This year marks the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit’s 10^th year of organising the annual learning and teaching conference. To celebrate, we’ve made all of our materials from our previous conferences available on our conference webpage.

We’ve also been looking over our stats and brought together a number of facts for you.

Since the first conference in 2013, we have had:

• Over 400 different members of staff and students from Aberystwyth University present at the conference
• Over 1000 attendees

Most sessions by Department:

Our top 10 academic departments presenting at the conference are:

1. IBERS with 41 sessions
2. Education with 28 sessions
3. Lifelong Learning with 26 sessions
4. Psychology with 21 sessions
5. Computer Science with 18 sessions
6. Aberystwyth Business School with 17 sessions
7. International Politics with 14 sessions
8. Physics with 13 sessions
9. Geography and Earth Sciences with 12 sessions
10. Law and Criminology with 11 sessions

Most sessions by a presenter

We’ve got a tie for first place with the greatest number of sessions run by an academic member of staff. With a total of 8 sessions, we have Education’s Steve Atherton, Psychology’s Antonia Ivaldi and Gareth Norris. Tied in fourth place, with 7 sessions, we have IBERS’ Basil Wolf and Physics and the Graduate School’s Maire Gorman. Big well done to them.

We’re really looking forward to the next 10 years of conferences. We hope you can make the conference between 12 and 14 September with a mixture of online and in-person sessions. Book your place online.

We are pleased to announce this year’s annual learning and teaching conference keynote (12-14 September 2022).

Kyra Araneta, Jennifer Fraser, and Moonisah Usman from the University of Westminster will be joining us virtually for their keynote speech, Navigating power lines: Developing principles and practices to support socially just student : staff partnerships.

In this keynote Kyra, Jennifer, and Moonisah will be discussing their successful staff-student partnership projects.

Session Abstract

For many of us universities and classrooms are sites of possibility (hooks, 1994) that we invest with hopes for different futures for students and ourselves. They are also sites of tension as we navigate complex relationships and power dynamics. How we live education for liberation has become even more pressing in recent years with mobilisations for Black Lives Matter and calls to decolonise universities. In Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances Aimee Carrillo Rowe asks ‘How do we build power lines that connect us to others in, through, and for justice?’ (2008, p. 2). Our keynote engages with this question to explore how we develop principles and practices to support socially just student : staff partnership relationships. We argue that, if designed for social justice, partnerships can create anti-racist and decolonial atmospheres (Bell, 2018) that become sites of possibility. Using examples from our work at the University of Westminster we engage with the intersections of power, allyship, social justice and partnership to consider strategies for building programmes that centre transformative relationships. We share examples of how we have built relationships, co-created programme values and enacted these in partnership projects. To illustrate how we can build partnerships with power lines that connect us for social justice we will use the example of the Pedagogies for Social Justice Project  (https://blog.westminster.ac.uk/psj/). This project is committed to centring student voices in its values, beliefs and experiences and in using these to dismantle contemporary forms of coloniality in curricula, relationships and research. We argue that partnerships are pivotal to this work as they co-produce knowledge; develop new and critical ways of understanding disciplines; and undertake sustained collaboration, experimentation and dialogue. Understanding that these are challenging and complex processes, we offer this keynote as a step in your University’s and your own journeys toward creating socially just pedagogical spaces for students and staff.

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We’re pleased to announce our first guest speaker for this year’s annual learning and teaching conference (12-14 September 2022).

Dr Alex Hope will be joining us to talk about how to embed sustainability meaningfully into the curriculum.

Dr Hope is Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor (Education) and Associate Professor of Business Ethics at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University. He is responsible for the strategic leadership of education across the faculty and undertakes teaching, research and consultancy across topics such as education for sustainable development, responsible business, business ethics and the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Alongside his work at Newcastle Business School Dr Hope is Co-Chair of the United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education (UN PRME) Climate Change and Environment working group and past Vice-Chair of the UN PRME UK and Ireland Chapter. He is a member of the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS) Learning and Teaching Committee and sits on the Northeast board of Business in the Community, the Prince of Wales responsible business network. He holds a PhD in Sustainable development, an MA in Academic Practice and BSc (Hons) in Environmental Management.

A reminder to colleagues that the Call for Proposals is currently open (due to close on 27 May 2022).

Booking for the conference is also open.

Further information can be found on our webpages. We will be announcing additional external speakers, including our keynote, in due course.