The Learning and Teaching Scholarship Network exists to support colleagues across the institution who are engaging in scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) - or who, more directly, who have a scholarly curiosity about the experiences of their students, and how their learning intersects with staff teaching. It’s open to all colleagues, no matter their role, career stage, or discipline, and is led by a cross-institutional steering group. One of the ways in which we support colleagues undertaking a scholarly inquiry into their learning and teaching is by running workshops and information-sharing events; and this blog post reflects on a handful of these from earlier in the summer.
As part of the University’s Education Celebration Event, Professor David Hyatt and Professor Louise Robson ran a workshop on scholarship. The session explored staff motivations for doing scholarship in the learning and teaching space and highlighted a number of barriers to doing scholarship. The LTSN is going to work with Elevate moving forward, to identify solutions reducing those barriers, something which we think is critical given the value placed on scholarship in the Academic Career Pathway.
Louise and David also featured in another event on the 5th of July, entitled Writing for Publication on SoTL. They were joined by Professor Claire McGourlay (University of Manchester, School of Law) and Dr Matteo Di Benedetti (Multidisciplinary Engineering Education). David, from his experience as a published author and as Deputy Editor of a high-ranking educational journal, spoke on the reasons for publishing on SoTL, what editors are looking for in journal articles, why articles are rejected, and ways authors can increase their chances of being successful. Louise, Claire, and Matteo discussed their experiences of publishing, and all four presenters offered their advice and reflections on issues to bear in mind when considering publishing scholarly work, as well as discussing a range of potential outlets and genres for dissemination. The session provided an interactive discursive space for participants to ask questions and clarify their understandings of the publication and dissemination process.
The impact was very positive - participants’ confidence in communicating their ideas and experiences through published work increased, and they expressed an intention to be involved in a wider range of dissemination activity. One attendee joined the Research Support Group in Multidisciplinary Engineering Education and has continued to contribute to scholarly activity within this field.
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This Research Support Group was busy earlier in the summer as well, running a couple of workshops in April and July about qualitative data analysis. These were intended to give newer researchers in learning and teaching some background knowledge and tools for thinking about educational research, and how evidence might be generated to inform professional development, and/or peer-reviewed dissemination.
The first workshop practically explored different approaches to qualitatively analysing data, and this led naturally into a second workshop, about the potential uses of NVivo software to support data analysis. One distinctive feature of these workshops was that Graduate Teaching Assistants from the School of Education were employed to share their expertise, primarily with academics and teaching technicians in the Faculty of Engineering. This was intended to benefit both GTAs (by teaching a cohort they were not familiar with) and people attending the workshops. The value of their input was reflected in discussions after the session, where participants used words like “invaluable” to describe the contribution the GTAs had made.
Formal and informal feedback highlighted the positive outcomes of these two sessions and were instrumental in building confidence in the attendees to engage and support others with qualitative data analysis. It’s through work like this that we hope to move from individual patches of scholarly inquiry into learning and teaching, to a more sustained collective, cultural approach, where we are attentive to the value of inquiry through all of our practices.
If any of this sounds like something with which you want to be involved, please feel free to join the conversation - you can sign up to the LTSN mailing list through the website above or follow us on Twitter. In the coming months, we hope to put on an event about ethics in research, as well as start a journal club to provide a space for cross-institutional discussions about SoTL. We hope that you will feel able to be involved with some of these activities!
- Dr Tim Herrick is a Senior University Teacher in the School of Education
- Professor Louise Robson is the Professor of Digital Innovation in Learning & Teaching Assistant, and the Faculty Director of Learning & Teaching
- Dr Matteo Di Benedetti is a University Teacher in Aerospace, Civil and Mechanical Engineering, based in Multidisciplinary Engineering Education
- Professor David Hyatt is the Director for Postgraduate Researchers in the School of Education