Why apply for HEA Fellowship?
Becoming a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy is an opportunity to reflect on your work and demonstrate your experience to others in the HE community. In common with many other HE institutions, City is keen to see many of its staff gain this recognition.
What is HEA Fellowship?
There are four levels of Fellowship, depending on experience: Associate Fellow, Fellow, Senior Fellow and Principal Fellow.
Whichever level you decide to apply for, you’ll need to show that you meet all the criteria of the UK Professional Standards Framework. The UKPSF concerns your ability to plan and deliver teaching, carry out assessment, understand how students learn, promote equality and diversity, and much more.
How to apply
Some courses (including City’s MA in Academic Practice) are HEA-accredited, so Fellowship is built in to the qualification.
But the HEA also offers an experience-based route to Fellowship. On this route, you can apply for Fellowship either as an individual approaching the HEA directly, or through an institution’s own scheme, such as City’s RISES programme, which is led by Professor Pam Parker.
I recently undertook the experience-based application route via the RISES scheme. I chose to aim for Fellowship, so I was required to write a 3000-word reflective account of my work demonstrating how I meet all the criteria of the UKPSF and showing that my practice is informed by relevant literature. This is a fully referenced academic essay, albeit reflective in style and thus written in the first person.
In addition, applicants write a short summary of their HE career to date, and draw up a table outlining their proposed CPD for the year ahead. Finally, applicants seek references from two people who can verify that the applicant has done all of the things they claim to have done in their reflective account.
All of this is explained in much more depth in the RISES programme, which includes a Moodle module with all the forms you need and a thorough reading list. There’s no need to worry that RISES will be a big time commitment; you might only need to attend one or two sessions. Apart from that, you’ll just need to set aside some time to write your reflective account, and perhaps edit it in response to comments from the RISES programme leader.
In summary…
HEA Fellowship is well worth having, and the application process really isn’t so arduous. Go for it!
