Starting your first SoTL project

In this podcast, Phil and Lucy discuss the key steps in getting started with your first project. They emphasize the importance of reflecting on one's teaching practice and identifying a topic of interest. They also suggest attending journal club sessions and reading key texts to familiarize oneself with the scholarship teaching and learning literature. They discuss the benefits of collaborative writing and networking with others in the field. They mention the possibility of inter-institutional collaboration and the importance of disseminating one's work through various outlets. They also touch on the challenges of finding time for scholarship and obtaining ethics approval for research projects. Finally, Lucy shares her interest in qualitative approaches and storytelling in scholarship of teaching and learning. Welcome to the Scholarship and Teaching Learning Podcast. I'm Phil Martin. And I'm Lucy Turner-Oaks. And Lucy, if I wanted to get started with a social project, what would be the first thing that I would have to do? That's a good question. And I think the first thing I would advise people to do is think about what you're already doing that can lead into that project. So it's quite likely in your teaching practice you might be reflecting on what's working or what's not working. So I would start with what happens in your actual teaching context. You just have to think about something that you're genuinely interested in. So it's, I guess, that first idea around identifying a topic, identifying a theme, what matters to you. You know, scholarship, it's something that we don't always have a huge amount of time for. So I think it should be something that genuinely will help your practice and help learners as well. All right. So starting with something that you think you do distinctively, that you think you do well, and practice you'd like to share. With regard to, I guess, what that leads us into a section on reading and key texts and finding out about what's already been done. If I'm a teaching practitioner but I don't have a great deal of knowledge of the scholarship teaching and learning literature, where would be a good place to start? Well I'm glad you asked me that, Phil. So the first thing, of course, that you should do is come along to some of the subtle network events. So coming to something like one of the journal club sessions, we look at specific papers there. But then within those specific papers, the same kinds of names turn up. So like with any sort of field of scholarship, there are, I guess, key texts or sort of milestones in the development of the field which you'd want to be aware of. But the first thing I would say is come to a session. Come to a journal club or come to a writing group or attend one of the kind of central learning and teaching workshops that we run. Because you need, I suppose, scholarship is an extension of reflective practice. And I think lots of people here at York are already doing reflective practice. The difference between scholarly teaching and reflective practice and subtle is that subtle is about being part of that bigger conversation. So you need that both with real live humans. And I would say, again, come to a journal club or come to a session. And then you also need to do what I think your second question relates to, which is around getting to know the discourse and the participants in the debate sort of in the published sphere of subtle. OK. So, yeah, that would be a good place to start with. Yeah, I mean, just the social interaction of journal clubs and talking to people and running ideas past peers. We're talking about the journal clubs that happen here at York. Do you know if these are quite common across institutions? Would most universities have their own kind of version of a journal club or? From talking to kind of colleagues in other research intensives, I think it's coming more and more. I mean, on the SADA mailing list, there's the Oxford Brookes International Reading Group, which I haven't been to yet. But I know that's been running for a while. With varying degrees of success, really, I think journal clubs run. It depends on how much participation and sort of buy in you obviously get from people in departments who are known for supporting scholarship of teaching and learning. But York, we're quite lucky with that in that we do, as you know, have a kind of regular set of attendees who come to those sessions and then other people will bob in and out. I think I think it's probably going to become more and more widespread across the sector. Oh, good. I ran another bullet point of this past year, which is collaborative writing. And I think that's quite an interesting thing to talk about, because I found it to be completely different to working by yourself and trying to find someone. Have you done any collaborative writing? Have you written with anyone else? Yes, I have. Both in my sort of research, previous research career and a little bit in SOTL. They're very limited, actually. Yeah, I suppose one of the things that it does is it socialises your SOTL work again. So if we talk about, you know, you want to go to a place where people are talking about scholarship, you want to engage with literature, you want to engage with those kind of bigger conversations, a collaborative writing relationship is also that. I have to