Category: Academic Development

  • Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Chapter 1

    Review: Hochschulbildungsforschung Chapter 1 I have been reading this book, the title would translate into Higher Education Educational Research and probably considered a book of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. One of the things I had entirely forgotten–or rather supressed–was how annoyingly superfluously elaborate and cluttered German academic writing can be. In one of…

  • Making Work Flow

    Hacking the Working from Home Day I really struggled getting back into the swing of things this semester. You know once the plates are all up and spinning it is relatively easy to keep them going, but picking up again after a three week break in yet another lockdown is difficult. But look whom I…

  • Barriers

    Aside There are so many blog posts I want to write but the beginning of this semester saw me chasing my own tail like never before. What’s up with this? Did I take on too much–probably. BUT there is also so much to fix, develop, improve, support, help. And everyone around me feels the same…

  • Of Wormholes and SoTLwalks

    Hello lovely bloggers and readers, I have no idea what happened to November! So my theory is that on my last SoTLwalk I fell into a wormhole and came out in December back in my office instead of the path I was walking. I am sticking with that explanation. It’s 2020 and this makes as…

  • Using Blackout Poetry to aid Translation

    Cite as: Sheridan, Nathalie (2020): Poetic Inquiry as a Meaning-Making Process Across Languages. figshare. Online resource. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13146242.v1  Poetic Inquiry as a Meaning-Making Process Across Languages I find translating from German into English particularly when it comes to academic text indefinitely more difficult than the other way around. Which is strange as I am fluid in…

  • Blackout Poetry and Pancakes

    If you have not yet joined Pedagogy and Pancakes run by Chris Headland come on in, these morning sessions are fab. So, today the fabulous Aimee Merrydew was introducing Blackout Poetry as a creative teaching method to encourage students to engage more deeply with core texts they have to read. And while I was listening…

  • Falling into the Heather

    About failed adventures, resilience, and preparing for the new academic year. Last week we spend four days in the Cairngorms (Scotland), as a short break after the summer was all but relaxing. However, the weird and wonderful mechanisms of stress and being worn out saw me reaching some physical and mental boundaries. And led to…

  • Zoom Break Zumba

    This is one option, ten minutes dance-off while you are waiting for the next session to begin–by the by: beginning. Over the last couple of months people have been asking for suggestions of what do you do during these newly acquired breaks between meetings. You know the ones we used to use to run from…

  • Friday-Artday

    Over the last evenings I have been playing with digital and mixed media art to reflect on all the challenges faced working in higher education at the moment. In part these are responses to the irresponsible press articles demeaning online learning and teaching–it’s all just watching some videos after all, right?– dismissing the unbelievable amount…

  • A Story about Becoming a University Teacher

    Living by the Proverb ABSTRACT There seems to be a strong link between developing our identities and storytelling. As humans, we strive for coherence, and this coherence is found in stories (Hermans, 2001). This is an experimental paper telling a story about developing a brave, and authentic self as an educator (teacher) in Higher Education…

  • Presentia Review:Get your Students Moving and Learning

    What is this about? Prof Ken Wong from Canada shared a resource today (I realised I never pressed publish on this post!) which might work as a really nice icebreaker or simply to get your students engaged outwith the classroom but with the material. Experiential Place-based Learning (presentria.ca) A whole lot of pedagogical reasons to…

  • #SoTLwalk August 2020

    This is a non-walk SoTLwalk and rather late. I hurt my back and walking was so uncomfortable there wasn’t much reflecting going on through the process. I was so annoyed not being able to go out much during a sunny weekend, I made a ridge-walk with Munro in milk foam. 😂 This month’s topic is…

  • National Teaching Repository

    It’s Official! If you ever want to understand the meaning of a Kraftakt (immense effort that goes into something) then have a look at Dawn’s brainchild the National Teaching Repository! Which is now all up and running and I have the honour to be curator for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning section! So without…

  • Lockdown Adventures

    This is one of the blogposts meant to go live a couple of months ago, and then things went head over heels in a thousand different directions, and suddenly it is the end of summer. Anyway, the issue I have been pondering is the relationship between our lockdown micro-adventures and pedagogy. There is learning to…

  • You can find Learning Everywhere

    You can find Learning Everywhere

    Reflections on a summer holiday where almost nothing went as planned My granddad always said: There is always something to learn, in every situation, and in the least you will learn how not to do a thing. Writing some contributions to the Life Wide Magazine* for which the editors asked to reflect on how imagination…