We are based in two different universities in the Midlands, each with its own distinct mission and history. Our roles are substantially different, as are our professional backgrounds and life experiences. Our paths might never have crossed had it not been for a spur of the moment blog (Sterling, 2022a). We quickly discovered a shared interest in the need to create, support and celebrate flexible academic pathways – quite an odd thing on the face of it!
HESA’s broad categorisation of academic employment into teaching only, teaching and research, research only, and neither teaching nor research helps aggregate and simplify an extremely complex dataset. While dealing with one challenge, however, it creates another. The teaching/research binary erases in one fell swoop the visibility of richly varied learning-focused roles in a university.
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