What I’m reading now, or rather who I’m (not) reading?

Who get’s cited and who doesn’t? Who should get cited? As Chick, Ostrowdun, Abbot, Mercer-Mapstone & Grensavitch 2021 state: “Citing is a political act. It is a practice that can work both sides of the same coin: it can give voice, and it can silence.” I came across this paper as a chance discovery while searching for something else, but it made me think. How concious am I about the choices I make in who or what to cite?

My typical literature search process can be a little unstructured. I will search on google scholar using hopefully relevant key words and I’ll follow a thread of relevant papers cited by or cited in papers of interest. Rarely do I consider who the authors are or where they are coming from. Chick, Ostrowdun, Abbot, Mercer-Mapstone & Grensavitch 2021 explore citation practices within the SoTL community, asking colleagues to be explicit about citation decisions they make. Top ranked principles for citing sources were reputation of the source or that the work is considered ‘canon’. When following these principles, the field becomes an echo chamber with only certain voices heard.

SoTL is by its very nature a wide and diverse field. Yet the majority of published, or frequently cited, scholarship seems to be from a rather narrow geographical area, predominantly UK, North America, and Australia. I found a similar bias when exploring literature in the very different field of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, though perhaps for somewhat different reasons.

Figure from Veneman et al 2016 showing the number of publications per year for each geographical region. These are all papers added to a meta-analysis database on mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock production.

Despite, or perhaps because of, these publication biases some respondents in Chick, Ostrowdun, Abbot, Mercer-Mapstone & Grensavitch 2021 declared making a concious, and political, choice to diversify the choice of scholars they cited. This echoes a much wider push to decolonise curricula and broaden horizons in all disciplines. My own motivation to do so has been developing content and reading lists for a new online module with a global audience and a global perspective. Knowing where to look or how to find relevant papers is challenging, I am often relying on chance discoveries. As an aside, I looked for my own most recent paper on google scholar out of curiousity recently and couldn’t find it. This made me think who or what else I might be missing! Still, with some persistence I have been able to discover interesting and useful scholarship from a wide range of countries and higher education contexts. And each new discovery opens up a new pool of potential citations and further discoveries.

In the push for diversifying our citation or reading lists and to expand the range of voices heard, Chick, Ostrowdun, Abbot, Mercer-Mapstone & Grensavitch 2021 also make a point about race or gender diversity of the authors we cite. They suggest we need to self-assess, to research the authors present and more fully know the people we cite. This can be challenging. You certainly can’t know much about author identity just from the name. My own name being a good case in point. If you are in Norway, you would assume I’m a woman. If you are in the English speaking world, you would assume I’m a man. But does it even matter which assumption is right? Another recommendation by Chick, Ostrowdun, Abbot, Mercer-Mapstone & Grensavitch 2021 is to read widely and curiously. The more you read, the harder it would be to take the time to research each author in order to know more about their positionality. Perhaps we need to get better at explicitly positioning ourselves within our own research, rather than leaving it up to the reader to assume, guess or research?

Chick, Ostrowdun, Abbot, Mercer-Mapstone & Grensavitch 2021 provide 10 principles of inclusive citation practices in their paper. Although none of these principles are necessarily easy to follow, they provide good justification for why we should strive to do so. There are no simple solutions, it will require concious thought, negotiation and deliberation. On reflection, I will do my best to cite more intentionally, to read as widely and diversely as I can, and hopefully to improve my citation practices over time to be more inclusive though I make no promises that I will ge it right!

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These thoughts/ideas percolated as I prepared the content for one particular unit of a new online course. Here is the full reading list for that unit as it currently stands. If you have further suggestions or recommendations, I would love to hear it:

• Behari-Leak (2020) Toward a borderless, decolonized, socially just, and inclusive scholarship of teaching and learning. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 8(1), 4-23 https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/TLI/article/download/69848/53912
• Chick et al. (2021) Naming is power: citation practices in SoTL. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 9(2), https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1314759
• Leibowitz (2017) The significance of SoTL in the South. SoTL in the South, 1(1), 1-3, https://www.sotl-south-journal.net/index.php/sotls/article/download/7/1

