Back to the Drawing Board: Reimagining the Module

“If we removed every module today and had a blank sheet of paper, what would the program look like? What would the content look like if we redesigned it?” mused Professor of Geography, Bill Austin.

One door down, Dr Antonis Vradis bounced ideas off postgraduate student Ewan Jenkins. “You would teach the decolonial stuff after the normative frame. You wouldn’t do decolonial stuff first. Or would you?”

Modules lie at the centre of learning here at St Andrews. As I spoke to faculty from the School of Geography and Sustainable Development (SD), we explored the module and broke it down to understand its limits and possibilities. 

Each faculty member acknowledged the autonomy they had over their own modules in their roles as convenors. “My module is something I’m very passionate about, which is how we manage environments,” explained Dr Lydia Cole. Her module, Critical Dimensions of Environmental Management, is shaped by her training as an ecologist and her perceptions of what a career in environmental management would demand.

At the honours level, academics bring unique concerns, backgrounds, and methods to their teaching. Dr. Charlotte Lee teaches a module called Cultural Geographies of Climate Activism. For her, it’s important to make her students more hopeful. She expressed her surprise at the fact that students "were always quite cynical about activism", and her desire to change that. 

Subjective focus is thus inherently central to honours modules, which are research-driven and shaped in form and content by the individuals teaching them. A similar subjectivity bleeds into sub-honours modules as well.  

Jenkins considered Vradis, his PhD supervisor and module convenor for What is Sustainable Development?, as vital to determining the critical edge of the module. "If someone else had designed that, they may not have gotten a critique of SD so early or even so forcefully."

Tutors also shape the fundamental understanding of curricula at the sub-honours level. Jenkins compared his critical approach to SD with a fellow tutor whose own methods are informed by experiences working at the United Nations. He explained how some tutors engage with content through a more "on-the-ground approach," whereas he approaches SD as an "institutional, weighty, and powerful ideology" that demands critique.

This subjectivity results in a range of outcomes. While Vradis introduces students to SD using a critical lens, that's not always the case. A common theme across my conversations was the recognition of an inherent contingency tied to module design.

"Of course there’s legacy, there’s baggage, there’s momentum, and there are all the downsides that follow that stuff that end up in our teaching," said Austin. 

"Modules can just fall into a bit of a template. If it works, if it’s not broken, why change it?" As Jenkins explained, a broken template is often tied to the criteria of students passing exams and assessments. He questioned whether the module content plays any real role in the achievement of these criteria. 

"Even though you’d think a sub-honours module would be more or less structured neutrally there’s not really such a thing," added Vradis. "There’s no such thing as objectivity. Because it’s all human knowledge that’s built on a specific sort of structural concepts." 

To better understand how this subjectivity can shape the student experience, I also spoke to the Director of Education, Hitanshi Badani.

"It was really hard for me in my initial years to talk about my context in a way that was nuanced, because I felt like I needed to explain so much to even start." Badani described an assumption of knowledge that obscures scholarship beyond the mainstream. For example, teaching non-Western perspectives often necessitates spending time on basic details which can lead to a loss of nuance. 

She also explained the "week eight effect" — a phenomenon where critical perspectives, often taught towards the end of the semester, are received with lower levels of student engagement. Seemingly small considerations, such as when things are taught or the order in which they are taught, tend to remain unchanged over decades of teaching. She highlights this as an example of pedagogical practices that need to be challenged. What might such challenges look like? In Dr Vradis’s words, "we’d be proposing turning the entire notion (of SD) on its head."

By altering the order of topics in What is Sustainable Development?, Jenkins described a module that could "start with the peripheral and make that the centre of thought."

The effect of such changes could go beyond the lecture theatre and alter the pedagogical realities of the university, inciting change in the way resources are allocated.

"If you’re working on an academic area that’s not mainstream, you have to be proactive in acquiring resources," explained Badani, who struggled to find books for her dissertation on the city of Mumbai at the library. “They’re really good if you proactively seek it out, but if you’re a student you’re never gonna accidentally stumble upon a book about that." 

Because module reading lists help shape the composition of university libraries, changes to courses’ content can directly inform changes to the breadth of knowledge accessible to students. Therefore, while decolonising the curriculum is often perceived as a top-down process, these conversations displayed the scope of the module as an effective vehicle for students to create change in collaboration with academics. 

"As far as I know, we’re not engaging students at that design stage, or even at the stage of here’s a blank sheet of paper — would your student group like to help us reimagine a program?" said Austin. The lack of various avenues for student input was echoed by Badani, who explained that the only mechanism for students to have input in the curriculum is through student representatives. An interactive module design process between students and conveners could be the key to actioning greater change. As Dr Cole puts it, "If you’ve got students for ten weeks, you can really do quite a lot." 

Every academic I spoke to was receptive, even enthusiastic, about the idea of greater student input. However, they recognised a range of logistical considerations that were central to actioning the transformation. 

"There are pragmatic aspects to everything we do; it is often about resources," Austin explained. The challenges of striking a balance between field training, lab-based training, lectures, and managing the resource and time-tabling constraints that come with each, are not to be overlooked. Vradis highlights the role of staff availability. "When you design the syllabus, you need to see who’s available and at what time of the year." Institutional realities may also require alteration to achieve change.

My conversations left me optimistic, however, that the individuals designing our modules are open to these conversations, negotiations, and change. As I stood up to leave Dr. Cole’s office, she added a final thought that only strengthened this optimism: "In this last year I’ve almost been thinking, does it really matter what I teach students as long as I teach them to be tolerant of each other and think more holistically about how they want to be in the world?" 

Illustration: Grace Robinson