Join us on Bluesky on Wednesday 25th June 2025 at 2000 BST
Led by Dr Maisha Islam, Research Culture Lead for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Southampton’s Doctoral College, @maishaislam.bsky.social
“So, what is it that you actually do?’
That was the question posed to me when I introduced myself as a Research Culture Lead for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. While it might have come across as slightly patronising, I’ve come to see it as a well-intentioned query – and one that highlights a broader issue: the term ‘research culture’ still feels like a bit of a fuzzword. Despite growing attention across the sector, and with institutions preparing for the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2029 – where ‘People, Culture and Environment’ (PCE) will sit alongside outputs and impact – the concept remains elusive to many.
Despite some ‘fuzziness’ to the term ‘research culture’, The Royal Society definition offers a useful (and widely referenced) starting point:
“Research culture encompasses the behaviours, values, expectations, attitudes and norms of our research communities.”
As a social justice researcher, I approach research culture through an equity lens. That perspective shapes how I understand what research culture is — and what it could be. In that context, I found Dr Natalie Marchant’s framing of research culture particularly valuable. Her approach offers a more grounded and actionable vision of what a positive research culture looks like and how it functions:
Actively promote collaboration, transparency, and open communication in research practices.
Recognise and celebrate diverse contributions to research, including those from research support staff and underrepresented groups.
Engage in ongoing dialogue with colleagues to identify and address systemic barriers to inclusion.
Support initiatives that prioritise the well-being and professional development of researchers at all career stages, especially those early in their career.
Invest in yourself and the people around you by taking advantage of training opportunities and engaging in two-way feedback.
Research Culture spotlight – Postgraduate Research (PGR) students
In answer to the question which opened this blog, I have the privilege of working to ensure that the research culture for current (and prospective) PGR students, at the University of Southampton’s Doctoral College, is one that is accessible, diverse, inclusive and collaborative. This has included:
Introducing an award-winning PGR Student Partners scheme – a paid, partnership opportunity for our PhD students to work collaboratively with us on our projects with an equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) focus. This has resulted in several co-authored research and outputs including an investigation of Black and Asian PGR student experience, and broader understandings of PGR research culture.
Developing a suite of activity to ‘demystify the PhD’ and support underrepresented students’ decision making related to PGR. This includes providing information workshops, an online module, and ‘Progress to PhD’ peer-mentoring scheme with the aim of widening access into postgraduate research.
The increased focus on research culture is often accompanied by a rhetoric of organisations increasing their profitability and holding a competitive edge. Whilst it is true that there is a link between inclusivity, innovation and income, it would be remiss to make the case for developing inclusive and positive research cultures on this basis or even as the driving motivation to doing so. The reality is that deep-rooted inequities persist across our research and academic environments. Addressing them shouldn’t require a business case. It’s simply the right thing to do.
As a minoritised researcher, it is not surprising that nearly two-thirds of researchers report witnessing bullying or harassment, and 43% experience it themselves. This may explain why PGR satisfaction scores around research culture and community have remained strikingly low over the past five years. Therefore, for those early on in their careers, occupying marginalised identity markers, and/or are working in precarious conditions, our research culture seems stuck in peer review stage – eternally in a ‘revise and resubmit’ cycle.
So, with all this talk about “changing research culture” – making it more inclusive, more supportive, more sustainable – how do we actually do that? Who gets to decide what the culture should be? How might these ideas apply to technologists/technicians, librarians, academic developers? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Join me on 25th June 2025 for #LTHEchat to talk all things ‘research culture’!
Guest Biography
Bio:
Dr Maisha Islam is the Research Culture Lead for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Southampton’s Doctoral College. Her research areas of interest and expertise centre student engagement, and racial and religious equity in higher education. She is a co-editor of the recently published book ‘Uncovering Islamophobia in Higher Education: Supporting the success of Muslim students and staff’, and co-Chair of a Research England/Office for Students Steering Group seeking to improve access and participation of racially minoritised students in postgraduate research.
Q1 How would you define “research culture” in your context? Is it something you feel part of?
Q2 In your opinion, what stakeholder groups are neglected in research culture-related activity?
Q3 In an ever-evolving and turbulent HE sector, what do you believe to be the biggest threat(s) to enabling an inclusive research culture?
Q4 Can you give any examples within or outside your university/context which resulted in positive changes in research culture recently?
Q5As the People, Culture and Environment (PCE) element of REF 2029 is being piloted, what key indicators do you think should be used to assess and evaluate research culture?
Q6 If you could change one thing about research culture in HE, what would it be — and why?
Join us on Bluesky on Wednesday 18th June 2025 at 2000 BST
Chat led by
Dr Shaun Mudd, Head of Teaching Expertise Development, Bath Spa University, @shaunmudd.bsky.social
Prof Helen King, Director of Learning Innovation, Development and Skills, Bath Spa University, @profhelenking.bsky.social
Blog by Shaun Mudd with contribution from Helen King
When I mention “Artistry of Teaching” to a room full of new colleagues, there’s typically a long silence.
I’ve taught about expertise in HE teaching on UK PGCerts (initial professional development programmes largely intended for new lecturers) for about seven years. It’s the model proposed by Helen King at a Symposium on this theme in 2020, and published in 2022, but I had a sneak peek having shared an office with Helen and seen early drafts pinned to the wall. The model comprises three elements which describe the HE teacher who takes an expertise-based approach. The scenario usually goes like this…
The first element I introduce is “Professional Learning”. I might ask someone to define this; other times it’s irrelevant as the session is focused on this topic. Either way, it’s obvious for colleagues engaged in a PGCert: a type of professional learning which usually dwells repeatedly on this topic.
Next, I turn to “Pedagogic Content Knowledge” (PCK). Sometimes there’s a probationary Lecturer in Education who can define this precisely. Other times there’s a slight hesitation and the group then start to pick it apart. Some Socratic Questioning can usually get them to the point where they understand it as a teacher’s knowledge both of pedagogy and of their discipline, and the interlacing of both.
We’re then on to the “Artistry of Teaching”. I ask if anyone knows what this refers to, and almost every time there’s a lengthy pause before someone hesitantly responds.
What is the Artistry of Teaching?
A participant in a PGCert session once provided a useful analogy. They suggested we could apply this model to stand-up comedy. Someone could learn the foundational knowledge and skills of standup comedy (akin to PCK) and work on honing their craft through development and reflection (akin to professional learning). The artistry element would encompass the difference between a successful professional comedian who can read the room and adapt their set to enthral the audience, compared with me doing the same set. (I try not to be offended.)
Artistry is notoriously difficult to define (King et al. 2024, pp.4-6). But as a starter, effective artistry of teaching in HE can involve:
Adaption (adaptive expertise), flexibility and improvisation in the moment to changing circumstances
Rapid problem-solving and almost-instantaneous reflection-in-action (Schön 1982)
The personal and emotional elements of teaching, including empathy and care, and the ability to build a learning community
Authenticity in teaching, recognising our own limitations, and drawing upon the expertise of others
The practical and performative elements of teaching, such as vocal skills and body language
This list is far from exhaustive. By its very nature it varies according to context and inevitably will evolve and change over time.
Why Should we Focus on Artistry?
