Guest speaker - Tansy Jessop
We are very pleased that Professor Tansy Jessop from the University of Bristol will present a keynote address and facilitate a workshop at the 2024 Teaching and Learning Symposium. View the programme outline.
Professor Tansy Jessop, PVC Education and Students, University of Bristol
Keynote abstract
Fostering student agency and engagement in assessment and feedback: taking a programme approach
In TESTA data, students routinely describe being overwhelmed by summative assessment. In rushing to complete assessments, they often fail to see their wider purpose and relevance, or to find space and time to shape or take pride in their work. Students say that they struggle to see connections between assessment tasks across the programme, and to trust feedback enough to act on it. Drawing on theories of alienation and engagement, this talk will explore how we might design assessment and feedback across programmes to enable students to exercise their agency, play to their strengths, become more curious, deepen their understanding, and surprisingly, have more fun.
Workshop abstract
Co-creating institutional principles for curriculum design: how, why, and so what?
This interactive workshop will take a playful and critical approach to examining the purpose and impact of institutional curriculum frameworks: the relatively recent process of identifying distinctive values and principles for curriculum design at different universities. The workshop will briefly outline the story of two curriculum frameworks, one at a post-1992, and the other at a research-intensive. It will invite participants to undertake activities to identify for themselves the educational value of articulating distinctive curriculum principles, whether and how they come to have resonance, how they can be acts of resistance in a highly regulated environment, and how and whether they intersect with disciplinary practice. The ‘so what’ question will be central to the activities and discussion.
Tansy's biography
Tansy Jessop is PVC Education and Students at the University of Bristol, where she has led curriculum enhancement across the institution to re-imagine the design of programmes and assessment. Across the sector and working with many programmes in different universities, she has led the ‘Transforming the Experience of Students through Assessment’ (TESTA) research and change project for 15 years. Her recent book ‘Student Agency and Engagement: Transforming Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education’ draws on findings from TESTA to show the value of taking a programme approach, offering fresh perspectives of students’ experience of assessment and feedback through theories of alienation and engagement.
Before joining Bristol, Tansy was Head of Learning and Teaching at the University of Winchester and Professor of Research Informed Teaching at Solent University. She has previously worked as a research consultant in India, the Middle East, and South Africa on social justice and leadership development in education. Tansy started her career as a secondary school teacher in South Africa, completing a PhD which analysed the narratives of rural primary teachers in KwaZulu-Natal in the early post-apartheid period.
On weekends, Tansy walks the dog, reads detective novels and biographies, and has fun messing about in the kitchen cooking new recipes.
How to contact Tansy
