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The perfect marriage of research and student education – Reflections on a Leeds Educator Community discussion about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

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By Sascha Stollhans, Associate Professor of Language Pedagogies & incoming Director of Scholarship in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies

 

I was honoured to be able represent LCS/CELT and lead a discussion at one of our regular Leeds Educator Community Coffee Morning events in May 2023. These events bring together colleagues from across the University of Leeds to discuss innovations and spark discussions related to student education practices. My contribution was concerned with the “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)”.

We had some fascinating discussions, focussing on the following questions (and Leeds colleagues can read a short summary of all the discussions held on the day on the Leeds Educator Sharepoint site):

  • What is scholarship?
  • Why engage in it?
  • What barriers are we facing?
  • What is the context for SoTL at Leeds?

While there are various definitions of scholarship, the one we worked with was based on the “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning”: researching pedagogy and developing practice in an evidence-based way. This is in line with the definition used by Advance HE, whose UK Professional Standards Framework for educators working in Higher Education recognises SoTL as both an Area of Activity (A5) and as a Professional Value (V3).

In our discussion, we agreed that SoTL is the perfect marriage of research and student education: researching pedagogy is an impactful activity by its very nature and a way of making sure our teaching is research-led. This, in fact, led to an interesting discussion about the very meaning of “research-led” teaching: is it about teaching what we research or teaching in a way that is informed by research? Ideally both, we decided!

For the context of language teaching and learning, Dr Alex Ding and colleagues have developed a “Manifesto for the Scholarship of Language Teaching and Learning”, in which they describe SoTL  as a “vehicle for all actors in language education (including students, researchers and practitioners) to contribute to a collective exploration and understanding of the many complexities of language teaching and learning“, and highlight that “scholarship is about impact [...] on language educators [...]; impact on students [...] and impact on people, policies and practice“.

Colleagues from across the University who joined the discussion at the recent Coffee Morning very much agreed with this. We talked further about the benefits of engaging in SoTL: It is a way of valuing teaching, developing your own practice, bringing staff together. It is also a key priority within Curriculum Redefined.

As for barriers or concerns, some colleagues mentioned that engaging in SoTL is sometimes not valued enough or seen as an equally important type of research compared to ‘traditional’ disciplinary research (for want of a better term). This has an impact on workload allocations and prestige – but we all agreed that this needs to change and is already changing. We also wondered if the distinction between research and scholarship is unique to the UK context: lots of international colleagues commented that this distinction is not made at international institutions they had previously worked at and that there are not even two different words used for “research” and “scholarship” in many other languages.

We had an open and frank discussion about the role SoTL plays/should play at a Russell Group university which traditionally has a strong identity as being first and foremost a research institution. We agreed that we were observing a shift though and that student education and SoTL are and should be valued more. As one colleague put it: “Can’t you identify as both a good researcher and an evidence-informed teacher?”

Specifically talking about SoTL at Leeds, we talked about all the invaluable opportunities that are available to us: LITE, pedagogic research centres at school and faculty level, such as our Centre for Excellence in Language Teaching and our Pedagogic Research in the Arts Centre, OD&PL workshops and programmes, such as the “Build your Scholarship Practice” programme, led by Dr Eva Sansavior. Some colleagues asked for a mentoring programme, and many highlighted the value of having a strategic leadership role within schools: the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, for example, has a dedicated Director of Scholarship – a role which I feel honoured to take up in August 2023.