From traditional lecture to block teaching in EU law: the student and lecturer experience

In her paper Clare Chambers (University of the West of England) intended to present student and lecturer experiences on teaching EU law via block teaching. Her session was unfortunately cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances, but you can download her full paper at the bottom of the page (RTF file, 31 pages, 114 KB) or see her slides (embedded below).

The ethos of universities is changing – courses are student centred and the focus is on releasing staff and student potential for each individual to fulfil their own and universities’ agendas. Lecturers request more research time in order to update their teaching and feed into the courses they teach, yet with increasing demands from students they are often stretched to the maximum in delivering a high quality learning experience. Notwithstanding this, research remains a high priority.

One solution sometimes posed by management is block teaching. Bournemouth has initiated a ‘releasing potential’ scheme, allowing academics the freedom to manipulate their teaching timetable so they can teach as well as have time for research. The presenter, a passionate teacher and researcher, was part of the first cohort to go through this scheme. Her ambition was to reconcile without compromise the demands of teaching and research.

Block teaching is used in conjunction with podcasts to enable student centred learning, an approach which has been embraced in the law department in the second year module on EU law. EU law is a subject that not many law students like to begin with, but once they get to grips with it they normally succeed. The presenter wanted to deliver the course in a manner that provided not only an effective learning experience but also ensured that the learning was deep and would be able to be used in later legal careers.

Can block teaching deliver a high quality learning experience? This paper presents the experiences, successes and failures of using block teaching as a method of disseminating information for both students and lecturers, exploring the rationale behind block teaching, its advantages and disadvantages, and mapping this onto practical experience over one year.

The aim of the paper is not to propose a panacea for all those who wish to pursue the ‘freeing up’ of time for research – it merely wishes to propose another method of teaching that could be embraced, whilst suggesting that the notion of block teaching is not as daunting as it first appears despite its obvious risks.

About Clare

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Clare moved from Bournemouth University to take up a post as senior lecturer at Bristol Law School in January 2009. She teaches European law, banking law, tort law and corporate governance law. Her research interests are banking law, financial education, financial exclusion, alternative financial delivery mechanisms and mobile finance.
 
Clare holds PG Certs in Academic Practice (2007 Bournemouth University) and Research Supervision (2008 Bournemouth University).

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Last Modified: 9 July 2010