Artistry is frequently appreciated as a core element of successful HE teaching. It is also an area where colleagues appreciate development opportunities. Anxieties raised by colleagues new to teaching in HE frequently surround topics such as preparation and rehearsal, communication and expression, and confidence and identity (Bale 2020, pp.22-23). Yet artistry is rarely an explicit and sustained focus of HE professional learning (e.g. Petrova and Mudd 2024, King et al. 2024 p.5, Bale 2020 pp1-2, King 2022 p.9). The sector’s interventions instead have traditionally focused more on reflective practice, pedagogy and situating this in one’s own practice and discipline – principally aligning to PCK and professional learning. It is interesting to note that the dimensions of the Professional Standards Framework (2023) include explicit focus on professional learning (V3 and A5) and PCK (K1 and K2). Artistry is less explicitly a focus of descriptions and dimensions (though Advance HE’s Guides to each Dimension do include guidance prompting applicants to include evidence aligning to artistry).
I believe it is essential to support colleagues through explicit and sustained focus on the artistry of teaching in initial and continuous professional learning. If we omit to do this, we’re setting up (at least some) colleagues to fail by neglecting a significant part of what it means to take an expertise-based approach to teaching in HE. My suggestion therefore is for us to reflect on the support we already offer which aligns to artistry and consider how this could be enhanced further. We could usefully think about our own and other colleagues’ professional learning, double checking how prominent artistry is in:
Professional learning programmes such as PGCerts, wider workshops and formal interventions
The inductions of new colleagues
Mentoring, coaching and supporting ongoing professional learning
Communities of practice, conferences, networking
More on Expertise and Artistry
For examples of interventions on the artistry of teaching, see Petrova and Mudd 2024, and Bale 2020.
A third Expertise Symposium will be hosted as an “unconference” by the University of Queensland, Australia in October this year. This in-person event will be supplemented with a separate online element to engage an international audience. More details coming soon!
References
Bale, R. (2020) Teaching with Confidence in Higher Education: Applying Strategies from the Performing Arts. Routledge: London.
King, H. (2022) Developing Expertise for Teaching in Higher Education. Routledge: London.
King, H. R. Bale, E. Corradini, P. Fossey, D. Gannaway, L. Morantes-Africano, S. Mudd and J. Potter (2024) The Artistry of Teaching in Higher Education: Practical Ideas for Developing Creative Academic Practice. Routledge: London.
Petrova, P., S. Mudd, I. Palmer and S. Brown (2024) ‘Developing the Artistry of Teaching and Approaches to Learning: What we can Learn from those Teaching Theatre Improvisation’, in: H. King, R. Bale, E. Corradini, P. Fossey, D. Gannaway, L. Morantes-Africano, S. Mudd and J. Potter eds. (2024) The Artistry of Teaching in Higher Education: Practical Ideas for Developing Creative Academic Practice. 163-177. Routledge: London. Schön, D. (1982) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Routledge: Abingdon.
Guest Biographies
Dr Shaun Mudd is Head of Teaching Expertise Development at Bath Spa University. This team facilitates professional learning for all staff who teach and support learning at Bath Spa, particularly in relation to pedagogy, professional learning and curriculum design/enhancement. Immediately before joining Bath Spa University, Shaun was Senior Lecturer in Academic Practice at the University of the West of England, and Programme Leader of their Academic Professional Programme (including the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Professional Practice, and Academic Professional Apprenticeship). Shaun is co-editor of The Artistry of Teaching in Higher Education (2024).
Prof. Helen King is Professor and Director of Learning Innovation, Development & Skills at Bath Spa University, UK. Her career in educational development spans three decades and has included leading roles in UK–wide learning and teaching enhancement projects and organisations, as an independent consultant collaborating with colleagues internationally, and university-based senior leadership. Her role supports a range of learning, teaching and assessment themes but her passion is supporting colleagues’ professional learning and development. She holds a senior fellowship of the Staff & Educational Development Association (SFSEDA), is a UK National Teaching Fellow (NTF), Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA) and Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland. She also thoroughly enjoys trail running and playing Bluegrass banjo (not necessarily at the same time). Helen is editor of Developing Expertise for Teaching in Higher Education (2022) and The Artistry of Teaching in Higher Education(2024).
By Cassie Lowe, Helen Morley, Jo Hall, Eszter Kalman, Alyson Lewis, Tracy Part, Heather Pennington, Isabelle Winder
In higher education, collaboration is key to navigating the complex challenges educators face. Recognising this, we—eight academics from seven institutions—came together with a shared goal: to explore how Communities of Practice (CoPs) can support professional development, foster meaningful connections, and enhance teaching and learning. The result? Two interconnected achievements:
The formation of an international Educational Development Community of Practice (EdDCoP), now 180 members strong.
1. Co-creating the Toolkit: A collaborative framework
The power of collaboration
Communities of Practice (CoPs) are not a new concept, but their potential to drive innovation, share expertise, and sustain engagement in higher education is immense. Our journey began with a simple question: How can we harness the power of CoPs to support educators and developers?
This toolkit is the second of nine projects published as part of Advance HE’s 2023-24 Collaborative Development Fund grants. Led by the University of Cambridge, the project brought together seven institutions across the UK and Australia to produce a practical guide for developing teaching and learning communities of practice.
What’s in the toolkit?
Drawing on our diverse experiences, we pooled insights, challenges, and successes to create a resource that:
Helps educators establish, sustain, and evaluate CoPs.
Offers frameworks, case studies, and reflective questions.
Grounds theory in real-world practice, ensuring relevance for practitioners.
The co-creation process itself mirrored the collaborative ethos of CoPs—iterative, inclusive, and driven by shared purpose.
2. Growing a community: The EdDCoP story
While creating the toolkit, we realised the importance of living the principles we were advocating. This led to the formation of the Educational Development Community of Practice (EdDCoP), an international network for colleagues leading or interested in CoPs within higher education development.
How EdDCoP works
EdDCoP meets virtually four times a year, providing a space for members to:
Engage in professional learning and grow together.
Share successes and challenges in running inclusive and effective CoPs.
Explore new ideas for sustaining engagement.
Reflect, evaluate, and refine strategies in real time.
With over 180 members, the community has become a dynamic forum for collective learning. Sessions have explored topics like building inclusive communities, hybrid engagement models, and measuring impact—all while fostering connections across institutions and borders.
Successes, challenges, and lessons learned
Our successes:
A supportive, cross-institutional network spanning career stages and geographic locations.
Collaborative leadership: Our rotating steering group ensures diverse voices shape the community.
Bridging theory and practice by testing toolkit strategies in live settings.
Challenges we’ve navigated:
Fluctuating engagement: Sustaining momentum requires intentional design (e.g., interactive workshops over traditional webinars).
Balancing structure with flexibility: Clear objectives help, but rigidity can stifle organic growth.
Looking ahead
Our work embodies the transformative potential of CoPs—combating isolation, sharing knowledge, and driving change. The Advance HE Toolkit is now an accessible resource for those starting or refining CoPs, while EdDCoP continues to evolve as a space for collective growth.
#LTHEchat: Join us on 11th June 2025 to continue the conversation!
Dr Cassie Lowe (University of Cambridge), Dr Helen Morley (University of Leeds), Dr Jo Hall (University of Brighton), Dr Eszter Kalman (University of Sydney), Dr Alyson Lewis (Cardiff University), Dr Tracy Part (Goldsmiths, University of London), Heather Pennington (Cardiff University), Dr Isabelle Winder (Bangor University).
