Sharing Practice 2013 Keynote

Creative curriculum change through research-  Professor Angela Brew

In designing innovative new courses, decisions have to be taken about the structure and nature of the student experience, what it is intended that students should learn and how and whether their work is to be assessed. Using research-informed approaches to educational enhancement means infusing these decisions with disciplinary and pedagogical research findings and processes.

                Increasingly disciplinary academics are engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning and carrying out research on their own teaching and their students’ learning. Often this work is small-scale and may take the form of an investigation into a particular course or subject.

This session will explore how this kind of scholarly work can inform decisions about both the content and the processes of  learning that need to be taken in designing a course that will prepare students for the kind of professional life they will face when then graduate.

Using research to inform teaching in this way poses a number of challenges. Who is included in making the decisions and at what level? Sometimes curriculum decisions are taken at an institutional level, for example, when there is a decision to require all students across the whole campus to engage in a work-based learning experience. Sometimes the decision-making is at a departmental or course team level, for example, when a decision is taken to move the particular degree program to a problem-based curriculum. These decisions may constrain or open up opportunities for individual lecturers and course or subject teams regarding the particular ways learning is to occur.  So on what basis are decisions to be made?  Whose research is to be drawn upon? What theoretical approaches are to be used to inform decisions and what is the role of theory in making curriculum decisions? What are the benefits and pitfalls of including students in the research and in the design and decision-making process?

Angela Brew PhD, is a Professorial Fellow in the Learning and Teaching Centre at Macquarie University, Australia. 

She is Honorary Associate Professor, University of Sydney and Visiting Professor, Gloucestershire University UK. She is an elected Fellow of the UK’s Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), a Life Member of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) and holds a Senior Fellowship of the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA). She was President of HERDSA from 1999-2003 and co-editor of the International Journal for Academic Development from 2000-2008. She holds degrees in philosophy, sociology and organisational development.

She was awarded a prestigious National Teaching Fellowship from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) to enhance undergraduate engagement by involving them in research and inquiry. Before joining Macquarie in 2009, she worked at the University of Sydney where she led strategic projects developing the scholarship of teaching and learning, research-enhanced learning and teaching, and research higher degree supervision. She has published seven books and over 200 articles, book chapters, conference papers and reports. Her research is focused on the nature of research and its relation to teaching, learning and scholarship, models of research-led teaching and undergraduate research. Her books include: The Nature of Research: Inquiry in Academic Contexts (RoutledgeFalmer 2001); Research and Teaching: beyond the divide (PalgraveMacmillan 2006); Transforming a University: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Practice (University of Sydney Press 2007, with Sachs); and Academic Research and Researchers (McGraw Hill 2009, with Lucas).