A Cup of TEA

This week Catherine and Mike meet Brian Houston, Knowledge Exchange lecturer based in the Aura Innovation Centre, discussing his academic journey through research, teaching and knowledge exchange (KE).

Brian is a Mechanical Engineering Knowledge Exchange Lecturer, and Manager of the Aura InventX initiative. As a KE advocate he is passionate about facilitating collaboration through the delivery of multi-disciplinary Research, Development, and Innovation projects; and bringing together the Aura Innovation Centre (AIC) facility and team, academic and technical colleagues from across the University, and external stakeholders over real world innovation challenges. He aims to increase utilisation of, and accessibility to, University Research and Development capabilities; and to combine them with academic expertise to support Knowledge Exchange initiatives, increase research impact, and to encourage progressive education.

“The ethos of Knowledge Exchange is integral to both research and education [...] whenever I was standing in a lecture theatre projecting to a group of students, you could generally always be confident you were the most knowledgeable in that subject in that room at that particular time. In the Knowledge Exchange domain, I find myself standing in front of public audiences and you just look into the audience, and you could have someone there with 40 years in the industry, an expert in that particular area. At the same time, he is probably there to understand what I know about the subject at that time because he is open minded to be engaging in that way. So I tend to, as a result, go into a conversation humble, expecting to understand the person you are speaking to, before you are expected to be understood... and I think that works for the other domains as well. You need to know what level of understanding of your subject students have.“

You can contact Brian on LinkedIn.

InventX brochure

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Cup of TEA artwork created by Layla Jabbari

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Join us as we talk to Georgios Efthimiou, from the Centre for Biomedicine, and discuss ways of promoting student engagement and a sense of community within modules. Georgios explains how he's used games to help support this and how to scale it across large cohorts.

Georgios has kindly provided us with useful links relating to this discussion;

• Microbes against Humanity paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8209641/
• Coccus Pocus scary story competition: https://www.biofilms.ac.uk/coccus-pocus-2022-winning-stories/
• A guide that I wrote for writing pedagogy research: https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/acmi/10.1099/acmi.0.000416
• as Pedagogy Editor for Access Microbiology, Georgios helped building a Pedagogy Collection: https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/pedagogy
• Pedagogy Collection is now under National Teaching Repository: https://ntrepository.com/home/

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Join Catherine and Mike as they meet Catherine Wynne, Reader in English and Lucyl Harrison, PhD student in English, both members of the Living with Death - Learning from COVID research cluster at the University of Hull. They explore how a chance conversation as part of a personal supervision session led to the development of a podcast with a now global listenership and talk all things public engagement, research development, the wider PhD journey and podcasting as a diverse way of engaging with learning & assessment.

Dr Catherine Wynne is Reader in Victorian and Early Twentieth-Century Literary & Visual Cultures and Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise in the Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education. Catherine supervises Lucyl's PhD thesis on the language and literature of COVID & pandemics and as Associate Dean, leads a team responsible for the faculty's postgraduate researchers.

Lucyl Harrison is a PhD researcher specialising in how viral experience narratives are archived during pandemics with a focus on the emerging genre of Covid fiction. She founded the podcast, Pandemic Pages, which explores how writers have responded to the coronavirus pandemic through literature. Featuring in-depth conversations with authors, academics, and creative voices, Pandemic Pages brings listeners an insightful look into the cultural and emotional impact of pandemics on storytelling. She is also a 'Story Maker' at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich, Norfolk.

Catherine: “When you’re working with PhD students, you need to start thinking about developing them for the knowledge exchange and creating all of those other professional skills sets that can be adaptable in various ways”

Lucyl: “When I started my PhD I kind of needed to be practical about the academic space and jobs because not everybody gets a job in academia afterwards... so part of the reason of doing the podcast was building a digital portfolio [...] trying to set myself up outside... [but it’s been so much more!]... and a really good networking tool.

Further links

Listen to Pandemic Pages podcast

Follow Pandemic Pages on Instagram

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Cup of TEA artwork created by Layla Jabbari

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In this podcast, Catherine and Mike discuss playful learning with Simon and guest John.

Simon Grey is the programme director for the Computer Science for Games Programming degree courses at the University of Hull and is an advocate for creating playful and fun learning experiences for students. He also runs regular board games sessions for staff to help encourage collaboration between cross-disciplinary groups.

John Lean is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he leads the award-winning co-curricular experiential programme Rise. His background is in philosophy teaching and education innovation, and he focuses on using play to develop agency and democracy in university students. In his spare time he plays too many videogames, drinks too much coffee and tries to encourage a four-year old to listen to Steely Dan.

Simon: “If you believe that every module has a goal and rules, voluntary participation and feedback, [then] it’s already a game!”

John: “As an education philosophy, it’s about empowerment and agency and having the freedom to do things differently.”

Useful links and references

• The Playful Learning Association site is the best place to start for anyone who wants to get involved. Details of the conference on there too: https://playfullearningassoc.co.uk/
• John's quote "playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles" is from Bernard Suits' book The Grasshopper, John's favourite work on play.
• Simon's definition of a game is from Dr Jane McGonigal's book “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World”
• and also mentioned by Simon: Ryan and Deci’s theory of motivation – self-determination theory (Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L., 2024. Self-determination theory. In Encyclopedia of quality of life and well-being research (pp. 6229-6235). Cham: Springer International Publishing)

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Please do subscribe and share it with anyone you think might enjoy.

Cup of TEA artwork created by Layla Jabbari

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In this episode, join Catherine and Mike who revisit with colleagues Paula Gawthorpe from Nursing and Katharine Hubbard from Biological Science, their work on the Inclusive Education Framework. First home-grown and now available nationally since it was further developed as part of a QAA collaborative project. Tune in to find out all about it and visit the Inclusive Education Framework website for full information and to download the resources.

Paula Gawthorpe is a senior lecturer in Nursing and Director of Studies (Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professional Programmes). Paula's areas of interest include student retention, academic and pastoral support. Paula is a Senior Fellow of AdvanceHE.

Katharine Hubbard is a Reader in Biology Education and Director of Education (School of Natural Sciences). Her expertise is in inclusive education and awarding gaps, as well as effective laboratory based teaching within the Biosciences. Katharine is a Senior Fellow and National Teaching Fellow of AdvanceHE.

Paula: “How do you evidence that in day to day practice & action and the way your institution function on a daily basis... how do you demonstrate that?”

Katharine: “The Framework is a starting point for discussion [...] and a really useful tool to show the depth and breadth of inclusive practice."

Useful link The Inclusive Education Framework

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Cup of TEA artwork created by Layla Jabbari

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