See you on 11th June 2025 for #LTHEchat!
Guest Biographies
Dr Jo Hall is a Principal Lecturer in the Learning and Teaching Hub at the University of Brighton. Her current research focuses on the development of inclusivity, well-being and race equity within Higher Education pedagogies. https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/jo-hall, @jolhall.bsky.social
Dr Heather Pennington is a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University’s Learning and Teaching Academy. She is a Mentor, and Assessor within the AdvanceHE-accredited Education Fellowship Programme and leads the Associate Fellowship pathway. Heather is also a member of the University’s Inclusive Education Project Team. https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/penningtonh1, @heatherpennington.bsky.social.
This #LTHEChat took place on Bluesky on Wednesday 4th June 2025 at 2000 BST
Led by Louise Rees, Senior Academic Developer at Swansea University, @louiserees.bsky.social
MS CoPilot generated image based on prompt of asking to include giraffes with the phrase “A picture paints a Thousand Words” and the attribution
In teaching on a PG Cert teaching in HE programme, I use creative approaches to prompt participant reflection on educator identity. I have outlined these approaches on a previous LTHEChat (Rees L.J., 2023).
Recently I caught up with several PG Alumni to discuss the ongoing development of their educator identity and journey. One shared how they had progressed towards the professional development goals they had set themselves in their assignment several years ago. I reminded them that in their assignment submission – a great video reflecting on their practice and their journey – they had included a rollercoaster as a key element.
This didn’t represent their interpretation of their own journey but instead described how their students might experience a tumultuous rollercoaster ride through their degree programme. But there are several instances of teachers indicating their journey and development as at least an emotional rollercoaster – see Godfrey (2023) and Marbaniang (2024) for some informal reflections.
As I started to teach the PG Cert module again in 2025, I was, despite offering a choice of 8 possible “creative” approaches with exemplars, still concerned for those who thought they ‘could not be creative’. Would Gen AI be used to help them ‘be creative?’ Or for those pushed for time, would using a Gen AI tool be a quicker option to produce the output requested?
Simultaneously came an announcement of the University of Liverpool’s annual Islands of Innovation Conference for May 2025, with the topic of ‘Theme Park of Innovation’ and a full range of amusement park sub-themes. An alumnus discussing teaching and learning as a rollercoaster journey. Me wondering about Gen AI and its use in creating images. Coincidence? Something seemed to be telling me to experiment with Gen AI.
Recognising what I already knew about the limitations and ethical issues of using a Gen AI tool, I ‘tested’ whether it could adequately convert my written prompts into images and apply the ‘critically reflective’ aspect of the activity. That involved participants annotating their “creative output” by considering what factors impacting educator identity applied to their own experiences (as explored by Thea van Lankveld et al, 2017) and/or considering what stages of educator development applied (drawing on the work of Peter Kugel, 1993).
I used Microsoft Copilot AI and a few other Gen AI tools to translate written prompts reflecting some fictitious scenarios of a day in the life of an educator in Higher Education into images. I included in the prompt instructions to include in the generated image the relevant theoretical factors and stages on teaching identity which at the time (March 2025), MS CoPilot was unable to do.
I guided workshop participants at the Islands of Innovation conference on May 9 2025 to generate an image from text describing their “educator day”, including using an amusement park ride to represent their feelings. I invited them to critically reflect on the images generated through that process and shared my own reflections on the process and output.
During this chat I invite you to consider whether Gen AI can adequately convert written reflection to images and how you might use the activity of image generation from text to promote Gen AI digital literacy for your learners.
If you want to create your own image based on a short reflection of your “educator day”, see the ‘prompt’ below in the Note.
van Lankveld, T., Schoonenboom, J., Volman, M., Croiset, G., & Beishuizen, J. (2017). Developing a teacher identity in the university context: a systematic review of the literature. Higher Education Research and Development, 36(2), 325–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2016.1208154
Note:
Here is the suggested prompt:
“Prepare a SHORT, written piece based on “A day in your educator life…”. This will be your prompt to input into a Gen AI tool of your choice. Cover the following in your text:
CONTEXT: What briefly is your role in Higher Education?
WHAT: Write a brief description of the circumstance/day you’ve experienced.
HOW: Did you feel about the situation?
INCLUDE the following instruction at the end: “Please provide an image representing my day using an appropriate amusement park ride.”
I gave participants an example “prompt” as we had a limited amount of time to do the activity and reflect on the output.
Guest Biography
Louise is a Senior Academic Developer in Swansea University’s Academy for Learning and Teaching. She teaches on the PG Cert teaching in HE regarding professional identity for HE educators, assisting participants to reflect on their practice and PG Cert journey. She also supports colleagues in their claims for recognition through the University’s internally accredited programme for Advance HE Fellowship. Louise is a Certified Online Learning Facilitator and an Advance HE Senior Fellow. She can be reached through LinkedIn: (13) Louise Rees | LinkedIn or Bluesky: @louiserees.bsky.social . Giraffes are her favourite animal 🙂
Questions and chat
Q1 Have you or your learners used a Gen AI tool to generate an image from text? What kinds of activities did/could you use it for?
Q2 If you/ your learners have used Gen AI for image creation, what was captured well/accurately in the generated image? Were there any shortcomings?
Q3 What did you/they learn about the content or order of the words used in the prompts?
Q4 In your context, how might you use the creation of a Gen AI image as an activity or assignment for learners to demonstrate higher order evaluation skills?
Q5 When using Gen AI to create images, what key questions or issues would you ask your learners to consider to develop their Gen AI literacy?
Q6 If a Gen AI tool isn’t available, what other websites or platforms can learners use to find images that would help them visualise a situation?
This #LTHEChat took place on Bluesky on Wednesday 28th May 2025 at 2000 BST
Led by Paul Driver, Director of Simulation-Based Learning in the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Social Care at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. @pauldriver.bsky.social
Introduction
We (learning designers, educators, librarians, learners…) are often required to navigate the space between pedagogy and innovation—balancing tried-and-tested methods with emerging technologies and pedagogic approaches. Among these innovations, immersive learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm, transforming how learners engage with content, each other, and the world beyond the classroom.
What Is Immersion?
At its core, immersion refers to the psychological sensation of “being there”—the feeling of stepping into a new reality that envelops the senses and demands attention. Whether achieved through high-end virtual reality, mixed-reality immersive rooms, narrative simulations, or well-crafted game-based learning environments, immersion aims to create a state where learners feel physically and cognitively involved in the experience.
The Immersive Room Best Practice Guide (shared below) captures this well through the lens of simulation-based learning (S-BL), noting the constructivist framing of learners as “not mere spectators but active participants,” engaged in environments that are spatial, tangible, social, and embodied. Immersion isn’t just a technical effect—it’s a cognitive and emotional state that can be purposefully leveraged to promote learning and engagement.
Immersive Rooms: A Physical Space for Embodied Learning
Immersive rooms (sometimes referred to as VR Caves), offer one of the most accessible forms of high-impact immersive learning in higher education today. These spaces are designed to blend digital projection, 3D modelling, interactivity (with peers, interfaces and physical objects) to simulate real-world environments. Crucially, they support constructivist learning: students actively manipulate scenarios, collaborate with peers, and reflect on experiences to build knowledge.
