Wednesday, December 9, 2015

10:45 AM - 11:45 AM

The Shine Dome

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Overview

Louise Kuchel

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Details

Communication, in all its forms, is touted as one of the most valuable transferable skills, and TLO4 is both noble and ambitious in its recognition of this. But what does communication ‘with a range of audiences, for a range of purposes and in a range of modes’ actually mean and how can it be implemented? The most common responses by science academics to this question are to focus on what communication ‘products’ students should produce and/or what genres their students should learn to write. In this workshop I argue that both approaches miss the point and are several steps ahead of where the discussion and research into TLO4 needs to be. I advocate for an approach based on identifying and developing core skills that enable students to become effective communicators and to transfer those skills to different contexts. An approach such as this both facilitates life-long self improvement in students’ communication abilities and opens opportunities for students to work with an enormous diversity of communication ‘products’ and genres whilst meeting the TLO4 requirements. I will discuss examples of strategies and approaches that you can use in your own contexts to identify and develop these core skills, several of which I have used in recent research into this topic.

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Speaker