Diversity in Higher Education Teaching

By Falila Kurfi Ishaq and Lina Latif

Learning and Teaching are important aspects of higher education that can be enhanced through workshops, seminars and conferences. They add to the individual learner’s skills, enhance talents and abilities through sharing of ideas with others. This in turn augments individual learning and teaching skills in the sphere of education.

With this in mind, UCSI University held its 2^nd Learning and Teaching Symposium entitled ‘Diversity in Higher Education Teaching’. The symposium held on 12^th June 2010 at the South Wing, KL Campus consisted of two workshops by distinguished speakers.

The workshops that ran concurrently were titled ‘Learning together; learning from each other’ presented by Associate Professor Dr. Keith Thomas, who was also the keynote speaker while the other workshop was lead by Anthony Pinto, a guru in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and training.

In his workshop Dr. Keith Thomas covered six sub-themes which included: the dangerous business of teaching in higher education; the concept of volcanic power; articulating strengths; identifying areas of development; learning together; learning from each other and building a diverse learning community in higher education.

It was an interesting sharing of ideas among the facilitator and participants and they were required to pull from their own personal experiences and try to relate them to what their students were experiencing. That, above all, would help the students to cope better regardless of where they come from, cultural background or political narrative history.

Some interesting terms were also coined during the workshop like ’sexy theory’. In short, it was how to make learning theory interesting for students given that it is a more heavy and serious domain of teaching and learning.

In the other workshop which was titled ‘Delivering unconscious learning with NLP & Neuro-semantics’ roofed five sub themes - understanding the NLP communication model and the 3 Drivers of Behavior; understanding and communicating, using the 4-MAT system for structuring the subject materials; using state management and anchoring techniques to install learning and using the power of metaphors to tap into our unconscious minds.

NLP is a model of how we operate and function given our mind and body emotions. NLP also describes human function, focusing on experience, experiencing and experimenting, rather than theory. Through the workshop, participants understood the different human attributes such as attitudes, learning preference styles which include visual, auditory or kinaesthetic representational systems and how they can be used to understand the social world.

The workshop was both theoretical and practical, as the presenter not only presented his ideas but also engaged participants in a demonstration of learning experiences. Actions, according to Pinto, involve higher cortical functions in the brain which enable people to create language and to map things out linguistically.

Overall, the half day workshop managed to catch the interest of lecturers and students alike as many turned up at the last minute to join. They expressed positive feedback of the benefits of the workshop and how different approaches could be used to further boost ‘the dangerous business of teaching in higher education’.

More pictures in Frontiers Gallery 2010