeping it not uniformly negative, an aspirational example. So maybe an even better version of that would be something like I know, moving to everything being online is an unexpected adjustment for many of us. But I think it has some positive aspects to for accessibility and inclusion. I'm sure we'll make this work for everyone. So that's a little bit more because you're acknowledging both sides explicitly. Now, why does this matter? This kind of goes back to what I was saying at the beginning, moving to online teaching happened very, very quickly. And with not a lot of planning for the vast majority of us, that inevitably has negative consequences for mental health, for stress, for sleep for planning for preparation, as with anything unexpected, however, as I mentioned at the beginning, for students with disabilities or learning differences, online learning actually can give them many more opportunities to engage and participate than they had previously. And so by you as the teacher and therefore kind of the powerful person in the room, if you make a comment, even if it feels to you like an offhand comment at the beginning of a kind of greeting everyone session, if you make a comment that implies that you assume that everyone has a negative experience with online learning, that can feel to these students for whom it's actually beneficial. That you're sort of, you don't want to hear the positive sides, that your that your perception, as an online learning is bad, and therefore, that maybe this isn't going to be a type of session that takes advantage of the extra opportunities that online learning affords. And so whether or not that's actually your intent, in fact, I would guess that for many people, that's not their intent. The phrasing of this language, the fact that only one side of the experience, as acknowledged, can feel to students who are at the other end of the power dynamic and who are often disadvantaged any way in learning environments, feel less able from the outset to participate and speak up, which is of course not what any of us wants for students in terms of engagement. So a really, really simple change in your language. Just for example, diluting the negativity or mentioning the positives as well as the negatives, really simple changes in your language can nevertheless have a really important signaling effect.
Lienkie Diedericks:Absolutely. And it just could mean the difference, a small difference can make a major difference in that student's ability to feel comfortable in the class and also engage with the content eventually,
Miranda Melcher:exactly. And that's the whole principle of this teaching primer, which is I focus on low effort, high impact changes. So none of the things that I'm recommending require you to go write a research paper, or read a new book, or take a whole new bit of technical training. This is all about how small tweaks in your language and communication can actually have a really big impact on a key portion of students.
Lienkie Diedericks:And we're going to how is this being implemented at Kings? Staff I now staff could download the rimer? Are there any? Will he e holding any more workshops in his in 2021? Way, they can find ut more about it and see how hey can get involved?
Miranda Melcher:Yes, so the primer is available is somewhat in bits and pieces at the minute throughout kings, but we're working on getting it established on a bunch of different web pages within the university. We did have a workshop in December 2020, that actually was really well attended, and people found really useful. And there are already plans to hold another workshop in January 2021, and potentially in future. And then additionally, this, I presented this to just the education charity in November, and hopefully should have sort of a blog post written about that coming out in the next month or two as well to reach beyond the king's community.
Lienkie Diedericks:Yeah, fantastic. Because I think that's so important. So I'll definitely be sharing this with with all our listeners. And please do tweet back at us. And let us know if this is helpful. engage in discussion and do let us know at your institution, whether you have something similar so we could link up and join forces. Miranda, and I think this is absolutely timely, because even though Obviously, we've seen our lately that COVID isn't about to just disappear. And so it really it cannot come at a better time to help us adjust to new ways of working and new ways of learning.
Miranda Melcher:Well, and the important thing as well is that a lot of these recommendations are not specific to online learning. So I'm sort of hoping to take advantage of this disruption, and everyone having to rethink their teaching, but ideally, to create habits and teaching practices that can then transition back into face to face teaching as well.
Lienkie Diedericks:Absolutely. And so you really have sustainable change for small if it like you said for a big outcome across a range of teaching environments. That's really fantastic. That's the goal. Alright, well, thank you so much for being with us here today. And also just all our listeners, Miranda has submitted her PhD. So a big congrats to you. And yeah, and all the best for the future and everything that lies beyond the PhD.
Miranda Melcher:Thank you.I have no idea what that is yet. But I'm hoping it will be fun. And I really quite hoping to continue in this area with inclusive teaching. So please, if people have their own ideas, or things that do or do not work or things you want to add or whatever you've come across in your own experience, please do reach out to me. I would really love to continue the conversation.
Lienkie Diedericks:Well guys, there you have it, please get in contact with Brenda. She's a fabulous person who's doing really important work and we're very happy to have had her here on enabled in academia today. Thanks for listening to today's episode of enabled in academia. Please do like, share and support this podcast on Twitter by following us at enabledinaca. If you have any questions, suggestions or impressions, please tweet at us or send me an email at enabledinacademia@gmail.com. The music for this podcast a room for two is composed by Dan labor and is available on the YouTube Audio music library. As always, access isn't optional for us to be enabled in academia. Yep, I'm making that a thing.