Adrian York is a Senior Lecturer in Commercial Music presently developing protocols for interactive jazz performance as part of his PhD research. Still active as a jazz musician in past lives he was a pop star, media composer and ran a music agency business.

— Adrian York

Caroline Baruah, originally from New Zealand I settled in London after graduating from Goldsmiths Art School (Textiles). I have worked as a self-employed artist both before and, during teaching in Higher Education. At UoW I currently teach Illustration & Visual Communication at undergraduate levels.

— Caroline Baruah

My early career in classical music and theatre developed in occupational psychology and change management. My work in cultural change, and coaching at board level, has informed my approach to teaching. I am Director of Employability at the School of Management and Marketing at the Westminster Business School. I teach HR and Organisational Behaviour at levels 5 & 6 and train MBA candidates in negotiation, communication in change and strategic influencing. My contribution to Pop Goes the Now! centres on the evolution of business and the commodification of art.

— Nuala OSullivan BSc MSc Dip.HE SFHEA Ac.MCIPD MBPS.

Anne-Gaelle Colom is a Teaching Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster. She is an Open Web enthusiast, passionate about Teaching and Learning and the use of technology in higher education, as well as front-end and mobile web development. Anne-Gaelle has been developing for the web since 1995 and for mobile devices since 1996. Very active in Open Source since 2010, she became a member of the jQuery Mobile Team and the Content Lead for the jQuery Foundation in 2011, and was a member of the jQuery Board of Directors from April 2013 to October 2016. Anne-Gaelle won the Net Award for Innovation of the Year with the jQuery Mobile Team in 2011, and won the Bloomberg International Open Technology WISE (Women in Science, Technology and Engineering) Award in 2016. She is leading the ‘Learn to Code’ Project and Learning Community, and the creator of the codeVisualiser.

Wendy Purdy is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Recipient of the ‘Westminster Teaching Excellence Team Award 2018’ for contributions to the ‘Learn to Code’ digital learning resource.  The project combines my experience of teaching multiple computer programming languages with my research interest in technology-enhanced learning.

The team award funding will be invested in resources to facilitate the participation of students as co-creators in the next stage of this on-going project.

Hilde Stephansen is Lecturer in Sociology and Course Leader for the BA Sociology and Criminology, in the School of Social Sciences. She teaches across a range of modules in social theory and research methods, and her research-led approach to teaching and learning is inspired by principles of critical pedagogy. Hilde is an active researcher with an internationally recognised profile in the fields of social movement studies, media activism and citizen media, and has published a number of journal articles in these areas. She is currently writing a book called Global Media Activism and co-editing a book called Citizen Media and Practice, both to be published by Routledge in 2019. Hilde will be spending her award on a teaching and research exchange visit to the University of Bergen, Norway, in Spring 2019.

Francis is a senior lecturer in sociology and has been at Westminster since 2007. During this time they have been dedicated to teaching in the areas of gender and feminist theory, sexuality and the body. Francis currently leads several modules in these fields within sociology, as well as the interdisciplinary Westminster Elective module in LGBTQ Studies.

Francis’ teaching not only concerns the importance of understanding gender and its intersections with race, class and sexuality as a key theme in contemporary sociology, but aims to equip students with analytical tools to make sense of (and potentially transform) their personal, political and professional lives. Francis is also an active member of the university’s LGBTQ staff network and is currently engaged in various research projects in the area of trans and non-binary embodiment.

Francis will be putting their WLTEA award money towards funding a symposium as part of a pedagogical research project on non-binary genders in Higher Education. The project is being undertaken with Jennifer Fraser (Westminster) and Raf Benato (City University) and aims to gather experiences of non-binary staff and students in HE and imagine what academia might be like beyond binary gender.

Lara is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment and works in the Department of Architecture. The application she put forward for the Award focused on a number of pedagogical developments and teaching quality enhancements that she has introduced in the BA Interior Architecture and in the MA Interior Design and her commitment to developing outreach activities to enrich the students’ experience, such as live projects. She also showed significant engagement in supporting colleagues develop as community of practice around learning and teaching.

The application reviewers were impressed by the ‘transformative impact for both students and colleagues’ in the work described. One example is the project that Lara organised building on her relationship with the Victoria and Albert Museum, which started as a workshop for the cross-departmental Playweek and further developed into an extra-curricular project, working to a brief from the curator of 20th Century and Contemporary Furniture and Product Design, to make a proposal for the 20th Century Gallery. Through getting involved in this project a very diverse range of MA students could work collaboratively to achieve a common objective in response to specific requirements from an external organization and within a defined timeframe. In this project, students developed teamwork aptitude at the same time they were learning about their subject. The feedback and comments from the V&A curators gave students a sense of accomplishment, pride and confidence.

One of the participant students commented: ‘This was an amazing experience. I am certain that all the members of the group are as thankful as I am for this project initiative that represented enrichment to our academic experience at the University’.

The work put forward by the team showed outstanding commitment to finding ways to ensure that the internationalisation of the curriculum is a lived reality for all students in Politics, International Relations and Development. Their approach is to imaginatively triangulate internationalisation of the curriculum, employability, and students as co-creators of knowledge, to enable their diverse community of students to thrive in a changing world through:

• Fostering learner autonomy through independent enquiry, developing student research projects and students as co-creators in an international environment, such as through the International Community Project  and the Democratic Education Network.
• Inspiring Westminster students to think globally about their changing worlds. This is achieved through dialogue and shared experiences across borders with students from partner universities in Turkey, Brazil, Peru, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. It is also achieved through innovative approaches to outward mobility, informed by principles of equality and access; – Facilitating global mobility for 200+ plus Westminster students,
• Embedding skills for global employability and professional resilience, using diversity as resource and a tool for problem-solving, and authentic learning as a foundation for professional capacity building in students.

The application reviewers commended the team, for “… their extensive engagement, globally, with international partners, and the sustained beneficial impact on students, the course, the university and in other institutions. It is clear that the learning experiences for the students will impact both professionally and personally beyond their student lives.”

This award comes as recognition of the team’s long-term efforts to transform and enhance the mathematics provision, as evidenced by the pass-rate on one core module rising from 53% to 87% over a period of six years from 2010-2016. Over the years the team has been involved into the design and implementation of 13 mathematics related modules at both UG and PG levels by bringing and reflecting constantly on their scholarship and research experience.

Mathematics is related to the wider context of computer science and software engineering. The team’s approach was to identify the ways to present core mathematical concepts that underpin the discipline in a ‘problem-based learning’ approach to enable students to access the abstract logic of mathematical thought-process. Various techniques were used here – group discussions and analysis of problem scenarios supported by use of video materials and mobile technologies in teaching mathematics. The team developed this process not only as a means to help students reformulate concepts that might have been only poorly formed in their earlier maths education, but also to build the practice of strengthening students ability of abstractions and abstract reasoning – which is the corner-stone of computer science and many other theoretical sciences. The approach also enables students to learn collaboratively with brighter students modelling thought- process for weaker ones and reduces dependence on tutors for one-to-one explanation and feedback.

The application reviewers were impressed by the transformative impact of team’s work for both students and colleagues. In particular, that the “application clearly demonstrates excellent practice, based on sound pedagogy, innovation in terms of synoptic delivery and the team’s focus on student-centred learning. The result of their work is outstanding, not only in terms of the marked improvement of the pass rate, but also in terms of students’ self-efficacy, as evidenced in the feedback…. The team provides an outstanding example of its impact on promoting and transforming the student learning experience with its discussion of the transformation of a core maths module.”