PGCAPHE

As part of my work with The Brilliant Club, I have been invited to take a course through King's College London's Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice in Higher Education. Most universities have these kinds of programmes as a fairly low-intensity teacher training programme for uni faculty. Teaching assistants in the upper years of their PhDs often enrol as part of their professional development. Teaching staff who are hired onto the uni faculty and don't have a similar qualification are required to complete the programme within their first few years of teaching. My hope is that, through the Brilliant Club, I'll manage to build up the credits to essentially be done when I graduate with my PhD. This will make me a more attractive hire for UK unis and make my first few years of teaching easier since I won't be trying to tick this off the checklist. 

This term is "Rethinking Teaching in the Context of Diversity". We are taking the concept of "diversity" widely, which I really appreciate, and all of the assignments are geared toward reflection on and brainstorming about our own teaching contexts. So I'm getting a structured way to work through the course I'm developing and how I want to tackle pedagogy in my classroom. Also a great chance to meet other PhDs and young staff from across King's. Our first in-person session was yesterday, after a fairly robust discussion on the online forum about what makes up diversity in our classrooms. We had guest speakers from the Disability Services and Equality Offices in yesterday, so some good arguments about what makes up disability, how we are required to be proactive (or not) about approaches to equality, and the like. All grand fun. 

And now, back to my solitary reading and writing. ;)