About this Event
Join us for the first session of the Postgraduate Tutor Community Café, a relaxed and reflective space for postgraduate tutors to share practices and learn from one another.
In this 1st session, Dr Hang Lu, a recent PhD graduate from Moray House School of Education and Sport and now a Teaching Fellow, will explore "Keeping Inquiry Open: Rethinking Criticality in Postgraduate Tutoring". Drawing on her extensive tutoring experience during her doctoral studies, she will reflect on how she understands criticality as a key attribute for students, and how everyday teaching practices can nurture this capacity in the classroom.
Each session of the Community Café will begin with a short sharing from the speaker, followed by open discussion. There will be ample space for postgraduate tutors, teaching assistants, and demonstrators to exchange experiences, ask questions, and learn from one another.
Whether you are new to tutoring or simply interested in university teaching, we warmly invite you to join us. We hope this series will create connections across Schools, Colleges, and disciplines.
We look forward to seeing you there!
For any questions, please contact Yuemiao at [email protected], or through Eventbrite.
Speaker Bio
Hang Lu is a Teaching Fellow at the Institute for Language Education, Moray House, the University of Edinburgh. Her research background is in linguistic ethnography and critical policy analysis, with a particular focus on English language education, agency, and subject formation under structural constraints. Drawing on experience in teaching, tutoring, and doctoral research across different educational contexts, her work explores how criticality is learned and enacted in everyday academic practices. In addition to her academic role, she co-founded FromWomen Community, which aims to empower and connect Chinese-speaking women in Edinburgh and beyond. She is always involved in public-facing projects and activities that centre on people’s lived experiences and stories.
Abstract
This session draws on my own academic and professional trajectory: from literary studies and teaching in China, through critical ethnographic research during my PhD, to my current work in postgraduate teaching and tutoring. I reflect on how criticality is learned, enacted, and sometimes flattened in higher education contexts. Across tutorials, feedback conversations, and student writing, tutors frequently encounter questions such as ‘What is critical thinking?’ or ‘How do I show I am being critical?’ While these questions are often treated as skills-related or assessment-oriented, this session suggests that they point to a deeper issue: how students come to rely on totalising explanations, premature theoretical closure, and the erasure of agency in their attempts to be ‘critical’.
Rather than treating critical thinking as a set of techniques to be taught or performed, I propose thinking in terms of criticality as practice. This suggests a sustained orientation towards keeping inquiry open, unpacking explanatory mechanisms, and holding judgment long enough for complexity to emerge. Drawing on ethnographic practices and critical theory, this session explores how tutors could enhance criticality through small, often unnoticed interactional moves. Try to respond with questions rather than answers, redirect attention from labels to processes, and make space for variation and agency under constraint. This session will be structured as a short reflective talk followed by discussion, inviting everyone from across disciplines to share experiences of how criticality is enacted, rewarded, or constrained in their own teaching contexts. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the session aims to develop a shared language for noticing and sustaining criticality in everyday tutoring practice.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Levels Cafe & Lounge, 9C Holyrood Road, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
