Can’t quite believe we’ve come to the end of our seventh year as the Bristol Institute for Learning and Teaching! This academic year has been our most successful yet in terms of engagement and outcomes, with almost 25 research projects funded by us. Through the CREATE programme and HEA Fellowship scheme we have recognised 338 new Fellows, we’ve worked with 5 Student Fellows, we’ve also had a fully-booked conference and 40,000 visits to our blog!
This year we have really championed student co-creation and partnership – our conference was all about student agency, engagement and choice and we heard from dozens of academics who are putting student needs at the forefront of their teaching. Many of our fund-holders project’s focus on this core theme and we have loved watching them progress.
We are also so proud of the work our Student Fellows have achieved this year. From Robynne’s report on inclusive assessment practices in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law, Ivory’s guidance on teaching international student experience through storytelling, Ethel’s work with the Race Inclusion team on the University Reimagined and Carla’s and Izzy’s work on the Student Research Festival and Journal – they are all amazing examples of what we can learn when we work alongside students, giving them a voice and agency to lead on projects close to all of our hearts.
The Hackathon we ran in December was a hugely insightful day into the lives of international students, with outputs already feeding into future research we are planning.
We’ve put together this round-up as a way to collate all of this excellent work together – we haven’t included everything we’ve published (there’s over 200 blogs from this academic year to date!) but just wanted to highlight some of our ‘Best Bits’.
Student research and collaboration
Student Research Journal, Issue 5
The fifth issue of our Journal also includes a ‘curated highlights’ version which we’ve had printed – if you’d like a copy, please get in touch!
Student Research Festival
If you didn’t get chance to come along to our brilliant Student Research Festival you can still catch up with what happened with this post. Want to get involved in next year’s Festival? Please let us know! We’re running the Festival in January 2025 so will be looking for student contributors as early as October.
Carla and Izzy have recently been award the JISC/SEDAStudent Impact Partnership Award for their work on the Journal and Festival – we are so proud, well done!
Designed for all: Presenting Prospecting of Historically Excluded Students in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law
Robynne Grant-Jepps held focus groups with students in her Faculty, discovering more about students define inclusive assessments and how the timings, formats and types of assessment align to the concept of them being ‘inclusive.
Both the executive summary and full report can be found here. We also have more copies of the leaflet Robynne co-produced with a student if you’d like us to send any copies out.
Tacit Knowledge Acquisition for International Students: Strategies and Recommendations
Ivory Wang did a large-scale survey with international students and then held focus groups to really discover more about the lived experiences of our international student body. This brilliant research comes in the form of a beautiful magazine (get in touch if you’d like a copy!) with three chapters looking at transition, language, and the unique Chinese perspective. See the magazine and read more about the research here.
Blogs and posts you might have missed
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) – Education Research Group Interviews
Associates working on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning project have undertaken interviews with colleagues in education research groups in the School of Biological Sciences, Bristol Vet School and Faculty of Engineering.
Digital Accessibility Conference
Fiona Hartley recently attended a conference on digital accessibility hosted by the University of Nottingham and shared some of the top tools that were promoted, with contributions from colleagues in attendance.
Bristol Skills Profile Series
Earlier in the year the Careers Service launched their Bristol Skills Profile and the MySkills platform, a space where students can record their skills development, focussing around nine skills, with the aim to help them in their career development and future prospects. You can read all about this programme with this blog series. There will also be two Student Fellows working in this area from September.
Feedback Fundamentals
Our Research Associate Joe Gould shared this brilliant series on feedback practices earlier in the year and we just wanted to highlight it again for anyone looking for some light-hearted reading around a topic that impacts all teaching colleagues and students.
Everything about A.I.
We couldn’t do a blog about 2023/24 without mentioning A.I.! It feels like every education-event you go to, this is the topic everyone is talking about, and we are really happy that we have lots of new guidance to share soon with colleagues. Above is a link to all of the blogs we’ve posted on this topic so far this year.
Things to keep an eye out for
- New guides we’ll be promoting in September, including inclusive teaching and many assessment opportunities!
- Our next ‘Intro to HE teaching at Bristol’ courses starting in September! Find out more about the courses on our Events page.
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