Tag: me

Totes Emosh

I don’t really know who reads this blog. I’m not sure what influence I have over edu-twitter. I am too tired and too emotional to write anything sensible or analytical here. I have many half-finished drafts. I’m not even sure what I’m trying to communicate here. I want to be insightful and witty. I want to be helping. I think I’m just venting.

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I have been crying a lot. Its the end of Week 3 of teaching, and I’ve had at least three big meltdowns and some smaller ones.

I’m one of life’s criers. I cry at graduation, at weddings, at birthdays, I cry at the thought of this advert and at the bridge of this song. Tears are my response to any strong emotion. I’ve cried in meetings. This is who I am. 

This week, I’ve had a lot of questions from my students. They haven’t understood some elements of the course. I haven’t been clear enough. Each time the questions come I feel the tears pricking. I’ve heard from some of them about the shitty year they’ve had, I’ve listened to their worries, and I feel just awful for not being better at this. 

In this swirl of guilt and sadness comes frustration. I’ve said this I’ve written this I knew all this would happen. I want to scream. I want to cry. I do cry. I walk away from my emails a moment and come back. 

I rewrite what I think I’ve said before. I try so hard to be kind. I film another round up video to try and put a face to everything that they’re getting. 

And my god this is taking up my time. Trying, and sometimes failing, to be kind is eating my time. I see the untackled jobs and emails mounting. And I will not answer emails after five. Unless you count the insomnia emails.

I don’t really know who reads this blog. I’m not sure what influence I have over edu-twitter. I am too tired and too emotional to write anything sensible or analytical here. I have many half-finished drafts. I’m not even sure what I’m trying to communicate here. I want to be insightful and witty. I want to be helping. I think I’m just venting.

Here’s what I’d like to be reading:

You’re doing the best you can right now. I know that this sucks, and the fact that you’re doing it at all is the victory. Remember that the students are stressed too, and kindness goes both ways. You have made some mistakes, but you know that you can learn from them. Mistakes don’t mean you’re stupid. What will you do differently next time? Remember, I’m asking what you are going to do differently. You only have control over a limited number of factors, which one of those are you going to change? 

One of the small factors I have control over is a bit of an audience. Someone to share this with. To say “hey, I’m finding this hard. I think you might be finding it hard too.” Maybe I can help us keep staff and keep students if I just remind people that at the other side of a screen is a human who’s hard a hard 7 months.

Most of all, I want to be told I’m doing a good job, and I want a pat on the head for getting this far.

That’s probably how the students feel too.

Chronicles of Athena: Chatty Theenie

I’m training Athena how to use Augmented and Assisted Communication tools (talk buttons!) Want to know more?

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Have you heard of Hunger 4 Words? Christina Hunger is a speech pathologist who has started using Augmented and Alternative Communication techniques to help her dog communicate. You can read about Christina and her lovely dog Stella over on Christina’s website here.

Needless to say, I was immediately fascinated.

Christina has a great introductory post here which I recommend you read to verse yourself in AAC. Athena certainly is able to express herself, often with different vocalisations, but often with behavioural cues. And she’s pretty good at understanding what we mean with our vocal and behavioural cues. Things like ‘food’, ‘play’ and ‘bedtime’ are all easily communicated between us.

We know that Athena will learn a behaviour – she has a whole host of ‘tricks’ that she will do (despite me being a terrible trainer). So why am I interested in button pushing? Well I want to know if Athena can generalise and predict.

If Athena knows what ‘ball’ is, can she press ‘ball’ to tell me that’s what she wants, even if she can’t see it? Would she ever be able to press ‘food’ + ‘ball’ to tell me she wants her puzzle-feeder filled? Would I ever be able to say ‘food’ + ‘ball’ and would she be able to say ‘no’ + ‘food’ + ‘hedgehog’?

To be honest, I don’t believe she ever will. I think that’s a step too far for a cat. I don’t think I’ve ever seen scientific evidence that a cat can conceptualise of two different futures and choose one or the other. I think they’re more reactive than that. But one of the things I love about social media is how it can give us access to larger sample sizes, to more information, to more examples of what’s possible.

