Navigating Challenges in Postgraduate Pedagogy: An EDI Consideration to Preparing, Designing, and Delivering Teaching by PGRs

Abstract

Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs) play an integral role in shaping the pedagogical landscape within Higher Education despite encountering several challenges as they prepare, design, and deliver their teaching. This paper explores these challenges, focusing on the advantages of advancing Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in postgraduate pedagogies. Except for barriers from literature, this paper will also include authors’ personal teaching experiences in the module Technology Management for one and a half years. When PGRs prepare and design for the session, they should be aware of EDI issues since students may have different cultures, knowledge, and personalities. Therefore, it is a challenge to prepare and design the teaching to ensure all students can easily understand, participate equally in the session, and have an equal chance to express or share their thoughts and ideas with others after the session. By addressing this issue, this paper will explain things that PGRs should be concerned about and the challenges they face, such as how they would split students into each group, how they support different students with different characteristics, such as disabilities and how to innovate in the method of teaching, etc. PGRs should also consider EDI in their teaching practices, which can be more complex than preparing due to unexpected situations that arise during actual practice. Therefore, PGRs should seek to learn from others’ teaching experiences and seek support when needed. This paper will illustrate challenges aligned with EDI issues that have been faced, such as arguments between students, sensitive questions asked by students and reports from students, and, more importantly, how to perfectly deliver the knowledge that has been prepared and designed to ensure that students can feel that EDI is also a challenge that PGRs faced.