Join us to discuss what the hell scholarship is on Monday 6th July at 1pm BST (UTC+1)
Scholarship. Plenty of people are talking and writing about it. Some people are even doing it. You’ll find the word scholarship liberally sprinkled in job descriptions and promotion requirements for academics, especially relating to a core function of every University: teaching of (and learning by) students. But there are lots of contradictory ideas about what scholarship means in practice. So what the hell is scholarship exactly? Join us on Monday 6th July at 1pm BST (UTC+1) to discuss via a paper published last year by Rose Gann and Julie Hulme on reimagined scholarship [1]. From the abstract:
The expansion and marketisation of Higher Education (HE) over recent years has prompted significant growth in the number and proportion of education-focused academics (EFAs) within the academy. Recognition and reward for these staff has however been a persistent challenge, in part because of debates around the nature of scholarship, variation in institutional criteria pertaining to scholarship, and lack of clarity around recognition of the work undertaken by EFAs. As part of our remit to develop scholarship in our own institution, we conducted workshops with academics from six departments within a post-1992 English university, capturing lived experiences of scholarship, understandings of what it comprised, and perspectives on how scholarship could be supported. We reflect on these discussions, on the literature defining scholarship, and on our own lived experiences as EFAs and supporting EFAs, to reimagine scholarship through an integrated framework, the DARSHE (Description of Activities Relating to Scholarship in Higher Education). The DARSHE framework offers a synthesis of some of the different approaches in the current literature, taking into account the development needs we have identified, and subsequent evaluations with wider stakeholders. The framework can be used by individuals to reflect on their scholarship, as a tool to support the development of an inclusive approach to scholarship by academic developers, and to enable reward and recognition for EFAs in university policy. We suggest that this will lead to a positive impact on colleagues seeking to develop their scholarship, the HE sector, and the students that study within it.
We’ll be joined by one of the papers authors, Rose Gann, who’ll give a lightning talk summary of the paper to kick off our discussion. All welcome, as usual, we’ll be meeting on Zoom, meeting URL is public at zoom.us/j/96465296256 (meeting ID 9646-5296-256) password is in the slack workspace at uk-acm-sigsce.slack.com, join by emailing Duncan Hull or Steven Bradley if you’re not already a member. While we have your attention, here are some upcoming dates for your diaries:
- We currently have open slots for SIGCSE journal club on the first Mondays of the month: 3rd August, 5th October, 2nd November and 7th December, If you’d like to present a lightning talk about your conference or journal paper (or there’s somebody you’d like us to invite to speak) let us know uki-sigcse.acm.org/contact
- The next Raspberry Pi seminar is 14th July 17:00 – 18:30 (BST) with Dan Verständig from Goethe University Frankfurt talking about Co-constructing critique: Social XAI and Critical Computational Literacy see raspberrypi.org/research-impact/research/seminars
- Early bird registration for the UK and Ireland Computing Education Research (UKICER) at the University of Cambridge (3rd & 4th September) closes on 31st July, See ukicer.com
Please note this months meeting takes place at the slightly earlier time of 1pm (not our usual 2pm slot).
References
- Gann, R.J., Hulme, J.A. (2025) Scholarship reimagined: creating the DARSHE, an inclusive and flexible framework for developing scholarship in higher education. Higher Education. DOI:10.1007/s10734-025-01562-5
You can cite this post using the full DOI:10.59350/es0k7-6m273 or the shorter doi.org/rddq – both point the same article, provided by rogue-scholar.org