Teaching in service units: The need for relevance

The following material was taken from M5 - Teaching in service units Links to an external site. within the AustMS unit.

Service teaching is teaching to students whose main studies lie outside our discipline area. For the students, this ranges from as little as one unit – for example, a first-year statistics unit required by biology or business  through to a sequence of units, for example, in engineering.

We have a fantastic opportunity to turn these students on to mathematics and statistics so that they learn the ideas deeply and integrate them with their discipline studies. We also hope they actively seek out further units in the area – perhaps taking a mathematical sciences minor or even a double degree. In any case, we have a responsibility to provide them with the knowledge and skills that they require, and that they will apply in their program and their future work.

In addition to the usual considerations in teaching units, those taught to partner disciplines benefit from close interaction with the partner, provision of directly relevant examples, and careful attention to the career intentions of the students.

There is plenty of published material – though very little evidence-based research – on the sensitivities of service teaching, in particular attitudes towards service teaching, suitable teaching strategies, the practicalities of dealing with students and the partner faculties, and the pressures engendered by institutional funding. In what follows, we cite relevant literature. Many excerpts, but not all, relate to service teaching for engineering, both in mathematics and statistics. The issues are similar when teaching for other disciplines (Broadbridge & Henderson, 2008), but be aware that there is a difference between service teaching of a sequence of units, as would happen in engineering, and the provision of a single ‘general’ prerequisite unit, such as statistics for business and biology, or discrete mathematics for computer science.