Thinking and reading about energy and emotion in teaching

In recent conversations with colleagues, we have been talking about how tired we all are after a year of pandemic teaching. Not just physically tired, but really struggling to stay motivated to keep going. This semester has particularly felt like a hard slog. Over the past year, the increased workload has been one issue we have all faced. Moving to online teaching for those of us new to this mode has taken more time and effort than ‘just’ delivering the same course as last year. The past year has been a steep learning curve as we get to grips with new technology and new ways of communicating. But this steep learning curve, and shifting to online – that happened months ago. Why are we still feeling the struggle now? Surely we should all have got to grips with the technology and the new teaching methods by now?

There is of course still much to learn, and our workloads are likely still impacted by the pandemic in many different ways. However, I think there is more going on here than just needing to put more hours in to get the work done. A colleague pointed out how it takes so much more energy to stay engaged and enthusiasic when teaching online where the direct feedback and input from the audience is missing or reduced. Whether you are creating recorded lectures, or delivering live sessions to blank screens, the lack of audience feedback makes the performative aspects of teaching really challenging. This got me thinking – and looking for papers to read – to try to understand more about the emotional aspects of teaching and how the pandemic has impacted those aspects.

In my search came across a recent paper by Myyry et al (2020) which discusses both positive and negative emotions associated with feedback practice. They show how workload, lack of community, and lack of student engagement was associated with frustration; while concerns over student demands or heavy workloads increased teachers’ sense of anxiety. I’m sure we can all recognise some of these aspects in what we are currently experiencing, with frustrations around student demands or lack of engagement being a focus of many conversations these days. The authors also highligh positive emotions; in particular how the opportunity to improve teaching methods are a source of pride and addressing individual student needs an expression of compassion. I wonder whether part of what we are struggling with now is that much of what would normally be a source of positive emotions, and motivation, has become additional sources of stress and anxiety? Compassion for students can be a great motivator for engagement and pride in our work, but when we are faced with increasing numbers of students who are struggling or increasing demands for adjustment perhaps our compassion becomse a source of stress or guilt instead? And if adapting and improving our teaching practices would normally be a source of pride and job satisfaction, what happens when all that hard work is thrown out the window and we are having to start the design from scratch in a new format we are totally unfamiliar with and have little control over? To me it seems that the sources of negative emotions are dominating, and that many of the sources of positive emotions in teaching have also taken a negative turn. No wonder we are all emotionally drained and struggling for motivation – classic signs of burnout!

Exploring this relationship between burnout and motivation, Maricuțoiu & Sulea (2019) suggest that self-efficacy is a personal resouce to draw on in times of stress or challenge which potentially counteracts burnout or drop in engagement. But what if our self-efficacy stores have run dry? If we are pushed too far outside our comfort zone, do we have enough self-efficacy reserves to deal with the new challenge? Although Maricuțoiu & Sulea (2019) are focused on student engagement and self-efficacy, I suspect this relationship migth also hold for teachers. High levels of stress and uncertainty, such as teaching in a pandemic, might mean that we run out of self-efficacy reserves much quicker; that might be why we are struggling with burnout now?

In one of our many conversations over the past year, a colleague asked a really good question: what sustains you as teacher? This prompted some really interesting reflections on the emotional side of teaching, of what replenishes our self-efficacy reserves, and of what motivates us to keep going. A sense of compassion and an emotional connection with our students was certainly high on the list for many of us. This emotional connection was seemingly lost without the body language and live interaction with our students which is very difficult to replicate online. I suspect this might explain our sense of exhaustion and fatigue just as much as the excessive workload. But what do you think? What are your thoughts on emotions and energy in teaching? I’d love to hear your thoughts, and your recommendations for what I should be reading next!

References

Maricuțoiu & Sulea (2019) Evolution of self-efficacy, student engagement and student burnout during a semester. A multilevel structural equation modeling approach. Learning and Individual Differences, 76, doi: 10.1016/j.lindif.2019.101785

Myyry et al. (2020) Experienced academics’ emotions related to assessment. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 45, 1-13, doi: 10.1080/02602938.2019.1601158

Exploring what ‘Scholarship’ means

In my role as Academic Developer, I have been given a remit of ‘developing scholarship’. But what does this actually mean? And how do I do this? Over the past year or two, I’ve been reading a lot on this topic. I am by no means an expert in the Scholarship of Learning and Teaching! I just thought I’d try and pull together a synopsis of where my thinking is up to at this stage, to have a clearer sense in my own head of what I’m doing and why. Maybe this will also be of use to you? If so, please do get in touch for a chat!

