Supporting scholarship in yourself and others

Time and workload

Let’s get the elephant in the room that’s sitting on your head out the way – the first thing anyone needs to do scholarship is time. If SoTL is part of your promotion criteria then it should be an appropriate part of your workload. The first step is knowing exactly what proportion of your time – at Glasgow full-time LTS staff should have 20% (308 hours a year at 1FTE) allocated to scholarship activity. The second, much harder step, is actually protecting that time. As a manager and leader, you need to fight for your staff to have a functioning, transparent workload model, and listen to them when they tell you they don’t have the time and dig into the reasons. Sometimes it’s their total workload, sometimes it’s the balance of workload across the year, and sometimes it’s that people are not making good choices about how they spend their time. But they all have different solutions and you can’t start working on the appropriate one until you know the exact nature of the issue.

As a member of staff trying to do scholarship, I think it’s important to be realistic about the nature of academia. My 20% allocation could be viewed as a day a week but it would be unreasonable of me to demand that I get a day every single week to work on scholarship because that’s not how seasonal academia works - we’re essentially farmers with laptops, and sometimes the harvest has to take priority. Instead. I find it’s useful to take a longer view and think about the year as a whole. I know I will get very little done during term time but during the summer I might have whole weeks where I work on research. During those periods, I block out half or whole days in my diary and I consider them as immovable as all my other meetings. I don’t demand a day a week to do scholarship, but I do demand my 308 hours a year.

Learn to say no, but remember to say yes

Related to the above, learning to say no is an important skill. My favourite line is “I’m afraid I don’t have capacity”. If it’s an opportunity that would benefit someone else, then put their name forward instead. If it’s an internal request, ask for something to be taken off you in replacement and go in with a solution. A common complaint about workload is that managers and models don’t take into account how long things actually take. If that’s the case, then take control and frame the conversation yourself and use your knowledge about your workload. You’re saying that doing X will take this much time, I can take that on if I give up Y.

Protecting your time isn’t just about demands your employer places on you, think about how much you are giving to your students. I often frame the time we spend with students as “water workload” in that it will take up as much space as you give it. Have set office hours, set dissertation project meetings, set boundaries on replying to emails and expectations for your availability. Offer students the support they need and deserve, but not at personal cost to your wellbeing or career development. I have spoken to junior staff who never turn off their email and who offer each of their 10 project students an hour long meeting each week – we simply don’t have the time to do that. Also, I’d argue that’s not actually good for the students but we’re getting off-topic.

But also, remember to say yes. With the pressures of workload and everything else, being reminded to say no is very important. But if you say no to everything you will miss out on the opportunities that make the job fun, that allow you to meet interesting people, and that tick those boxes on the promotion form. You will never do scholarship if you never choose to do scholarship. If something has to burn, make the choice to let something else but your scholarship burn occasionally. This blog is too long and my colleagues will roll their eyes too hard if I tell this story for the 100th time but saying yes to something I thought I didn’t really have time to do ended up with me being interviewed about lecture capture opposite the Matterhorn.

Knowledge broker

One of the challenges I have faced trying to get SoTL done is ensuring I have the resource to do robust research. Sometimes this is about money but it’s more often about data and the fact that the nature of educational research means it’s reliant on observational, opt-in, self-report data with underpowered samples. A watershed moment for me was when I discovered the concept of “knowledge brokering”, the idea that you don’t have to do your own empirical research but instead you can have just as much impact being the conduit between the research and those who need it. A large part of what I do now is packaging up the literature in ways that are easy to digest for academics who don’t have educational expertise but just want to do things a little bit better – for example Lecture capture: Practical recommendations for students and instructors or Ten simple rules for supporting a temporary online pivot in higher education. Aside from trying to be useful, what these types of papers give me is control. I don’t need money or participants I can only access at a certain time of year to write these papers. I can write them when I have the time and thinking space to do so and they also don’t really require funding to conduct.

SoTL your day job

Be strategic about what your scholarship focuses on. My main teaching and admin role has been with first year students, so my research focuses on study skills, self-regulation, and belonging. This means that my research informs my classroom and my classroom informs my research. I am a better first year lead than I was a decade ago because I can explain the theoretical basis of every part of the course, it’s all evidence-informed but also, it’s just efficient. If your research has nothing to do with your teaching and admin, the cognitive effort in switching gears will add friction. SoTL what you know and know what you SoTL. You also want to try and develop an area of expertise, something you’re known for. Mine is lecture capture and it’s the thing I always return to. I’m not saying don’t get distracted by shiny new topics and try new things, and when you’re first starting out, it can take time to find your niche. But, it helps to have a clear area of expertise as it makes it easier to become known for that area – someone who does everything is known for nothing.

Money

This one is aimed at the managers and leaders. If you want your LTS staff to do high-quality, impactful SoTL you have to fund it appropriately. At UofG we have several SoTL-related funding schemes staff can apply for and I am lucky to be in a School that has a generous travel fund. As I write this the sector is in a death spiral and I know the reality for many is very far away from what I have access to and I recognise my privilege. But it doesn’t make it any less true that some level of resource is needed to transform SoTL from a course level evaluation to impactful, robust research that is disseminated properly, and if the only thing I can do to help is to say that out loud, then at the very least I can say it out loud.

Collaboration, community, and mentoring

I’m also lucky that I work in a large LTS team so we have a very strong community of scholarship support. But in other Schools the LTS team is smaller and so we also have an institutional SoTL network that brings people together and this network does vital work. You’re much more likely to be successful at SoTL when you work with other people and when you can share skills and expertise and workload – my mantra has been to try and do more with less, to aim for fewer projects that actually make it to output.

I’ve also found social media to be a great networking tool and it’s allowed me to work with the best people rather than just the nearest people. These kind of communities also allow for both formal and informal mentoring. When staff are starting out on their SoTL journey, my advice is to get involved with an existing project with someone a bit further down the line and this is particularly important for those LTS staffs whose discipline research and expertise is very far away from education research. Making the jump can be hard, but it’s much easier in collaboration.

Don’t wait for stuff to come to you

Nominate yourself for awards, ask to be invited for a talk, put yourself forward for things you want to do. Lots of stuff isn’t in our control but you have to be in the race to win it. Similarly, make sure that you have access to sources of information about SoTL related funding, conferences, journals, and other opportunities. My main source of information for this type of thing is social media – LinkedIn and Bluesky these days. Social media isn’t for everyone and that’s fine but in that case, sign-up to mailing lists (e.g., the SEDA list) or join an organisation like ESPLAT. No-one is going to come chasing you with information, you need to do something to find it.

For the love of god, share what you do

And finally, for the love of god, tell people about your work! Again, social media isn’t for everyone and that’s fine, but if it’s not for you then go to a conference, find other ways of networking, write a blog, send out a carrier pigeon. If the work was worth doing, it’s worth getting out there properly and it’s a more efficient use of time to wring every bit of impact out of one paper than it is to write 5 papers that no-one reads. I get asked how I manage to get so many invited talks and the main reason is that I have put a huge amount of work into promoting my work -it’s not an optional extra, dissemination should be part of your project plan.