The Best Practice Guide emphasises that such simulations must be grounded in clear educational objectives—whether developing affective skills, procedural knowledge, or competencies required by professional bodies. Interactivity, multimodality, and narrative all play essential roles in driving learner engagement.
The images below show an example empty immersive room and inside one with the projections active (derelict building):
Narratives as Anchors for Immersion
One of the most effective, and often underestimated, tools for immersive learning is narrative. Jesse Schell, in The Art of Game Design, argues that story is a “lens” through which we understand our experiences. A compelling narrative structure can serve as both motivation and guide, helping learners make sense of complex or abstract content.
Narratives create emotional hooks, define goals, introduce context and provide a reason to psychologically invest—all of which enhance immersion. James Paul Gee suggests that well-designed video games teach not through didactic instruction but through situated learning, where players learn by doing within meaningful contexts. This insight is directly applicable to immersive learning environments, where storytelling can frame challenges and anchor new knowledge.
Beyond the Room: Other Modalities of Immersive Learning
While immersive rooms are exciting and fertile ground for both practical and theoretical experimentation, they are part of a broader ecosystem of immersive approaches:
Virtual Reality (VR): Fully digital environments accessed via headsets, offering high sensory immersion. VR is particularly effective for simulating high-risk scenarios (e.g., medical procedures or hazardous environments).
Augmented Reality (AR): Layers digital information over the real world. AR is powerful for contextual learning—enhancing fieldwork, museum visits, or architectural studies.
Mixed Reality (MR): Blends digital and physical environments in real time. MR is still evolving but holds great promise for embodied, location-based interactive and collaborative learning projects.
Game-Based Learning: Interactive, rule-based “ludic” environments that provide feedback and encourage problem-solving. Ian Bogost emphasises how procedural rhetoric—the practice of using the rules and mechanics of a system, particularly in games, can be used to persuade, express ideas, or make arguments about how things work in the world. This emergent rhetoric can be designed to promote reflection and critical thinking about real systems and specific themes (e.g. mental health, capitalism, sustainability). Mary Flanagan, in her work on critical play, also highlights how games can challenge assumptions, promote empathy, and open space for reflection—all vital aspects of deep learning.
Alternate Reality Games (ARGs): These combine physical and digital media to create narratives that unfold over time, often involving collaboration and investigation. In another life (and a couple of careers ago) I used to design this type of game as a strategy for teaching English as foreign language (EFL), e.g., https://digitaldebris.info/spywalk-porto.
Designing for Immersion: Considerations and Challenges
Immersion doesn’t happen by accident. It requires intentional design, interdisciplinary collaboration, and a grounding in pedagogic theory. As an illustration, in my Immersive Room Best Practice Guide (see image below) I outline 13 areas educators must consider, including cognitive load, multimodality, Interface design, accessibility and, of course, pedagogy. I created this as a quick-starter guide-on-a-page, so it is far from comprehensive.
We are at a turning point. The technology is increasingly accessible, the pedagogic rationale is strong, and the student appetite for experiential, relevant learning is growing. But to move from novelty to impact, we must focus on design, evaluation, and integration. Immersive learning isn’t about replacing existing methods—it’s about enhancing and extending them.
Flanagan’s and Bogost’s framing of play as a non-neutral activity (especially collaborative, locative play) align well with immersive learning, where scenarios can simulate not only environments but ethical dilemmas, power structures, and social dynamics. Immersive learning can offer this bounded rehearsal in powerful new ways. By embedding learners in well-designed stories, environments, and systems, we equip them not just with knowledge, but with the insight and agency to apply it, and apply it in a low-stakes, scaffolded and repeatable way.
Final Thoughts
Immersive learning is more than just a buzzword—it’s a reimagining of how we teach and how students learn. Whether through VR, narrative simulations, or the carefully designed spaces of an immersive room, the goal remains the same: to foster active, situated, and meaningful learning experiences.
As education professionals, we’re in a unique position to lead this transformation—bringing together pedagogy, technology, and creativity to craft experiences that truly engage and inspire.
References
Bogost, I. (2007) Persuasive games: the expressive power of videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Driver, P. (2024) Immersive Room Best Practice Guide. ARU Digital Simulation Team.
Flanagan, M. (2009) Critical play: radical game design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gee, J.P. (2003) What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schell, J. (2008) The art of game design: a book of lenses. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Author Biography
Paul is Director of Simulation-Based Learning in the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Social Care at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. His current research spans immersive technology, applied game design, generative AI, embodied cognition, and pedagogical theory, with a focus on how these intersect to shape innovative teaching and learning practices. He can be reached on Bluesky @pauldriver.bsky.social.
Questions and chat
Q1 How can immersive learning be meaningfully scaled, or is it inherently suited to small-group contexts?
Q2 What kinds of assessment strategies align best with immersive or simulation-based learning experiences?
Q3 How do we avoid ‘tech-first’ thinking and ensure pedagogy drives the design of immersive learning?
Q4 What role should Learning Designers and Learning Technologists play in co-creating or curating immersive learning content and how can learners be involved as co-designers?
Q5 How do we ensure accessibility and inclusivity in immersive learning environments, both digital and physical?
Q6 What types of support or training would academic staff need to confidently adopt immersive approaches?
This #LTHEChat took place on Bluesky on Wednesday 21st May 2025 at 2000 BST
Led by Kelly Trivedy, Independent Academic Enhancement Consultant for Pedagogic Development and Academic Skills in HE and FE. @kellytrivedy.bsky.social
We live in a world where critical thinking is more important than ever. Globally, the World Economic Forum (2025) has stated that analytical skills are the number one skill required. On an academic level, research commissioned by HEFCE found that, among other related skills, students’ aptitude to think critically was a contributing factor to post-university success (Zahner, 2018).
If you take a moment and think about:
What was your experience with critical thinking when you first started higher education?
Did you ever question why certain ideas were presented as unquestionable?
Did you find yourself agreeing silently, even though the material didn’t quite resonate with you?
Keep your answers to these questions in mind as you read through the remainder of this article.
What is critical thinking?
Within the context of HE, critical thinking has been a focal point for many years. Dewey (2012) talked about it in the context of having good thinking habits. But if we rewind further, we can see its philosophical roots that date back to the time of Socrates and Plato.
It is regularly the ”buzzword” (Fisher, 2011, p.1) given to the method that involves thinking by competently exercising control of the “structures inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual standards upon them” (Paul and Elder, 2010). What I’ve found, however, is that it often gets reduced to checking for bias in sources or debating opposing views. We are reminded by bell hooks that “thinking is an action” (hooks, 2010, p.7). Taking on the view of hooks, I believe that thinking critically may provide discomfort, a chance to reflect, and ultimately lead to transformation.
But for this to happen, we need to equip ourselves with the tools that help us think critically, regardless of where we are in our personal, professional, and academic journeys.
Throughout my earlier research for my MA in Education on critical thinking, I noticed that almost every paper I read started with a similar statement: “there is no singular shared definition of critical thinking.” I see this lack of a uniform definition as both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it allows for nuanced application across various disciplines. However, it can be a curse if educators, students, and colleagues in the education sector do not have a shared understanding of what critical thinking means.
I prefer this definition as it really provides focus of the process as opposed to product: “everything to do with how we think,” vs “what we think” (Mulnix, 2012).