say, I've found I've had two experiences of writing with other people. The first was terrible. The second was really, really positive. So I do think it matters, the details of that sort of relationship and how you how you find that person. Yeah, I mean, so far we've got so we found that I'm a practitioner. I found an area that I'm interested in. I've been to Journal Club and got an idea of what people are talking about, the kinds of research that people have been carried out. Networked a bit and I found someone with shared interests and might make a good collaborative writing project. Are there a lot of inter-institutional collaboration going on like that with SOTL? Do we ever get people from other institutions coming to ours? Is there any sort of joint scholarship of teaching and learning journal clubs staged at all? Is that something? I mentioned the Oxford one, the Oxford Bricks International one. I mean, it's something I'd really like to see that, you know, might transpire, I suppose, is a White Rose type SOTL network. I think that would be brilliant. I think there's a real benefit in talking to people who are not in your immediate area of practice, in your immediate teaching context and sort of cross-fertilisation of ideas. So, I mean, and there are obviously, so I don't think there's currently, there's not currently a journal club on that sort of level, but there is a learning and teaching conference at Leeds. I think you've been to that, haven't you? Or colleagues of yours may have presented there. I've got a couple of contacts in other departments here who are going to present at, again, an Oxford Brookes Learning and Teaching Conference. So, I suppose you can network in those events and you can connect with people who'd be interested in looking at sort of scholarship themes. And you could do that at national and sort of more local level. Cool. I mean, this is all, it sounds like scholarship of teaching and learning and educational research is much more of a social exercise. There's a lot of networking involved, is that to say? Well, more than what, I suppose. I think if I compare it to the only other sort of academic area that I know well, and I worked as an early career researcher in history, I think maybe the key distinction is that this is practice focused. So, I was in a very sort of, if you like, pure discipline where the readership for what I was producing would have been fairly small. The discourse, and this is something you and I have talked about before, was very specialised. But I think what I found coming into scholarship of teaching and learning is there is a genuinely quite collaborative approach. And I think that has origins in this kind of movement for scholarship of learning and teaching as it was set up in the States, which is very consciously about creating a teaching commons, which is something Randy Bass was talking about. I think we discussed that in some other sessions as well. But, you know, teaching is a large and diverse exercise. It's no good one person reinventing the wheel over and over and over again. This is a practice and it's going to take sort of, you know, the research, the systematic research and reflection of lots and lots of us to take us forward. So, I think I've found it to be a very welcoming space to be in. The reason I asked was I'm thinking of people who might be coming from different research backgrounds. I know we've touched on this in different than other podcast episodes, but then it doesn't seem like a kind of discipline where you keep your head down in your siloed and you kind of write in your own bubble. It really seems to be like this. I suppose you probably could do that, but people coming either teachers who aren't necessarily from research background or researchers who are now teaching and aren't familiar with the research methods that we use in software. The networking aspect seems to be really useful and it would be quite challenging for someone to do something entirely solo. Was that a bit unfair? I guess it's interesting. It's a really interesting way of when you say to do something solo, what would that look like? I'm just I have my idea. I'm going to hit the books, find out what's already been written about this, you know, where we are with the literature, go through the usual process, but entirely by myself, bring myself up to speed and kind of I think that that was the bit that struck me as needing where the networking really comes into its own, because it gives you someone who might necessarily be from this background, a good kind of view of the scholarship of teaching and learning landscape, the literature, you know, what people are doing research on, what's happening at the moment. That's the bit where the networking comes in really handy. And it might be quite challenging. I'm just wondering if there might be people thinking like that when they think about carrying out research projects or doing scholarship, this is what maybe comes to their mind, the idea of just being stuck in a library corner somewhere. Right. Yeah, I suppose I suppose one of the things you've got, what you picked up on there is partly about sharing knowledge and understanding, maybe sharing sort of methodological expertise and not feeling like that's just one person, but maybe more of a kind of collaboration. I think there's also a really big issue around