Planting a SEDA

by Dr Tim Herrick

Thanks to the generosity of the School’s Research and Scholarship Committee, I was able to attend the annual conference of SEDA, the Staff and Educational Developers’ Association. This was held in Leeds, and I was talking about the Student Observation of Teaching Scheme that I’ve been running for the last couple of years (and am currently recruiting to again, for anyone who is interested). This scheme is about putting students into working relationships with staff that enable them to discuss learning and teaching in a more open and dialogic fashion than might be possible within traditional institutional structures. The audience here was, as the organisation’s title might suggest, predominantly those involved in academic development, so supporting staff to develop their practice; I think I made it onto the agenda because there weren’t many other papers thinking about the role of students in this process, so I think the work offered something a little distinctive.

The paper was in the final parallel session of the final day, so the audience was, in the words of Spinal Tap, more selective; but the advantage of that was that we were able to have a really good small group conversation, and I came away having learnt as much from them as I think they did from me. That’s a good result for a process of observation that, as I say, is grounded in dialogue and more equal power relations, and the reason I’ve been taking this work around to various conferences in the last year is to try and get others interested. At this event I spoke to colleagues from institutions who aren’t doing exactly this kind of work, and I hope I planted a seed — there’s nothing in the scheme that couldn’t be replicated elsewhere, and one of the points I labour is that it is relatively resource light, so it doesn’t take a huge amount of industry to get it going. As I say, I left the conference with ideas about how the scheme might be developed, and if someone else left with some notion of what they might do with the ideas I discussed, then I consider that a positive outcome.

Dr Tim Herrick is a Senior Teaching at The School of Education.