20th Annual SEDA Conference – Scholarship and Educational development: The importance of using an evidence base for Learning and Teaching 19th – 20th November 2015 Cardiff.

is conference was focused on scholarship and how it provides an evidence based for pedagogic and academic practice. Many working in educational development are very familiar with the work of Boyer (1990) and Shulman (1999) but there have been many developments since their work and this conference is an opportunity to share practice today. Scholarship underpins the SEDA values and the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF) is also underpinned with engagement in professional development, research, scholarship and the evaluation of our practice. There were many sub-themes for the conference providing some rich discussion of scholarly practice, strategies to develop scholarship and how to raise the profile of this within our institutions.

There were three very interesting key notes with Professor Keith Smyth looking at how as educators we must be clear about our contribution to higher education but that measuring impact was a longitudinal activity which made this difficult. Dr Dilly Fung focused on how the term SOTL often caused problems because the meaning was not always clear and lastly Professor Gina Wisker focused on the Teaching Excellence Framework and the need for us to define SOTL for our institutions and look at qualitative measures as well as metrics. There were also a range of interesting parallel sessions which had both research activity related to teaching and learning and strategies in institutions that supported staff developing their role around SOTL.

For further information on some sessions see my conference blog here https://blogs.city.ac.uk/pamsconferences/