So I’ve started Theenie on her AAC journey. If you’re interested in following her, she has her own Instagram now!

https://www.instagram.com/p/CDOwdtcnv0L/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

Reflecting on Values

If nothing else, the impact of COVID19 is going to make people think about how they teach. Now’s a good time to think about how we work to the UK Professional Standards Framework

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By now you will have read and no doubt commented on our 10 Simple Rules for an Online Pivot, after all it’s been preprinted for over a week, and time moves fast these days.

You have now sought out my blog for more of my intelligent wisdom on all things pivoting.

Sadly, my coauthors are not here to edit me down or cover for my ineptitude, so you’re stuck with me today.

Something we gently hinted at in our 10 Simple Rules, but didn’t have the time or indeed the energy to go into detail on, was the idea that monitoring and evaluation of courses was going to be exceptionally challenging over the next academic year. I think this also feeds into what we mean by ‘evidence’ in higher education, which is a conversation I have with my mentees for the Advance HE Fellowship Accreditation Scheme a lot.

Absolutely everyone teaching through this experience should be able to go for one of the Advance HE Fellowship levels after this. Associate Fellow, Fellow, Senior Fellow or Principal Fellow. The four different roles aren’t so much a progression up the ranks, but rather a reflection on the different ways you can teach. At R(D)SVS for example we’ve gone big on getting people to Associate Fellow level, particularly our clinical staff including vet nurses, and lab and teaching techs. The scheme is flexible, and allows our staff to get recognition for example as to how they manage their learning environment (you ever tried to manage 20 UGs in a cow shed?), even if their teaching role doesn’t include aspects like assessment and QA. Fellows are likely lecturers, Senior Fellows are supporting others to teach, and Principal Fellows supporting the sector and the development of their colleagues. 

As clinicians and STEMM practitioners, my mentees often take a narrow view of evidence, in that it has to be somehow quantifiable and testable. Perhaps we’ve spent too much time teaching null hypotheses. When my mentees are writing their reflective accounts of practice, I often spend time asking them to broaden their definition of evidence of teaching. It can be, I assure them, your  reading of free text comments in course evaluation questionnaires, your student feedback, even your feelings of how the course went.

The reflective aspect of Advance HE Fellowship follows the UK Professional Standards Framework. In the reflective part, you often focus on the Values of the framework, which are:

  • V1 Respect individual learners and diverse learning communities
  • V2 Promote participation in higher education and equality of opportunities for learners
  • V3 Use evidence-informed approaches and the outcomes from research, scholarship and continuing professional development
  • V4 Acknowledge the wider context in which higher education operates recognising the implications for professional practice

You demonstrate these across all areas of activity that are relevant to you, and with the core knowledge you have. People going at different levels of the award will use them differently, but I often find that people struggle to identify how they use the values. Well today I taught my first pivoted class. I think this one probably counts as ‘non emergency pivoting’ as we had a bit of time to think about it. I thought it would be useful for folks to see an example of reflection here for teaching. You can see where I highlight how the values affected my choices, and how I use ‘evidence’ in this context. 

