Usher Institute

Usher Education Group: First Meeting

We are excited to announce the start of a new Usher Education Group to create a regular opportunity for everyone from those just starting out in teaching to those with decades of experience, to get together. 

We would like the group to:

  • Create an open and supportive environment to discuss experiences, challenges and good practice in teaching and learning.
  • Encourage and support the educational development of staff and PhD students, including work towards the PGCAP and Edinburgh Teaching Award.
  • Encourage and support staff and PhD students towards dissemination of educational work through blogs, journal articles and conference papers.
  • Identify issues and proposed actions to raise with the Usher Board.

What we will do? 

We will meet once a month. Initially this will be on Mondays 10.00-11.00, but we can revise this if a different regular day works better for the group.

At the meetings we will do a range of things:

  • Discuss an educational paper: this is intended to promote an open discussion around practice rather than focussing on a more theoretical, academic discussion of the topic.
  • Present/discuss our writing, or development work, and provide supportive comments and advice.
  • Occasional writing retreats may also be organised out with or extending the regular meeting slot.

For the first meeting, we want to discuss the role of kindness in teaching and feedback. For this, we've chosen Danny Dorling's paper calling for kindness. This has been received as a provocative text, particularly around its authorship. Dorling's focus is upon geography, but we want to expand this to thinking about wider social sciences and interdisciplinary teaching, which bring additional and sometimes different challenges. The first group will reflect upon the paper, and our wider practices of teaching and learning. In doing this, we hope to have some important conversations around what kindness and care might currently look like, or bring to our own experiences, as well as thinking through its challenges.

We will not usually ask people to sign up for meetings, but as this is the first one we would appreciate if could email Jeni so that we have some idea of who may come along.

We are looking forward to an interesting discussion!

Feb 17 2020 -

Usher Education Group: First Meeting

Usher Education Group

Sydney Smith Lecture Theatre