My story and experience with critical thinking
My work in critical thinking began (years ago) during my PGCE course when I was involved in developing a new Bachelor’s degree program in criminal justice alongside my mentor. We had the freedom to design the entire course ourselves. Early on, I noticed that the students enrolled in the program struggled with critical thinking; they tended to accept everything they read without question. This raised alarm bells for me, and I decided to create my first critical thinking skills program. For the first 30 minutes of each session throughout the year, we focused on developing critical thinking skills.
After graduating from the PGCE course, the importance of critical thinking continued to occupy my mind, and I felt that my work on the PGCE was just beginning. I secured my first role as a skills specialist, where I worked to advocate for the significance of critical thinking through tailored programs that supported both educators and students. I have incorporated critical thinking methods in my lecturing, developed subject-specific programs, led general workshops as a coach, and am currently consulting with higher education and further education departments nationwide to address critical thinking in curriculum redesign, continuing professional development, and student development initiatives.
Why does critical thinking matter?
Critical thinking impacts all of us at different stages of our lives. We rely on it more than we might realise! If we consider everyday life and decision-making regarding the most mundane things, such as buying a plastic-free water bottle, we research materials, size, properties, and price points. This is critical thinking.
It engages us in developing our own intellectual autonomy and exercising it when we need to draw upon it. University study enhances knowledge of a subject, but hopefully, it also provides the skillset to question that knowledge and understand how it is constructed.
Critical thinking also encourages us to think beyond our subjects, and I believe it is a transferable skill; it can be adapted, nurtured, and applied across various disciplines.
Ultimately, I would argue that at its core, critical thinking gives society the best chance for honest and compassionate debates. If exercised purposefully, it can lead us to be more empathetic with views different to our own.
Higher education aims to transform how students think, question, and engage with the world and across the sector, with critical thinkingcentral to this mission. However, this transformation won’t occur by accident. It requires intentional design, reflective pedagogy, and a commitment to fostering environments where students can challenge assumptions, particularly their own.
In my work (broadly speaking), these are the steps I follow to help both students and educators achieve this:
In a society filled with misinformation, polarisation, and change, I believe universities have an ethical responsibility and intellectual ability to equip students with the tools to facilitate their critical thinking skills.
Those of you who strive to include critical thinking as part of your practice, do let me know how it’s going. I am always open to a conversation about critical thinking. We are all in it together to help and support the next generation of critical thinkers. As bell hooks (2010, p.11) articulates, “…it calls for initiative from everyone…”
Reflecting on the earlier questions in this article, here is a new set of reflective questions to help to re-frame how we may approach critical thinking:
How would you help others to enhance their experience of critical thinking in education?
How can you and others around you question ideas with curiosity?
How can you support those around you to feel comfortable in speaking out, even if their ideas don’t completely align with your own?
Since creating my podcast, Talking CriticalEd in 2024, and my Substack, ‘The Critical Thinking Loop’ in 2024, I’ve had many positive responses, and I hope to continue my work spreading the word and enhancing how we frame critical thinking.
References
Dewey, J., 2012. How We Think. United States of America: Martino Publishing.
Fisher, A., 2011. Critical Thinking: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kelly Trivedy is an Independent Academic Consultant specialising in pedagogic and skills development with a focus on critical thinking, research skills and reflective practice. Her career spans roles in lecturing, academic development, consulting and coaching. She is the author of ‘Plan your Research Project’, ‘The Critical Thinking Loop’ Substack and host of the Talking CriticalEd podcast. Kelly has also contributed to blogs, podcasts and book chapters across the HE sector. You can find more about Kelly and her work on her website.
Q2 What challenges have you observed learners facing regarding critical thinking?
Q3 What impact does or will AI have on critical thinking, and are there any changes or adaptations needed? What might these look like?
Q4 What role can learners play in their critical thinking journey, and how can educators, developers, and other education professionals facilitate this process?
Q5 In what way is critical thinking given importance in your subject? And why do you think it should be given that value? Please share your discipline in your answer.
Q6 If you could summon a genie, what would be your three wishes for re-designing critical thinking in education? How would it look, and what actions would you take to make it happen?
This #LTHEChat took place on Bluesky on Wednesday 14th May at 2000 BST
Led by Dr Jonny Branney, Principal Academic in Nursing and Clinical Sciences, Bournemouth University, @jonnybranney.bsky.social
I like to try new things. Do you?
When I first became a full-time lecturer in 2014, I thought I knew how to teach. By this point I had studied at three different institutions and experienced all ranges of educational approaches from the good (actively working through clinical case studies) to the bad (reading off PowerPoint presentations) to the ugly (sitting at the front reading off handwritten notes, not looking up once to engage with the audience). With my years of experiential learning gained from being a perpetual student, I felt ready to get my PowerPoint together (mainly image based, no reading off PowerPoint for me!) and do my stuff. I was barely in the door of the office however, when my colleague pointed out I had been signed up to do a PgCert in Education Practice. This made me grumpy. Whatever did I need that for?
Unsurprisingly I soon discovered that I indeed did not know what I was doing and there was a whole tonne of learning to be gained. I will remain eternally grateful to my colleague (Dr Dawn Morley!) for roping me in as, amongst other things, I got to immerse myself in the world of Team-based Learning (TBL). Incidentally, I had originally found out about TBL while preparing for my interview for my first lecturer post. I was looking for ‘latest innovations in nursing education’ or words to that effect and the paper that grabbed my attention was this one by Laura Middleton-Green and Sarah Ashelford (2013). I loved the sound of TBL so much that I implemented it in a small way (one class) with student nurses in my first year of teaching and I loved it so much I never looked back. I even wrote a paper about it, with Dr Jacqueline Priego-Hernández, if you’re interested to find out more about the student outcomes that were achieved (Branney and Priego-Hernández 2018).
So, what is TBL?
TBL is a form of flipped classroom where learners are provided the learning materials to engage with before attending class. This ‘pre-reading’ might include, for example, podcasts, online videos as well as written material. What would traditionally be ‘taught’ in the classroom therefore becomes ‘homework’, prepared before the sessions. This is then followed up by a variety of activities designed to review and consolidate learning as well as identify any gaps in knowledge or misunderstandings. This then leads to team exercises designed to encourage the application of this new knowledge to real world situations. This is where the gold happens. We all want students to be able to do something. In the application exercises students ‘do.’
An example from my own discipline of nursing is that students may have to justify a particular course of action within a patient case study. If the case study is written well (I do try!) this will prompt discussion between the student teams who try to justify their decision-making. This helps not only to deepen learning, viewing a situation from different perspectives, but reflects the reality that real-world decisions are not black or white but grey. There are often competing demands when a decision has to be made and the key thing is not so much getting the answer ‘correct’ but providing a defensible, reasoned argument in support of a decision.
Other reasons I love TBL are that it:
Promotes independent learning and maximises time in the classroom to help individuals with whatever they are finding difficult;
Elevates the status of the learner who has a voice in the classroom alongside the lecturer;
Shifts the emphasis from the lecturer being the expert imparting knowledge to one of facilitating students’ learning;
Leverages the social benefits of learning together, not only for deepening learning but promoting the formation of social networks, so important in the context of student loneliness.
Want to find out more?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on TBL. You might use alternative active learning methods with similar aims and outcomes, or perhaps the thought of giving up lectures fills you with dread. I should add that I love giving lectures too and would not want to give these up! Variety is the spice of life. Hope you can join us for the chat!