accountability. If we take this podcast, you know, you and I have sort of committed to doing this. The fact that there's another person doing it with me makes me turn up. I wouldn't do it on my own. And actually, we've already talked about certain times when we've both been under pressure to be doing other things. And actually, what I reflect on is that coming to this and talking things through is fed into other areas of practice in really helpful ways. So I think but I think the human sort of showing up for a relationship based kind of approach to something is different to doing it solo. And I think, you know, in disciplinary research, we're part of academic communities in scholarship. We maybe have to build those communities a bit more. So there's groundwork to do. And I think doing that in in numbers is is a more sustainable way of approaching it. And that's a very long winded way of saying I think it helps to be to have some accountability. Yeah, I think. Yeah, I think so. Definitely. When you're setting your own deadlines as well, working with somebody and that social aspect, I mean, there are challenges there, too, you know, in terms of who writes when and how you manage that process. And McKeeley's written quite a lot about this. I can't remember the name of the book. It probably is something about writing scholarship of teaching and learning. And he writes there quite a lot about both the benefits and the challenges of working collaboratively. So if people are interested in having a bit of a background, sort of knowledge of that, I can we can put that reference up somewhere, too. Brilliant. Yes. OK. References below. We've got right. So we've got the stage where we're building momentum in the project. We have a really firm idea. We're getting to grips with the subtle kind of culture and we haven't. We have we're starting to get a good ground of what project might look like. Ultimately, I suppose we want to disseminate the work. So we've talked again about various ways in which we can do this. So we've got the traditional impact journal, perhaps which I've always seen as quite a high bar as something, especially for people new to subtle. You know, is that is that something that is is worth aspiring to on your first subtle adventure or would it be, you know, should we is there more value in perhaps in going around doing small conference presentations, lightning talks, perhaps disseminating work in scholarly blogs or more semi academic outlets and building up to these things? Or what's your what's your advice around dissemination generally to do what you feel comfortable with on that on that spectrum? I mean, if you're completely feeling like this is a very new area, absolutely. So accessing university level stuff first with that conference or writing for a magazine or writing for our in-house journal, the York Subtle Journal. I do I do think that as a research intensive, we should be thinking about publishing our work as scholars or as part of a research intensive. We should be thinking about the capacity for that long term. I don't think that's a bad thing to kind of aspire to. I think you're right about maybe high impact educational research journals are not feasible. They're not feasible because we don't have the resources to do that kind of research. Most of us who are working in scholarship of learning and teaching. However, I would suggest there are usually journals out there that you can pitch to. And we've got that journals list on on our Web pages, which kind of has a little bio for each journal. And I think it's quite helpful to think of journals in terms of different categories. You've got those high impact journals, things like teaching in higher education or British Journal of Education Technology, big names. You've then got discipline specific journals that might look to publish specifically on geography and environment, pedagogy. You've also got scholarship of teaching and learning journals. And I think they're a good place to start. And even if you're not pitching for them, you should be looking to them for the kind of language and themes that you're going to address. OK, I mean, that actually links to another bullet point I had here, one of our final ones. And that's the idea of resources and time. And one of the things that might again with the two strands of people that might we might be coming from very different backgrounds. You already got a research position and you're from a research background, you're from a teaching background. So in both of these cases, this is going to be new terrain in many ways for people. You'd be doing something that you're less familiar with. Do you have any tips generally on carving out time? I know we talk a lot about workload models and just on a personal level, have you got any advice on how to incorporate this into incorporate scholarship teaching learning into your routine, writing and making headway on this on a daily basis? And what kind of resources should people generally expect to have? So the time one is really key, isn't it? And I suppose, again, my strategy is to try and integrate this part of my practice with things that I am having to do on a routine basis. I suppose one thing in terms of staying up to date with themes and debates is the journal tables of contents page. So it's a web page where you can select different topics for research. So