History Lecturer Rachel to tell THE Live conference how to teach Generation Z

An academic from the University of Northampton will be speaking at a high-profile Higher Education conference this week, where she’ll provide insights into teaching Generation Z students.

In the past year, the first cohort of Generation Z students have started university, and it’s believed they come with new perceptions of their consumer power, and different dynamics and habits as learners, compared with the millennials they are following.

Lecturer in History, Rachel Moss, will provide her thoughts on teaching Gen Zeds when she appears at the THE Live event, in London, on Thursday 28 November.

Rachel, pictured above, recently penned an opinion piece on the subject on the Times Higher Education website.

In the piece, she says: “As an elder millennial, I sympathise with my Generation Z students.

How do we teach students who are, as The Economist recently put it, ‘stressed, depressed and exam-obsessed’? Perhaps part of the solution lies in hiring more millennial academics, who may be up to two decades older than their students but who share many of the same anxieties.

Life is stressful, and in striving to make my classroom a safe space for my students, focused on their needs rather than on my ego, I am not attempting to shield them from uncomfortable truths, or even to set aside their very understandable worries. Instead, I hope to equip them to deal with their problems outside class as well as inside it.”

University of Northampton Vice Chancellor, Professor Nick Petford, is also speaking at THE Live, on Wednesday. Prof Petford will take part in a panel discussion on the civic duties of universities – something UON was praised for in a Guardian feature, last year.

Prof Petford will also be fielding queries during the conference’s Vice Chancellor Question Time, on Wednesday afternoon.