Posters & podcasts

Initial situation

This course is the only compulsory course in the AISE (Analysis and Intervention in Educational Systems) Master’s program: students can choose it in their first or second year. It thus represents, in a way, the backbone of the Master. It must therefore be linked to the Master’s in general and allow students to mobilize all the knowledge and skills they have acquired. The teaching staff’s aim is to raise awareness of the importance of this knowledge and skills in the students’ future professional practice.

Following a retirement, the teaching team has changed in 2021. In addition, the course has been expanded from 3 to 6 credits. These changes were an opportunity to evolve the format of the course. The project management offered to the students, which supports the implementation of the acquired skills, has been completed by two innovative activities: the creation of posters and podcasts.

Project implementation

The objective of this course is to introduce students to the different forms of intervention in education sciences and to enable them to distinguish and analyze them to implement the appropriate form depending on the situation. In this perspective, after a first theoretical session presenting the concepts and the organization of the courses with the help of the Padlet tool, the whole of the first semester is dedicated to the presentation of about fifteen external speakers on the theme “What is intervention in education?”. These speakers may come from the educational, associative, research or cultural world (e.g., the Am Stram Gram Theatre in Geneva, which explains how they welcome schoolchildren; the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva, which explains how to make knowledge accessible to children).

In the 2021-2022 edition of the course, students were invited to choose a mandate, to which they would respond in the form of a project proposal for an intervention by remobilizing elements addressed in two or three of the interventions. To avoid too great a disparity in the mandates proposed, the teaching team has now decided to draft several proposals for fictitious mandates which it gives to the students to choose from. The aim is then for each student to conduct an analysis of the situation, proposing an intervention to be put in place. They design a project in the field of their choice, taking into consideration the contributions of the experts and actors they met during the course.

At the end of the year, the objective is for students to be able to respond to a call for intervention (e.g., if a school has school climate problems, what analysis does the student propose, and what form of intervention, according to an established budget and schedule).

the SEA (Teaching and Learning Support)

In addition to the report, each student creates a poster summarizing the project carried out, with a view to communicating their proposal and proposing a visibility of an entire management of a project that is feasible (budget, timeframe). During the sessions led by external speakers, the SEA (Teaching and Learning Support) a central service of the University of Geneva, offers 2 sessions of training in poster creation and support to students in their creation. At the end of the year, three class sessions are dedicated to the presentation of the posters to the class for feedback and preparation for the poster exhibition day which takes place in the public areas of Unimail.

The organization of the course is also based on the creation of 3 distinct groups of students, each of whom chooses to take on one of three roles: presenter of the interventions (between 8 and 10 members), organizer of the poster exhibition (between 5 and 6 members) or creator of podcasts (between 4 and 5 members).

Presenters are expected to prepare the discussion of the 14 speaker sessions. They must facilitate the twenty-minute discussion time allocated to each presentation. They must write a summary of each speaker’s presentation following a grid of questions proposed by the teacher who guides them to reason about how each of the presentations sheds different light on intervention in teaching and education. Finally, they must design and facilitate a round table at the end of the semester. This round table invites former AISE students to come and share their feelings about the course, their professional experience, the opportunities (e.g., a lecturer, a student working for an NGO, a student working for a trade union).

The second group organizes the poster display. They should take care of the reproduction of the posters, organize the installation and removal of the posters. The venue is booked by the teacher, and under her supervision, they must organize the opening, organize an aperitif in collaboration with the school cafeteria and publicize the event in advance.

The last group, new in 2022, is the one that created the podcasts. While the other groups are completely autonomous, this group meets regularly with the teacher (once a month or every two months) to review their ideas and progress. This year, they chose to answer the following question: “What is the AISE Master?” Through various interviews and recordings of some of the speakers, they try to explain what intervention analysis is. A voice-over provides the underlying explanations.

The evaluation of this course is based on the written work (the project report), the oral presentation (the poster) and the investment in a group. The teaching team has developed an evaluation grid for this purpose, which includes the following main points:

Highlighting the educational issue - 6 points

Potential of the proposed system to solve the problem - 6 points

Coherence, feasibility, precision of the project - 6 points

Argumentative capacity to defend the project - 3 points

Explicit support for the experiences presented in the course and ability to integrate the knowledge learned into the overall training - 2 points

Poster (general presentation, clarity, synthesis, hierarchy of information) - 2 points

Thoughts and advice

In terms of content, it is important to link the activities to the course objectives. It is also important to anticipate the instructions at the outset: the teaching team realized when creating the evaluation grid that certain instructions could have been clarified or underlined at the beginning of the course (on the evaluation of posters in particular). The experience gained through practice allows to articulate everything and to improve the instructions.

In terms of skills, teachers are not always trained to create posters. The intervention of the SEA pole on this point was essential. However, the teaching team noted that support in the development of the podcasts would have been welcome, but that they had not found adequate help. As regards the editing of the podcasts, the time needed by the person in the audiovisual department in charge of this task must be considered in the deadline for students to hand in their podcasts.

In terms of logistics, it was difficult to book a place for the poster exhibition. Last year, the exhibition took place, not without difficulty, on the esplanade of the 3rd floor of Unimail. This year, the teacher booked a year in advance to obtain the reservation of the central space on the ground floor of Uni Mail. The aperitif was organized with the collaboration of the cafeteria. The university’s reprographic service was quick and efficient. The costs of catering and printing were covered by the Section Chair.

Student feedback

À venir à la fin de l’année, les posters et podcast n’ont pas encore été évalués.