So what is Scholarship?

Scholarship might seem an obvious concept to many, but is regularly debated and a few different definitions have been offered which suggests that it is a rather abstract concept and difficult to pin down. I have been thinking and talking about this for a while. I even recorded a podcast with colleagues in the Academy on this topic a little while back. Scholarship is related to research, but not treated as synonymous with it. To some, Scholarship is a subset of Research. Some see it the other way around.

I have landed on ‘Scholarship’ as the broader term, with disciplinary research being a form of scholarship. To me, scholarship is about taking a scholarly approach to your work, in all dimensions of your role. Engaging in Scholarship then means engaging with evidence for and about your practice, whether that is as an academic or in any other role. I really like the explanation Gary Poole gives at the start of this video, about how you can be a consumer of scholarship, or a producer of it, or both at the same time.

I find that this way of thinking about scholarship can apply in all aspects of my work, not only learning and teaching. Back when I used to do ecology research, I would engage with the scholarship of ecology by consuming the research of others. I would use this scholarly evidence, both about how to do ecology and about ecology theory or evidence, to improve and develop my own practice as an ecologist and to help me produce new research as a contribution to the field.

By exploring scholarship in this way, as engaging with evidence for and about pracice, I have also had to explore what ‘research’ is and how very different disciplines are in their outlooks. I think I’m finally understanding the concept of ‘epistemology’! This disciplinary diversity is what makes my job both challenging and interesting. I am supporting colleagues to engage with the scholarship of learning and teaching; colleagues who come from vastly different approaches to scholarship and research.

If scholarship is about engaging with evidence for and about practice, then developing scholarship really is at the heart of what a university is all about. We should all be looking at evidence for and about practice, exploring it, interrogating it, debating it, and using it to improve practice in some way. And in my opinion, this does not just apply to disciplinary research or academic disciplines. This applies to all aspect of university work, including teaching and learning and academic support roles.

How do I foster or develop scholarship?

If Scholarship, and developing scholars, is at the heart of what a university is about, then how do we support further development of scholarship? Academic colleagues surely are already scholars, and hence already engaging in scholarship – do they need further development or support? This is where the difference between research and scholarship perhaps becomes most obvious. Academic colleagues are experts in disciplinary reserach, and in taking a scholarly approach to their research discipline but perhaps less experienced with wider scholarship of academic practice. They may well need some support for engaging with, and maybe even contributing to, the evidence base of other areas of academic practice such as teaching.

And again that difference between disciplines comes to the forefront. Colleagues may be experts in their own disciplinary research field, but need a little help in recognising the value of other forms of evidence based on epistemologies and methodologies far removed from what they are familiar with in their home discipline. I see my role as supporting colleagues to understand, critique, engage with, and even contribute to this wider range of scholarship relevant to their role.

My challenge is finding helpful ways to do this, which supports colleagues to build an evidence base for their own academic practice without overburdening them with more hurdles to jump over or hoops to jump through. Currely, my main routes into scholarship is in relation to the scholarship of learning and teaching, through modules on the PGCAP and PGDIP programmes. I am also part of the organising committee for the Pedagogic Research Conference, which we hope will be a supportive and developmental space for those engaging with the scholarship of learning and teaching. But what about the wider scholarship of academic practice? Is there more I could do? What support would colleagues benefit from? I would love to hear ideas from others on this!

Incomplete Bibliography

These are some of the books and papers I have found particularly useful as I explore the themes of scholarship development and Scholarship of Learning and Teaching. Please do send me recommendations for further reading.

