SRHE Blog

The Society for Research into Higher Education

Tag Archives: Academic practice


by 1 Comment

Telling by hand: why academics need a different kind of reflection

by Elizabet Kaitell

On slowing down, noticing, and visual reflective journaling in the accelerated university

There are mornings when I arrive at my workstation, and my mind is foggy, my shoulders tight, before I have even opened a single email. Sometimes this is the residue of a difficult week. Sometimes it is something from outside work entirely, something happening in my life, in my body, in the people I love, that has followed me here, because, of course, it has. We do not leave ourselves at the door.

This is something we rarely say plainly in academic life: that we are not separate from our private selves, our families, our losses, our fears. We are embodied and embedded, porous, complex, open organisms, shaped by and shaping the environment we inhabit. What happens at home registers in the body that shows up to teach. What happens in a difficult seminar is carried home. The influence runs in every direction at once, and no amount of professional resolve, resilience training, or determined compartmentalisation changes this. The body does not take instructions. It registers, carries, and tells what our environment imprinted on us, often in ways we only notice when we finally slow down. This matters more than it might first appear: our sense of self is anchored in our capacity to feel and interpret these physical sensations — we do not fully know ourselves without access to them (Van der Kolk, 2015). And yet the conditions in which we increasingly work make exactly this kind of noticing harder.

We work increasingly in what Vostal (2016) calls the ‘accelerated academia’, a culture that prizes productivity, accountability, and efficiency at the expense of human sustainability (Mountz et al, 2015). These conditions require scholars to ‘excel at work rather than be well’ (Nørgård et al, 2024, p 133), with university staff showing significantly lower well-being than the general population (Kinman & Wray, 2021). In this environment, something quietly gets lost: our capacity to notice what is actually happening in our bodies, our encounters with students and colleagues, and in the texture of our everyday working lives.

I have been learning, slowly, imperfectly, to work with this rather than against it. Not to lock things away before I enter the classroom, but to notice what I am carrying, to let it surface with some gentleness, and then, with practice, to let it move through rather than accumulate. That is what this piece is about.

A different kind of reflection

Over the past few years, emerging from my doctoral research, I have been dwelling on a practice I refer to as Visual Reflective Journaling (VRJ). It began as a method of generating data about my own academic experience, but became something more: a way of staying with experience rather than rushing past it. Knowing is not confined to cognition but emerges through ongoing interactions between bodies, materials, and environments, and VRJ became a way of engaging these entanglements in practice.

The practice is deliberately simple. A notebook. A pen. Words, images, marks, fragments, brought together not to produce something polished or insightful, but to let the hand move in response to what the body already knows. Drawing on Ingold’s (2013) notion of ‘telling by hand’, where drawing is understood as a way of telling that keeps us closer to sentient engagement with the world, mark-making becomes a way of remaining closer to experience as it unfolds rather than processing it from a distance. A stick figure cycling uphill can carry more truth about a difficult week than three paragraphs of structured reflection.

VRJ starts not with a framework but with the body. Before writing or drawing anything: what is here right now? Is there tightness somewhere? Heaviness? A sense of bracing? These are not trivial questions. Our bodies carry the emotional labour of teaching, the tension before a difficult seminar, the weight of anonymous feedback that research suggests disproportionately targets women and marginalised colleagues (Heffernan, 2023), the physical and emotional effects that accumulate from student incivility (Lampman et al, 2009). By translating these somatic cues into marks, images, and fragments, we begin to see patterns that no single incident review would reveal. In doing so, we hold together words, images, and bodily experience in ways that can generate forms of knowing that exceed what any one mode might evoke alone (Ellingson, 2017).

Not a tool. Not a solution.

I want to be clear about what VRJ is not. It is not a coping strategy, not a resilience intervention, and not an institutional remedy for structural problems. Proposing an individual practice within a sector under systemic pressure risks reproducing exactly the narratives of self-management that make academic life harder. VRJ does not fix workloads, or eroded professional trust, or the conditions that produce burnout.

What it offers, more modestly, is a practice of attunement, a way of remaining present to one’s own experience within conditions that actively discourage it. Arts-based reflective practices have been shown to deepen reflection and heighten awareness of personal and contextual influences on practice (McKay & Barton, 2018), while visual journaling specifically can support mood repair and emotional sense-making in ways that purely verbal reflection cannot (Drake et al, 2011). Viewed through the lens of slow scholarship as a counter-narrative to accelerated, productivity-driven academic cultures (Nørgård et al, 2024), VRJ is a small enactment of deliberate slowness: pausing, noticing, staying with what is there rather than managing it away.

An invitation

You do not need artistic skill. You do not need special materials. What I would invite is this: find a notebook you like the feel of, keep it somewhere close, and occasionally, after a teaching session, at the start or end of a working day, when something is sitting with you, open it and spend five or ten minutes with whatever is there. Draw. Write fragments. Make marks that don’t mean anything yet.

A journal entry at the end of a working day, pausing before leaving, noticing what the day had left in my body before asking it to carry anything else. The dense, tangled marks at the head capture the weight of an overcrowded mind, and the beginnings of a migraine that comes when too much has accumulated, from work, from life, from everything at once. The orange lines tracing the neck and shoulders map tension and the persistent discomfort of an injury still healing. The circled warmth in the stomach is anxiety, not dramatic, just present, as it often is. This is not an analysis. It is simply noticing. [Figure 1].

Figure 1: End of Day

Over time, the practice generates its own knowledge. The journal becomes less a static record and more a space where past encounters, present sensations, and imagined futures intermingle (Phelps, 2005) The body’s quiet registrations, the things we have been moving too fast to notice, begin to become visible. And something in how we move through academic work starts, gently, to shift.

The body that shows up

This shift is not only personal. It touches something more fundamental about how we understand the academic body itself. Building on Dania and Ovens’ (2026) conceptualisation of academic bodies as lively material presences, continually producing and absorbing meaning through their encounters, I suggest that accelerated academic cultures privilege edited, high-functioning scholarly personas, rendering the lived body comparatively invisible. The body that walks into a seminar room is not a neutral delivery mechanism. It carries the morning’s difficult email, the tension from a conversation that didn’t go well, the particular exhaustion of a week that has asked too much. Students sense this, not consciously, perhaps, but in the quality of the encounter, just as we sense what they are carrying into the room with them. Within such conditions, VRJ creates a space in which the academic body can appear not as a polished performance but as a sensing and responsive presence.

Telling by hand is a way of letting that body back into view. Not to resolve the structural pressures shaping higher education – those remain, and individual practices cannot undo them. But within those pressures, VRJ may open small moments of freedom: spaces where experience can be explored rather than managed, where embodied forms of knowing can quietly reassert their place, and where the academic body can appear not as a performance to be sustained but as a presence to be inhabited.

Elizabet Kaitell is a Senior Lecturer in Learning and Teaching at Kingston University’s Learning and Teaching Enhancement Centre. She completed her doctorate at the University of Roehampton, where Visual Reflective Journaling emerged as part of her a/r/tographic methodology and sparked a curiosity that has continued to evolve since. She has a longstanding interest in embodied ways of knowing and ‘whole body selves’ in higher education.


by Leave a comment

The missing middle ground between research-led and practice-led education

by Saeed Talebi and Nick Morton

A peer reviewer recently challenged our pedagogical approach. We had described embedding an industry-led research project on Digital Twin development into our built environment curriculum as ‘research-informed teaching’. The reviewer disagreed: this was ‘practice-led rather than research-informed,’ they argued, because students weren’t producing research outputs themselves.