Dr Jonathan (Jonny) Branney is Principal Academic in Nursing and Clinical Sciences and Programme Leader for the MSc Advanced Clinical Practice traditional and apprenticeship routes. He has a substantial clinical background as both a registered nurse (critical care; accident & emergency) and was formerly a registered chiropractor. He is passionate about the role of biosciences in nurse and healthcare education, using innovative teaching techniques such as Team-based Learning. He is a Team-based Learning Collaborative (TBLC) certified Consultant-Trainer in TBL, a Senior Fellow of AdvanceHE and a National Teaching Fellow (2024). Jonny has most recently combined his research into musculoskeletal pain with his teaching expertise in developing TBL pain education for patients with chronic pain. Read more about that here.
Questions and chat
Q1 What attributes are needed by a lecturer to be an effective facilitator of learning?
Q2 What formative assessment strategies (regular checks of learning) work well? Why?
Q3 Is learning more effective with individual learning or group learning? Please explain.
Q4 In your experience does group learning work best when all groups have different tasks? Or the same task? Please explain.
Q5 What are the best ways to get students engaged with real-world problem-solving?
Q6 Are the challenges going on in higher education right now an opportunity or barrier to small group learning? Please explain
This #LTHEChat took place on Bluesky on Wednesday 7th May 2025 at 2000 BST.
Led by Dominic Pates, Senior Educational Technologist at City St George’s, University of London, @dompates.bsky.social
If you can remember that far back (and dare to recall the moment), what barriers did you decide to cross during the first pandemic lockdown? For some of you, it might have been making minor transgressions to the litany of new rules that suddenly governed social behaviour, or perhaps not wearing any shoes for a year. For me, it was no longer being so insistent on maintaining the distance between the personal and the professional.
During the early weeks of the first Covid lockdown, by day I was a frontline Educational Technologist, playing my part in my living room with helping my institution to continue to function during the biggest professional crisis any of us had faced in living memory. By night, I was running a sudden hit online nightclub as people around the world who could no longer leave their homes found themselves roaming around online and finding a release from the pressures of the bizarre circumstances that we all found ourselves in.
Since 2012, I’d been helping run an online radio station I co-founded with some friends, called The Thursday Night Show (TTNS), which gave live weekly broadcasts of an array of different DJs and broadcasters. Early in the first 2020 lockdown, we bolted a Zoom Meeting room onto the website, opened up the platform to more activity than just once a week, and saw our online audience suddenly spike as people came together to dance alone in their rooms. A nightclub in a browser was born.
After the novelty had worn off and things had settled down a little, I noticed that the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) – one of the key membership organisations for people that do the same work as I do – was putting an online version of its flagship conference ALTc together. ALT were also beginning to show other organisations how to do online conferencing well. I approached them and offered a radio component to the conference, as I thought that what I’d seen working with TTNS could apply in different ways in professional circumstances too. After all, one of the questions that many of us were struggling with at the time was how to encourage engagement in fully online (educational) contexts. This was the point where I chose to ‘cross the streams’ and collapse the strict boundaries I’d long maintained between what I did at work and what I did outside of work.
ALTc Radio was born that summer. I did a short show myself and made space for some others from within the community to play some songs and to gain some experience in broadcasting as a part of the overall conference programme. This worked well enough to repeat the experiment over a handful more of the online ALTc events that continued while the UK shimmied in and out of varying Covid lockdowns.
Then, in early 2023 and with memories of lockdowns fading, ALT invited me to join them at the University of Warwick for the 30th anniversary of the conference for a full parallel programme of conference radio. This meant bumping my operations up to 30 hours of radio programming. It meant gathering a variety of pre-recorded material together so that I could guarantee something to listen to throughout the event (whether people were there in person or not). It also meant inviting several sectoral colleagues to see radio as a vehicle for sharing their professional practice and therefore providing an alternative to the more usual methods like giving a presentation or running a workshop.
What surprised me most about this strange new medium of conference radio was the impact of introducing music to a conference environment and threading it throughout, as shows were broadcast live in the exhibition space as well as online. It was noticeable that some people arrived at the conference venue with a spring in their step as they heard a song that they liked when they walked through the doors of the venue. More than just the less formal nature of podcasting (to cite another audio-based medium), people could also use their radio shows to express themselves and their professional practice through the songs that they chose to play.
In 2024, ALTc came to Manchester and the radio component returned, having succeeded with the proof-of-concept the year before. This time, I put together 43 hours of original radio programming and had 20 new DJs from the learning technology community sharing their practice and playing their choices of songs to a distributed audience of their peers. After Manchester, I reached out to some of the sectoral broadcasters that had been part of ALTc Radio that year. I asked them what their experience was like and how they found radio as a medium for the expression and dissemination of their professional practice. This blog post shares some of those insights for the first time.
Mark Childs (Durham University) gave a combination of live online and pre-recorded shows, and had a variety of guests on:
‘It was an opportunity to get to know people better by inviting them on the show…I found using the music as a prompt for talking about people’s practice worked very well – not only did it give them a different lens to reflect on it through but it also got them talking because they were enthused by their music.’
Helen Greetham and Gemma Westwood from the University of Birmingham used a live broadcast slot from Manchester as a different way to talk about a project they’d been involved in on digital assessment. Helen:
‘It was the highlight of the conference for me!…thinking how to weave together the narrative of the project we’d worked on alongside music was a fun creative challenge’. Gemma: ‘It was a great way to share the research that we have been doing as a group, joining this up with careful music choices allowed to showcase the range of emotions in completing the research alongside the research itself, humanising the work that we have been doing’.
Jo Elliot (Queen Mary University of London) provided a pre-recorded show with Puiyin Wong:
‘Being part of the radio programme allowed me to still feel part of the conference. I loved being able to tune into the other shows and hear the discussions there as well as being able to join the social media chats…I had never used radio to talk about my work, or teaching and learning generally, before so this was a great introduction…the conversational nature of radio is ideal for talking about teaching and learning (and) unlike with a podcast for example, you knew people were listening live’.
In 2025, ALTc will be held in Glasgow, again along with the radio component. Will you lend us your ears?
Author Biography
Dom Pates (MA SFHEA SCMALT) is a Senior Educational Technologist at City St George’s, University of London, where he manages the digital education relationship with three schools – Bayes Business School, The City Law School and the School of Science & Technology. Prior to joining City St George’s, Dom worked as an IT Trainer and as a teacher. He has worked in education for most of his career, which has included five years in Japan.
Specialising in learning design, use of multimedia in teaching and learning spaces, he also co-manages The Thursday Night Show, an internet radio station established in 2012. In 2025, Dom received a Jisc Community Champions award for his development of ALTc Radio.
Questions and chat
Q1 What songs, albums, playlists or genres help you to get ‘in the zone’ in professional contexts like teaching, training, presenting, or writing? Feel free to share links.
Q2 Where or when have you been prepared to ‘cross the line’ and bring your authentic self into the space of your professional identity?
Q3 What examples have you seen of music being used effectively to support or enhance teaching and learning?
Q4 How do you feel about music being a component of continuing professional development (CPD) activities (e.g. conferences, workshops or webinars)?
Q5 What do you think radio can bring as a medium for CPD and the sharing of professional practice?
Q6 If you had your own ideal radio show (for work), what would the short description of it be for potential listeners?
