Case 5: Teaching the Unthinkable
Dr Shannon Woodcock, History Program
Genocides and the Holocaust is taught to approximately 90 students at Bundoora, and 30 students at Albury-Wodonga.
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The Challenge: To enable students to learn through listening and reflection, and engage with the lived experiences of survivors of traumatic events.
The approach:
In Shannon’s approach to teaching this subject, she uses blogs to construct an online reflective writing space for students to respond to difficult and confronting issues that arise. This allows students a writing space in order to come to terms and engage with the experiences and events in the subject. This online space also allows students to share responses, and especially to “listen” to others’ experiences and responses. Hence the blogs are personal responses, and shared with the class. The online blogs, one per student in the LMS, become a closed community of blogs, which develops weekly over the life of the subject. This blog community offers a bridge for students across the campuses.
The unit is structured around a weekly two hour lecture, which usually includes a film or guest speaker, and a one hour tutorial.
The individual reflective blogging comprises one assignment (of three in total), in which students are required to show “sincere and critical engagement” with the subject material, and submit their blogging as a document. This assignment is largely self-managing, so that the learning via blog is primarily mediated as learner to learner, minimising workload requirements on the lecturer and tutors.