This class was an SCQF Level 11 tutorial on data literacy skills, and was the first time I had taught this material as I was new to the course this year. It is very similar to an on-campus course I teach at SCQF Level 8 and an online MSc I teach at SCQF Level 11. In addition, this teaching is being split across two staff members, so needs to be consistent. I teach this kind of material quite differently on campus and online, so it was challenging to receive a new tutorial set with limitations on what I can change and how I can influence the classroom. I know from both other courses that this subject is sometimes challenging and frustrating for students, partly because students are often at very different stages with these skills, and being able to check with each individual where they’re at is a key part of the teaching. I have seen this in course feedback, and challenges in teaching data literacy is often discussed in the literature (Kross & Gau, V3). In my preparation I found myself wondering how many students would be learning with only one screen, and so balancing the computer task at hand with the handout and e-learning software. Having had several one-to-one interactions with students during this period, I’d noticed that workspaces were often not ideal, in bedrooms, or in shared workspaces with family (V1). I decided to mirror the handout on the e-learning software presentation, and when screen-sharing I would share a small window to ensure detail was preserved when viewing on a small screen (sharing my large monitor for example would result on very small text if viewing on a laptop screen, I had discovered this during a run through with a colleague, V2, V3). During the session I was keen to manage expectations and model the practice I wanted to see, for example I highlighted to the students that this was not ‘typical’ teaching and I would appreciate their feedback on what worked and didn’t work, and I told students that as I was broadcasting my mic a lot during the session, they may hear some background noise as I was working in a shared space. I wanted to ensure that reasonable levels of background noise, such as pets or children engaging with the students, was not something to be worried about during the session. There is a lot of debate at present regarding what a good learning environment looks like, and I have seen people take stricter approaches to effective working environments (V4), however in my previous experience with teaching this topic, particularly with online learners, it was more important for me to create a relaxed and welcoming environment, particularly for these students who are having difficulties learning online. In future I might want to re-evaluate this approach, particularly as some students may find their working style evolves with more experience at distance learning, and I will continue to monitor the informal feedback from classes and colleagues’ experiences to make that decision. 

I hope that example of a worked reflection, mapped to the values, will be useful for anyone worked towards Advance HE fellowship. What I did leave out was a feeling of intense sadness after I was finished. I felt homesick for my campus, my home, in a way I wasn’t expecting. What’s coming up is going to be hard for all of us – but if this is the push you need to finally recognise the active choices you make when you teach, well I’ll count that as a win.

Productive Wastage

I’m often accused of being productive, which is not how I think of myself. Instead, I spend time on things I never think will be finished . . .

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I’m often accused of being productive which I find hysterical because I have had to dedicate a whole cupboard to my unfinished crafting projects and my list of ‘started’ papers is longer than my list of actual finished ones, never mind just the published ones.

Some colleagues and I were discussing productivity on Friday and one of my accusers said she’d read that the key to productivity was focussing on the process and not the end product. When I describe my work process I often say that I hate ‘kidding myself’. If I’m not going to do the thing that I’m supposed to do I don’t sit staring at it, instead I do something else. For example, my NSS package happened when I was supposed to be addressing some reviewers’ comments for our assessment paper. And on Friday, when I was supposed to be addressing those comments again, I went home and played Assassin’s Creed because it had had been a bit of a difficult week and the freedom to say “bugger it” is one of academia’s greatest perks. (Never underestimate the power of ‘bugger it’ when talking about productivity). I don’t kid myself about the work I’m doing.

I have never considered my ‘don’t kid yourself’ motto in terms of ‘process’, but it might actually be a more useful way to conceptualise it. I like exploring different processes. I usually have a little chunk of something I’ve tried before – you want to know about ‘play’? Well one Monday afternoon I randomly did a lit review for the beginning of a paper, here it is. You’d like to know how to make an R Package, well one week I wrote a data package for fun. While there is an end product for these things, I don’t necessarily bother with them.

One of the greatest examples of this is NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated, National Novel Writing Month takes place in November each year and encourages everyone to write a 50,000 word novel. I love NaNoWrimo and have taken part several times, and finished only once. NaNoWriMo does not care about the final product. A common solution to writer’s block is to have ninja’s jump through the window, which will take at least ten pages to resolve before you have to get back to wherever you were doing. To me, this is the ultimate test of process.

I’ve been idly playing with my own idea for 2018 and I decided to announce the name with this blog post – I’ll be writing “Love in the Time of Elk Cloner” this year, and I probably won’t finish, given that November has a lot of marking for me, but that’s not the point. The point is that I will work on those skills, and exercise my creative muscles, and next time someone needs something a bit left-field written, I’ll be ready.


So, academics and technical folks – this is my recommendation for being productive like me – waste more time on stuff that won’t be finished, especially ridiculous novels with barely thought out premises. If you want to give it a shot, you can start NaNoWriMo with me this year. Follow me over there.

The Gold Standard

This a blog about assessment and urine. I promise there’s more of a point than the punny title.

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This is a blog about assessment and urine. Please stay . . .  

