It is now ten years since UNSW launched the Education Focussed (EF) career pathway and community. Here are some details about the original logical foundations and how it has progressed.
All universities have batters, bowlers, and all-rounders. Some academics prioritise teaching, others research, and some balance both.
But in the old days, those dedicating their careers to teaching and student support often had fewer opportunities for promotion and for collaborations, whereas those contributing to research tended to be more visible and were thus recognized and rewarded.
The development of our EF Community occurred at a time of great change and expansion at UNSW. The way we taught and supported students was changing. Gone were the days of going into a lecture hall with a piece of chalk. Academics were talking about digitization, or ‘electrifying the curriculum’, they were managing huge classes, and these classes included students of varying preparedness. We had to do more. We were building “Work Integrated Learning” and redesigning assessments to withstand “contract cheating” and also now AI. We were supporting more, and more diverse students.
We needed new strategies, and we needed to share them across the institution. Given rising student numbers, the first thing was to appoint more academics. If we wanted to keep improving learning and the student experience, we would need to appoint people who were deeply committed to that goal.
Even the hard-nosed economic rationalists were quickly on board, because it was clear we could not afford to keep building high-tech labs for each new appointee and the research grant system was not expanding. Every argument indicated that we – and indeed most universities – would need to establish a proper Education Focussed career pathway and community. Accordingly, we advertised Education Focussed positions internally and externally.
But we had to ensure that these roles would work not just for the university but also for the individuals concerned.
Rightly or wrongly, prestige is a big thing at universities. So, the first thing was to make sure that no one jumped to the conclusion that Education Focussed staff were simply those people who hadn’t excelled at research. We deliberately set high standards for appointment. We took educational excellence seriously, and looked at peer review of teaching; student feedback information was carefully reviewed; and we encouraged applicants to showcase their contributions in the full range of education activities.
We also established the Scientia Education Academy, initially comprising about 20 senior academics who were highly respected for their teaching. We worked hard to celebrate outstanding teachers.
With this framework and this collective expertise, we were able to ensure that the people appointed were demonstrably excellent in teaching and student support.
We deliberately set out to establish a self-sustaining community of scholars. We have a rich calendar of events, and we have a physical space – the Teaching Commons in the middle of campus. We have now held ten offsite Education Focussed retreats. We have Pecha Kucha sessions to introduce new members of the community, we invite leading academics from across the sector to give guest lectures, and we have a dinner, a trivia night, and awards.
We have regular reports from our 13 Communities of Practice (CoPs), including CoPs on AI, digital learning, assessment and feedback, course design, the first year experience, student wellbeing, equity, sessional staff, teamwork, work integrated learning, and a special CoP to welcome new EF academics. The CoPs bring together EF academics, teaching and research academics, and professional staff for workshops, talks, and special projects. They provide a vital network that informs, shares and supports educational innovation and leadership.
We provide competitive funding so that EFs have the opportunity to attend and present at conferences, thereby providing them with the opportunity to gain visibility for their scholarship and to build connections beyond UNSW.
I had not realised this initially, but it is easier to collaborate across a university on education, on things like ‘assessment design’ or ‘groupwork’, than it is to collaborate across UNSW on something like my own research area – Sickle Cell Anaemia. I can collaborate globally, but there will never be many academics specialising in my very specific research area at UNSW. Talking about education has brought our academic community together. Recently, UNSW added 2 “Nexus” EF fellows per School – Nexus Fellows were charged with being intermediaries connecting each School with Central teams, and with other Schools.
We now have 700 Education Focussed staff and they operate as a vibrant community, supporting individual members, showcasing excellence, and recognising and rewarding exceptional achievements in educational scholarship, innovation, teaching and student support.
We have grants for travel to education conferences and for special projects, and we have had visiting fellowships, inviting people here and sending others out to learn and share ideas. We now have a big presence at the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) and Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSoTL) conferences. We have also provided training and support for the scholarship of learning and teaching, so that EFs are able to conduct educational research appropriately and publish it if they wish. Leadership opportunities were also created – each Faculty has designated EF Faculty Champions and each CoP has an EF academic lead and a deputy.
We also have an annual Education Festival at UNSW where staff present their teaching and student support strategies, we have a Quality Indicators of Teaching and Learning Symposium and our Scientia Education Academy holds the NSW Higher Education Summit each year.
We have a 2 minute video competition – Teaching News You Can Use – which is like the 3 minute thesis competition and enables the sharing of teaching tips. We have a good range of teaching awards but also prizes for the videos and for other achievements. Awards help EF staff to build their profiles. High profile staff tend to find more opportunities to collaborate and contribute.
It is possible to demonstrate achievement and contributions in this community and accordingly Education Focussed staff are being promoted at the same rate as Teaching and Research, or Research Focussed staff. We monitor this carefully and have Education Focussed staff on promotion committees ensuring that standards remain high, but also signalling that we value these contributions. We also revised our promotions policies and academic frameworks to specifically lists ways of contributing to education. Importantly, we do not require our EF staff to do any research, though some choose to contribute in their disciplines, and others do research in the scholarship of teaching and learning.
In the last ten years, 269 academics have been promoted along the EF pathway.
I believe this initiative has been good for morale across UNSW. Education and supporting students is at the core of the university’s purpose, but in modern times the unmissable visibility of research achievements and the importance of serving society and showcasing engagement has made it easier to overlook the ‘business as usual’ core purpose of putting student learning first. With 700 EF staff, including 23 in senior leadership roles, and others rising in rank and in influence, we can be sure that UNSW will not forget its core mission as a university.
Finally, teaching and student support are inherently ‘community building’ and arguably more collaborative and less competitive undertakings than research. Thus, this also influences the culture of the institution. As I said the initiative has turned out to be good for UNSW and for individual academics. Student feedback data tells us that the EF staff are highly appreciated by students, and I would even argue that the initiative has increased UNSW’s capacity in research too, because we are focussing resources on those academics who have ‘research in their DNA’ rather than forcing and resourcing everyone do research.
I end by acknowledging that we were fortunate to have excellent people who built, launched and developed this initiative. It would not have happened without Anne Simmons, Cath Ellis, Louise Lutze-Mann, and Karin Watson, who were all instrumental in crafting and supporting the EF Community, and Chris Tisdell, Alex Steel, Gary Velan, Shirley Scott, Patsie Polly, and Alberto Motta who have been leaders of the Scientia Education Academy, and others such as Peter Heslin, and Richard Buckland our Director of Teaching Practice, who have consistently provided excellent new ideas.
To me, these initiatives reflect what universities are meant to be like and if we can keep supporting this and keep getting the message out, it will be good for UNSW, the sector, our staff and our students.
Professor Merlin Crossley is Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic Quality at UNSW