Image by Hugo Hercer from Pixabay [edited] Teaching Matters congratulates and celebrates Sylvia Joshua Western and Josephine Foucher, PhD interns for having recently been awarded the Student Partnership Impact Award. In this blog post, co-authored with Jenny Scoles, Lead Editor of Teaching Matters, Sylvia and Josephine share their insightful experiences as PhD interns. They discuss the significant contributions made by their team across the university, emphasising their role in driving and shaping institutional change.

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Sylvia Joshua Western (current PhD student) and Josephine Foucher (recently graduated PhD student) have worked in partnership with Dr Jenny Scoles (staff member, Academic Developer, and Lead Editor) at Teaching Matters in the Institute for Academic Development for a number of years. They have worked together to make Teaching Matters a key learning and teaching resource base for staff and students looking for examples of best practices and reflections on pedagogical innovations, and to bring students’ perspectives and contributions to the fore. The Student Partnership Impact award is issued by the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA), in collaboration with Jisc, as an international recognition of students who have had impact at their universities relating to Educational Development.

Co-creation stands at the heart of Teaching Matters, and our long-standing partnership with inspiring PhD and undergrad interns has been critical in solidifying our longevity and impact as a leading learning and teaching in HE blog. This paid student internship is now a well-established tradition within Teaching Matters to ensure authentic student-staff co-creation. It is important that this is a paid opportunity for students, highlighting the need to reimburse students for their time in learning and teaching production, and creating an inclusive and accessible environment, which removes the barriers to student-staff partnership work to produce knowledge production (Symonds, 2021). Jenny asked Sylvia and Josephine about their experience working for Teaching Matters…. How does your role as co-editing PhD student interns help Teaching Matters grow as a platform? We feel that our work on Teaching Matters can drive meaningful dialogue between staff and students to enhance teaching and learning practices across the University, which can shape institutional change. Recent blog series that we created and produced, such as Generative AI, Being student parents/carers, Embedding enterprise in the curriculum, go beyond facilitating the exchange of ideas and sharing best practices; they amplify the voices of students and staff from diverse backgrounds and disciplines. How does your work relate to the strategic priorities of the University? Our work informs the University’s strategic Curriculum Transformation Programme and fosters a culture of inclusivity, innovation, and community. Focusing on growing student contributors to Teaching Matters, we collaborate with the Edinburgh University Student Association and Student Partnership Agreement projects. Our innovative Student Illustration project invites students to illustrate teaching and learning concepts artistically. We have made educational content more accessible and engaging for diverse audiences, fostering active student involvement in shaping educational dialogue. Furthermore, Teaching Matters has had over half a million views worldwide, and has directly inspired and informed the development of similar blogs for University of Sussex, National University of Singapore, Times Higher Education Campus, and Monash University, Melbourne. What impact do you think have you had? I think for us, this comes under three areas where we have created spaces to share practice and drive change; to highlight the hidden; and to empower others through co-creation. 1. A space to share and drive change: To share Teaching Matters’ outputs, we run active social media accounts on X (3622 followers), LinkedIn (968 followers), and Instagram (704 followers). This creates a constant dialogue around the blog posts, which circulates internationally, and we are often signposted to by other universities as one of the leading learning and teaching blogs. To further the impact of our readership, we created a newsletter for each of our series, which summarises the blog posts featured in a ’Five things’ we learnt from this series’ format. To include the voice of our international audience, we created a ‘Collegiate Commentary’ section, where we invite an expert from an external HE institution or community group to provide valuable reflections on the series, and offer resources and examples from their own institution. One external contributor told us that our “approach is really interesting as part of developing an academic community”. So, for example, we led the conversation around Generative AI at our University, with the ‘Moving forward with ChatGPT series’. The associated newsletter brought together a discussion of five conundrums that Generative AI poses to Higher Education.  The newsletter was circulated on our social media pages, with more than 1000 views on Twitter/X. Our Generative AI podcast series brought together four speakers: an MSc student; a PhD student; a teaching fellow; and a lecturer, who disrupted taken for granted assumptions and discussed healthy ways of engaging with Gen AI technologies in academia. So far, the podcast episodes have been downloaded about 500 times. Testimonial from one of the podcast speakers reads:

“…we express our gratitude for offering the opportunity to have this conversation and disseminate it. Now that the series is complete, I think it is a valuable resource for teaching as well…. Looking forward to future collaborations and thank you again for all your help, communicating, collating the work, and constructing the blog and podcast materials!”

2. A space to highlight the hidden: One of the blog posts from our ‘Student parents/carers’ series featured our Carer & Child room, an inclusive study space at the Main library. The post went viral (about 1000 website visitors in a day) as many University staff and students were not aware of such a space at the University. Our recent podcast series on ‘Student Wellbeing’ brings to light the significant challenges students face today, particularly around financial hardships and the cost of living crisis. Further, our ‘Embedding enterprise in the curriculum’ series showcased success stories in which academic knowledge gets translated to solving global challenges around the world. The Teaching Matters team recently collated five take-aways from the series into a newsletter. Enterprise Executive at Edinburgh Innovation, who co-edited the series talking about the newsletter, shared:

“We have a conference coming up – “Global Inspiration, Local Action: Scaling Up Enterprise Education” which is all about bringing our Scottish Ecosystems together and sharing best practices and I would be keen to print some [newsletter] copies for delegates to see”.

3. A space to co-create and empower: We conducted autoethnographic research with other student interns on Teaching Matters to explore the process of student-staff co-production in making podcasts, as we began to realise that the experience of co-creating podcast episodes was actually more powerful than how many downloads the episodes generated. This resulted in a conference presentation at RAISE 2019, and a peer-reviewed paper. Josephine organised and co-edited the ‘Sharing Ideas’ podcast series with high profile academics in the field of decolonisation, and this has become one of the University’s key resources to promote the ongoing work in decolonisation at Edinburgh. Lastly, some of our podcast audience have contacted us to say:

“I just came across your podcast and I was wondering how you managed to set this up… And can you give me an idea of the production? I only ask because I am planning on setting up a podcast for our department”.

By giving guidance and signposting resources, we are empowering and enabling staff and students to start and run their own cost-free podcast channels. What are you most proud about during your time working for Teaching Matters?

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Sylvia Joshua Western

Sylvia is currently doing her PhD in Clinical Education at The University of Edinburgh and has a Master’s degree in Clinical Education. Her PhD research explores test-wise behaviours in Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) context.  She has worked as a PhD intern at Teaching Matters, through Employ.ed scheme at the Institute for Academic Development.

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Joséphine Foucher

Joséphine completed her PhD in Sociology at The University of Edinburgh. Her research seeks to engage phenomenologically with artworks and the aesthetic experience which she argues provides a different epistemic access into the political and moral intentions of contested artists in contemporary Cuba.

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Jenny Scoles

Dr Jenny Scoles is the lead editor of Teaching Matters. She is an Academic Developer (Learning and Teaching Enhancement), and a Senior Fellow HEA, in the Institute for Academic Development. She provides pedagogical support for University course and programme design. Her interests include student engagement, sharing practice, professional learning, and sociomaterial methodologies.