Following on from the new innovation of the ‘SoTL roundup’ at the start of the month, which Jeremy got the ball rolling with yesterday, we’re also going to start the new academic year with a bit more blogging about scholarship and pedagogical research on ALPS!
Last April, at the UK Political Studies Association conference in Birmingham, I convened a roundtable on the role of pedagogical research in education-focused careers. We had a range of contributions from folks at different career stages, all in education-focused roles, leading to a series of fascinating reflections about how research and scholarship had enabled interesting, rewarding careers, contributed to academic missions in departments and wider institutions, and supported the development of a theoretical and evidence base in the discipline for educational work. We will hear from some of these voices on ALPS in the next few days.
According to a recent British Academy report, as many as one in five academics in Political Studies in the UK are currently employed on ‘education-focused’ or ‘teaching and scholarship’ contracts. However, the requirements to get these jobs, or progress and be promoted in them, are still a work-in-progress and often highly inconsistent across the discipline. In my own institution (UCL), publishing or disseminating pedagogical research isn’t even really mentioned in the promotion criteria on the teaching track at all. Nevertheless, I’m certain that my pedagogical publications and other dissemination work (including this blog) helped with my various promotion cases over the years. The work I’ve done jointly with students, including co-authored publications and projects to make the curriculum more inclusive, also fit most definitions of scholarship and enabled me to meet various published criteria for progression.
There is a politics to this, of course. First, if we don’t have clear, consistent understandings of the scholarly work that education-focused academics should be doing, then it will continue to be difficult to move institutions on the teaching track, especially at higher levels, and we will continue to be confused about what these careers might look like and how to do well in them. Second, if recruitment and promotion criteria do not clearly signal that scholarship is required, or what it even is, then we stand to lose, or at least fail to incentivise and reward, one of the most valuable assets the disciplinary education route has to offer: trained and skilled social scientists who are able to contribute to our understanding of how to promote education and learning for our students. For our discipline, in particular, we have much to offer in our sharp understandings of power relations in classrooms and the sector, which colleagues working in other disciplines (including Education) may not be able to grasp and analyse as well as we, experts in politics, do. Finally, we will undervalue and fail to recognise as research and scholarly activity the kind of excellent work that we are doing in education-focused roles, as Jeremy’s regular round-up is about to highlight to us ever more clearly. Ongoing confusion about the role and purpose of education-focused careers, including the ways in which they are thoroughly scholarly and intellectual, can only compound the inequalities of status, enjoyment and materials conditions of our professional lives.
I am therefore really excited that over the next few days, we are publishing blogs by Rose Gann (Chair of the Political Studies Association), our very own Jeremy, and Andy Judge (editor of Politics journal) reflecting on their adventures in scholarship, including thoughts about what ‘counts’ as scholarship, how to work together with students on co-constructing pedagogical knowledge and how to think about publishing and disseminating scholarship and pedagogical research.
These blogs are personal and biographical in nature, building out from reflective practice to start theorising the role scholarship can play in our professional lives. We hope they might help readers think about how scholarship might play a role in their own career (whatever type of contract they may be on), the very wide range of work they might end up doing under the umbrella of scholarship, and how they might engage with others in a scholarly community by working with students and colleagues and publishing and disseminating their pedagogical research. We also hope that we might start a conversation about the role of pedagogical research in the discipline and how the wider community should think about and value it.
If you too have a story to tell about the role of scholarship in your career – or you have some scholarship of your own that you’d like to write about here on the ALPS blog! – please do get in touch with us. You can comment on this post or email cathy.elliott[at]ucl.ac.uk.