Annual Conference 2016; Call for papers extended
Annual Conference 2016; Call for papers extended
The deadline for submission of papers to the UKCGE Annual Conference 2016 has been extended until Friday 18th March.
Held at Liverpool’s Town Hall on the 4th and 5th of July, the 2016 UKCGE Annual conference focuses on ‘Achieving Excellence in Postgraduate Education’. The event aims to bring together stakeholders of postgraduate education within membership and supporter institutions through the following key themes:
- Excellence in Masters Teaching
- High Quality Supervision in Doctoral Education
- The Impact of the Cohort-Based Approach
- Judging Excellence
- Rewarding Excellence in PG Supervision & Teaching
- Research Methods Teaching
- Structural Support
- Leading Excellence
Nurturing and achieving excellence in teaching, supervision and programme design and structure is fraught with problems. It can be hard to define and difficult to identify. In terms of teaching and supervision, some apparent measures such as contact hours or staff student ratios are not really about teaching quality. Student perceptions of it are swayed by academics’ gender, ethnicity and other cultural characteristics. Achieving supervisory excellence is particularly challenging as it does not lend itself to conventional student evaluation questionnaires or peer observation in the same way as classroom and laboratory-based teaching. Excellence is not something anyone displays all the time (Ashwin 2015) and estimations of it can vary from just really liking someone as a teacher/supervisor to carefully documented assessments as found in the UK Higher Education National Teaching Fellowship applications (what Land and Gordon 2015 call high and low fidelity approaches).
Equally the structures that support excellence, such as graduate schools, doctoral colleges, doctoral training programmes and staff development centres are part of complex systems. Structures are often defined or shaped by external forces (policy, funding) and are designed with an eye to a variety of drivers including recruitment and priorities in the broader research landscape (such as interdisciplinarity, academic and student mobility, national and international collaboration).
In addition, it can be difficult to separate out the multiple agencies involved in delivering excellence. Supervision and teaching may be carried out by teams. Leadership in teaching is important too (Gibbs 2009). Programme design and support structures are also a team effort, involving a range of staff.
The postgraduate sector would benefit from widening our understanding of excellence in teaching, supervision and programme design and institutional structures and how to support and reward that excellence.
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