The comment revealed a conceptual confusion we suspect is widespread in higher education. We often assume that if students aren’t producing original research, then any industry-focused teaching must simply be vocational training with academic window-dressing. This leaves practice-facing disciplines in an awkward position: industry engagement is essential to what we do, but it risks being dismissed as less scholarly. There is, however, a middle ground.

Healey and Jenkins’ (2009) model offers a useful way through this confusion. They identify four modes of engaging undergraduates with research: research-led (learning about current scholarship), research-oriented (learning research methods), research-based (undertaking inquiry), and research-tutored (engaging in research discussions). These are mapped across two dimensions: whether students are positioned as audience or participants, and whether the emphasis falls on research content or processes. The model’s key insight is that students can be meaningfully engaged with research even when they aren’t producing research outputs themselves. The question isn’t simply whether students are ‘doing research’, it’s whether they’re positioned as passive recipients of established knowledge or as active participants in scholarly inquiry.

Practice-led teaching operates on different logic, though that logic has a closer relationship to applied research than is sometimes acknowledged. Its primary aim is developing professional competence through authentic engagement with messy problems and competing stakeholder priorities. The distinction isn’t whether industry is involved – it can be present in both approaches. The distinction lies in how students are positioned in relation to knowledge. In practice-led education, knowledge tends to be treated as relatively settled. In research-informed education, knowledge is contested, evolving, and open to question. An opportunity arises when these approaches coincide without conscious design, and a risk emerges when they collapse into one another. Research-informed teaching can become performative, referencing staff publications without changing how students learn. Practice-led teaching can slip into employability theatre, where live briefs are added without interrogating what knowledge students are actually developing.

As Professor Hanifa Shah OBE recently argued in Times Higher Education, STEAM education at its best equips students to “move fluidly between analytical and imaginative modes of thinking“, asking critical questions, considering ethical implications, and bringing meaning to innovation. This is precisely the disposition that research-informed teaching seeks to develop. In STEAM disciplines, including architecture, built environment, computing and engineering, emerging technologies create spaces where research and practice intersect meaningfully. Digital Twins and real-time monitoring tools, for example, allow students to work with live systems while engaging critically with the assumptions and ethics embedded within them. Students aren’t merely applying research after the fact, nor mimicking professional routines. They’re learning to question how data is generated, how models simplify reality, and how decisions are shaped by both evidence and judgement. Practice becomes a site of inquiry.

There’s an institutional dimension here too. Across the sector, promotion frameworks, workload models, and teaching quality metrics often reward research visibility and industry engagement without asking how either is translated pedagogically. Academics are encouraged to ‘bring research into teaching’ and ‘embed employability’, yet rarely supported in doing the difficult design work that meaningful integration requires. Recent discussions within the sector have highlighted how delivery models shape the possibilities for integrating academic and workplace learning. These are sector-wide conversations, and they reflect shared challenges around diverse learner cohorts, blended delivery, and the risk of compliance overtaking genuine learning. As a result, many innovative practices remain dependent on individual effort rather than structural support.

None of this means practice-led and research-informed approaches are mutually exclusive. The most effective curricula often blend elements of both. But blending deliberately is quite different from conflating accidentally.

When designing industry-engaged teaching, it’s worth asking honest questions. Are students positioned as inquirers or executors? Are they engaging with contested knowledge or settled practice? Does assessment reward critical reflection or merely competent performance? Is the industry project a vehicle for scholarly inquiry, or is scholarly framing a veneer over vocational training?

The answers won’t always be clear-cut, and that’s fine. But asking the questions helps us design with intention rather than stumbling into confusion – and helps us articulate what we’re doing when a peer reviewer, a sceptical colleague, or a university committee asks us to justify our approach.

Dr Saeed Talebi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at Birmingham City University and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). He has held a number of T&L leadership roles, including Departmental Lead, Course Leader, and Academic Lead for Teaching Excellence and Student Experience. He has a keen interest in pedagogy in higher education, with particular interest in research-informed teaching and the integration of emerging technologies and practice-led projects into built environment curricula to enhance student outcomes and experience. He has also led the delivery of large STEAM research projects.

Professor Nick Morton is the Academic Director of Partnerships and STEAM at Birmingham City University. A Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA), he was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in recognition of his track record in curriculum development. He has held a number of senior leadership roles at BCU, including Associate Dean for Teaching Education and Student Experience, overseeing Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment. He was elected Vice-Chair of the Council of Heads of the Built Environment (CHOBE) in 2012 and is a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (FRICS).


by Leave a comment

What is a poem doing in a literature review?

by Nguyen Phuong Le, Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan and Thang Long Nguyen

If the phrase ‘write a poem’ makes your stomach do a tiny backflip, you are in good company. The three of us came to poetry from very different places. Kathleen has been working with poetry in teaching and research for many years, across different countries and contexts. Phuong first encountered poetic inquiry while working with Kathleen as a research assistant, learning her way into the field as a newcomer. Long joined as a critical reader of this blog, bringing curiosity from outside poetry‑based research.

Those different starting points matter. None of us came to this work believing poetry was an obvious or easy fit for literature reviewing.

In our conversations, workshops, and conference sessions, we have seen friends, postgraduate students, supervisors, lecturers, and experienced researchers worry that they are ‘not creative’. Some worry their English is not ‘good enough’. Others feel uneasy because poetry sounds personal, exposing, and even childish, in a higher education context.

Our starting point is simple: using a small, low-stakes poetic process to think with literature, stay engaged, and find your way into scholarly conversation. When you do this with another person, the process can feel even more doable. You cannot get this wrong, because the point is not to produce a ‘professional’ poem.

Why poetry in a literature review, seriously?

You don’t have to write poems to review literature. Most reviews are written in conventional academic prose. But if you are doing qualitative research, you may already know that knowledge is not only built through tidy argument. It is also built through attention, resonance, discomfort, contradiction, and voice.

Literature reviews can become a performance of mastery: you read fast, extract key points, categorise, critique, cite, and move on. Although these steps seem straightforward, the focus on moving quickly and efficiently may mean we miss what texts invite us to feel, picture, and connect with. The emotional texture of reading disappears, along with much of what makes qualitative work matter: empathy, imagination, and relational engagement.

Poetry calls for slower digestion. It invites you to ask, ‘What stays with me?’. It offers a way to respond before you feel ready to produce polished academic claims. That response can later feed your analytic writing, without needing to look like academic writing at the start.

What do we mean by “collaborative feedback poetry”?

Kathleen and Phuong’s article, ‘Reimagining qualitative literature reviewing through collaborative feedback poetry’ (Pithouse-Morgan & Le, 2025), introduces the term collaborative feedback poetry to describe a literature-reviewing strategy in which people respond to academic texts through short poems and exchange poetic responses with one another.

In such a strategy, collaboration matters. Many researchers struggle not only with the literature and writing, but also with the loneliness of the process. Working alongside someone else shifts the emotional climate. You are no longer trying to “prove” that you understand. You are noticing, articulating, and learning together.

Feedback matters as much as the poem. In academic settings, feedback often points out what is missing, what is weak, and what needs to be fixed. In collaborative feedback poetry, the focus is not on correction but on extension. The poem becomes a doorway, inviting you to walk further into the text rather than retreat from it.

“But I’m not a poet!”

That’s the point.

In the first few minutes of Kathleen’s collaborative feedback poetry sessions, the atmosphere is often tense. People apologise before they write. They say they are not creative, have never written a poem, or worry that their English is not good enough.

What changes things is permission: Permission to know, from the start, that there is no way to get this wrong.