I was very proud of myself this morning for collecting a urine sample from Athena. She seems to be suffering from cystitis, which is common in cats in her demographic. By a bizarre coincidence I happen to have a UTI this week as well, which is a common occurrence in my demographic. The upshot of this is that on Wednesday I saw a GP deal with my case very effectively, and a vet deal with Athena’s case very effectively. Both practitioners impressed me.

In medical education we have a concept, Miller’s Pyramid, which describes the different levels of ability in a practitioner.

  • You know
  • You know how
  • You show
  • You do

Obviously the ‘doing’ is the most important part. Both my GP and my vet did an excellent job of doing, with a lot of similarities in how they handled their respective cases. Both were good at providing detail, providing treatment options, making me feel consulted, and both were respectively gentle with their patients (although I will say Athena was less grateful than she could have been). But large parts of that ‘doing’ is subjective, involving my feelings and Athena’s feelings, as best we can know them.

Let’s take a less medical example. An excellent question for a statistician might be:

Calculate the likelihood of a cohabiting 32 year old woman and 4 year old spayed indoor female cat presenting with cystitis on the same week.

A statistician would need to investigate the prevalence of these conditions in these populations and then calculate how often these populations intersect. We might then ask them to comment on the factors which may make this an under/over estimate, and see if they show enough awareness of the real world to realise that I’m probably more sensitive to Athena’s problems when I’m in pain myself.

Even with this example, which uses lovely objective maths, there isn’t a true ‘right’ answer for doing. You might use different estimates, for example, or you may bring in other information (such as the fact cystitis may be associated with stress, in cats, and possibly in women). The best you can do is give your estimate and outline your thinking as to why this is the case.

At the same time, it’s MSc marking season. We say the gold standard for an MSc is to be of ‘publishable quality’, but in line with #PeerReviewWeek18 (yeah, that is unbelievably a thing), we scientists can’t decide that amongst ourselves. A recent study has shown that as readers, scientists are reasonably good at guessing which papers will not be replicated, and yet we still allow those papers to be published – we are the ones who peer review them after all.

My GP and my vet were responsive to me, and both were very accepting of the ‘grey’ areas in diagnoses. My vet deeply impressed me by strongly recommending a painkiller for Athena (who is currently snoozing very comfortably on my left leg), and my GP was extremely good at parsing my confused jumble of “I’m not sure if this is a symptom or if I’m just overly-anxious today”.

When I was asked to collect a sample of Athena’s urine I thought back to when I used to perform similar tasks in the wildlife hospital I worked in over ten years ago. Then, the assessment criteria (that I perceived anyway) was to perform the task quickly, with economic use of resources and with a minimum of fuss. But this morning I wanted to do it calmly, inflicting as little stress on Athena as possible, and still get to my first meeting on time. Similar task, two different sets of criteria.

The same task in different contexts requires different definitions of ‘doing’ – and good practitioners are adaptable. But funnily enough, this week has made me a lot more confident in ‘assessing’ practice. You recognise good care when you get it, not necessarily because it ‘works’, but because afterwards you feel better. Athena and I feel better today, and even if our respective problems aren’t fixed, we’re better for having seen good health professionals. Vice versa, the next time I think a paper isn’t publishable, I’ll remember that I’m capable of recognising quality when I see it. 

And just an observation, it’s those ‘softer’ skills that my practitioners used to demonstrate their excellence . . . 

Dear Readers

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Dear readers,

I have confession to make. In 2017 I did not publish a single paper. In fact in 2018 so far I’ve only had one paper accepted. That’s worrying for someone whose job is ‘researcher’. Someone whose worth is often judged by the length of the publication section of their CV.

It’s fair to say I’m quietly shitting myself about this and it’s been the source of great existential angst.

First of all – there are lots of ways to explain and justify why my publications section is light at the moment, but I should not. I am trying, very hard, to internalise the message that I am more than my publication count, and I don’t want to spend time justifying why I haven’t met an arbitrary target. Suffice to say there’s little I would have done differently.

Instead I want to talk about some of the steps I’ve taken to change this.

