Brookes Scholarship Groups

Brookes Scholarship Groups are teaching scholarship communities composed of cross-disciplinary academics and professional services staff (10 to 15 in total members) that engage in an active, collaborative, year-long programme on a theme of wide institutional relevance.

The overarching aims are to enhance student education and to learn with a community of peers. Each member applies to join the group and works on their own project within the theme. In addition, members of the group attend regular group meetings that accelerate and share learning and build a strong sense of community among members. Group meetings may variously take the form of seminars, reading groups, writing circles, mentoring circles or action learning sets.

Each scholarship group is supported by one or two facilitators from the Oxford CAED and is assigned a small fund to support the functions of the community – extra funds may be available for members or the group each year depending on the topic. There is no workload allocation for participation in these groups. Participating in the Brookes Scholarship Groups provides an excellent opportunity for learning across all academic staff and professional services staff.

Features and benefits of participating in Brookes Scholarship Groups

Brookes Scholarship Groups provide a ‘process and content’ approach to enhancing education practices. They have firm foundations in the scholarship of teaching and learning, thus ensuring a strong evidence basis to educational practice developments as appropriate to institutional and sector context.

They:

build University-wide community through teaching and learning
enable all Brookes' staff to explore interest in undergraduate/postgraduate teaching and learning
investigate and incorporate ways that difference can enhance teaching and learning
nourish scholarship of teaching and learning and its application to student learning
increase staff collaboration across faculties and directorates
encourage reflection about education and coherence of learning across disciplines
each Brookes Scholarship Group has its own specific goals and objectives, which the facilitator and members refine but each member and the community as a whole are expected to produce outcomes or products about the topic for use by Brookes (and beyond as appropriate)
opportunity to meet and work with colleagues on your own projects within the group theme as well as learn from others
monthly meetings with peers in the group to work through projects, shape and direction of each meeting is decided upon by the group and is set in the initial ‘away-day’ that each community member must attend
a closing scholarship group event

Past groups

Brookes Scholarship Group on Academic Advising (May 2021 - December 2021)

The pandemic has shown us the importance of academic pastoral support for students alongside their academic study. Students have told us they welcome proactive timely contact from academic advisers. The purpose of this Brookes Scholarship Group - Academic Advising is to draw together a community of interested colleagues from across the university in order to explore what has worked well over the last year. The community will provide a space for members to devise and pilot interventions to further strengthen academic advising practices in the first semester of the next academic year. This group and all the work associated with it will run from May 2021 until December 2021.

In this group we will:

Explore what's working internally and across the sector through sharing case studies of effective practice on academic advising.
Each develop and run small scale pilots/projects to explore and expand effective academic advising practice.
Design and systematically evaluate local pilots during semester 1, 2021/22.
Present and share evidence based proposals and recommendations resulting from the semester 1 pilots to OBU early 2022 to feed into academic advising developments across Brookes.
Collate practices that work at Brookes and beyond, and make recommendations to the University that could improve the consistency and positive impacts of academic advising.

An initial community kick-off event will be held in May and your attendance at this is required to be a member of the community as this is integral to the group’s focus (the dates are on the application form and you select all that work for you). Following the initial event there will be monthly meetings (excluding August) and a final event in December where we will work as a group on our projects to support the aims of this Brookes Scholarship Group.

For more on the features and benefits of participating in a Brookes Scholarship group please see above.

If you have any questions about this, please add to this Padlet

Brookes Scholarship Group on Leading Inclusive Teaching and Enterprise Education (May 2020 - June 2021)

This is the inaugural Faculty Learning Community (FLC) at Oxford Brookes University, the Brookes Scholarship Group - Leading Inclusive Teaching and Enterprise Education.

This is a topic based community, including two topics; Enterprise Education and Leading Inclusive Teaching with 13 members of staff led by Dr Roger Dalrymple (Associate Dean - Student Outcomes).