Permission to be simple.

Permission to be incomplete.

Permission to use a home language.

When that permission feels real, participants begin to read, talk, and act differently. The literature starts to feel less like a wall and more like a space they can enter – through poetry, in whatever form it takes.

Phuong has seen these hesitations surface in conference conversations and informal chats with colleagues in Vietnam. After presentations on poetry as a literature‑reviewing practice, people are often interested but quiet. Later, they admit their worry about whether there is a ‘right’ kind of poem, or that writing poetry in a second or third language will expose them as less than capable.

That hesitancy matters. So instead of defending poetry in abstract terms, we slow down and walk through a small example.

Here is one example, a short haiku:

Creative Arts Professors’ Concerns

Pandemic’s harsh fall,

professors’ struggles echo,

incomplete sonnets.

(First published in Pithouse-Morgan & Le, 2025)

Phuong wrote this haiku in response to two papers by creative arts educators in higher education: Holmgren (2018) and Meskin and van der Walt (2022). Holmgren’s paper, written before the COVID-19 pandemic, explores musical interpretation through philosophic poetic inquiry and autoethnodrama. Meskin and van der Walt’s paper, written during the pandemic, uses poetic inquiry and reciprocal found poetry to reflect on disruptions to educator-artists’ academic and creative lives.

Rather than summarising either paper, Phuong read them together and asked: ‘What feeling carries across both texts?’ The answer was interruption – teaching and creative work that could not fully unfold. This is where ‘incomplete sonnets’ came from.

The poem does not replace the literature review. Instead, it marks what stayed with the reader after reading closely. This is not (just) an artistic move, but an act of attention and relation.

When we introduce this process, we usually ask a few simple questions, such as ‘What stayed with you after reading?’ ‘Which words carry that feeling?’ ‘What happens when you space those words out on a page?’ And ‘What occurs when another person reads and responds to your poem?’

When we introduce this process, we ask readers to notice what remains with them after reading. Kathleen’s poem Growing Beyond came from that noticing: reading across texts about doctoral students’ poetic inquiry (Chan, 2003; Kang et al, 2022) and attending to what stayed with her. In their poetry, Chan and Kang et al wrote about what it felt like to be doctoral students, including experiences of isolation, marginalisation, and internal struggle. Their work highlights the restorative, reflective, and critical possibilities of poetic inquiry in higher education. The poem opens with an impulse Kathleen recognised in their writing:

A sudden compulsion,

a yearning to express,

to write poetry.

                (First published in Pithouse-Morgan & Le, 2025)

Why the collaborative element carries weight

Higher education research can be intensely individualised. Even when we are part of a student cohort or a research centre, as students or academics, we often read and write alone before submitting work for evaluation or review. Collaborative feedback poetry encourages a different kind of scholarly space. The goal is not to show you are clever, but to practise staying with ideas and emotions in the supportive presence of another.

That matters for students and academics at different levels, and for supervisors and educators trying to teach literature reviewing without turning it into a fear-fest. It also matters for multilingual writers, who are too often made to feel that academic voice counts only when it sounds like confident English.

Collaboration does not remove difficulty; it changes what difficulty feels like. You are not stranded in it. You are accompanied. To us, this companionship feels more welcoming than working alone, not least because, like many of you, we are also trying to find and express our voices within the wider literature.

A takeaway for you

If you want to try this, keep it small. Choose one article. Give yourself ten minutes to jot down words that come to mind as you read, and select phrases from the text that grab your attention. Shape these into a short poem, in any form, with space around the words. Share it with someone you trust. Ask them to respond – not by grading it, but by writing back with their own short poem. Then briefly discuss what the poems say and why that matters.

If you leave with just one idea, let it be this: literature reviewing is not only about demonstrating coverage. It is also about cultivating relationships with ideas, voices, emotions, and sometimes with each other. Collaborative feedback poetry is one way to make these relationships visible and accessible.

By now, we hope you feel encouraged to step into poetic literature reviewing in ways that feel doable and enjoyable. With baby steps, of course.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust through the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Scheme. (Grant holder: Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan).

Nguyen Phuong Le is a lecturer in English Education at Hanoi National University of Education, Vietnam. She is a graduate of the Master of Arts in Digital Teaching and Learning at the University of Nottingham, UK, and the Bachelor of Arts in English at Northern Kentucky University, US. Passionate about digital education and literature, she has held various positions in research, teaching, and learning across higher education and educational organisations.

Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan is a Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham, UK, and an honorary professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She focuses on professional learning and supporting professionals as self-reflexive, creative learners. Passionate about arts-inspired research and teaching, especially using poetic methods, she co-convenes the British Educational Research Association’s Arts-Based Educational Research group.

Thang Long Nguyen is currently a student of the Master of Arts in Sociology at University College Dublin, Ireland. Graduated from Doshisha University in Japan with a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts, he has an interdisciplinary interest in themes of nationalism. Still, he is deeply concerned with the progress of education in social sciences and humanities in his home country, Vietnam.


by Leave a comment

Perspectives on pedagogical innovation

by Kamilya Suleymenova and Emma Thirkell

The landscape of higher education (HE) in the UK (but also more widely, in Western countries and across the globe) has significantly changed, driven by the massification and the following marketisation of HE studies (Alves & Tomlinson, 2021; Molesworth et al, 2009). The predominance of particular governance structures and schools of thought shape the narrative further (as discussed by Marcia Devlin (2021) in her SRHE blog) and create a deceptively heterogeneous environment, where each prospective student can find their “place”, but all are conditioned to follow a similar narrative.

New disruptions

On this backdrop new disruptions appear, of which we want to focus on two specifically for the UK HE. First, the legacy of lockdowns, bringing more flexible working environment and an astonishing pervasiveness of digital tools together with disrupted earlier education and legacy of health, including mental health, concerns, unsettles further already brittle UK HE sector (as illustrated by SRHE blog by Steven Jones (2022). Second, the advent of Generative AI and its implications for teaching, learning, and assessment. Much has been said about these (Lee et al, 2024; O’Dea, 2024) – our learning points from this rapidly growing literature are that i) significant disruption has occurred and ii) something needs to be done to react to this change in context. In other words, while there are many tried and tested theories and methods in teaching and assessment, they need to be reviewed and very likely adapted to keep up with the changing context.

The change did not occur only in the tools: we argue here that it is not merely a quantitative technical change (eg speed of communication), but a qualitative change, which affected or at least has the potential to affect, the mindset and the behaviour of students (and staff). Together, these factors produce more stressed, more demanding, potentially differently engaged students (sometimes perceived as less engaged), focused on the “added value” of their degrees and their “university experience”, anxious to acquire competences and skills through experiential learning to be in the best position for securing the employment of their choice.

In this rapidly changing context, the need for pedagogical innovations (PI), or at least the desire and the ability to engage with disruptions in the education process, seems almost inevitable. But how do the staff working in the UK HE, respond to this demand? Are the challenges viewed as opportunities or rather as additional pressures, adding to an evolving workload and requirements to navigate a complex bureaucracy?

Research focus: understanding the lived experiences of educators

Our research explores the lived experiences of educators across 13 UK universities, investigating their engagement with PI in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. By examining how institutional dynamics, personal motivations, and perceived barriers shape decisions surrounding PI, we have developed the initial stages of a conceptual framework, presented at the SRHE International Conference, to guide policies that better support educators and foster sustained PI in teaching. Through 30 interviews with educators, senior staff, and technology-enabled learning (TEL) specialists, we reveal the complex decision-making processes that influence whether and how educators embrace or resist innovation in their teaching practices.

