This blog post is a write-up of a workshop run by the ASPIRE Network at this year’s Political Studies Association’s Teaching and Learning Network Conference, held at the University of Glasgow. This post and the workshop were produced by Prof. Stuart McAnulla, Dr. Jillian Terry, & Dr. Jeremy Moulton.
How do you tell the story of a Teaching & Scholarship career? For many colleagues on education-focused academic career pathways, this deceptively simple question can be surprisingly difficult to answer. That challenge was the focus of our recent ASPIRE workshop, held on the final day of the recent PSA Teaching and Learning Network conference in Glasgow. The workshop brought together colleagues from across career stages and a wide variety of universities to work on something practical: a usable draft of their own career narrative.
The problem
Why do so many talented educators struggle to articulate their professional story as academics? In the workshop, we identified three primary, interlocking difficulties.
The first is the research-focused language of contemporary higher education. The dominant vocabulary of academic success, e.g. big grants, big citations and high-impact journals, maps poorly onto careers built around excellent teaching, curriculum leadership, and pedagogic scholarship. When the sector’s default measures of achievement don’t describe your work, and when so many colleagues are used to (and even happy with) using that vocabulary, telling your story often means working against the grain.
The second is a lack of clarity. Job titles for education-focused roles vary confusingly across institutions, paths to promotion are often opaque, and colleagues can inadvertently give the impression that they were “lumped” with a T&S role rather than having built a deliberate and successful career.
The third is a lack of reference points. Research careers come with well-worn templates. There are role models to emulate, established literatures to contribute to, familiar institutional structures to climb. Education-focused pathways are newer, and colleagues on them often find themselves on untrodden ground, hopefully forging paths that others might follow in the future but without fully knowing whether these might actually be missteps.
In short, the overarching challenge is novelty. Whilst T&S roles have grown significantly in recent years (in the UK, a report published last year said that over a fifth of Politics academics are now in education-focused roles), these career narratives are still being invented, often by the very people trying to write them.
This workshop, therefore, was designed to give education-focused academics a chance to step back and reflect on what their narrative could and should be, with some helpful pointers to guide that consideration.
The fix
In order to help promote thinking about how T&S academics might shape their career narratives, Prof. Stuart McAnulla offered four pieces of advice for building a compelling T&S narrative.
- Keep it simple: A T&S career narrative should be exactly that and one should resist the urge to hedge by focusing too much on the more readily recognisable aspects of research-driven academic roles (large grants, citation metrics, etc.). Focus on surfacing the strengths of your teaching experience to date, show how that experience speaks to common challenges in contemporary politics education, and explain how your practice offers strategies for tackling those issues, including any specialism or niche areas you bring.
- Display your professional links: Emphasise successful collaboration with colleagues on modules, programmes, and on scholarship work. Demonstrate that you are not a “lone wolf” and are able to bring valuable and meaningful contributions to education-focused projects. Highlight your participation in internal and external networks and how these will benefit your institution, explain how these activities advance your ongoing academic agenda, and highlight professional accreditations within your narrative.
- Develop your leadership profile: Maintain a clear sense of how you continue to grow as an academic leader through administrative roles, projects, and key educational leadership posts. Recognise your own agency and impact on practice, e.g. through mentoring. Crucially, do not self-deprecate or minimise your roles as “mere admin”. Your narrative should emphasise how your experiences position you to take on new and more senior leadership positions.
- Speak to institutional and disciplinary challenges: Orient your narrative towards particular institutional priorities: teaching diverse cohorts, for example. Emphasise both what you add to an institution and how you fit within existing agendas and teams. Show how your work has relevance for known gaps in current education provision and how you are part of the collective approach to combatting the challenges that face contemporary politics education and wider HE.
From advice to action
In Glasgow, we took this advice to then individually write new career narratives. Colleagues were given fifteen minutes of dedicated writing time to take Stuart’s advice and craft their career pitch, structured around the four prompts.
Drafts were then shared in small groups, guided by three questions: What stuck with you? What was distinctive? What should I cut?
Now, of course, doing something like this with colleagues can be a little awkward. But we were pleased (relieved!) to see that people really did get stuck into the writing exercise, sharing their pitches with each other, and giving pointers for how colleagues might improve what they had written.
If you are unlucky enough not to have been at the PSA Teaching and Learning Network conference in Glasgow this month, this is always an exercise one could try on their own. However, we would still really recommend finding an opportunity to test your pitch out with other T&S colleagues.
Shaping your career narrative is an essential part of developing your profile as an education-focused academic, no matter where you find yourself on the career ladder. While your narrative can (and should!) be the basis for job applications, promotion cases, and submissions for professional qualifications, you can equally use your narrative as an ‘elevator pitch’ when meeting new colleagues and expanding your network.
By articulating a clear narrative about where you’ve been and where you’d like to go, you can situate your educational leadership, enhance your external profile, and meet new like-minded scholars and future collaborators on SoTL projects. A compelling narrative tells a story more convincingly than a list of accomplishments on a CV ever could, bringing your T&S journey to life to share with others.