Participants in this community are undertaking projects under one of the two themes, Enterprise Education or Leading Inclusive Teaching. In keeping with the features of all Brookes Scholarship Groups all participants are undertaking their own project and are committed to reviewing and renewing practices to ensure that all students achieve to the best of their potential and are committed, through their projects, to collecting evidence of the impact of innovations, ideas and approaches to reflect an evidence-based approach to educational enhancements.

Group members and their project titles:

Dr Alys Beverton, Lecturer in History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Dr Roger Dalrymple, Associate Dean Student Outcomes, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences (co-lead)
Mary Davis, Senior lecturer, Oxford Brookes Business School, Inclusive academic integrity: raising awareness of inclusive issues in the teaching, support, guidance and processes involved with academic integrity at Brookes (Leading Inclusive Teaching)
Irmgard Huppe, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, Which factors are vital in making a synchronous online teaching session an authentic learning experience for students as well as an authentic learning experience for lecturers? (Leading Inclusive Teaching)
Helen Liddar, Associate lecturer Oxford Brookes Business School, The value of understanding communication styles for students in their group work at university and beyond (Enterprise Education)
Dr Samia Kamal, Principal Lecturer, Student Experience, Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment (Enterprise Education)
Dr Mary Kitchener, Senior Lecturer, OCSLD
Dr Elizabeth Lovegrove, Senior Lecturer, OCSLD, Collaborative online documents for inclusive learning and teaching. (Leading Inclusive Teaching)
Alan McBlane, Senior Lecturer, Oxford Brookes Business School, Creating opportunities in partnership with students to develop and enhance the learning experience (Enterprise Education)
Lucy Turner, Head Quality and Validations, Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment, Research study into the undergraduate self-perception of employability, Enterprise and career ownership within the School of Arts. (Enterprise Education)
Marion Waite, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Louise Williams, Course Leader Foundation Art and Design, Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment, An exploration into the relationship between the academic advisor and advisee (Leading Inclusive Teaching)

Overview of Brookes Scholarship Group - Learning Inclusive Teaching and Enterprise Education

From the original call for applicants the two themes are:

Leading Inclusive Teaching theme

Participants in this community will be people at Brookes who are leading the development of inclusive curricula, assessment or teaching approaches for diverse students on programmes in subject areas across or within modules. Participants will be committed to reviewing and renewing practices to ensure that all students achieve to the best of their potential and will be committed, through their projects, to collecting evidence of the impact of their team’s innovations, ideas and approaches. Projects will not only explore inclusive practice but could also focus on the educational leadership of staff teams through change and challenge as part of the review and renewal of curricula assessment and teaching strategies to make them more inclusive to enable all learners (POLAR and IMD Quintiles 1 and 2, and BAME). Participants and projects will need to demonstrate how they are committed to ensuring the success of all students through targeted work addressing low attainment of specific groups or through work that adopts ‘good for all’ principles for example universal design for learning.

Enterprise Education

This is a learning community designed to support the development of entrepreneurial teaching practice. Through the creation of a diverse and supportive network of practitioners who are all addressing a common goal (to change teaching practice/delivery methods to support the development of entrepreneurial attributes in their students). This group seeks to embed novel approaches within their teaching and share their approaches with others. The collaborative nature of this community seeks to build upon the pre-existing experience to share expertise and develop new approaches, where necessary. By drawing from a wide range of teaching traditions and disciplines, this group will serve as problem solvers as well as ‘critical friends’ to those that are seeking to change the way they are delivering.

Projects within this community will focus on the topic of Enterprise Education and consider what and how this is expressed within the formal/informal curriculum at undergraduate/postgraduate level. For example, how do you embed aspects of enterprise education within the teaching, learning and assessments within existing module/s or how can enterprise education be a key feature of the teaching, learning and assessment within the programme at each year of study. Approaches need to be focused on student experience and impact as well as rooted within the European entrepreneurship competence mode; “Entrecomp”. Work needs to support the development of one or more of the 15 competencies identified within the three areas in order to ensure that this community is creating a library of materials that will benefit others across the University.