What drives educators to innovate?

Our research highlights a multifaceted landscape where educators’ motivations for engaging with PI are shaped by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. For many, intrinsic motivations, such as a deep-rooted desire to enhance student learning and a personal commitment to pedagogical excellence, act as powerful drivers for innovation. As one educator noted, “I’m always looking for new ideas. Innovation gives me a sense of purpose and connection with my students, making teaching more fulfilling.” This indicates that where academics feel a strong personal commitment to education, and it is rewarded, they are more likely to embrace innovative practices.

The tension between rhetoric and reality

However, these motivations are often counterbalanced by extrinsic pressures from the institutional environment, whether perceived or real. Many educators reported feeling that institutional strategies, while rhetorically supportive of PI, were undercut by bureaucratic barriers, a lack of adequate resources, and managerial cultures focused on short-term, measurable outcomes. One academic explained, “Innovation is a buzzword here, but when it comes to implementing anything new, we’re stuck in a system that values research output over teaching innovation. There’s little incentive to invest time in something that doesn’t directly contribute to my publication record.” This highlights the tension between institutional narrative and individual motivations, with many educators perceiving a disconnect between institutional rhetoric purporting to encourage PI and the reality of its implementation.

Autonomy and trust

Another key finding concerns the role of autonomy and trust in fostering a culture of innovation. Educators who felt empowered within their departments – where trust was placed in their judgment – were more likely to experiment with new teaching methods. As one TEL specialist remarked, “When leadership trusts us, we feel freer to try new approaches. But when we are micromanaged, the innovation just stops. You’re constantly battling to prove that your idea is worth the time it takes.” This sense of autonomy, closely linked to professional identity, is crucial in determining whether educators feel motivated to innovate or revert to traditional methods.

The cost of innovation

However, these ‘empowering’ environments were not universally experienced. Many educators, particularly those in large departments or with heavy teaching loads, reported feeling that the cost of innovation – both in terms of time and energy – was too high. “It’s hard to innovate when you’re overwhelmed with marking, preparation, and administration. It feels like there’s no room to breathe, let alone experiment,” shared an academic. This sense of burnout, compounded by a perception of growing academic bureaucracy, led some to feel that the costs of engaging in PI outweighed the benefits, making it more difficult to justify the time and effort required for innovation.

A balancing act

Perhaps not surprisingly, some educators justified their lack of engagement with PI by citing these perceived institutional constraints. As one educator put it, “We’re told to innovate, but the structure just isn’t there to support it. It’s easier to stick with what we know works than to risk failure with something new.” This reflects the cognitive flexibility educators employ when balancing personal motivations with institutional limitations. As per Goffman’s (1959) ‘front’ and ‘back’ stage theory, educators sometimes present a compliant, innovative persona on the ‘front’ stage in order to ‘fit in’ (Nästesjö, 2023), while in the ‘back’ stage, they rationalize their lack of engagement by attributing it to costs and benefits, reconciling their professional image with their lived experiences.

Reflections

We are certain that some, if not all, of these quotes will resonate with many of the readers: these trends have been discussed in, for example, Lašáková et al (2017) and Findlow (2008). Our aim is not only to systematise and categorise the individual aspects shared with us by both frustrated and aspiring colleagues, but to focus on an in-depth analysis of their motivations. Based on previous literature and our data, we aim to generalise and develop a theoretical framework through the lens of an interdisciplinary management and economics analysis. The preliminary version of this theoretical framework, presented at the 2024 SRHE Conference, should provide a foundation for shaping institutional policies to develop a sustainable pipeline of innovations, in the full respect of both academic freedom and students’ interests. In other words, we hope that our work will facilitate structural changes to unlock the innovation potential and help institutions to help us to innovate.

Kamilya Suleymenova is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham with interests in assessment and feedback particularly for large cohorts, Generative AI in HE, as well as institutional and behavioural and experimental economics. Now twice a presenter at SRHE International Conference, Kamilya appreciates the constructive feedback of the community.

Emma Thirkell is an Assistant Professor in Human Resource Management at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University with interests in pedagogical innovation, experiential learning, and the integration of technology in education. A four-time teaching award winner, she is passionate about bridging academia and practice through innovative curriculum design and leadership in higher education.


by 3 Comments

Restraining the uncanny guest: AI ethics and university practice

by David Webster

If GAI is the ‘uncanniest of guests’ in the University what can we do about any misbehaviour? What do we do with this uninvited guest who behaves badly, won’t leave and seems intent on asserting that it’s their house now anyway?  They won’t stay in their room and seem to have their fingers in everything.

Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?[1]

Nietzsche saw the emergence of nihilistic worldviews as presaging a century of turmoil and destruction, only after which might more creative responses to the sweeping away of older systems of thought be possible. Generative Artificial Intelligence, uncanny in its own discomforting ways, might be argued as threatening the world of higher education with an upending of the existing conventions and practices that have long been the norm in the sector. Some might welcome this guest, in that there is much wrong in the way universities have created knowledge, taught students, served communities and reproduced social practice. The concern must surely be though that GAI is not a creative force, but a repackaging and re-presenting of existing human understanding and belief. We need to think carefully about the way this guest’s behaviour might exert influence in our house.

After decades of seeking to eliminate prejudices and bias, GAI threatens to reinscribe misogyny, racism, homophobia and other unethical discrimination back into the academy. Since  the majority of content used to train large language models has been generated by the most prominent and privileged groups in human culture, might not we see a recolonisation, just as universities are starting to push for a more decolonised, inclusive and equitable learning experience?

After centuries of citation tradition and careful attribution of sources, GAI seems intent on shuffling the work of human scholars and presenting it without any clarity as to whence it came. Some news organisations and  authors are even threatening to sue OpenAI as they believe their content has been used, without permission, to train the company’s ChatGPT tool.

Furthermore, this seems to be a guest inclined to hallucinate and recount their visions as the earnest truth. The guest has also imbibed substantive propaganda, taken satirical articles as serious factual account (hence the glue pizza and rock AI diet), and is targeted by pseudo-science dressed in linguistic frames of respectability. How can we deal with this confident, ambitious, and ill-informed guest who keeps offering to save us time and money?

While there isn’t a simple answer (if I had that, I’d be busy monetising it!), an adaptation of this guest metaphor might help. This is to view GAI rather like an unregulated child prodigy: awash with talent but with a lacuna of discernment. It can do so much, but often doesn’t have the capacity to know what it shouldn’t do, what is appropriate or helpful and what is frankly dangerous.

GAI systems are capable of almost magical-seeming feats, but also lack basic understanding of how the world operates and are blind to all kinds of contextual appreciation. Most adults would take days trying to draw what a GAI system can generate in seconds, and would struggle to match its ‘skills’, but even an artistically-challenged adult likely myself with barely any artistic talent at all would know how many fingers, noses or arms, were appropriate in a picture – no matter how clumsily I rendered them. The idea of GAI as a child prodigy, in need of moral guidance and requiring tutoring and careful curation of the content they are exposed to, can help us better understand just how limited these systems are. This orientation to GAI also helps us see that what are witnessing is not a finished solution to various tasks currently undertaken by people, but rather a surplus of potential. The child prodigy is capable of so much, but is still a child and critically, still requires prodigious supervision.

