Sally Kift is a Professor of Law at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia (QUT). Over 2006-2007, she was seconded to the QUT Chancellery as the institution’s Director, First Year Experience Project. From 2001-2006, she served as Assistant Dean, Teaching & Learning in the QUT Faculty of Law. Her research interests include criminal law, legal education, first year experience, sessional staff development, and the teaching, learning and assessment of graduate attributes/ transferable skills.
Sally was a recipient of a National Teaching Award in 2003, winning the Australian Award for University Teaching (AAUT) in Economics, Business, Law and Related Studies. Amongst other things, that award acknowledged her work in first year curriculum design, support for sessional teaching staff, enhancing the student experience and the development of graduate attributes in core curriculum. In 2006, Sally was awarded one of three inaugural national Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Senior Fellowships for a project entitled, Articulating a transition pedagogy to scaffold and to enhance the first year learning experience in Australian higher education. In 2007, a Project Team that she led was awarded a further ALTC (Carrick Institute) National Teaching Award for the QUT Law Faculty’s Assessment and Feedback practices.
Abstract
A transition pedagogy for first year curriculum design and renewal
Professor Sally Kift
ALTC Senior Fellow
Queensland University of Technology
This Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Senior Fellowship has investigated good practice in first year curriculum design. The impetus for this work has been the recognition that, in all their diversity, a defining commonality amongst first year students is that they come to us in higher education to learn. It is therefore within the first year curriculum that students must be engaged, supported, and realise a sense of belonging. A major Fellowship outcome has been the articulation of a research-based 'transition pedagogy' – a guiding philosophy for intentional first year curriculum design that carefully scaffolds and mediates the first year learning experience for contemporary heterogeneous cohorts. This presentation will set the scene for our interactions over the next two days. It will discuss briefly the Fellowship’s identification of six interconnected, organising principles for first year curriculum design and then move to a meta analysis of findings and observations from a prolonged period of sectoral engagement and dissemination under the auspices of the Fellowship.
