Scholarship in action

Abstract

Baume and Popovic describe three complementary and connected approaches to being scholarly in higher education – reflecting critically on practice, using the literature and contributing to the literature. Subsequent work reported here applies and tests the model in three settings – a meeting of the Southern Africa Universities Learning and Teaching Forum (SAULT); a seminar for senior staff in support of an institutional wide curriculum revision project at the National University of Lesotho; and a Professional Doctorate (EdD) seminar at London South Bank University. Reflecting critically on these experiences, the article explores some relationships between stages of the model, and thereby extends the model a little. More broadly the article suggests how an explicitly scholarly practice can permeate our work in universities. The article also tries to show a reflective and scholarly approach in action, and perhaps to demystify and even de-problematise a little the concept of scholarship.

Keywords:

• Higher education
• scholarship
• academic development
• educational development
• SAULT
• Lesotho
• London South Bank University
• professional EdD
• SEDA
• UKPSF

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to: Celia Popovic, my co-editor for Advancing Practice in Academic Development, co-author for Chapter 1 thereof and of the model of scholarship quoted and used in this article, and co-facilitator of the workshop at the November 2015 SEDA conference, which formed the basis of the seminar for the SAULT Forum described here; facilitators of and participants in the SAULT Forum, for welcoming a stranger and engaging passionately, rigorously and constructively with the theme of scholarship as it relates to their practice; senior staff of the National University of Lesotho, for their lively, critical and positive contributions to the seminar on curriculum revision; and EdD tutors and course participants at London South Bank University for, again, engaging with the model of scholarship offered and for then testing and extending it in relation to their own studies.