So as universities look to use student-facing chatbots for support and answering queries, to automate their arcane and lengthy internal processes, to sift through huge datasets and to analyse and repackage existing learning content, we need to be mindful of GAI’S immaturity. It offers phenomenal potential in all these areas and despite the overdone hype  it will drive a range of huge changes to how we work in higher education, but it is far from ready to work unsupervised. GAI needs moral instruction, it needs to be reshaped as it develops and we might do this through assuming the mindset of a watchful, if also proud, parent.

Professor Dave Webster is Director of Education, Quality & Enhancement at the University of Liverpool. He has a background in teaching philosophy, and the study of religion, with ongoing interests in Buddhist thought, and the intersections of new religious movements and conspiracy theory.  He is also concerned about pedagogy, GAI and the future of Higher Education.

[1] The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed., with commentary, Walter Kaufmann, Vintage, 1968.               


by Leave a comment

Painting and shaping Learning Landscapes with Assemblages in mind

by Peter Goodyear

This third SRHE Landscapes of Learning symposium – Assemblages – was a deeply engrossing and thought-provoking event. In this response, I want to do three things: pick and connect some particularly fruitful points from each talk – there were many, so this is hard; comment on assemblages and assemblage thinking in relation to current and future learning arrangements, and segue into the practical work of realising better spaces for learning in better universities. Landscapes are both depicted and made. An alertness to relations and flux can sharpen our perception, but can an assemblage sensibility inform better architecture?

Points plucked from the talks

Carol Taylor’s keynote made a persuasive case for connecting Deleuzian thinking about assemblages with a broad set of posthuman perspectives. She went on to offer an impressive array of spatially and materially-grounded example studies, illustrating her approach and also inspiring further research. Assemblage thinking helps us to see things that would otherwise be invisible, to give (almost?) simultaneous attention to questions of how, why, when and what, and to refuse sharp distinctions between bodies, things, words, ideas and feelings – to start with relations between things, rather than with the things themselves. Forming better ways of understanding the circumstances in which things happen is important for students of all fields and disciplines. It is important for teachers and other education workers in a second sense, because it helps set up situations for valued learning and for inducting students into practices of knowledge-making, including the practices of shaping convivial epistemic environments for themselves.

Tim Fawns used ideas of entanglement to reconcile hackneyed arguments about “technology in the service of pedagogy” vs “technology as driving and constraining pedagogy”. Pedagogy first or technology first? In most cases of educational innovation, pedagogical practices and technological infrastructures already exist and are used to justify, explain and constrain one another. They are already assembling or, one might even say, co-constituting one another. This argument is even stronger if one looks more broadly at the personal aims and technologies that students bring with them, and when one takes properly into account the complicated learning places that students configure, furnish and equip for themselves and their peers. 

Karen Gravett’s talk made clear that very little is known about how students’ activities are distributed in space, how students find, make and curate places for learning and what this means for matters of belonging (to a university). Certainly, university teachers and leaders cannot claim to know this in any representative, well-theorised or systematic way. Indeed, it emerges that there are many ways of belonging, no one way of managing campus spaces to afford inclusion and no simple metric connecting qualities of place with feelings of belonging, such as might be useful for an estates director’s KPIs.

Harriet Shortt researches relations between places, artefacts and organizational life, including places we might too-simply tag as “for work” or “for learning”. The main research site she spoke about was a newly-built Business School, though she was using this to advocate for participant-led visual methods: getting the users of buildings to photograph places of significance to them and share their annotated images. This is very useful for post-occupancy evaluation but also raises lots of deeper questions about place-making, including how people reconfigure places to resolve tensions between privacy and community, or collaboration and interruption.

The four talks illustrate the importance of understanding study activities through students’ eyes and experiences, with a capacious framing – so that what students curate and contribute isn’t simply missed – and then weaving more elaborate descriptions that catch multiple entanglements (place, tools, tasks, bodies, minds etc) so that all participants and stakeholders can agree a shared understanding of how things are being achieved, sufficient to improve the circumstances in which joint work is done. Subtle observation and an openness to complexity are important when making descriptions of how things are coming to be as they are. Then provisional simplifications are needed to agree on collective action.            

Assemblages and assemblage thinking

At several points in the “Assemblages” symposium, a leitmotif emerged: an allusion to using theoretical language at Academic Board. This recognisable shorthand conjures up our shared frustrations, as scholars of higher education, with the conceptual and linguistic gaps between research, policy and practice and with a paradox at the heart of educational work in universities: the insistence on discussing education in a vernacular language, unpolluted with exotic terms-of-art.

I am academic enough to value fine-grained disputes between knowledgeable scholars over what Deleuze and Guattari were trying to say when they wrote about rhizomes, lines-of-flight, segmentarity or assemblage. I also endorse something Carol Taylor said about the dangers of extracting ideas and terms from their intellectual homes and deploying mangled versions of them to serve dubious ends.  

But, in my own practice, I am deeply invested in understanding how knowledge, ways of knowing and ways of coming to know, that emerge in our work as scholars of education, can be made useful to other teachers and to students.  I have a practical interest in this occurring, coupled with an intellectual interest in how people actually do this work; I study epistemic practices at the boundaries of disciplines and professions. I try to understand what happens when (say) university managers in education, campus infrastructure and IT try to create better learning spaces or when people try to help design ideas travel. In thinking about “assemblage”, I am interested in how clusters of ideas migrate and become useful – to students, when they are tackling challenges that matter to them – and to teachers, architects, technologists and others involved in shaping educational spaces. So, I would say:

  • Whatever disciplines, professions or roles our students might be preparing themselves for, they will need subtle and sophisticated tools for understanding the world and acting ethically and effectively with others. Posthuman and postdigital perspectives can help students analyse the complex (learning) situations in which they find themselves, and reflect more deeply about how good work is accomplished.   
  • Scholarly teaching must acknowledge the complexities and risks involved when ideas move outside the domain of specialist scholarly debate. It is one thing to induct students into academic life by modelling scholarly disputation. It is quite another to maim or kill a half-grasped idea while it is in flight. There is a time and a place for correcting other people’s use of the term “assemblage” – but perhaps not at meetings of Academic Board.  

It’s also worth noting that “assemblage” exists somewhat independently as a technical term in fields such as archaeology, ecology, data science and art practice. One can use the noun “assemblage” to speak about the toolset of an ancient culture, the animals and plants typically inhabiting an area, a complex data set or a three-dimensional collage of objets trouvés, though these usages don’t normally have strong connotations of flux and evolution, such as we find when assemblage is understood as a verb. Moreover, there are lines of analysis within organisational science and science and technology studies (STS) that talk cogently about sociomaterial and sociotechnical assemblages, free from any visible Deleuzian mooring. I’m thinking, for example, of writing by Wanda Orlikowski, Susan Scott and Lucy Suchman on  technology in organisations and sociomaterial entanglements in working practices: productive resources for thinking about educational technology, technology in higher education, current and future learning spaces.

In sum, “assemblage” helps us notice and depict sociomaterial relations and change, but it is not the sole preserve of Deleuzian scholarship.

Learning landscapes: making places for coming-to-know

“A key element of placemaking is thus its open-ended and contingent nature. Placemaking is a dynamic experience, through which people, practice and the materiality of place undergo constant change.” (Sweeney et al, 2018, 582).

Harriett Shortt asked why so many new campus buildings mirror corporate head offices. Why do estates directors and architects impose these giant glazed voids upon us? She asked us to think of other more congenial forms: galleries and museums, for example. I think we should also be bolder and think how it might become possible for everyone involved in university life to engage in intentional place-making. We see what can be done in course and curriculum design through movements such as “Students as Partners”. We get other glimpses of what’s possible in the place-making events captured in the images our speakers shared. Beyond that, I suggest, we might try to make a scholarship of learning places that works in symbiosis with much more organic, bottom-up developments: less concerned with space-efficiency metrics and enabling the corporate; more invested in giving biophilic form to the market-place of ideas. There’s a well-established strand of work in architecture, urban planning and place-making on which we can draw. Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, Marwa al-Sabouni and Thomas Heatherwick spring to mind.