Cornejo Happel & Song (2020) Facilitators and barriers to engagement and effective SoTL research collaborations in faculty learning communities. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 8(2), 53-72

Felten (2013) Principles of good practice in SoTL. Teaching and Learning Inquiry: the ISSOTL Journal, 1(1), 121-125

Kern et al. (2015) The Role of SoTL in the Academy: Upon the 25th Anniversary of Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered. Journal of the Scholarship for Teaching and Learning, 15(3), 1-14

McKinney et al. (2013) The scholarship of teaching and learning in and across the disciplines. Indiana University Press.

McKinney (2007) Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: the challenges and joys of juggling.

Murray (2008) The scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education

Schulman (2000) From Minsk to Pinsk: Why a scholarship of teaching and learning? Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 1(1), 48-53

Vithal (2018) Growing a scholarship of teaching and learning institutionally. Studies in Higher Education, 43(3), 468-483

Webb & Tierney (2019) Investigating support for scholarship of teaching and learning: we need SoTL educational leaders. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 57(5), 613-624

The ISSOTL 2013 conference produced a series of videos exploring what SoTL is through interviews with experts in the field available as a YouTube playlist.

What I’m reading now: The Hidden Curriculum in Doctoral Education

On my reading list this week was this new book by Elliot, Bengtsen, Guccione & Kobayashi: The Hidden Curriculum in Doctoral Education. If you are interested in doctoral education or reseracher development you should definitely check this book out and then follow the associated blog. I’m only half way through and the book has already got me thinking, both about my own journey as a doctoral researcher (a long time ago now!) and my current work as a researcher developer.

I have now started to rethink the role I play as a developer, and workshop facilitator through this lens of formal and hidden curricula. The authors place university workshops and development sessions within the formal curriculum. However, in my experience these sessions also open doors to the hidden curriculum. They become a space where the two aspects of doctoral learning are intertwined. The conversations between participants which are inspired by the session topic or content become a further learning opportunity. And meeting at a workshop becomes an opportunity to start a conversation with other scholars which may well continue well beyond the workshop topic or space.

This merging of the formal and hidden curricula, is making me think more carefully about the purpose and the design of sessions I deliver as a developer. My aim has always been to foster a supportive community within these spaces, where participants feel confident and comfortable sharing experiences and challenges. Although there often is a formal curriculum to deliver, I feel the informal spaces in between are just as important. As much learning can happen in the coffee breaks, as during the formal session itself.

Thinking about my own journey as a doctoral student, the support network I built up was largely made up of fellow doctoral students whom I met through formal training sessions or informal student society events. Thank you to all of them for listening, and sharing their experiences over the years. If it hadn’t been for those initial coffee break chats, or Friday ‘happy hour’ events….

My challenge now is to find ways of facilitating those coffee break chats when there are no coffee breaks. When workshops are online, and people step away from the computer to get a coffee (or other beverage of choice) in their own kitchen alone. How do we facilitate those seredipitous conversations and unexpected learning opportunities with colleagues you may not have met before? Can I as a developer still play a role in facilitating students’ enagement with and discovery of this hidden curriculum?

I would love to hear your thoughts, ideas or experiences! How are you engaging with the Hidden Curriculum, as a developer or as a doctoral student?

Shutting up and writing under Covid lockdown

Way back in 2017, when the world seemed normal, I started hosting shut-up-and-write sessions for PhD students. I wrote about my reflections on those early events here. The writing retreats proved popular, and I have hosted various writing retreats or shut-up-and-write sessions ever since. What I found particularly beneficial with those events was the social interaction and cameraderie of writing surrounded by other writers. We all drew motivation from seeing others working, and we all shared experiences, furstrations and solutions in the breaks. And then lockdown happened.

Alongside the shut-up-and-write sessions, I had developed a personal writing habit by going to my favourite coffee shop (shout out to 92 Degrees) every morning for an hour or so of writing or reading before going to the office. These sessions were where I got my academic fuel, my new ideas, and where I clarified my thinking through writing. With this regular writing habit, I managed to get my MA thesis written, a couple of papers written, some blog posts written; I was inspired and productive. And then lockdown happened.

