THESIS 2024 Higher Education Teaching Development Conference: A summary of the day, By Aysha Bellamy
On June 4th 2024, Royal Holloway hosted its first national Higher Education Teaching Development (HETD) Conference. This initiative was spearheaded by THESIS, a pedagogic research group based in the Psychology department of Royal Holloway, University of London with extensive experience and expertise in Higher Education pedagogy. After some success organising internal events (see here for a summary), THESIS decided to aim higher this year and organise a national conference to celebrate the hard work of academics with a pedagogical focus across the country.
Although there are many facets of the student experience deserving of attention, we ended up picking a theme for the conference that was felt as important to THESIS goals: designing and delivering inclusive education. Inclusivity has been a core aim of the THESIS group, as demonstrated by our commitment to improving the student experience for students from a range of backgrounds. These initiatives range from supporting LGBTQ+ students and trying to improve the educational experience of Global Majority students. The latter also involves a ‘decolonising the curriculum’ project in collaboration with undergraduate students, early-career academics and more senior lecturers. This encapsulates THESIS’ commitment to support academics at any stage of their career. Likewise, the conference aimed to attract speakers from different pathways and stages in their career, to unite them under the joined aim of sharing best pedagogical practice.
The day was organised into several sessions, including keynote addresses, two panels where some of the attendees submitted to present, and a workshop. Here we provide a brief account of the several key moments of the day.
Keynote speakers
We were fortunate to have two big names in inclusive pedagogy present in the conference as keynote speakers. One of them was our very own Prof. Danijela Serbic in the Department of Psychology and THESIS Director who had just won the Higher Education Teacher of the Year for her work in coordinating staff members to support the development of student experience, with a particular focus on careers and employability.
Dr Jane Sedgwick-Müller (Senior Lecturer at Kings College London, and chair of the Neurodiversity Steering Committee in Jersey, Channel Islands) rounded off the day with her keynote presentation discussing how to best support students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), drawing on a fascinating combination of experimental research and lived experiences to inform her pedagogic initiatives.
Panel presentations
We had 10 speakers in total in the morning, split across two parallel sessions; one was connected by the theme of ‘Inclusivity and Student Identity’ and the other, ‘Wellbeing, Academic Skills and Engagement’. For example, in the latter one, we had an interesting range of talks ranging from co-producing and co-creating student experience days, qualitative feedback on students’ perceptions of mental health support in Higher Education, and a talk from support staff from a university library, among others. In the other section on Inclusivity and Student Identity, there were talks ranging from making music students more open to assessments to enhancing equality, diversity, and inclusion in online cybersecurity education. One of the talks about students perceptions of AI (University of Durham) was co-presented by an undergraduate student who was involved in the project, bringing in an important student perspective to an event that was primarily about academics and for academics.
EDI workshop
Participants then had the opportunity to form small groups to design a pedagogic initiative of their own, aiming to improve inclusivity. In this workshop led by Dr Sam Fairlamb, participants were asked to imagine a barrier, or ‘anchor’, to educational achievement and what we could do to help remove this to ensure ‘smooth sailing’ towards an ideal inclusive educational environment.
For example, one of the teams aimed to encourage staff to engage in EDI initiatives. Put bluntly, many institutions have few formal guidelines on what counts as a successful EDI initiative and yet will ask for these in promotional criteria. This may lead to situations where staff exaggerate their involvement with EDI initiatives to secure promotion, whilst leaving other members of staff – often from marginalised identities themselves – to do the heavy lifting. This team pitched a way to make commitment to EDI more measurable and tangible, which could then feed-forward to promotion criteria or other initiative schemes.
Feedback and final thoughts
Our conference was attended by 54 people from all around the UK, representing many different degree subjects and career levels. The feedback provided showed that 83% were happy with the day. Individual points of praise were mostly about the “broad scope of inclusivity” of our “range of interesting talks”, although another common point of praise was our “friendly and supportive atmosphere”.
To round off with another soundbite from the day, I think we all wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that we left feeling we have “done important work”. The day ended with a social moment over nibbles, wine, and other refreshments, where attendees and organisers had a chance to chat and further discuss plans for collaborating in the future. We now look forward to the next conference where THESIS hopes to continue and extend the excellent collaborative work done in the 2024 edition of the HETD Conference.
Finally, we would like to thank the HETD conference organising committee for all their hard work on our first annual conference: Natasha Baxter, Sam Fairlamb, Gaia Giampietro, Beatrice Hayes, Ryan Jeffries, Danijela Serbic, Ciaira O’Brien, Sahana Shankar, Matthew Talbot, Isabella Vainieri and conference leads, Nuno Nodin and Deidre Birtles.
Contact: Aysha.Bellamy@rhul.ac.uk