Over the last six weeks I’ve adopted a practice I’ve called ‘Writing Fridays’. This is where I’ve blocked off the whole of a Friday simply to write. In this period, I wrote and submitted a short paper, did major revisions on another paper, and published my first preprint. Writing Fridays has been successful enough for me to decide to maintain the practice.

I remember once taking a workplace personality test, most likely an MBTI rip off (see the book for my feelings on this), and whatever my type was called (Eldritch Abomination?), the test made this prediction. “Whenever someone knocks on your door for help you’ll drop everything to do it, even if there’s somebody already talking to you mid-crisis. You just want to be needed.” It’s one of the few times personality tests have really ‘got’ me. I am very guilty of this behaviour.

For me, writing is not about finding ‘time’ but about finding and protecting the mental space to write. I need a whole day set aside, with no meetings, with no expectation that I’ll also be supporting students and colleagues. That support is a hugely valuable part of my role, and I love doing it, but for me writing papers is an expensive mental activity. By blocking off one day in the week I’ve been much more productive at what is actually a core part of my role. I think when I return to work next term, I will be very explicit about my office hours being Monday-Thursday.

The next step has been about more positive about feedback. I’ve spoken about feedback a lot on this blog, and my challenges with it. So part of that, and part of making my work more accessible, has been publishing my first pre-print.

Pre-prints are inarguably a good thing, but somehow in my head only hard science is ‘deserving’ of pre-prints. The kind of fluffy science I do is somehow trying to hide behind pre-printing. This is yet another example of my own internalised prejudices about the kind of work I do. For example, I am more than happy to share a git repository for example about the NSS analysis even though it’s an unfinished flow of consciousness, but my carefully collected thoughts about Discipline Based Educational Research in two fields I know well feels . . . it feels presumptuous.

I hope the pre-print gets feedback, and I hope I listen to it.

And finally, I have been keen to keep a record of my other activities. All academics should be recording their publications and activities for ref. At Edinburgh we use a tool called Pure for this (pure dead brilliant so it is). In pure there’s a category for publications > other> multi media forms. This blog lives there, so do other types of entry.

Let’s be clear. This blog doesn’t, and probably shouldn’t count towards my ref eligible publications. But the other types of publication do matter, and we have the facility to record it. We should be tracking all of our activity, especially as publications become more contentious.

But for now it’s time for me to take some annual leave. I’ve uninstalled outlook from my phone, I’m going to work very hard at forgetting about work, and I’m going to come back to it more productive.

We all have dreams 😉

Clever Cat

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A friend recently asked me about their dog who was showing some unusual behaviour. The dog was suddenly acting fearfully around traffic, although there hadn’t been an obvious incident to spook him. I said “Sometimes clever animals get spooked by things just when they’re slightly ‘off’, they’re clever enough to recognise the pattern is wrong and start obsessing over why”

In some ways, this explanation is mainly to soothe the owner’s feelings. People like to think their animal is clever.

And I’m proof of this. Since having this conversation, I’ve been quietly re-evaluating some of Athena’s behaviours. Athena is a great example of a fearful cat, who runs away at the slightest provocation . . . except when Edinburgh had a brief but very welcome thunderstorm she sat by the window watching the lightning, completely calm. Living where we do, she has got a lot of experience with fireworks and other things that typically frighten animals, and she is utterly blase about them.

In fact, earlier this month we had a packed house, full of noisy family doing all the unpredictable things that Athena finds uncomfortable, and she still chose to join us, and to complain loudly about all the people sitting in her various spots. She even chose to sleep on the bed with our guest rather than on the floor with me (cow).

Like many people in my age and general middle class demographic, I greatly value intelligence. I want, very dearly, to believe that Athena’s general quirks are due to a very intelligent little cat mind that tries to understand a human world. And yet, as much as I want it, I still have to acknowledge this is a cat who regularly walks off windowsills and sofa edges because she’s too busy talking to me to watch where she’s going. 

I got very angry recently at a news article about the increased levels of unconditional offers being made to university. This was supposed to be bad because it would encourage students to take their foot off the gas and make them slack in the year before they got to university. There is a lot to unpack in that statement, which I may get in to another time, but I had also recently read this interesting blog post purporting that examinations make it easier for students with poor social capital to demonstrate their ability.

