This Action addresses the challenge of creating synergy among the increasingly more specialised and centralised supports for four key higher education activities – research, writing, teaching and learning – which frequently fail to capitalise on their shared territories and common ground. In many institutions, central support for these four areas continues to grow, repeatedly in a reactive rather than strategic manner, in the form of sometimes overlapping programmes or activities, centres, institutes and other units. This responsive growth, often influenced by external forces, can result in the goals, structures and services of these central supports being less than optimal. Equally, what contributes to success, productivity and quality of outcomes, across research, writing, teaching and learning, can remain tacit, ill defined or indeed invisible. This Action addresses the dearth of professional conversations and research around the shared territory of support for, and development of, these four areas. Such dialogue and research, across units and institutions, will illuminate intersections and contribute to institutional transformation based on complementary, coherent and integrated provision.
This Action will address the identified challenge by:
- classifying, as ‘frontier taxonomies’, the common ground in terms of shared purposes, processes, knowledge, values and skills among centralized institutional supports for research, writing, teaching and learning in order to capitalise on their synergies
- offering the most advantageous models and practices for supporting these four areas that are mindful of the availability of new technologies and assessments and that prompt a reworking of current institutional supports which will be valuable and far-reaching.
Higher Education Pedagogy - Teaching and Learning - Higher Education Academic Writing - Building research capacity and processes - Higher Education institutional transformation and reform - Professional learning in higher education
