Where next for university teaching improvement? What the Scottish example of quality enhancement has to offer

No abstract available

Where next for university teaching improvement? What the Scottish example of quality enhancement has to offer

No abstract available

Queer desire’s orientations and learning in higher education fine art

This paper explores the mechanisms of LGBTQI+ desire that intersect with fine art disciplinary learning. Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology provides a theoretical scaffold for this work, particularly her reflection that orientations involve different ways of registering the proximity of objects and others. In so doing, sexual orientations might shape not just how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance (Ahmed, 2006, 3). I posit that the desires which determine self-placing within the LGBTQI+ rubric orient learning towards and/or away from disciplinary objects of engagement. They effect this through: accentuated tensions between two colliding aspects of a students' singularity (firstly, sexuality-centred states of being in which productive erotic desires reside and secondly, an individual student's creative will); sense making of the related desires; and the interaction of all of this with dominant disciplinary cultural manifestations in creative visual arts higher education. To investigate this premise, the work of queer/queering visual artists is introduced to the higher educational student learning research canon as a valuable source of understanding of what it means 'to be' in sexual orientation. In light of the work of queer artists, the discussion recognizes that tactics used by queer student artists and the cultural registers that they access and create can usefully be identified as a queer anatomy of agency that deserves fuller investigation. Specifically, it demonstrates how an analysis of queer artists' work offers a unique way of interrogating LGBTQI+ student learning experiences in fine art

Research-teaching linkages: enhancing graduate attributes. Arts, humanities and social sciences

This publication represents one output of the Quality Enhancement Theme of Research-Teaching Linkages: enhancing graduate attributes. Sections 2-5 relate primarily to the project outcomes of use to educational developers and arts, humanities and social sciences academics looking for approaches to enhance their practice. Section 5 comprises in-depth case studies. Section 6 is an introductory discussion of the evidence from the interviews undertaken by the team. Section 7 explores project conclusions and recommendations for the future

Equality and diversity in learning and teaching in Scottish universities: trends, perspectives and opportunities

This publication reports on a desk-based analysis of engagement with equality and diversity in learning and teaching at Scotland’s universities. It: provides an overview of the higher education policy ecosystem in Scotland in which the equality and diversity agenda operates; explores current trends in learning and teaching practices, processes and regimes in relation to equality and diversity; offers theoretical and practical explorations of opportunities and ways forward to improve student learning in this area that concentrate less on fixed curriculum-design methods and methodologies, and more on relational approaches to change

The TEF and HERB cross the devolved border (Part 2): the paradoxes of jurisdictional pluralism

This short piece of commentary outlines the tensions within the Scottish higher education sector in the light of TEF2 & the Higher Education and Research Bill (Westminster)

The TEF crosses the devolved border

This short commentary outlines the complications of Scottish higher education institutions opting into the Westminster government's Teaching Excellence Framework

Prophetic Nomadism: An Art School Sustainability-Oriented Educational Aim?

This discursive article proposes that the learning and teaching regimes provided within art school are uniquely placed within higher education to foster nomads. It suggests, however, that nomadism is not enough. Rather it emphasises that to reconcile art and design education with sustainability, such nomadism needs both to be prophetic and collaboratively based. Prophetic nomads are defined here as mobile, social influencers able to change perspectives through calling forward uncomfortable awakenings. They achieve this by creatively reframing what is at stake if we continue to act and be as we are. The presentation will explore the similarities between key concepts in the literacy of sustainability and the elements of prophetic nomadism. It will challenge us to reconsider these in the light of their potential generation through three ingredients of learning within art and design: reason, aesthetics and making. It will finish by declaring that as educators we should have the courage to more formally craft our pedagogies to call forth (evoke) and push-out (provoke) sustainability-oriented creativity through these domains

The latest TEF Assessment Framework, automated analysis of data, and some Scottish anxiety

This short commentary analyses the initial problems likely to face Scottish quality enhancement assessors who sit on Teaching Excellence Framework panels

Notes from North of the Tweed: Valuing our values

This policy briefing outlines the possibility of value extraction around enhancement of learning and teaching as it has operated within Scottish Higher education. Using the work of Mazzucato (2018) as a frame of reference, it points to the need to protect the publicly funded assets of Scotland's Enhancement themes work. It also raises questions about how the Scottish HE sector might move forward to ensure the values of inclusive and sustainable value co-creation underpin HE in Scotland