Creative strategies that promote student study success

In United Kingdom Higher Education students are said to ‘read for their degrees’. This indicates that there is very little direct teaching, and if there is, it is often in a traditional lecture format, and that contact-time with academics, those members of the university who teach or research, is limited. Instead the students are expected to be able to organise themselves for independent study and inter-dependent learning. This means, the students are expected to understand the forms and processes of university teaching and learning; to know how we teach and assess, and what sorts of academic work they have to undertake to get tasks and assessments successfully completed. They are also expected to have the motivation, self-discipline and agency to engage actively and proactively with their learning; to be able to step back from their learning experience to develop critical and analytical thinking skills, and to improve on future performance. The reality is that many students are underprepared for the sort of university teaching and learning environment just described. The purpose of this chapter is to share our experience of developing and teaching an interdisciplinary first-year undergraduate module where we embedded emancipatory and creative study strategies that promote student study success. We thereby argue for a model of teaching and learning that accommodates the ‘flawed self’ of both the learner and the teacher - a model that acknowledges and accommodates learning in all its complexity.