Academic & Digital Development

Monday 21st March 10am-11am 

Organisers: SoTL SenSEI (Beth Dickson, Frances Docherty, Sarah Honeychurch, Carolyn Loveridge, Lindsey Pope, Victoria Price, Linnea Soler, Nathalie Tasler)

This workshop will offer participants an opportunity to talk to like-minded colleagues about the various stages of SoTL and to focus on the particular stage(s) that currently occupy, trouble or interest them the most

Who are we?

We are an interdisciplinary group of teaching and SoTL focussed colleagues who have emerged from the UofG SoTL Network. For the last eighteen months we have met regularly to share our experiences of the trials, tribulations, and rewards of working on LTS contracts and about how we are finding our feet with SoTL. We discuss our individual and collaborative practices, and we learn from each other different approaches to achieving the same goals. We do not pretend to be experts, but we are a group of reflective practitioners with some expertise both in running SoTL projects and in reflecting upon our own teaching practice, and we have an ever-growing appreciation of the power of collaborative networks. With members from each of the four colleges and from Academic Services, our diverse backgrounds mean that we have a wealth of experience to share about our individual journeys to becoming LTS practitioners of SoTL. 

We would like to open this conversation up to others on the LTS track and from professional services and invite you to join us and take part in a conversation about the various stages of SoTL and the support needed for it to be fruitful. Participants are encouraged to bring along any ideas they have for SoTL– from a tiny spark of an initial thought to a full-grown project with bells and whistles – for discussion, support and encouragement. 

Programme

Monday 21st March 11am-12pm

Presenter: Alison McCandlish, Urban Studies

Looking to remind yourself to make time to write, or connect in different ways with your SoTL projects and writing goals? Using images and text we will consider our influences, solidify our writing and research intentions and inspire ourselves to make writing goals which work for us, via the power of collage. Don't worry, you don't need to be in anyway artistic or creative, this is all about experimentation and making something which is unique and useful for you.  

This technique draws on the work of arts and social science approaches, but can be applied to any subject or discipline. Collage can be a way to make new connections and ideas (Gauntlett and Holzwarth, 2006), explore your own teaching and learning practice (Childs, Mapasa and Ward, 2020), and even overcome SoTL related issues which you may struggling with (Culshaw, 2019).     

• Childs, M., Mapasa, T. and Ward, M. (2020) “Considering craft-and arts-based practitioner inquiry activities as a prompt for transforming practice” Educational Research for Social Change, 9(2). doi:10.17159/2221-4070/2020/v9i2a6. 
• Culshaw, S. (2019) “The unspoken power of collage? Using an innovative arts-based research method to explore the experience of struggling as a teacher,” London Review of Education, 17(3). doi:10.18546/LRE.17.3.03. 
• Gauntlett, D. and Holzwarth, P. (2006) “Creative and visual methods for exploring identities,” Visual Studies, 21(1), pp. 82–91. doi:10.1080/14725860600613261.