We published the first edition of The Lecturer’s Toolkit with Routledge 1998 and there have been four further editions since, published by Phil alone. When we were asked to do a sixth edition for 2025, we had to recognise just how much has changed in the last five years. The intervening years witnessed the unprecedented changes that came about in teaching, learning assessment following the onset of the Covid pandemic and some amazing and challenging technological innovations that no Higher Educator can ignore. That’s the area we are covering in this blogpost and associated chat.
Looking back through the earlier editions, it’s amazing how many of the questions that occupied us nearly 30 years ago when we first started writing the book soon after we married remain today. These include: how do students learn? What part does assessment play in learning? How can feedback be made meaningful? What are lectures for? Why is small group learning important? How can those new to teaching in higher education look after ourselves? How can we make our teaching and learning support inclusive? At the heart of the first and every subsequent edition was what became known internationally as the “Race model of learning” that Phil had been propounding long before the book was written (if fact one of my first recollections of meeting Phil, was at one of his sessions on exactly this topic!)
But some things have moved away from current practice, at least in privileged nations. Rarely now in Higher Education do you see endless screeds of chalk on blackboards. Mastering the overhead projector was once an essential talent, now not so much. Hard copy handouts have mostly disappeared in financial cuts and students tend not to take endless handwritten notes in lectures (which were often ignored afterwards!) Phil’s favourite Post-its still can still be found in many a workshop exercises though!
New issues we addressed inter alia included:
What has been the impact of the pandemic on face-to-face and online learning, especially the wider take up of digital tools to help students learning online?
How can (or should) we respond to the ubiquity of large Language Models e.g. ChatGPT?
How can we move towards greater authenticity in assessment and feedback practices?
What’s to be done about the ’new digital divide’ which will separate wealthy institutions and students who can invest in ‘state-of-the-art’ GenAI facilities and support from the rest?
How can we retain momentum in recognising the importance of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion issues in our live and virtual classrooms every day?
With students spending less time on campus physically than previously how can we help students to actively engage with HEIs?
How should both good and excellent practice in teaching, learning and assessment be recognised, valued and accredited?
We knew that in our semi-retired state we would need some help to check our currency and relevance to changing contexts, so we recruited eminent colleagues as chapter readers and advisors on innovations.
Michelle Morgan helped us navigate issues around the student experience and transition to make us think about how students really learn nowadays as well as advising us on diversity issues including the Uk University Mental Health charter;
Kay Sambell gave us both scholarly and practical advice on assessment and feedback issues:
Sue Beckingham helped us greatly to think about how lecturing, both live and virtual, has changed since the pandemic, and her advice with Peter Hartley on using Generative AI effectively in higher education was invaluable.
Mark Glynn supported our rewriting of the small group teaching chapter and also was tremendously helpful in shaping our thinking about good and poor academic conduct.
Our final chapter looking at future trends benefitted from guidance from all of the above plus Steve McHanwell and Marita Grimwood on evidencing teaching achievements, with Belinda Cooke making sure we were up to date on the Advance HE Fellowships scheme and similarly Karen Hustler of Advance HE helping us with currency of the UK National Teaching Fellowship scheme. Pina Franco offered perspectives as a regular user with her PGCHE students of earlier editions of the book.
Everybody helped, including our invaluable editorial assistant Joe Penketh, who as the most recent student among us helped with common sense perspectives and the occasional media-related apercu!
In the chat that follows, we hope to hear both your thoughts on what has changed as well as what has stayed much the same, alongside your ideas about where HE teaching, learning and assessment is going in the future.
Phil Race and Sally Brown are long established, semi retired learning and teaching aficionados with a great track record of publications and workshops.
Both have visiting professorships at Edgehill University and a panoply of earlier visiting professorships and honorary doctorates to their names, as well as being Emeritus/Emerita professors at Leeds Beckett University. Phil is probably best known for his pragmatic model of learning, now known as the Race model of learning. Sally nowadays is best known for her work on assessment and feedback but in earlier times worked on creative problem-solving and leadership. She has also mentored dozens of colleagues over the years Between them they have the best part of 100 books they have written, co written, edited or co-edited if you count all the foreign translations and subsequent editions . This blog is part of their celebrations of the publication of their last book, the sixth edition of the Lecturer’s Toolkit.
Questions and chat
Q1 What are the key aspects of teaching, learning and assessment that have continued to be non-negotiable for you? (split over two posts)
Q2 What do you think have been the biggest gains in the teaching and learning experience for students in the last five years (and the previous 25)?
Q3 What important aspects have been lost, ignored, wilfully dropped or omitted?
Q4 How in your country has the profile of the student cohort changed over the duration of your HE teaching career?
Q5 Given a mythical magic wand, what major change would you gift to universities of the future and their students?
Q6: We won’t be writing a seventh edition in 2030, but if we were to, what do you foresee will be the biggest issues on the horizon in half a decade’s time?
Led by Dr Kay Guccione, Head of Research Culture and Researcher Development and Co-Director of the Lab for Academic Culture, University of Glasgow @kayguccione.bsky.social
This post is based on a recent webinar for the Coaching in Higher Education Network which asked me to discuss how coaching in universities can be situated within educational practice.
Coaching and mentoring: learning processes
My work focuses on the learning that happens within doctorates, for supervisors and research team leaders, for research professional staff, and within research communities. My profession is broadly labelled ‘Researcher Development’. It could be seen as a sister profession to Educational Development but has some subtle differences in how it’s positioned and toned.
To single out one specific difference from my experience, it is notable that the development of doctoral researchers and university staff is often positioned as being something separate from ‘educational’ practice. For these groups, the words we use to describe their ongoing learning at and through their work leans more toward the language of ‘careers’, ‘professional skills’ or ‘practices’, ‘leadership’, ‘training’, ‘compliance’, or ‘performance’. In the midst of creating comprehensive multi-strand development programmes, we can forget to centre those being developed as ‘learners’.
Coaching and mentoring are increasingly key components of such a multi-strand approach to development of the academic and research professional workforce. But when we say ‘coaching’ and ‘mentoring’, what are we talking about pedagogically? In brief, we are describing two people learning together through dialogue, in a style that draws on the Humanistic principles of ‘person-centred’ approaches. This means working with the whole person, supporting reflection and sensemaking, and trusting our interlocutors to make the choices for themselves, that best fit their development needs and interests (after Rogers, 1959). What this looks like in practice, is a learning conversation.
For clarity, I define the two sister-practices of coaching and mentoring according to Guccione and Hutchinson (2021) as:
Coaching: a designed, non-directive learning conversation
Mentoring: A coaching conversation (larger part) plus some experience-based contextualisation, advice or guidance (smaller part).
In the rest of this post, I’d like to share with you three ways that ‘designed learning conversations’ (whether we position them as them straight coaching or nestle them in as part of mentoring partnerships) can be embedded within educational practice. I use learning experiences occurring within doctoral programmes as the framing for my examples, but it won’t take a great deal of imagination for you to apply these to your own learners, and contexts.
