Today I’m attending a writing retreat. First off, we’ve been told about the upcoming REF (Research Excellence Framework) 2021. I found the presentation both inspiring and daunting. In my head, I have moments of thinking I can do high quality research and moments of thinking I can’t do this. So I was swinging from one extreme to the other throughout.
During the presentation, something caught my attention that I’d like to share here. ‘REFable’ work should reflect ‘scholarship of teaching’ rather than ‘scholarship for teaching’. I think I understand the distinction and it seems to be a valuable one: practice-based scholarship is seen as being more valuable than for-practice scholarship. I’m not sure but the idea seems to be that the significance of scholarship should go beyond the classroom and the institution and be useful for practitioners more generally.
This is related to the need to answer the oft-cited ‘so what’ question. Whatever we do as scholars, ideally, should have implications for others in our field. A less often used question is ‘and then what’, which I am taking from my preparation to claim Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy here in the UK, meaning what is to be done about the knowledge gained through our scholarship work.
Throughout the presentation I kept thinking about how scholarship sits within this research framework. We were told, and I believe this was said in good faith, that scholarship counts as long as the work is significant and original in our field, and has been done rigorously. For instance, the seminal 2009 Worton report of modern languages in the UK would now get four starts, the highest ranking.
And, since I’m at it, what is my field? The presenter described hers very clearly as being at the crossroads between inclusion, educational technology and special needs. Mine is languages and education, though I’m interested in so many other things (leadership, translation, counselling, technology…). The ingredient I’m missing, I was told at the end of my one-to-one mentoring session, is confidence.