Informal? Well, should I just say, this posting concerns normal teaching opportunities rather than events deliberately set up for my PGCert studies. In the past week, I’ve spoken to our research students about bibliographic referencing tools and general good practice – that turned into a great discussion lasting just under and hour – and two groups of first year undergraduates (one surprisingly large class and one small), about useful online resources for their first proper essay assignments. Even the course-leader was gratified by the turn-out for the first session, and although I only had 10-15 minutes, I thought I got quite a lot across.
I’ve also done two 1:1 sessions on citation and referencing for an undergraduate with particularly challenging reference sources, and a distance-learner on one of our taught postgrad courses. These were more like tutorials than lessons, obviously. The students provided details of the materials they needed to cite, and I helped them to format them. We encourage students to use the Harvard system at the Conservatoire – it’s not the system I use myself, but hey, it’s just a question of formulating the citations and bibliography in accordance with a set of rules. I’ve spent decades with cataloguing rules, so citation and referencing really isn’t a problem for me! Hopefully I’ve made things a bit clearer for our students.
Karen McAulay Teaching Artist 