Weaving Golden Threads

Aisling Keane (Reader) Centre for Biomedical Sciences Education, Queen’s University Belfast

Recently as a mentee within the excellent Biosciences Educator Network, my mentor Professor David Smith challenged me to define my golden thread. What yarn or story could I weave through the various dimensions of my job as a teacher in HE that would tie it all together into a coherent story? Amidst my ‘Why am I doing all of this?’ existential crisis I was also asked to write a short piece for the SEDA Blog readership introducing myself as the newest member of the editorial team. For any of us starting new challenges, taking time to make explicit the tacit themes running throughout the projects we undertake is a grounding and time-consuming activity (particularly if there’s a work count). Golden threads can seem rather nebulous, but when we string them together, we weave a strong narrative around the perspectives we bring with us, the projects we choose, the impacts we want to have and our goals for the future. It’s a difficult but useful reflective exercise. Here is my attempt.

In 2011 I was a Lecturer (Education) in Biomedical Sciences, with teaching and support for teaching directing 80% of my work allocation model. With the support of a Centre Director who believed in me, I combined a previous PhD in Anatomy with a Doctorate in Education, graduating in 2019. Why? Because following several years incorporating a transition pedagogy into my home institution, second year students were still experiencing substantial difficulty with their studies. Exploration of this issue within the HE literature uncovered the phenomenon of ‘the second-year slump’ (Milsom et al., 2014) and so what we experienced wasn’t an isolated incidence. Influenced by socioculturalists Jannette Elwood and Barbara Rogoff my research focused on exploring narratives that the presence of formative feedback in first year programmes would support student enculturating into HE. Black and Wiliams’ (1998) seminal work highlighted the importance of assessment for learning, however it was through working with educational researchers, educational developers and HE networks like SEDA that I began to slowly but surely appreciate the important role of SoTL in HE. To truly support a transformative teaching and learning experience for our students, HE Pedagogy needs to move beyond description of practices and conceptual frameworks towards a theoretical approach. Without challenge, discussion, and theory as pillars to fortify our foundations it is difficult to illuminate and justify why particular practices do or do not work, or why they might be different for some groups of students and not others. But moving forward in this direction can’t happen until SoTL is held in as high esteem as disciplinary research, with equal amounts of human, financial and physical resources attributed to it.

I was challenged to summarise my golden thread into two or three sentences. The central tenet of what has motivated me in the past, and what guides me now, is the belief that learning and making sense of something is mediated through social interactions with others. From this perspective, learning lives within cultural settings, within our communities and between individuals. In HE each individual brings with them experiences of learning which influences how they believe students learn and how we should teach. I am passionate about exploring how our individual, collective and culturally derived thoughts and beliefs about education fundamentally impact the student experience and particularly so in the context of assessment and feedback. It is difficult to think that 17 years working in HE has boiled down to that, but it’s probably taken this long to define it.

So, what’s your golden thread?

Aisling is Associate Director for the Centre for Biomedical Sciences Education at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland with disciplinary expertise in Histology and Embryology. She was awarded the Kathleen Tattersall New Researcher Award in 2019 by the Association for Educational Assessment Europe.

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References

Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80, 139-148.

Milsom, C., Stewart, M., Yorke, M., & Zaitseva, E. (Eds.). (2014). Stepping up to the second year at university: Academic, psychological and social dimensions. Routledge.