The first couple of months of lockdown, I think a lot of us were in academic survivial mode. We were scrambling to get our teaching fully online, and dealing with suddenly working from home long-term. I found myself struggling with motivation and inspiration more than I thought I would, and I missed my regular writing habit. So I reached out to my past shut-up-and-write participants for inspiration yet again. I sent out a call for anyone interested in virtual writing sessions, and I was surprised by the level of interest. Clearly others also needed some mutual support, and inspiration, to make writing progress.

What I ended up doing was set up a writing group on Teams, and scheduling shut-up-and-write virtual meetings hosted through Teams. Personally, this has become my morning writing accountability group. I’ve made a commitment to writing (or reading) every weekday morning from 8:30. Anyone interested and awake, then joins me for an hour of writing by joining the virtual meeting. We have a brief chat at the start, then everyone is muted for 25 minutes while we all write. A brief break and chat, followed by another 25 minutes of writing.

These virtual meetings may not be quite as good as meeting in person, but they are certainly better than nothing. And the group has been very active, with group participants scheduling their own virtual writing meetings at times that suit them better. So what is it about writing in a group, even virtually? Why do these sessions work? I think for many of us it’s the accountability, the commitment to writing, the mutual support and being cheered on by colleagues.

How are you maintaining your academic writing habits during lockdown?

Blended/hybrid/resilient – new pedagogies or just new labels?

As universities grapple with the implications of Covid19 lockdown and the rapid shift to online teaching, summer is a time for reflection; Reflecting on the experiences we have gained, what the challenges have been, and planning for the next academic year. Next year is clearly not going to be business as usual, we are still going to have to grapple with social distancing measures and the looming risk of future lockdowns.

What lockdown has highlighted is how little resilience is built into our current teaching practices. Something many of our students, and some staff, have been aware of for a long time; students who have been unable to join us in the classroom due to illness, caring responsibilies, job pressures for example. And up to now, the response has been to either let these students miss out on those learning opportunities or to attempt to design alternative catch-up resources. But what if there was a better way, a way that would support the learning of all students whether we are facing a pandemic or just facing the usual access challenges?

As a response to the rapid switch to online teaching, the use of technology in teaching has come sharply into focus for all of us. Terminology such as Blended, Online, Hybrid, Mixed-mode or Flexible are on everyone’s lips. But what do these terms mean, and how are they different from each other? My own university is promoting Hybrid Active Learning as the new pedagogy going forward, but how is this different from blended learning or any other form of hybrid learning? And is it actually different from what many have been doing already?

In an attempt to answer these questions, I have been reading Snart’s (2010) book on hybrid learning; he seems to use the terms hybrid and blended interchangeably. In one chapter he sets out to define what hybrid learning means, but suggests that we cannot clearly state what it is because there is no clear defintion of how much time spent online vs in the classroom makes a blended course. My understanding from reading Snart’s book, is that whatever label you use, hybrid or blended, it is really a pedagogy of using a combination of tools to achieve learning aims; and that some of those tool will include technology used for ansynchronous online learning in some form. I may have misunderstood something, but my understanding is that all of these terms (blended/hybrid/flexible/mixed/flipped) are all aspects of the same thing, choosing the best combination of face-to-face and online to support learning.

Using a blend of tools something many of our colleagues already do, and they still faced challenges during lockdown. Using online quizzes or flipped classrom teaching, still relies on some face-to-face teaching. And this strategy still means having to come up with new alternatives each time a student is unable to engage in those face-to-face sessions. So do we now need to throw a new pedagogical term into the mix, or will that just add further confusion?

I recently came across blog posts by Bill Hart-Davidson and James DeVaney & Rebecca Quintana, and the concept of Resilient Pedagogy really struck a chord with me. My understanding is that resilient pedagogy is a little different from these earlier terms. Rather than focus on the medium of delivery, and debating how much time to spend online vs face to face, resilient pedagogy suggests shifting the focus to engagement and interaction. Rather than deliver content in the traditional way, and then have to come up with alternatives everytime there is a disruption, lets design our teaching to be adaptable and accessible in multiple media by focusing the design on the interactions we want to achieve rather than the content we want to cover.

I don’t necessarily see this new concept of Resilient Pedagogy being mutually exclusive of Hybrid/Blended learning. Rather, it is an overarching pedagogy which sets out a new philosophy of teaching. Hybrid/blended/mixed/flipped methods of teaching are then able to suggest some of the tools we might use to achieve our aims of a Resilient Pedagogy.

