CURRICULUM RESOURCES
What might RELT look like in your discipline - with your students?
RELT is not necessarily about involving every undergraduate student in cutting edge discipline research activities. However, for RELT to flourish, it does require growing learning communities of students and staff around our research work.
A core RELT strategy is teaching and assessing students using active and inquiry based pedagogies. An effective RELT strategy often includes making staff (and senior student) research more 'visible' to undergraduates. This can mean designing our buildings with this in mind. For example, building seminar rooms near research labs and building informal learning spaces that encourage students and staff to engage with each other around research related activities. Another effective strategy involves including opportunities for first year students to attend (inter)disciplinary research seminars by a famous professor as part of their curriculum. In later years the engagement of undergraduate students in research can be more direct. Students might meet staff to talk about research findings in seminars outside the staff member's research lab, or they may be engaged in contributing to the research as support for postgraduate students or in generating or analysing data or, as is very common in the USA, they may be engaged in undergraduate research projects of their own.
The focus of all these RELT strategies is on teaching and learning that makes best use of the University's rich research culture - and leads to valuable learning outcomes for students - with a recognition that RELT will look different in different disciplines, because the nature of research is different in different disciplines.
Faculty Workshops: Engaging undergraduate students in research and enquiry (pdf)
Ideas and strategies for RELT (pdf)
Undergraduate research schemes
Curriculum Examples (pdf)