HERDSA 2010 program: keynote address
*Please note that this provisional program is indicative only and subject to change.
Widening participation: Learning more about who is coming to university and where they might be going
Associate Professor Gary Poole
Director, Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth
Director, Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
University of British Columbia,
Canada
A university changes its admissions criteria such that less emphasis is put on incoming grades and more on student experience in the community and in leadership roles. Very quickly, classrooms change. Academic staff encounter an engaged, active student body, but one that appears to need different kinds of academic support. What can they do?
Admission criteria play an important role in the shaping of any program and, more broadly, the shaping of whole institutions. Changes in such criteria can have significant implications for the demographics of our classes and the ways we teach within them. Yet, admissions criteria are not often discussed in concert with other program factors such as pedagogy, assessment, and graduate attributes. In this session, we will link these factors with some of the ways in which admission criteria are changing, both in the form of broadening acceptable standards within a criterion, as well as with the addition of ‘alternative’ and other criteria. We will also look at kinds of data that inform these linkages.