This guest post is the next in our short series on pedagogical research/SoTL and its role in education-focused careers. It is by Chris Huggins, who is an Associate Professor and Director of Academic Programmes at the University of Cambridge.
Tune back in for more in this series
As part of a roundtable discussion at the 2025 Political Studies Annual Conference in April, I was asked to reflect on my experience with learning and teaching scholarship, how I got started, and why learning and teaching scholarship was important to me.
Getting started
My interest in all things learning and teaching was sparked by engaging in a workshop organised under the auspices of this very blog back in May 2016 at the University of Surrey. I had completed my PhD six months previously, and had just started in my first teaching post. For someone teaching EU politics in the UK at the time when the EU referendum campaign was in full flow, learning about different ways learning and teaching could be delivered to support students’ learning seemed like a good opportunity.
Since then my interest in the pedagogy of the field has been sustained by engaging with an active network of colleagues passionate about learning and teaching. Engaging in these networks has been made possible by UACES and the PSA, whose annual conferences have increasingly programmed discussions on learning and teaching (hence the roundtable) and provided spaces for colleagues passionate about teaching to come together and discuss their practice.
To give one example, this network and these discussions ultimately led to me and Viviane Gravey (Queen’s University Belfast) to co-edit Teaching European Union Politics. This book represents a reflective account of teaching the European Union (and European Studies more broadly) in a political context often characterised by ‘crisis’. The book discusses teaching the EU from different disciplinary perspectives, as well as offering some practical suggestions and examples for how a range of active learning approaches can be incorporated in teaching.
In this way, the discussions I had been having and various workshops, conferences and conversations with colleagues provided both inspiration for what the book should cover and what issues it should tackle (ensuring its value to the learning and teaching community in the field), but also who should be contributing.
Ultimately for me, getting started in this kind of scholarship was about making connections and having discussions with like-minded colleagues. I was partly helped by the availability of learning and teaching workshops and associations which provided the space for conversations to happen, but ultimately I had to be willing to engage in learning and teaching discussions with colleagues.
Why do it?
Why, then, engage in the scholarship of learning and teaching? This was the question posed at the roundtable, and I pointed to four broad reasons why I feel engaging has been important.
1. I get to write about what I do
On the one hand this is about being pragmatic and time efficient. The workload pressures in academia are well known. Being in a leadership position is busy and I also have a life outside of the university. Grounding much of my scholarly activity in my own teaching practice therefore enables me to engage in meaningful and impactful scholarship without having to set up independent research projects, and in many respects reduces some of the barriers to getting started.
Additionally I find writing about what I do encourages me to engage in constant self-reflection of my own learning and teaching practice. While I like to think I would be doing this anyway, linking it to my scholarship allows me to be more systematic about it. This in turn, I hope, makes me a better educator.
There’s also an altruistic motive. Over the course of my career I’ve learned a lot from the generosity of colleagues who have actively shared their practice and experiences of learning and teaching. By engaging in and communicating my own scholarship I have the opportunity to give something back to the field.
2. I get to engage with a diverse network of colleagues
Teaching politics cannot be done (or at least cannot be done well) in isolation from other disciplines. This is especially the case in my own area of specialism in the European Union and European Studies more broadly. Teaching European Union Politics is a reflection of this. Recognising the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the field, we sought contributions from colleagues from across Politics, International Relations, Law, History, Economics and so on.
Engaging in the scholarship of learning and teaching has therefore broadened by scholarly network beyond my immediate research interests. In turn I feel I have developed a greater awareness and appreciation for the field I work in.
3. Career development and progression
Engaging in learning and teaching scholarship is good for your career. In all of the recruitment panels I have been on, candidates who have a demonstrable track record of learning and teaching excellence have the edge. Your research (published outputs, grant income, public engagement and impact activities) is of course important, but at the end of the day there are likely to be students who need teaching, and the prospective employer is going to want them to be taught well.
This holds for career progression. A large part of my application for promotion to Associate Professor focused on my teaching practice, and being able to point to a body of scholarship was a way to provide evidence that I was a reflective educator and committed to excellent learning and teaching. For the last six years I have found myself in learning and teaching leadership positions (as Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching at the University of Suffolk, and now as Director of Academic Programmes at University of Cambridge Professional and Continuing Education). These positions have been important for my own career progression, and again would not have happened had I not been able to demonstrate a commitment to learning and teaching excellence and innovation.
4. The Teaching and Scholarship pathway as increasingly valued
The Teaching and Scholarship pathway is increasingly valued and recognised, and in many universities it now provides an opportunity for colleagues to progress and develop. In fact, a case could be made that this pathway often provides more opportunities for recognition and reward given the broad and flexible interpretation of what counts as ‘scholarship’ (see Rose Gann’s earlier blog in this series).
All of this serves to highlight that the “S” in the T&S pathway is important. There can be a temptation to think of this in terms of “teaching-only contracts” or “teaching track colleagues”. But this often overlooks the fact we are all scholars, we all spend time reflecting and assessing our own practice, and have something to learn from each other.
The responsibility here goes two ways. Institutions and university leaders need to recognise that scholarship is a core component of the job, even in education focused careers. Colleagues need to be given time and resources to engage in this activity. But colleagues on teaching and scholarship pathways themselves equally have a responsibility to ensure they are engaging in scholarship, not only to improve their own practice, but to support the field as a whole.