Case Study 1: Knowing and responding to my students’ diverse needs.

Background

I teach a unit called Critical Data Analysis and Representation, for students from MSc Data Science and AI. One of the goals from the unit, is to understand the biases present in datasets, and the fact that power relationships shape which data is used and for what. They have a final project called “The Devil’s Advocate”, where they have to explore and manipulate real datasets for supporting an hypothesis, and then run the same process but for supporting the opposite hypothesis.

Evaluation

Throughout the activity students showed interesting insight into the understanding of the importance of data biases. However, I think there was much to improve regarding the following Learning Outcome: apply big data tools and also communicate your findings through powerful visualisation techniques (Communication).

Most of the resulting works looked like an ensamble of different narratives, plots, and anecdotes coming from other sources, so they lacked of their own narrative. I feel it is paramount for data science students not only to find data or voices out there that support specific hypotheses. They have to go beyond, and be able to create their own narrative, leveraging the power of storytelling through data.

Moving Forwards

For future similar exercises, I can recommend a series of modification both in the teaching part but also in how is the project assessed.

1. Peer discussions or Crits: An instance of honest feedback from ther peers could benefit students by having an external reader (besides me) who can give useful insights on the power (or the lack of it) on the narrative of the stories they build. At the same time, this gives a real reader. As referred by Barrow [1] but also witnessed in my case, very often students write for the teacher or the assessor, narrowing down the potential of their writing. By having the peers as readers, maybe this helps students to imagine a more general reader that goes beyond the person who is assessing them. This could be even emphasised by having some sort of debate between students where two groups are asked to take opposing stances of the story.
2. Emphasise the narrative and storytelling aspects: I think tools like narrative-building or other writing tools could greatly benefit students. In particular, I plan to have a session (or part of it, at least) to invite an external speaker to talk about storytelling to help them respond to questions such as: for whom are we writing to, why are we writing this, among others.

[1] Barrow, M. (2006). Assessment and student transformation: Linking character and intellect. Studies in Higher Education, 31(03), 357-372.