How positive pedagogy can address mental health and wellbeing of students?

There is an increasing number of multi-disciplinary courses, such as Bioinformatics, Health Informatics, Personalised or Stratified Medicine, etc., now available in the Higher Education sector. These course involve the study of cross-disciplinary subjects, such as Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Programming, etc. While they are technically informed by current job requirements, most course teams are faced with the challenge of teaching vastly diverse subjects. Considering that these multi-disciplinary courses are new, most of the time they lack appropriately tailored teaching methods, leading to a significant portion of this challenge of learning those diverse subjects being delegated directly to the students, causing stress and anxiety among them. This is contrary to traditional courses where one would study a single subject throughout the period of higher education and specialize in it at the end. This, in contrast, represents a comparatively relaxed learning track, and one where well tried-and-tested teaching methods exist. This lecture will present and discuss the findings of an Advance HE funded (Shukla et al., 2019a,b) and Ulster University’s award-winning research project which aims to address above mentioned challenges. In this research study, student evaluation reports were gathered in order to identify the aspects of learning and teaching approaches inspired by the work of O’Brien and Blue (2017) and their coining of the term ‘positive pedagogies’, that contribute to reducing student anxiety when faced with a challenging cross-disciplinary subject i.e. Computer Programming in a multi-disciplinary course environment of BSc Hons in Stratified/Personalised Medicine course at Ulster University, UK. The lecture will also discuss the arguments and opinions made by the study team led by the speaker of this lecture in their recently published opinion piece article in Higher Education Pedagogies journal (Shukla et al., 2020). Finally, the lecture aims to stimulate a constructive discussion on this important topic and build future research collaborations between Italy and UK.

References:

O’Brien, M. & Blue, L. (2017). Towards a positive pedagogy: designing pedagogical practices that facilitate positivity within the classroom. Educational Action Research, 26(3):365-384.

Shukla, P., McClean, S., & Hidson, E. (2019a). An intervention through teaching and learning practice to address stress and anxiety in students caused by the challenges of studying a cross-disciplinary subject (Project Summary and Outcomes). Retrieved from https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/intervention-through-teaching-and-learning-practice-addressing-stress-and-anxiety

Shukla P, McClean S, Hidson E. (2019b). Enhancing teaching practice in a cross-disciplinary subject using Positive Pedagogy approaches. Poster presented at Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) - Newer and Early Career Researchers Conference, Newport, Wales, UK, 10 Dec 2019.

Shukla, P., McClean, S., & Hidson, E. (2020). The need for positive pedagogy in multi-disciplinary STEM courses in higher education: an opinion piece. Higher Education Pedagogies, 5(1):324-326.

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Dr Priyank Shukla earned a First Class BSc in Biotechnology (2001-2004) from Bareilly College, MJPR University, Bareilly, India, followed by a First Class MSc in Bioinformatics (2004-2006) from University Institute of Engineering & Technology, CSJM University, Kanpur, India. Thereupon, he joined Laboratory of Genomics at Department of Histology, Embryology and Applied Biology, University of Bologna, Italy for 3-months as a Visiting Researcher to co-work on a Bioinformatics project aimed at full parsing of Genbank database, where he was awarded ‘DIEBA Prize for a Young Researcher working in Bioinformatics applied to Functional Genomics’.

Subsequently, he was awarded ‘Brains-in PhD Residential Scholarship’ (2007-2009) by the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bologna, Italy, and ‘100-Young Indian Researcher Scholarship’ (2009-2010) by Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), Government of Italy, to pursue a PhD in Computer Science (area of research: Machine Learning and Structural Bioinformatics) at Bologna Biocomputing Group under the supervision of Professor Rita Casadio, where he developed Machine Learning based computational methods for prediction of disulphide bonding states of cysteine residues in proteins.

He then undertook a Postdoctoral Scientist (Bioinformatics) position at Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria (2010-2016), wherein he was responsible for consulting, data analysis and data management of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) based projects of Jak-Stat Signalling Consortium. His research then focused on applying NGS approaches to understand Epithelial to Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) and Jak-Stat Signalling – linking infection, inflammation and cancer. During his Postdoc stint he received travel grants from EMBO Germany, Virginia Tech USA and OIST Japan for presenting his research work at different workshops/conferences.

He was appointed to his current post as a Lecturer in Stratified Medicine (Bioinformatics) at Ulster University in July 2016. His current research interest focuses in the fields of Personalised Medicine, Bioinformatics and Positive Pedagogy in Higher Education. As a PI/Co-PI, he has been successful in securing research funding from Invest NI, Advance HE, UKRI, DfE and Novo Nordisk. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK, Fellow of Centre for Higher Education Research and Practice UK, and was awarded twice (back-to-back) Ulster University’s ‘Distinguished Education Excellence Award’, first time under ‘Professional Practice Innovation’ category in 2018, and a second time under ‘Early Career Educator Category’ in 2019.