Reflections on the Education Conference Festival Fringe: supporting colleagues in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (part 1)

By Tim Herrick

What was the Festival Fringe?

The Education Conference is a brilliant annual opportunity for colleagues to share their excellent practices in education, and to learn from one another about what’s happening innovative teaching and learning.  It’s also a great example of what’s sometimes called the “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” - a structured, research-informed inquiry into pedagogical practices, that practitioners can use to develop what they do - and maybe what others do as well.

To support colleagues in undertaking Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL for those in a hurry), the Learning and Teaching Scholarship Network within the university shares information about opportunities and resources, and runs events in collaboration with Elevate to address colleagues’ questions and needs.  This year, we ran a series of workshops around the Education Conference that we called the “Festival Fringe” - the idea being for colleagues to both be inspired by the brilliant things that are reported through the Conference, and develop their confidence and skills in undertaking them themselves.

The Fringe consisted of seven events, starting with developing initial ideas for scholarship projects, through identifying and analysing relevant literature, carrying out original research with all of its complexities, and presenting that to a range of possible audiences.  We had 60 colleagues participate across all events, and some really positive feedback; one participant said they valued the workshops for providing “a lot of information and relevant content all within one week [...] [they] allowed me to get a better understanding of the different steps involved when conducting educational research with students.”

This and a linked blogpost will report what some of the session leaders said about their workshops, including key insights shared by participants.  We plan to run a similar series next year, as well as continue supporting colleagues throughout the next academic year.  If you’d like to sign up to our mailing list, you can do so by completing a short form.  Thanks to everyone who ran the events and who participated - and we hope to continue fostering a culture in the university of excellent education, informed by critical engagement with practice, and transparent sharing of outcomes.

Developing your scholarship idea

In this session, we talked about what scholarship is, and the importance of embedding scholarship as part of your current practice. We also evaluated the importance of collaborative working on scholarship projects.  In the workshop, it was interesting to see ethics identified as an area participants felt less confident about, as this is something that we know staff have flagged previously. There is clearly an opportunity here for the LTSN to consider how we can support staff development in this area, and we are going to work with Elevate to continue to ensure growing levels of confidence and expertise amongst all staff.

(Louise Robson, School of Biosciences)

Literature Searching Tools for Education and Research

This session introduced participants to literature search planning techniques and tools available via the University Library. Participants were asked to create a search strategy for a research topic of their choice, incorporating traditional boolean connecting terms but making use of Google Gemini to suggest alternative keywords. In addition to trying out their search strategies in StarPlus and the multidisciplinary database Scopus, participants were introduced to two AI literature search tools, ResearchRabbit and Connected Papers. We discussed the pros and cons of using AI search tools and outlined the support available from the library when making decisions about where to search. The Library's Databases A-Z and AI Literacy Guide were highlighted. StudySkills@sheffield also provides further information on how to plan an effective information search. Participants in the session were particularly interested in support around identifying keywords to add into their search strategies and finding the most important and relevant up-to-date research papers. Participants cited the overview of boolean searching and the exploration of AI tools to enhance the literature search, as really useful parts of the session. 

(Emily Herron and Katherine Bishop, the University Library)

Tim Herrick, on behalf of the Learning and Teaching Scholarship Network Steering Group, who are Jenny Burnham, Janet Chamberlain, Matteo Di Benedetti, David Hyatt, Matt O’Connor, Louise Robson, Richard Steadman-Jones and Mo Zandi