Accessing the hidden curriculum
The value of a doctorate is understood as being more than its resulting academic credential; it, when seen as a process of development, is a personal opportunity for testing and learning about the self, and for acquiring a wide range of personal and professional experiences and social contacts (Bryan and Guccione, 2018). What each person deems ‘of value’ will be unique. Doctoral researchers have diverse past and ongoing lives, different personal and professional motivations for embarking on their doctoral journey, and a range of aspirations for their careers during and post-doctorate completion. Consideration of the doctoral candidate as a whole person existing within a working culture and personal and societal context helps us to see the differing needs of candidates within doctoral cohorts and to focus on the idea of creating a person-centred study experience, a personalised approach, rather than a uniform one (Guccione, 2025). Personalisation through different formal learning opportunities, is enhanced through a curated web of supportive relationships and networks that create rich opportunities for developmental conversations. These can help doctoral researchers to make sense of disorientating learning experiences and to navigate the academic workplace. To enable this rich culture of learning, the formal doctoral learning curriculum and traditional academic relationships can be supplemented with informal, often hidden, sources of learning and support, leveraging the doctorate’s hidden curriculum (Elliot et al, 2020) and helping students to process and make sense of experiential learning.
Completing experiential learning through conversation
Applying the idea of ‘learning through dialogue’ to this personal, messy and predominantly experiential mode of learning, we can immediately spot an excellent candidate for a theory of learning that a quality coaching conversation can support. Kolb’s (1984) Cycle of Experiential Learning offers the idea that learning is derived from our own experience, when it is appropriately reviewed, analysed and evaluated systematically. A busy doctoral researcher, rapidly accumulating new experiences, and with pressure to move at pace can find that without prompts to do so, they are not really reflecting on or analysing their experiences before dashing on to the next thing. A coach or mentor (in the form of supervisor, peer, researcher developer, etc) can support learning, by seeing their role as being one that supports the learning cycle to be completed in depth and detail. They place themselves in a position to help their coachee to describe their experience reflectively and to probe for deeper detail as they evaluate what it means for them. A coaching conversation can apply incisive questions about what next and why. It can support a plan for next steps to be realistic and chunked down into manageable actions. It can provide the encouragement to go and try it out, and the accountability for action to be taken as soon as possible.
If self-awareness, self-evaluation, and prioritising what is relevant and required to move through the doctorate can be supported through opportunities to engage in coaching that provide critical reflective discourse, coaching can hence be situated within the theory of Transformative Learning (Mezirow, 1991). Transformative Learning Theory focuses on the idea that learners have the capacity to adjust their ingrained thinking patterns and ways of ascribing meaning to new events, based on the critical evaluation and reflective sense-making of those events. The theory states that Transformative Learning is initiated as a ‘Disorienting Dilemma’ (often an emotionally provoking process). Many of us will recognise this as being a prominent and recognisable phenomenon in the doctorate, as old ways of approaching learning and generating academic success prove to be ineffective within the doctorate’s more open, unchartered and individualised learning framework, with high level of tacit, unspoken or hidden curriculum (Elliot, 2021). Understanding our own entrenched perspectives and habits (e.g. those picked up through prior study experiences) and unpicking these to weave in new ideas and perspectives (when we find those old ways are no longer working for us), is key for anyone on a sharp learning curve, with limited time to completion. Following Mezirow’s model, a coaching conversation (or many, with a number of different interlocutors) can help to resolve a Disorienting Dilemma through its pre-disposition to encouraging self-examination and critical assessment of prior assumptions before supporting the trying out of new ways of being and doing. Self-critique can be scaffolded through conversations with an empathetic ally (peer, developer, or supervisor) with shared experiences, and who affords the learner time and space to unpack both emotional and cognitive disorientation.
Patterns, boundaries and organisational learning
Whilst through the above examples, coaching conversations sound universally useful and ubiquitously applicable, coaching conversations have limits. We cannot coach away power differentials, or structural inequalities. We can’t coach one person to make another person act more fairly or responsibly towards them. We can’t coach higher funding success rates or more favourable peer reviews. And we can’t expect every coaching conversation to produce a transformative experience. There are boundaries to what coaching can achieve, and to what is a reasonable request of a coaching conversation. For example, in a PGR peer-mentoring programme, Guccione and Blackmore (2022) found that third-year PGRs could support first-year PGRs to access the hidden curriculum, make sense of emotionally charged experiences, provide allyship, navigate role expectations and try out new things. They could not support those same PGRs to overcome persistent issues of supervision related to the supervisor’s lack of people skills, neglect, poor ability to give feedback, or inclination to use bullying behaviours. Similarly, within a Thesis Mentoring programme (Guccione, 2021)postdoctoral research staff were able to support PGRs to develop good writing habits, to plan and track progress, and to reduce stress. They could not however enable PGRs to resolve persistent issues of supervision, as described above.
It’s important to note though, that where coaching conversations persistently can’t support certain educational outcomes, coaching can instead become a methodology for organisational learning – asking us to consider not ‘did we get the programme right?’ but ‘is this programme the right way to support the issues doctoral researchers face?’ (Argyris and Schön, 1974). In such cases we can utilise the collective intelligence arising from many coaching conversations and partnerships to facilitate strategic change. From the above data, for example, I developed an evidence-informed supervisor development programme, teaching supervisors to use coaching skills as a means of interrogating their power, relational position and pedagogical approaches, as well as being a means to support their doctoral scholars. Additionally, the great volume of positive feedback documenting the high value of postdoctoral research staff to doctoral education was used to create a case, to UK Council for Graduate Education for a new Recognised ‘Associate Supervisor’ Award.
Taking all this together, we can see that a coach acts as an empathetic ally who facilitates movement through the stages of learning, supporting personal transformation. I hope that for those of you now thinking about coaching practice less as a business tool, and more as a distinct set of pedagogical practices that enable dialogic learning, this opens up new ideas about how to deploy structured and well-designed coaching conversations for your learners. Let me know how you get on!
Guccione, K. (2021) Thesis Supervision: the educational value of postdocs in supporting research writing. Presentation for UCL Institute of Education Doctoral education and its purposes: research training for a changing world. Access online: https://youtu.be/kd9rKmZuluw
Guccione, K., and Blackmore, C. (2022) Stabilising transitions to doctoral study: Finding the reasonable boundaries of peer mentoring. Presentation for Student Mental Health Research Network. Access online: https://youtu.be/hTC_f3qZH_4
Guccione, K., and Hutchinson, S. (2021) Coaching and mentoring for academic development. Series: Surviving and Thriving in Academia. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Bryan, B., and Guccione, K. (2018). Was it worth it? A qualitative exploration of graduate perceptions of doctoral value. Higher Education Research and Development, 37(6), 1124–1140
Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative dimensions of adult learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc Pub.
Rogers, C. R. (1951). Client-centered therapy. Houghton Mifflin.
Author Biography
Dr Kay Guccione, Head of Research Culture & Researcher Development and Co-director of the Lab for Academic Culture, at the University of Glasgow. Since starting her career as a Researcher Development Professional in 2010, she has developed specialisms and research interests in mentoring, research supervisor development and research community building – anything that revolves around a good quality conversation, and the making of a positive research culture. Kay has published work on Coaching and Mentoring for Academic Development, The Hidden Curriculum in Doctoral Education, the Value of the PhD, and the Part-Time Doctorate.
In 2018 Kay was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in recognition of her impact in researcher development, and this is where her work at Glasgow focuses. She is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Masters qualified Leadership Coach, and a Member of the EMCC. Kay is a trustee of the UK Council for Graduate Education and has recently worked with them to develop a Recognised ‘Associate’ Supervisor Award that recognises the often invisible contribution of postdoctoral research staff to doctoral supervision.
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