(PLENARY SESSION) Staff-student Partnership And Peer Facilitation Fostering Student Engagement And Teaching Skills Development

Presenter: Luciane Vieira de Mello (School of Life Sciences, University of Liverpool)

Key words: Employability; Staff-student partnership; Peer-learning

Teaching and mentoring are important skills that underpin graduate development and boost employability both within and outside academia. Our degree programs, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels do not normally focus on developing these key skills. To address this issue, we have designed an innovative way to add context to bioinformatics teaching, with potential application to other cross-cutting disciplines.

Bioinformatics is a skillset underpinning almost all aspects of biology. The aim was to provide students with a perspective of how bioinformatics tools can be used on their own research projects while developing students’ teaching skills.

Peer facilitators (past students) drawn from previous years’ students, and peer receivers (current students) benefit through developing different sets of skills. It offered a peer-learning approach, employing a staff- student partnership to influence learning activities in a postgraduate interdisciplinary module with potential applications in broader spectrum of research. The activities were centred on the experiences of peer- facilitators who had applied knowledge and skills gained from the module to their own research work. Peer- facilitators presented their experiences and supported teaching during workshop activities by delivering a short presentation, helping the peer-receivers during workshops, and discussing the research projects of both facilitators and receivers. This student-centred approach was well received by the new cohort, who claimed to have gained improved understanding of the module content and increased awareness of the practical applications in one’s own research projects. Equally, peer-facilitators also developed better understanding of the subject through discussing projects of peer receivers and appreciated that the activity was a rare and invaluable opportunity to develop their teaching skills. In addition, a brief discussion on how the approach was further developed at undergraduate level will be presented.