Dr Diane Westwood

National Teaching Fellow 2015 Dr Diane Westwood has a key learning and teaching role in her University's Faculty of Applied Sciences and is a member of its Psychology department. In her department, she has promoted a focus on 'culture and environment', encouraging student-centred approaches and co-curricular opportunities, and developing a physical environment to support them. Diane introduced the University's first problem-based learning (PBL) module, evaluated its effectiveness as part of a national project and received a University Innovation Challenge Award for the work. She continues to support colleagues to implement PBL and has provided relevant CPD in a local college and secondary school. As a stimulating and adventurous teacher, Diane has developed learning, teaching and assessment methods to engage curiosity and creativity, drawing on her research on playfulness, and taking inspiration from the disciplines of art and design. Crossing pedagogical boundaries, she feels, has helped Psychology students clarify what it means to 'produce' new knowledge and to emphasise 'process' in learning. Starting with the question 'What do you do when you're not at University?' has led her students to a range of fascinating projects that bridge their academic and outside lives, leading one student to comment: "[T]his was the first time I felt that someone was interested in who I am, not just as a psychology student but in my outside life as well".   Diane supports students to present their research as digital sketchbooks and to produce and screen digital stories, finding that this is, for many, a magical moment - powerfully transformative as a new mode of expression opens up to them - and a moment that she recognises from her own experience of learning the digital storytelling method. A colleague has noted that students seem two inches taller during the screening of their digital stories. Diane is currently exploring methods of storymaking to support storytelling in the context of students personal development. Diane's approach is really about creating exciting and liberating liminal spaces for both students and tutors so that they can work together, as partners, in producing new knowledge.