you would write into the research by their higher education and it will bring up all the journals that have that in their title. You can then skim them. You might decide to and you can select from those and they'll then send you monthly updates of new publications there. You wouldn't. I subscribe to about six to 10 journals and I kind of change those and probably look at four or five of those regularly. But that is a very easy way to stay on top of what's current, at least just in terms of what's kind of being published on that comes to you and you can either engage with that or not. That's sort of the same current website again. Yet attending some of the stuff we provide with the scholarship of teaching and learning network like the journal club, which is, you know, more or less monthly feedback we've had is that if that's in your calendar, it maybe feels slightly more protected than just I'm going to do two hours of reading on Friday morning, which I always thought was a romantic kind of nice idea to do. But it's really difficult to do that. So scheduling time in the calendar, signing up to some kind of update stuff. And then I would suggest again, sort of building in. I just not want to work for everyone, but building in some kind of group or social time to do this. Yeah. OK. I think I think everyone can relate to the idea of having calendar, you know, things that we live and die by outlook and Google calendars and things like that. It's if it's not in there, it tends to get washed aside sometimes. So I would say something that a colleague from Canada said, actually, which I was really struck by in terms of scholarship, is that there aren't you can't shortcut this stuff. It is something that requires upfront commitment and time commitment. Yeah. I suggest that over a period that becomes more manageable. But I guess it's about the payoff of being able to put in that upfront commitment, whether that's reading, I don't know, three key works in subtle or it's, you know, saying I'm going to attend this thing fairly regularly for six months. But I think you do need to think about when you first enter the field, putting some real time around it if you can. OK, I think we did want to touch on this. This be a very short point, but the idea of ethics approval for these kinds of projects. Important. Yes. We're dealing with people in a lot of these cases. So what do you have to say around this area? Very clearly, the university policy is that you must consult with the ethics committee from your particular department. So we often get inquiries to academic practice saying, can you can you approve this? And the answer is no. You need to first of all, go and have an informal conversation, I would say, with the ethics officer from your department and then think carefully about the kind of data you're going to use. Different departments have quite different sets of guidelines. So you really need to be having that conversation in-house. Brilliant. OK, let's wrap this up with a bit of inspiration. So what would you do with can you can you give us a project that you've read or that you've worked on that really stands out as being an interesting case of a good example of scholarship of teaching and learning? I mean, I'm really interested, actually, in and maybe this is partly to do with my background. I'm really interested in storytelling and quite qualitative approaches to learning and teaching. And, you know, I've lifted that bias out of the bag before now in other conversations. I'm always struck that the scholarship of teaching and learning that we see in mainstream journals tends to be quite sort of traditionally social science in approach. And I think that's appropriate. But I also think there is increasingly space for, like I say, more kind of storytelling, ethnographic approaches to scholarship of teaching and learning. So I'm working with students as partners on some of that sort of production. So I would be interested in seeing, I don't know, student reflections on on how curriculum interventions went still relatively sort of underrepresented in the field. I mean, Healy and Co with the International Journal of Students as partners have made quite a big deal out of new forms of academic writing. So arguing for not just a research article as was, but even visual representations of scholarship output. So I suppose just looking at pushing the limits of what scholarship could be and seeing that more from a student perspective. OK, one final question we're going to wrap up with. What's is there a big pitfall that lots of people succumb to in their scholarship of teaching and learning? I mean, it's a really obvious one, but the focus should be on student learning. It should be on how we are supporting and improving student learning. So when you're thinking about translating reflective practice into an inquiry question and thinking about how you might see that through those project stages of development through to dissemination, you know, just keeping foremost and forefront that what's the contribution of this? How will it change practice and why does it really matter? Sounds great. OK, well, I hope a lot of those were useful points for people coming into scholarship teaching learning for the first time. We're going to be looking at a few more of these in more detail in future episodes and we will see you in the next show.