This guest post is (unless anyone else gets in touch to contribute!) the last in our short series on pedagogical research/SoTL and its role in education-focused careers. It is by Andy Judge, who is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at University of Glasgow and an editor at Politics journal.
As an editor at the Politics journal, I read a lot of scholarship. While most of the articles we publish are disciplinary research articles, we receive a fair number of teaching-focused manuscripts. Most of these are assigned to me as associate editor, along with my excellent colleagues Karen Wright and Niccole Pamphilis. This gives me a distinctive vantage point on the role of the scholarship of teaching and learning within our disciplines.
The manuscripts we receive are varied in topic, scope, and ambition. In the relatively short time I’ve been part of the editorial team, I’ve developed a much more expansive view of what the teaching of politics (broadly defined) can involve. I also get to see how scholarship develops and evolves as it moves through the peer-review process. While many if not most of us have been on the receiving end of bad reviewers, I can honestly say that the vast majority of reviewers of the articles I’ve steered through peer-review have taken the job seriously and provided useful feedback to authors. The end result is usually a much better piece of scholarship. Getting to see that process play out is definitely one of the better parts of being an associate editor.
However, it’s only in the last few years that I’ve started to genuinely regard scholarship as a major part of what I do as an academic. Back at the start of my career, I had no real idea what scholarship was. I knew that I loved teaching and wanted to find different and better ways to enthuse students about Politics and International Relations. While I had come across Paolo Freire and bell hooks during one of the many reading rabbit holes I went down during the first year of my PhD, I didn’t really have any conception that writing about teaching and learning was something that a Politics and International Relations academic could or should consider doing.
My ignorance proved to be a bit of a problem when I was shortlisted for an open-ended teaching-focused lecturer job at the University of Glasgow in 2016. During the interview, I was asked a convoluted and jargonistic question about how my “scholarship” related to my “research” and “teaching practice”. These were not categories and distinctions that I had encountered across several years of working in precarious, fixed-term jobs at different universities. I therefore did the only thing I could in the moment: I tried to wing it. Somehow, I managed to conjure some sort of cobbled together answer from the ether about how I sometimes used a “mock court” exercise I to help teach the ethics of war and that I might write something about it. The panel didn’t seem too impressed with my obviously strained answer. However, I’m guessing most of the other candidates didn’t fare much better, otherwise I might not have found gainful employment.
Fortunately, I got the job. Unfortunately, once I started my confusion about scholarship only deepened. It turned out that I was now employed on what Glasgow calls a Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship (LTS) contract, and that “scholarship of teaching and learning” was baked into the promotion criteria. I now understand that isn’t the norm everywhere, and would rather there is some sort of recognition for scholarship than not. However, at the time I mainly interpreted the emphasis on scholarship as an imposition. This was not a kind of research I was trained to do or, at the time, wanted to do. These are sentiments that I hear quite frequently from junior LTS colleagues, and I entirely understand where they are coming from.
So, what happened? A lot of things – far too many to squeeze into a single blog post (culling this part of the blog is a major reason why I’m sending this to Cathy two weeks after her deadline!)
However, a key turning point I can point to is when I came across an article by Edwin Bacon on Teaching Applied Politics: From Employability to Political Imaginary[1] by accident. There are many things that I love about this article, but what particularly resonated with me at the time was that it carefully set out what I regarded as a distinctly political pedagogy. This pedagogy was based around students explicitly articulating their shared values and developing skills in doing politics of various kinds. Bacon set out an approach to teaching that connected with some of my own ideas and teaching practices, but which I had struggled to put into words before then. In short, it just “clicked” in my head.
It would be too much to say that this was a “Eureka!” moment when everything fell into place. That’s not how these things work. However, reading that article helped to spark an interest in scholarship that hasn’t really waned. I started engaging more seriously and systematically with the literature. Some of it was great, some of it was not. Some of it was retreading old ground, some of it opened my eyes to different ways of teaching and understanding pedagogy. Overall, it gave me more of a language for communicating with myself and to others about education and made me more fluent in navigating different choices about how I design learning situations in my own classroom. It also introduced me to a range of broader debates that forced me to think through my own approaches from a different vantage point. It allowed me to start figuring out what I wanted to say and to join the conversation through my own scholarship.
And now, I’m a journal editor who reviews and publishes scholarship. This was not something I set out to do; however, when the editorship of the journal moved to Glasgow, I jumped at the chance to join the editorial team. I had come to recognise the importance of having spaces for these kinds of pedagogical conversations within the discipline and decided that I wanted to play a role in cultivating those spaces.
That brings us up to the current day. Truth be told, I still have a degree of scepticism about scholarship, although my reasons for scepticism have changed considerably (which is a story for another time). However, I still think that the increasing attention to scholarship within our disciplines is an overall positive. If nothing else, we should celebrate the impulse to disseminate, discuss, and debate teaching and work collectively to cultivate the spaces that allow us to do so.
[1] Yes, this article is published is in Politics. But that’s not important to the story.
This is a fantastic piece, Andy! Would absolutely love to read another (if you ever have the time/ inclination) on scholarship and scepticism.
Thanks Jeremy. Happy to follow-up about that at some point.