But what does this all mean for my teaching practice as an Academic Developer? For me, this means thinking through more explicitly what kinds of interactions and engagement with content and colleagues I want to foster. What is it about those face-to-face workshops that really make them valuable learning opportunities? And how do I explicitly design for those interactions, rather than organically let them happen as a side effect of throwing people in the same room together?

Which brings me back to my previous blog post about conversations as pedagogy. How do I make those conversations an explicit and deliberate part of my course design, independent of medium and hence flexible to changes in medium when circumstances change?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this!
How are you making your teaching more resilient?

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References:

Snart, J. A. (2010) Hybrid learning: the perils and promise of blended online and face-to-face instruction in Higher Education. ABC-CLIO

What I’m reading now: Conversations as pedagogy?

I have recently been working on a couple of papers discussing the value of development workshops for early career academics and I keep coming back to conversations being a key benefit. Interviees often bring up the value of opportunities to talk to peers, how it is reassuring and comforting to know others in same boat. As Clark (cited in Haigh 2005) suggests “Good conversation feeds the spirit; it feels good; it reminds us of our ideals and hopes for education; it confirms that we are not alone in our frustrations and doubts or in our small victories“. But this does raise the question of what counts as a good conversation, how we can facilitate those good conversations, and whether those good conversations just feel good or actually lead to significant learning.

In exploring this issue, I came across a paper by Haigh (2005) where he suggests good conversations do lead to professional learning. For example, onversations provide opportunities to articulate implicit theories and beliefs, and to have those questioned and interrogated. Conversations also open our eyes to different perspectives, and thereby open up new solutions to problems. In exploring the value of conversation, Haigh (2005) makes the point that conversation is different from discussion; something I had not considered. In my teaching, I always invite participants to discuss topics as a way to open up conversation and explore different perspectives. In my mind conversation and discussion were synonymous. However, if I understand Haigh’s explanation correctly, a discussion involves arguing a point and trying to convince others while conversations are more free flowing and driven by storytelling. In my experience those two actions are not easily separated, the lines are definitely blurred. My role as a developer is to allow space for both, and to encourage both where appropriate. The challenge is knowing the difference and when or how to stear the conversation towards discussion or vice versa.

Reading a recent book by Jarvis & Clark got me re-thinking conversations as a pedagogy for development. They discuss different kinds of conversations, and how to facilitate them; from 1-1 coaching, to peer dialogues to group conversations. What they discuss certainly strikes a chord with me as I discuss with my colleagues what our underpinning pedagogy is as a development team. Facilitating conversations as spaces for reflection and learning really resonated with me. And reading their book has made me think more carefully about how I make those conversations into valuable opportunities for learning, not just chance to catch up with colleagues; as opportunities for collaborative learning both for me and for our participants.

What I am grappling with next is how to make space for those valuable conversations during lockdown. If conversation is key to professional learning, how do we facilitate and encourage those conversations remotely? As a team, we are trying out different strategies both, synchronous and ansynchronous (for instance the podcast series developed by my colleagues Alex Owen and Matt Davis), but I would love to hear what others are doing. Perhaps this blog post can be my way of dipping into that conversation?

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References

Haigh (2005) Everyday conversations as a context for professional learning and development. International Journal for Academic Development, 10(1), 3-16, doi: 10.1080/13601440500099969

Jarvis & Clark (2020) Conversations to change teaching. Jarvis & Smith (eds) Critical Practice in Higher Education. Critical Publishing. ISBN: 9781913063771

Exploring Methodologies: Action Research

This year, I took on teaching a new module as part of our PGCAP programme – called Independent Scholarly Investigation. For this module, participants conduct a small scholarly investigation into their own teaching practice and write up a paper of their findings. Teaching the module for the first time this year, I didn’t feel confident in guiding others on methodology or methods. For next year, I will also be developing a module on Scholarship of Learning and Teaching as part of our PGDipHE programme. I want to make sure I have a better grasp of both scholarship and methodology which is why I aim to spend the summer exploring what scholarship is and reading up on research methodologies for the scholarship of teaching and learning. I recently did a podcast with some colleagues where I share my thoughts on Scholarship. Writing blog posts about what I’m learning will be my way of further consolidating my thinking, so bear with me.

