Page 56 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
The purpose of the seminars in GLG8X05 is to facilitate classroom discussions that deepen the understanding of the lectured topics and expose students to the practical applications of those topics in a wide variety of industries and academic pursuits (Parker 2001). We also see the seminars as a way, through practice and guidance, of enhancing the students’ ability to extract, rank and synthesise relevant information from journal articles and to critically engage with academic literature, which bolsters the transition to postgraduate studies (Hoeta 2021). Furthermore, the oral presentation component gives students practice in effectively communicating difficult scientific concepts – an extremely valuable and marketable skill, and one there is also not much opportunity to develop in the undergraduate programme. The seminar format, i.e., a facilitated group discussion,
as opposed to a more traditional oral presentation where information delivery is largely one way, is intended to create a more informal platform where students feel comfortable to speak up, to make the interpretation of the paper a group rather than solely individual effort, and to allow guidance from the lecturer at every step.
How the seminars are conducted
The journal articles used: We provide the students with a list of journal articles (in pdf format on Blackboard) and let each student select one preferred article on a first-come-first-served basis. We do also allow students to suggest their own journal article that is not
on the provided list, but it must be of a suitable topic and similar in style to the selection. The journal articles we select are mostly from high-impact journals such as Nature, Science, Geology and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Some examples of the journal articles used in the seminars
The reasons for this are, firstly, that the topics present particularly significant and often paradigm-shifting contributions to the discipline; and secondly because these papers are usually short
(on average four pages long, although some can have large supplementary datasets). The short nature of the journal articles
is ideal for the limited amount of time available to read the entire paper and extract information for the presentation (usually two days’ preparation time). The topics are chosen to show applications of isotope science in a diverse range of fields – including palaeoclimate studies, archaeology, geomorphology, cosmochemistry, forensics and medical geology, alongside more traditional geological themes.
1.