The ‘naked’ syllabus as a model of faculty development: is this the missing link in Higher Education?

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on an intentional syllabus redesign prompting Faculty in a research-led university to adopt agentic engagement practices for accreditation purposes. To develop this, a syllabus component was designed to align student agency with learning outcomes and assessment via lesson-specific action-orient- ed statements. Both as course designers and external examiners, university teach- ers provided experiential narratives of how this component can affect teaching practices, student learning, assessment and accreditation. Findings suggest that the student agency component prompted Faculty to reconsider roles and practices and can be a driver of change as a quality standard for accreditation purposes.

KEYWORDS:

• Accreditation
• action-oriented
• agentic engagement
• student agency
• learning outcomes
• student-centred syllabus

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all 6 faculty members and teaching fellows who participated in this study. This work was a follow-up action of a seminar on “A Students-centred Syllabus Design in Higher Education; Aligning Learning outcomes and Student Engagement” organised by the Training of the Trainers Initiative at the University of Crete.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kallia Katsampoxaki-Hodgetts

Kallia Katsampoxaki-Hodgetts is a Training of the Trainers (TotT) coordinator at the University of Crete. She is interested in Scholarship of Student Engagement and the Scholarship of Teacher Development in Higher Education. She is also teaching Academic English for Science undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Crete in Greece and she is interested in critical digital academic literacies honed in current instructional practices, inquiry based science education and genre pedagogy. She has also published three course books on English for Specific Academic Purposes in Chemistry, Biology, and Mathematics for international undergraduate students.