It can be helpful to make a distinction, in educational work, between analysis and design. The first tries to depict and understand an existing state of affairs. The second involves steps to protect or improve upon it. The two depend upon one another, but work upon different objects. They require a dual ontology. In reflecting upon past and present educational events, we do well to acknowledge that tasks, tools and people are deeply entangled – considering assemblages or agencement helps here. But in thinking about what we can change (eg for the next time a course is run, or for the layout of a new learning space), we must break tangled realities into components over which we have some control. By “we” I don’t just mean teacher-designers or learning space researchers. Everyone has a role in this kind of place-making.

Collectively shaping material instances of what Raewyn Connell calls the “Good University” or Ron Barnett calls the “Ecological University” involves some tricky challenges. How do we form coalitions around images of what universities should be doing? How do we identify zones in which we have power to make change – including changes that give us more power to make other changes? How do we consolidate incremental changes so that we don’t dissipate our strength in perpetual defensive work? How do we co-create the infrastructure and reshape the landscapes that afford more socially responsible, sustainable and just ways of working and learning together?

Some of this may still be in our DNA. Jane Jacobs closed her great book on the organized complexity of cities with the following words. I like to think we can apply them to universities.

“Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.” (Jacobs, 1961, p448)

Peter Goodyear is Emeritus Professor of Education at The University of Sydney. His research on place, space and learning has appeared in a number of books, including “The Education ecology of universities: integrating learning, strategy and the academy” (Routledge/SRHE, with Rob Ellis, 2019); “Spaces of teaching and learning: integrating research and practice” (Springer, with Rob Ellis, 2018) and “Place-based spaces for networked learning” (Routledge, with Lucila Carvalho & Maarten de Laat, 2017).


by Leave a comment

What do artificial intelligence systems mean for academic practice?

by Mary Davis

I attended and made a presentation at the SRHE Roundtable event ‘What do artificial intelligence systems mean for academic practice?’ on 19 July 2023. The roundtable brought together a wide range of perspectives on artificial intelligence: philosophical questions, problematic results, ethical considerations, the changing face of assessment and practical engagement for learning and teaching. The speakers represented a range of UK HEI contexts, as well as Australia and Spain, and a variety of professional roles including academic integrity leads, lecturers of different disciplines and emeritus professors.

The day began with Ron Barnett’s fierce defence of the value of authorship and the concerns about what it means to be a writer in a Chatbot world. Ron argued that use of AI tools can lead to an erosion of trust; the essential trust relationship between writer and reader in HE and wider social contexts such as law may disintegrate and with it, society. Ron reminded us of the pain and struggle of writing and creating an authorial voice that is necessary for human writing. He urged us to think about the frameworks of learning such as ‘deep learning’ (Ramsden), agency and internal story-making (Archer) and his own ‘Will to Learn’, all of which could be lost. His arguments challenged us to reflect on the far-reaching social consequences of AI use and opened the day of debate very powerfully.

I then presented the advice I have been giving to students at my institution using my analysis of student declarations of AI use which I had categorised using a traffic light system for appropriate use (eg checking and fixing a text before submission); at risk use (eg paraphrasing and summarising); and inappropriate use (eg using assignment briefs as prompts and submitting the output as own work). I got some helpful feedback from the audience that the traffic lights provided useful navigation for students. Coincidentally, the next speaker Angela Brew also used a traffic light system to guide students with AI. She argued for the need to help students develop a scholarly mindset, for staff to stop teaching as in the 18th Century with universities as foundations of knowledge. Instead, she proposed that everyone at university should be a discoverer, a learner and producer of knowledge, as a response to AI use.

Stergios Aidinlis provided an intriguing insight into practical use of AI as part of a law degree. In his view, generative AI can be an opportunity to make assessment currently fit for purpose. He presented a three-stage model of learning with AI comprising: stage 1 as using AI to produce a project pre-mortem to tackle a legal problem as pre-class preparation; stage 2 using AI as a mentor to help students solve a legal problem in class; and stage 3 using AI to evaluate the technology after class. Stergios recommended Mollick and Mollick (2023) for ideas to help students learn to use AI. The presentation by Stergios stood out in terms of practical ideas and made me think about the availability of suitable AI tools for all students to be able to do tasks like this.

The next session by Richard Davies, one of the roundtable convenors, took a philosophical direction in considering what a ‘student’s own work’ actually means, and how we assess a student’s contribution. David Boud returned the theme to assessment and argued that three elements are always necessary: assuring learning outcomes have been met (summative assessment), enabling students to use information to aid learning (formative assessment) and building students’ capacity to evaluate their learning (sustainable assessment). He argued for a major re-design of assessment, that still incorporates these elements but avoids tasks that are no longer viable.

Liz Newton presented guidance for students which emphasized positive ways to use AI such as using it for planning or teaching, which concurred with my session. Maria Burke argued for ethical approaches to the use of AI that incorporate transparency, accountability, fairness and regulation, and promote critical thinking within AI context. Finally, Tania Alonso presented her ChatGPTeaching project with seven student rules for use of ChatGPT, such as proposing use only for areas of the student’s own knowledge.

The roundtable discussion was lively and our varied perspectives and experiences added a lot to the debate; I believe we all came away with new insights and ideas. I especially appreciated the opportunity to look at AI from practical and philosophical viewpoints. I am looking forward to the ongoing sessions and forum discussions. Thanks very much to SRHE for organising this event.

Dr Mary Davis is Academic Integrity Lead and Principal Lecturer (Education and Student Experience) at Oxford Brookes University. She has been a researcher of academic integrity since 2005 and has carried out extensive research on plagiarism, use of text-matching tools, the development of source use, proofreading, educational responses to academic conduct issues and focused her recent research on inclusion in academic integrity. She is on the Board of Directors of the International Center for Academic Integrity and co-chair of the International Day of Action for Academic Integrity.


by 2 Comments

Mobilities and the ‘international academic’ in higher education

by Vera Spangler, Lene Møller Madsen, and Hanne Kirstine Adriansen

December marks the month of the International SRHE Research Conference. It was an interesting week full of presentations and discussions around the theme of Mobilities in Higher Education. In the opening plenary talk, Emily Henderson invited us to reflect critically on the different ways in which mobilities of academics and students in higher education are discursively constructed. She debated how discursive constructions of mobility may influence who can access academia/higher education, who can gain recognition, and who can establish a feeling of belonging. Emily’s presentation set an interesting and highly relevant ground for the week to come, opening space for critical thought about  academic mobility and experiences of mobility, subjectivities, and power. Our presentation about who is considered ‘the international academic’ addressed similar ideas and observations, which we would like to share in this blog post in order to open the conversation with a larger audience.

Never has the higher education sector been so mobile, particularly as internationalisation occupies a central position on the global agenda of policymakers. Over the past decade we can observe a significant increase in academic mobility. This is partly due to the fact that the academic profession is becoming exceedingly internationalised and globalised, often involving some sort of travel on the part of the academic throughout their career. In the academic sector, having international staff is often seen as integral to the institution’s reputation and recognition. Likewise, international mobility is perceived as inherently beneficial for the individual and as a valuable asset for academic research careers. Professional stays abroad can function as a mark of distinction or valuable international capital.