In the PGCAP programme, Action Research was suggested as a research methodology for their investigations. I had been using Action Learning as a teaching strategy in a development programme for Graduate Teaching Assistants a couple of years back. The idea was to use this as a way to develop tools for problem solving and building confidence for novice academics. My former colleague, Claire Stocks, wrote about her development of the programme here. But what is the difference between Action Learning and Action Research? And what actually is Action Research?

Both Action Learning and Action Research stems from a pedagogical idea of learning from reflection, but reflecting in dialogue with others. In Action Learning, a group works together to reflect on an experience presented by one of the group members. Through questions from and discussion with colleagues, our assumptions are challenged and new potential actions are offered. Norton (2019) suggests that Action Learning and Action Research are on a continuum. Both involve reflecting on practice in dialogue with others, but Action Learning is limited to personal observations while Action Research involves systematic gathering of data and evidence.

And this systematic gathering of data and evidence is what makes Action Research a research methodology. Action Research involves reflecting on your current practice, identifying a challenge or issue you are uncomfortable with or want to address in some way, gathering data and evidence to explore that issue, implementing an action, reflecting on the outcomes and your new practice and sharing that information and experience with others, then repeating the cycle. This overarching framework of reflection-evidence-action is the Methodology. Methods on the other hand are the ways in which you gather the data and evidence and Action Research can encompass a wide range of methods. The methods you use will depend on the issue you are reflecting on or the challenge you are attempting to solve.

Our motivation for including Action Research in the PGCAP programme is as a method for participants to explore their own practice and allow them to delve deeper into a particular area of pedagogic interest. Throughout the programme, we are encouraging our participants to become reflective and professional practicioners, but what does it mean to be professional and why would Action Research help? Bostock & Baume (2016, cited in Norton, 2019) suggest that professionalism includes being scholarly, being critical and reflective, and engaging with continued professional development. All of these elements are addressed by engaging with Action Research.

Currently on my Action Research reading list – please feel free to recommend things for me to add!

Gibbs, Cartney, Wilkinson et al. (2017) Literature review on the use of action research in higher education. Educational Action Research, 25(1), 3-22 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2015.1124046

McNiff, Jean (2013) Action Research. Principles and practice. 3rd Edition. Routledge. ISBN 9780415535267

Norton, Lin (2019) Action Research in Teaching and Learning. 2nd Edition. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315147581

Telling stories – what’s my framework?

As I am working on a Master’s degree in Higher Education, I am learning how to do social science research and appropriate writing for the discipline. Having already completed a PhD and published several papers (bragging list here), you might think that I already know how to do academic writing and writing for publication, and that this would be easy. Not so! As I have reflected on before, changing disciplines means learning very new ways of approaching literature and writing. Fortunately, I have recently had some important lessons courtesy of Reviewer 2. Last month I had two papers rejected, from the same journal. With an excellent Reviewer 2, who provided constructive and insightful feedback, the disappointment turned into an excellent opportunity for learning. I clearly need a better grasp of theory and frameworks to frame and justify my work, but this is easier said than done. This is the aspect I struggle most with as I move into a completely new research field. It means not just reading a few recent papers to get up to speed, but also reading wider theory, background context, older literature. And all that reading takes time – a lot of time! Moving to a new field of research, or engaging in truly interdisciplinary research for that matter, is not a trivial decision to make.

So why do I find the idea of “frameworks” or “theory” so difficult in my current research and writing? As a (former?) biologist, the idea of theoretical frameworks and perspectives is not intuitive. These are not aspects we explicitly discuss in writing within the discipline, they are underlying assumptions and implied to be universally understood. The focus is much more on facts and data, with the assumption that data directly address specific questions aimed at discovering “the true world”. In social science, the expectation is that the same data can be viewed in many different ways depending on the lens or framework used to interpret them. And if that is the case, then you need to explicitly state which lens or framework you want to use and how. But how do you choose the “right” framework for your study?