As an academic, I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that exams test intelligence. I can just about say that certain formats of them test knowledge and skill acquisition. When scientists try to measure intelligence, they get caught in whole heap of challenging research. There is, we think, a thing about some people’s brains that makes them perform better in the tests we give them (tests which we’ve designed are not unbiased). However, believing that intelligence is malleable seems to also make people perform better in these tasks. There are many ways in which social capital helps you perform better in many of the ways we judge intelligence.

What about Athena’s social capital? Daughter of a teenage mum, separated from her mother shortly after birth and raised in foster care. She was ill for a period as baby, and so was slow to gain weight. She was separated from her own kind and adopted by someone who then suffered a mental health problem. She lived apart from her own kind, as is the culture she was adopted into. She developed a long-term condition health condition that gives her pain and discomfort.

When I think about it that way, watching Athena study some loud, cheerful strangers from a safe spot beside me seems like a very, very intelligent response to something unusual. It’s just my measurement is bad.

Jill Goes Back to the Chalet School

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It was my birthday recently, and one of my friends gave me an old copy of The Chalet School. It’s one of the best presents I’ve ever been given. I’ve been hunting for the Chalet School books for years, but they’re very difficult to find and seem to be out of print at the moment.

For the uninitiated, the Chalet School series was written by Elinor M Brent-Dyer in the 1920s. It is probably a trope codifier for the ‘boarding school’ genre in English fiction. There are 58 books in the series and I reckon in my childhood I read a good 50 of them. The books serve as morality tales, preaching obedience and diligence to the girls, while recognising that the most fun girls still have character flaws. Jo, one of the great heroes, frequently is described as dishevelled and romantically dreaming of Napoleon’s conquests.

When I was little, I could devour two or three of these books in a week, so I imagine there was a period of about a year when I was obsessed with them. I remember constructing elaborate fantasies in my head about being sent to the Chalet School where I could somehow become Jo, and my two younger sisters would also be sent to the Chalet School and they would cause trouble and I would have to rescue them, while nearby a handsome Doctor would be waiting for me to turn of legal marriageable age. I also remember going through a period of putting brushes in peoples’ beds and being deeply disappointed by my mum’s utter lack of reaction (an excellent example of negative punishment).

I was aware that the Chalet School existed in another time. After all, it takes ten books to get to the second world war which lasts another five books in itself. But reading the book as an adult, there were a few things that jumped out to me. Firstly, I vividly remembered the odd feeling I had when Simone and Jo interacted and I recognise now that I identified their relationship as romantic long before I identified myself as bi. Secondly, the quality of the German in the book is appalling. Thirdly, the imperialistic tone of the book is really quite troubling at times even if you do try to remind yourself it was written in 1925, the same time as The Great Gatsby and Mein Kampf.

But the fourth thing . . . I think we could learn a little about curriculum design from the Chalet School. Re-reading the book, not just as an adult, but as an educator, was fascinating. I was never one to play ‘teacher’ as a kid (my fantasies were more about letting both my little sisters nearly drown in the ice-covered lakes of the Tyrol before deigning to rescue them in the nick of time so I could be lauded by a much older Doctor), so it’s interesting now to note how often the Chalet’s School’s curriculum is referenced. The girls are very much trained to be good wives, with needlework and mending forming a decent chunk of the timetable. They also must be fluent in three languages and possess good numeracy skills (which many of the heroes struggle with).

I’m not advocating a return to home-making skills in our higher curriculum, but in both the #UoELTConf18 and VetEd18 we had discussions about how much higher education should encourage community spirit and social responsibility. There was considerable debate in fact about to what extent it’s the responsibility of universities to do this. Many of my friends and family work in all stages of teaching and I happen to know that (in Scotland at least) there is a focus on community in early years education, so I’m not trying to pass this responsibility on.

