By Tim Herrick
The Education Conference is one of the highlights of the year for colleagues interested in learning and teaching, and it’s always an excellent opportunity to build links with other teachers and practitioners. To help maximise opportunities both for connection and professional development, the Learning and Teaching Scholarship Network run a programme of Festival Fringe events around the conference. These focus on developing scholarship practices, so that an increasing number of colleagues can carry out the kinds of work that the Education Conference recognises, hosts, and celebrates.
The shape of the week roughly modelled taking a scholarship project through from initial idea to final write-up; so the first session, Developing your Scholarship Idea, explored what scholarship can look like in practice. It can emerge from personal reflection, institutional data, published literature, or a focused investigation into a specific aspect of student learning. A sensible emphasis was placed on starting from questions arising in current practice, keeping projects manageable in scope, and thinking carefully about methodology and ethical approval at an early stage.
To show where scholarship can take you, in Journeys through Scholarship, we heard from three colleagues with different perspectives on how teaching-focused staff can build scholarship, confidence, and impact over time. Laura Neasmith reflected on her experience of impostor syndrome when entering scholarship, and spoke about how professional learning, formal study, and growing confidence helped her begin to see the value of her own knowledge and practice. Matteo Di Benedetti then discussed the importance of validation and support, particularly through scholarship networks at faculty, university, and wider professional levels, showing how these communities can help colleagues develop ideas, find direction, and build a sense of belonging. Finally, Louise Robson focused on evidencing and disseminating scholarship, outlining how colleagues can make use of a wide range of evidence to demonstrate impact and how sharing work through publications, presentations, blogs, and other outputs can help build both institutional recognition and wider influence.
More insider perspectives were shared in Evidencing the Effectiveness of Teaching Practice. Dan Morton from the Performance and Data Evaluation team explained TellUS, and how the combination of qualitative and quantitative information it offers, over a six year period, can be used to understand longer-term trends in the student experience. Then Kate Campbell-Pilling from the School of Law outlined how different forms of student data helped her design, deliver, and evaluate changes in her teaching.
In Fitting Scholarship into Challenging Workloads, Janet Chamberlain, Lisa Parker and Tim Herrick explored practical strategies for teaching-focused staff to integrate scholarly activity into an increasingly busy working week. Deconstructing the idea that scholarship only counts if it’s a peer-reviewed journal article, we focused on "easy wins" like the 15-minute micro-writing rule as a way to build momentum through small, consistent sprints. The key takeaway was that scholarship isn't an "extra" task; it’s a lens through which we view our existing practice. In this way, it’s an integral part of your professional development, not a hobby to be squeezed into your evenings.
Generative AI might well have a role in enabling scholarship, an insight explored in more detail in the session on AI and Scholarship. Here, Morgan Jones, Laurie Wilson, Kat Easton and Hadrian Cawthorne all explored different ways in which generative AI can inform, facilitate, and guide scholarship. One central reframing was AI as a creative aid within a scholarship process, rather than a shortcut to thinking or academic practice; it can be utilised to synthesise literature, refine research questions, and facilitate writing, to name just a few.
On the final day, the session on Analysing Qualitative Data was run in collaboration with Sarah Plumb from the Elevate team, and Victoria Mellon from Sheffield Hallam, as a follow-on from a session they ran earlier this year specifically for Hallam colleagues. It was therefore welcome that two-thirds of the participants came from this institution, and the session provided useful space for comparing experiences of qualitative data analysis, asking questions, and working through some detailed examples of different approaches. One crucial insight was the importance of justifying the choices you make within pedagogical research - the actual choices made might be more or less persuasive for other readers, but what matters was to be transparent in your reasons for making them.
Bringing things to a close, the LTSN writing retreat offered colleagues space to progress the results and discussion section of a pedagogic paper, start research and planning of a new scholarship endeavour, and continue work on the development of an open educational resource. Participants benefited from highly-productive distraction-free focus time, and also enjoyed meeting new people in the break in between bursts of writing. Thus-inspired, two participants blocked out future time to continue working on these projects in their own time.
As you can tell, it was a rich week of activities and insights. Thanks to all colleagues who took part, and especially those who led and facilitated sessions - Jenny Burnham, Matteo di Benedetti, Kate Campbell-Pilling, Janet Chamberlain, Matt O’Connor, Lisa Parker, and Louise Robson. Anyone who would like to know more, and be involved in further adventures, can join the LTSN to stay informed!
Tim Herrick is a Senior University Teacher at the School of Education