Scholarship Exchange Webinar, ESC - 17 September 2025
Title: Helping students understand 'the rules of the game' of university learning using LCT
Speaker: Professor Paul Curzon
Title: Helping students understand 'the rules of the game' of university learning using LCT
Abstract: Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is a general sociology theory of knowledge practice that gives very practical tools for improving teaching and learning (such as semantic waves as a way to improve explanation). One thing it can do is help surface 'the rules of the game' of knowledge practice. It is vital that students understand such, often hidden, rules if they are to do well at university. For example, is learning to program just about knowledge and skills (what you know), or dispositions (who you are) too? Is it about writing programs that do the right thing or about how they do it? We will outline our recent work inspired by the Specialisation dimension of LCT (Knowledge v Knowers) to change our practice in ways that help students, as well as briefly describing research based on the other two dimensions (Autonomy and Semantics) too.
Short Bio: Paul Curzon is a Professor of Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. His research areas include Computer Science Education, Interaction Design and Healthcare Informatics. In teaching, he has specialised in teaching introductory programming and Interaction Design. He has run ‘Computer Science for Fun’ (https://cs4fn.blog) a public engagement project inspiring school students about CS for almost 20 years, and Teaching London Computing (https://teachinglondoncomputing.org), providing unplugged resources and other research to practice support for teachers. He was awarded the global IEEE Computer Society Taylor L. Booth Education Award: “For outstanding contributions to the rebirth of computer science as a school subject.” He has written two books with Peter W McOwan: “The Power of Computational Thinking” and “Conjuring with Computation”.