Mobility and, notably, internationalisation are often used with many positive connotations, presented as neutral and unconditionally good. Internationalisation is often deemed instrumental in enhancing the quality of research and education. Universities put increasing effort into attracting international academics, seeking their contribution in establishing an international research and teaching environment to promote the status of the faculty and their position internationally. Particularly for universities outside Anglo-America, international scholars constitute an important element in creating a so-called ‘international university’. However we often see a uniform, unidirectional, and unproblematic description of how to attract and retain international academics in higher education strategies and mainstream policy documents. There is a dominant prominence in university strategies of attracting ‘global talent’ and ‘the best and the brightest’, promoting a specific idea of the ‘international academic’. Yet questions remain about how academics of different national and social backgrounds understand the role of being an ‘international academic’ and how their understandings are consonant with those sought, promoted and shaped by higher education institutions.

Our paper for the SRHE conference tried to unpack ‘the international’ in international academic mobility based on interviews with international academics (varying in age, nationality, and academic position) living and working in Denmark. The data stem from the larger research project Geographies of Internationalisation, which explores how internationalisation affects the perception of quality, relevance and learning in higher education and how these perceptions travel with mobile academics. Our conference presentation examined what it means to be an international academic, who the ‘international’ is, and how the academics’ ‘international-ness’ is being used and/or neglected by institutions.

During the interviews, interesting conversations emerged as to when one is considered international – do you have to be recruited as ‘an international’ or can you just be a ‘love migrant’ who then gets employment at a university? Others pondered how long one could live in Denmark and still be considered ‘an international’. Our analysis shows that ‘the international’ is not a neutral concept, but often ‘international-ness’ is associated with those from the centre (the Anglo-American academy), while academics from the (semi-)periphery are viewed as less international, perhaps just ‘foreign’ as one interviewee stated. Language is an important factor in this context. As we have shown elsewhere, English is often conflated with the international, for instance internationalisation may simply mean English Medium Instruction. This may explain why academics from the Anglo-American academy can appear to possess more of that universal character that is international. In this way, we point to the uneven geographies of internationalisation, and how universities in the (semi-)periphery can end up mimicking the Anglo-American academy in their attempt to internationalise.

While internationalisation can bring many social, material and professional benefits concerning, for instance, intercultural competencies and employability, there is a diversity in geographical patterns, constraints, demands, privileges and motivations that are to a large extent silenced in prominent policy documents and discourses. Hidden behind its neutralising and universalising discourse, internationalisation is a multi-dimensional, highly uneven process; a plural landscape of possibilities for some, and disadvantages for others. For some years now, critical scholarship on internationalisation has been growing. There is increasing concern that internationalisation practices and mainstream policies reproduce global inequalities and already uneven relations and geographies. There are a number of different ways to avoid this. Along with other scholars of critical internationalisation studies, we encourage efforts to rethink and critically explore consequences, practices and discourses of internationalisation both in scholarship and in academic conversations to open up questions for a renewed focus and to find ways forward.

Vera Spangler is a PhD student at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England. Her research project is a comparative study between England, Denmark and Germany with focus on knowledge legitimacy and the role of student mobility in the re/production of global hierarchies.

Lene Møller Madsen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen. She is part of the research project Geographies of Internationalisation, responsible for the WP on academic mobility. She holds a PhD in human geography, and have worked with pedagogical training of staff for many years including international academics.  

Hanne Kirstine Adriansen is Associate Professor and academic international coordinator at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark. Originally trained as a human geographer, her research concerns mobility, space, and education. Since 2019 PI of the research project Geographies of Internationalisation with 14 affiliated international scholars and master students.


by 1 Comment

#AcWriMo: Getting into the writing habit

by John Parkin

As I look back on Academic Writing Month, I reflect on what went well, what I could have done better and what I will try to carry on. For those who do not know, Academic Writing Month (or #AcWriMo) is held annually in November and gives academics and doctoral students the permission and focus to concentrate their efforts on academic writing in whatever form that may take.

I am a Senior Lecturer Practitioner in Education and also completing my EdD part-time, so it always a challenge trying to balance teaching and research commitments. Over the summer, I had managed to find some time to write, but with a busy term starting in September I really struggled to find the time for the academic writing I knew I needed to do. I was getting worried that I would only be able to find time to write in the summer and my EdD would never be finished!

The SRHE sent out a newsletter which mentioned Academic Writing Month activities they were organising over the month of November. I thought I would give it a try and see if it could help me develop some better writing habits.

I joined the first online session organised by the SRHE and run by Gillian Chu (who also blogged for SRHE recently) which I found to be really useful. We talked about what #AcWriMo and the importance of setting targets, both on a weekly basis in terms of either words or time spent writing and outputs I would like to achieve by the end of the month. I was also introduced to a shared Excel document where I could record my targets and the number of words I had written. The session also had time for attendees to work on some academic writing. Earlier in the year, I had attended some SRHE Power Hour of Writing sessions. I find this sort of online writing session really useful as I tend to find writing a solitary task and that I benefit from writing with other people in a community.

Over the month, I managed to get some writing for my EdD – I managed to write a positionality statement and part of my literature review. I really benefited from having some clear targets and some for how much I wanted to write each week. For a few weeks over the month, my aims were far too optimistic! However, taking part in #AcWriMo got me writing again and not worrying about when I was going to find time to write.

Overall, I found it really useful to participate in #AcWriMo. It managed to get me doing some academic writing this academic year and helped me carve out time to do this. If I can manage to do it for a month, then I feel more optimistic I can find time during the rest of the year too. I am looking forward to joining other SRHE writing events in the future such as the Power Hour of Writing. Having tried #AcWriMo for the first time, I will definitely be doing it next year as well!

John Parkin is a Senior Lecturer Practitioner in Education at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in Peterborough. He is also the Course Leader of the BA Primary Education Studies course. Before becoming an academic in 2018, John was an assistant headteacher and primary teacher. Most of his teaching experience has been as an Early Years teacher. John is also a doctoral researcher exploring the experiences of men training to become primary teachers.


by 2 Comments

Generous scholarship: a vision for academic life

by Ruth McQuirter Scott, Dragana Martinovic, Snežana Obradović-Ratković and Michelle K McGinn

The life of a scholar is often portrayed in popular culture as one of lonely struggle and pressure. It starts at the postgraduate level, when students work to meet the expectations of their programs and supervisors, jumping one hurdle after another until they complete their studies. If they are fortunate enough to land an increasingly rare full-time academic position, they discover a new set of expectations to fulfill. In application and renewal processes, most universities favour single-authored publications in tier-one journals, along with a research record that shows how the scholar is carving out a unique niche in their respective field. This portrayal of academic life is supported by studies that report pressure to publish, competition, isolation, and managerial influences on academic work (eg Castro-Ceacero and Ion, 2018; Dakka and Wade, 2019; Kyvik and Aksnes, 2015; McCarthy and Dragouni, 2020).

We believe there is a better way of living as academics, one that nurtures the strengths of colleagues and leads to mutual growth for novice and seasoned scholars.

Our group of four academics from two Canadian universities has been collaborating as writers for over 10 years. We represent a variety of roles in academia: professors, a research officer, and a university senior administrator. Since 2007 (until interrupted by the pandemic), we have facilitated residential academic writing retreats, bringing together new and experienced academics, postgraduate students, and outside experts for a week-long writing experience in a rural setting.