In some ways, I wonder if we come at this from the wrong perspective. Perhaps what we’re really asking for is authentic assessment. In my elaborate self-insert fantasies where a handsome doctor was waiting in the wings for me to turn 18, I was being assessed on how good I’d be as a wife. That assessment is unique to each individual pairing, and has unique criteria. I really like Guliker’s et al (2004) framework for thinking about authentic assessment. They suggest that authenticity comes from:

  • Task
    • i.e. a problem which will occur in practice
  • Physical context
    • i.e. in a space that will be equivalent to the space that you’ll be in in practice
  • Social context
    • i.e. reflecting the social structure you will be in in practice
  • Assessment form
    • i.e. the output of the assessment has a relevance or parallel in the real world
  • Assessment criteria
    • i.e. the things you mark are relevant to how that task will be assessed in the real world.

 

If we stay with the Chalet School a little longer, the tall Doctor waiting in the wings will presumably want me to remain calm under pressure around patients (i.e. rescue my drowning hypothermic sisters), in an unsupervised environment (The Austrian mountains), while not pointing out any of my working class roots (jolly good), and provide continued life for my sisters while keeping up appearances the whole time.

I think that when we wring our hands over whether our students demonstrate social responsibility and community spirit, we’re actually bemoaning how our programme design and assessment don’t translate to what the real world values. Unlike the Chalet School, we don’t want to produce good spouses in higher education, but we do want to produce good citizens. And therefore we need to make space in our curriculum and our assessments to reflect that importance.

And if anyone spots any other Chalet School books int he charity shops . . . . do let me know.

Welcome to the new Fluffy Sciences!

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Hello folks and welcome to the new-look (and nicer domain-name) Fluffy Sciences!

At present, the old blog is still happily present within the old domain, so all your links will still work. I’ve spent the last two years working in veterinary education research, and I’ve picked up a new phrase to describe myself ‘discipline based educational researcher’. I like it a lot, and I’ve started using it more and more, so this seems like a nice opportunity to cleanly move between the old Fluffy Sciences and the new.

(And yes, I hope this means a return to more frequent blogging . . .)

 

Adieu

USS Strike

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I want to tell you why I have chosen to join my fellow members of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) in industrial action from the 28th February.

I consider myself incredibly lucky in my career.

I am lucky, because I only signed on once after my PhD, for a short period of time. Many sign on for longer.

I am lucky because I knew that signing on would contribute to my National Insurance payments, which had been on hold, or only partially fulfilled, for the eight years of higher education I took part in.

I am lucky, because I finished my PhD at 26, and entered full time employment at 26. Many people do not finish their PhDs until their thirties.

I am lucky, because I was earmarked for a PhD on day one of my undergraduate degree, and I received exceptional support.

I am lucky, because I have been given fixed term contracts. Many academics are given guaranteed hours, or hours to be notified, and don’t even have the luxury of knowing how much they will bring home every month.

I am lucky, because my fixed term contracts ranged from three weeks, to three years, and so I have felt largely safe in my employment, as much as academics ever can . . .

I am lucky, because the bank decided to bend the rules on my mortgage, even though my contract did not qualify me for one.

I am lucky, because I’m coping with the mental health problems that accompany working in academia.

I am lucky because I am not juggling academia with a young family, because I genuinely love both teaching and research, because I am not stuck with one of the bullies as my boss, because my visa is not threatened by Brexit, because I happen to work in a field that is strong in the UK, because I’m publishing papers that happen to REFable, I’m lucky because I don’t want to quit . . . unlike them, them, them and them.

Yes, we have a good pension. An expensive pension. It is what the universities give us to make up for the fact that on average we earn less than we would elsewhere. We think that the creation, dissemination and curation of knowledge is vitally important for our students, and for our society, and so we put up with the challenges. One of our conditions of employment is that our employers take some of our money, and give it to us after our hard working life is done.

I am an experienced researcher, I’m an interdisciplinary researcher, and at the age of 32 I will be one of the youngest people to age out of the ‘six years post PhD’ definition of an early career academic. I am managing to keep my head above water, and my career going, and I just about feel safe now. The proposed cuts will take £12,000+ per year away from my pension.

 

I am what it looks like to be lucky in academia. Take our pensions, and academia will be lucky to have any of us left.