My Teaching Philosophy

As part of my online study I was required to draft an outline of what my teaching philosophy consists of. Please find it below:

I see my role as a “lamplighter”, by which I mean that I hope to make the complicated simple and provide my learners with the clearest and most informed possible information from which they can then formulate their own opinions, judgments and knowledge-base. I believe in providing such information in a multitude of ways including the development of interactive learning materials and, hopefully, engaging and interesting video resources which are hosted on my YouTube channel known as ‘Legal Locomotive’, (available to visit at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuzqppW8HZxPUL_Da_BULBg) and also available on the Chinese equivalent known as ‘YouKu’. Related to this aspect of my philosophy is my opinion that some parts of the discipline I teach are inherently dry and uninteresting for undergraduate students.

In addition to my creation of engaging resources, this is recently demonstrated by the ‘SWUPL Movie Academy’, a ‘club’ open to our 4th year Chinese students which enables them to appear as actors in the video learning resources we produce for our OpenMoodle pre-study materials which are accessed in China. The first video was on referencing and is available here: https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNDM4NDQwMzEyMA==.html?spm=a2hzp.8244740.0.0

I aim to be as approachable as possible to my students and try to make myself as reasonably available to them as possible and am always happy to field questions in person, by email and by other electronic means. In terms of the way in which I believe my students learn best, I believe that active participation in seminars – more so than lectures – is very important. I try to engineer such participation through the setting of group work and attempting to get the learners to engage in constructive debates. A way in which I try and draw these disparate aspects of my teaching philosophy together is by arranging interesting and stimulating activities which centre on a legal problem.

The most striking example of this is probably the series of seasonally appropriate Courtroom activities I arranged for my A-Level students in my last place of work. These included a trial of a man accused of murdering Father Christmas – on the predicate that he had mistaken him for a dangerous intruder.

If I had to write a book on teaching, it would probably be called “Making the Inaccessible Accessible”. This is from something that resonated with me on the Coventry University video about transformative learning and the educational strategy.