At our first writing retreat, we were introduced to the term “generous scholarship” as proposed by Constance Russell (2006). We were intrigued and excited by this term, which we felt captured a central component of the writing retreat and resonated with our approach to scholarly life. Sally Stewart Knowles, a retreat co-facilitator from Australia, was also inspired by the conversation at that 2007 retreat to argue that residential writing retreats foster generous scholarship (Knowles, 2017). Although neither Russell (2006) nor Knowles (2017) provides a clear definition of generous scholarship, we continued to be enticed by the term’s potential. This emerging concept seemed to suggest an intentional, collegial approach to scholarly endeavours that departs from the market-driven, individualistic view of scholarship so commonly present in academia.

To understand what generous scholarship could mean, we systematically examined these and other publications in which “generosity” was mentioned in the context of academia and elicited five key principles that characterize generous scholarship: social praxis, reciprocity, generous mindedness, generous heartedness, and agency.

To illustrate these five principles of generous scholarship, we use the example of our residential academic writing retreats. We provide a short overview of our writing retreat structure, define the five principles, and discuss the ways in which retreat participants enact these principles.

Writing Retreat Structure

Inspired by Barbara Grant’s (2008) model of residential academic writing retreats, our retreats consist of five days dedicated to individual writing projects, workshops, work-in-progress groups, and one-on-one consultations with shared meals and informal gatherings in a natural environment. Although most of the days are spent writing, we carve out time for discussions, reviewing each other’s work, and socializing. Accountability and on-site collegial support are embedded in the retreat structure, which promotes writing process and productivity, fosters learning with and from others, and builds a community (McGinn et al, 2019; Ratković et al, 2019).

Principles of Generous Scholarship

The five working principles frame generous scholarship as intentional, reflective, and collegial academic praxis.

Social praxis. Generous scholarship emerges within collaborative and collegial communities of scholarly practice. Our writing retreats enable participants to live and work together in a shared space. A sense of community is built through scheduled work-in-progress groups and workshops as well as meals, informal conversations, and walks in nature. Many new connections, relationships, and collaborative research and writing teams are established as people meet colleagues at various career stages and from different disciplines, departments, and institutions.

Reciprocity. Interrelations within generous scholarship are based on reciprocity through peer-to-peer learning and non-hierarchical mentoring. A key component of our writing retreats is the work-in-progress groups that meet each evening to present and respond to written work. The groups are mixed in terms of fields of expertise, academic roles, and career stages to provide multiple perspectives and rich discussions. When a writer’s work is being featured, another participant acts as a note taker, enabling the writer to focus on comments and suggestions from the others. Participants take turns over subsequent evenings, with each participant serving as writer, contributor, and note taker. The participatory and interactive workshops provide further evidence of reciprocity in action as participants exchange ideas, knowledge, and experiences.

Generous mindedness. Generous scholarship involves acknowledging other people’s situations or perspectives and committing cognitive resources to advance those individuals and their scholarly work. The workshops during our writing retreats foster generous mindedness as workshop facilitators and participants draw from their varied backgrounds and disciplines to inspire and inform each other’s academic practice. During work-in progress groups, writers are asked what type of feedback they wish to receive. Readers are asked to focus on specific aspects of the draft, or to respond to the overall piece. This practice helps readers to focus their responses and to make their feedback meaningful.

Generous heartedness. Generous scholarship requires empathy and emotional support for others. Generous heartedness has been a key feature of our writing retreats. We are open to adapting workshop content and the retreat structure to the needs of participants, and are flexible in expectations (eg participants spend parts of each day in ways that they deem most useful: reading, resting, or taking walks in nature). Emphasis is placed upon the importance of careful listening and attending to the emotional needs of writers as they share unfinished work during work-in-progress groups. A generous spirit is also fostered among participants through communal meals, informal walks, and evening activities.

Agency. Generous scholarship involves deliberately choosing and taking action to contribute to the scholarly community, the field, and society. It demands consciously embracing and modelling all the principles of generous scholarship. As organisers, we use our agency to structure and facilitate the writing retreats. We also engage as writers and participate in all workshops and work-in-progress groups. Many retreat participants demonstrate their commitment to generous scholarship by returning year after year to this community of scholars. Participants often report creating their own writing groups and retreats. Some have published scholarly work about writing retreats (Winters et al, 2019).

Conclusion

We acknowledge that following the principles of generous scholarship may challenge institutional structures that reward individualistic, competitive approaches; it can be difficult to navigate the logistical and human factors inherent in building a community of scholars. Our own writing retreats face an annual financial challenge, as we must repeatedly convince internal funding providers of their value. However, we are determined to overcome such barriers to enact and enable generous scholarship, and we look forward to returning to our residential writing retreats when pandemic restrictions allow. We have also found that following the principles of generous scholarship enhances, rather than undermines, academic productivity and personal satisfaction (Ratković et al, 2019). Furthermore, we are encouraged by the structures recently built into academia that might provide opportunities and spaces for enacting generous scholarship, such as open-access publishing and knowledge mobilization.

We invite you to consider generous scholarship in your own academic life and to share with SRHE blog readers examples of generous scholarship already present in your practice.

Ruth McQuirter Scott is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University, Ontario, Canada, where she is Assistant Director of Teacher Education and teaches Junior/Intermediate Language Arts. Ruth’s research interests are in the effective infusion of technology in education. Connect via rmcquirter@brocku.ca or on Twitter @wordstudy

Dragana Martinovic is a Professor at University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and a Fields Institute Fellow. In her research, Dragana explores knowledge for teaching mathematics, ways in which technology can assist in teaching and learning of mathematics, and epistemologies of STEM disciplines in relation to teacher and K–12 education. Connect via dragana@uwindsor.ca

Snežana Obradović-Ratković is Research Officer and Instructor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University, Ontario, Canada. Her research interests include migration, indigeneity, and reconciliation; transnational teacher education; research education; decolonizing arts-based methodologies; mindfulness and well-being in higher education; academic writing and publishing; and generous scholarship. Connect via sratkovic@brocku.ca

Michelle K McGinn is Associate Vice-President Research and Professor of Education at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Her primary interests include research collaboration, researcher development, scholarly writing, and ethics in academic practice. She is a co-investigator for Academic Researchers in Challenging Times. Connect via Twitter @dr_mkmcginn or mmcginn@brocku.ca

References

Grant, B (2008) Academic writing retreats: A facilitator’s guide. Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia

Knowles, SS (2017) ‘Communities practising generous scholarship: Cultures of collegiality in academic writing retreats’ in McDonald, J and Cater-Steel, A (eds), Implementing communities of practice in higher education (pp 53–80) Springer

McGinn, MK, Ratković, S, Martinovic, D, and McQuirter Scott, R (2019) ‘Creating and sustaining a community of academic writing practice: The multi-university residential academic writing retreat model’ in Simmons, N and Singh, A (eds) Critical collaborative communities: Academic writing partnerships, groups, and retreats (pp 136–148) Brill/Sense

Winters, K-L, Wiebe, N, and Saudelli, MG (2019) ‘Writing about writing: Collaborative writing and photographic analyses from an academic writing retreat’ in Simmons, N and Singh, A (eds), Critical collaborative communities: Academic writing partnerships, groups, and retreats (pp 149–168) Brill/Sense.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Jeanne Adèle Kentel for first introducing us to Russell’s (2006) use of the term “generous scholarship.” We extend our thanks to the many colleagues who have practised generous scholarship alongside us during the writing retreats and in other academic spaces. Details about our analysis process and an elaborated discussion of the principles of generous scholarship are presented in a paper currently under review for publication. Authorship of this blog and the associated paper has been shared equally.