Department of History
Teaching
Commitment to teaching
We care about our teaching and about our students, and have an active involvement with the Subject Centre for History, Classics and Archaeology that aspires to improve history teaching in Britain's universities. We are committed to ensuring that you make the most of your time with us, and that you emerge with a degree you can feel proud of. We have developed a range of on-line and interactive materials to support our teaching, and we are continually thinking about effective ways to use on-line resources to improve student learning. We take time to talk to our students about how to improve their grades, and we share our research work with them in our teaching, to keep them at the cutting edge of the discipline.
Teaching methods
Classes consist of lectures and seminars. Nearly all modules have one lecture and one seminar per week (each lasting 50 minutes).
Lectures consist of a broad survey of a subject given by a lecturer. They give you a framework for your reading. Lectures and seminars are usually supplemented by a web-site that you can access from home if you are registered on the module.
Seminars are discussion groups consisting of a tutor and 15-17 students. Seminars provide an opportunity to discuss and expand upon the reading. They provide interaction with your tutor and other students, so that you can check on your progress and expand your ideas. They are not a substitute for independent reading and thinking, but a support framework for that independent study.
You can use the seminar to raise any problems or queries. You can also use it for expanding on issues that have been raised by the reading, and pulling together themes that recur across seminars.
In most sessions, some members of the seminar group will be expected to have prepared specific comments, and/or to have done additional reading.
Attendance at lectures is optional but strongly advised. Attendance at seminars is very important. If you regularly miss seminars, you will be contacted and required to account for your absence. Attendance is related to performance in assessment: the highest marks are obtained by students who attend regularly.
Assessment
We use a wide variety of assessment methods including essays, extended essays, document tests and exercises, assessed seminar papers, individual and group presentations, book and/or periodical reviews, internet-based research, projects, a dissertation and end of year examinations.
Some modules include an element of self-reflective assessment, where part of your coursework will be a reflection on your progress and the skills that you have acquired.
Your overall mark for each module is based on assessed coursework and examinations. The ratio of assessed course work to examination for each module varies from 75:25 to 40:60.
Studying independently
At university, you have to take responsibility for your own learning. One of the great challenges of moving into higher education is to adjust to the amount of independent study you are required to do. Compared to department or college, you will spend less time in class (about 8 hours per week, on average). So you will be expected to do more studying in your own time.
Independent study primarily consists of reading and learning from published sources - books, articles, official documents, web sites etc. Independent learning means preparing properly for seminars, thinking about what you have studied, and being ready to discuss it with other students.
Teaching resources
There is a well-stocked library, with a short-loan collection for heavily-used resources. Most of our modules are also supported by websites, which have additional information and resources available on line and accessible from home computers (and internet cafés, if you want to read up for your seminar while on the beach.)
There are three computer labs available for general use on the St Matthias campus, with about a hundred workstations running Windows NT with the software that you will need for your assessment work. All PCs have full Internet access and university e-mail . A team of support staff provides instruction on using the range of software packages. There are additional twenty-four hour computing facilities at the Frenchay campus.
Some of the lecture halls and teaching rooms have internet connections, and we are aiming to ensure that all teaching rooms have network access over the next few years.