My research, and hence the two papers recently rejected, is around developing as an early career academic. One was looking at the lived experiences of research fellows (poster presented at Vitae 2017 available here), the other was looking at PhD students’ engagement with our development programme (previously discussed here).

We could be exploring this topic from a wide range of perspectives and we hadn’t clearly defined ours. In the natural sciences, I find this more intuitive to do. I was dealing with physical entities and systems, exploring a clearly defined question and expecting there to be just one answer. In social science, I find this much harder to do. The questions are often more open and vague to me, and they can be answered in many different ways depending on your perspective and framework.

Today, as I was about to start another blog post, I found this one nearly finished in my drafts. Clearly this blog has been on hiatus since October when this draft was written! As an update to what I wrote, I did manage to find my framework. And I did manage to get both of those papers published. They are both linked below. Happy Reading!

Petichakis, Saetnan & Clark (2019) The experience of research fellows seeking independence in multiple communities of practice. Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education https://doi.org/10.1108/SGPE-03-2019-0027

Saetnan (2020) Graduate students’ motivations for participating in development workshops. Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 14(1)

Learning for an unknown future? …and an aside about academic writing styles.

I recently had an opportunity to catch up with a former colleague, Claire Stocks, as we had both been asked to present at the same SRHE symposium recently. The focus of the symposium was training for graduate teaching assistants, and we had both been invited along with four others to talk about our different approaches. In reflecting on her development of a new GTA training programme, Claire had been reminded of a paper she had read a while ago which she felt spoke to her own philosophy in developing the programme. Of course, I had to read this paper!

The paper in question was one by Ronald Barnett on ‘Learning for an unknown future‘. In this paper, Barnett suggests that the future has always been unknown but that the scale, speed and dimension of change now is greater than it ever has been. Developing generic skills which might be transferable to other contexts is no longer enough to enable our graduates to tackle the challenges they might face in the future. According to Barnett, what we need is to develop critical thinkers and reflective practitioners, people with the skills for continued development and learning as opposed to generic skills in a particular discipline.

This idea of developing reflective practitioners, rather than a list of general teaching skills, really resonated with me as well. I have written before about my thoughts on the potential impact of academic development, about how my aim is to build confidence and self-efficacy. Yes, I do also share specific teaching tips and concrete examples of good practice. But my aim when doing so is to encourage participants to question why and when those practices can be considered good and to build the tools for reflecting on their own practice. I see a key role of development workshops as a space for participants to gain the confidence to try new things and to question and critique approaches. My hope is that they then also become teachers with the confidence to be flexible and try new things when the world around them changes in unpredicatble ways.

The challenge, I think, is to convince participants about this approach to learning. Many novice academics come to our sessions with the expectation that they are here to learn what to do to be a good teacher. They are looking for ‘the correct answer’. My goal is to convince them that I don’t necessarily have the specific answers for their specific context, but rather that through discussion and reflection they are building the skills to develop their own practice and find their own answers into the future. And my next challenge is to find out how to measure whether that goal is achieved. Am I really helping them become more confident and flexible teachers?

…and an aside about academic writing styles…

On different note, I had some major frustration in reading Barnett’s paper. Although I found the key message interesting and relevant, I found the paper incredibly dense and difficult to read and much of it went above my head. It took me several attempts to get to grips with it. As I’ve written about in a number of earlier blog posts (e.g. here and here), I have a particular interest in developing academic writing and this paper gave me some further food for thought. The writing style of Barnett is frustratingly dense and convoluted. It is as if it was written to deliberately confuse rather than clarify. One problem is that the author is using cultural or literary references with which I’m not particularly familiar (e.g Nietzsche’s Overman). The other problem, in my opinion, is that the sentence structures are overly complex making the train of thought very difficult to follow. I have a similar complaint about a lot of academic writing, written as if it is a deliberate gate-keeping exercise. Only those clever enough, and initiated into a particular secret world, can access the content. I find a lot of pedagogic work, though by no means all, is written this way. It makes interdisciplinary work difficult, and it makes it very difficult for otherwise clever academics to access pedagogic theory and thinking. Why can’t we aim to write text which opens the door for people, rather than put barriers in place?