Educational Ponderings

A blog by Helen Cramman. Posted: 10 April 2024

So I am not a rubbish academic. Academia just forgets to acknowledge the things I do.

Square peg, round hole.

I started writing this blog post four months ago. Then I forgot I had written it and rediscovered it.

In the intervening period I had become interested in a topic I had not encountered before, Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered. I love lightbulb moments and this was one of them. Whereas four months ago, I was convinced I didn’t fit in academia and needed to find a new job, now I suddenly saw how what I did had a place (it even had a name!) and had been acknowledged as being a crucial element of academia for the last three decades. It was just that no one had ever joined the dots for me before.

What it highlighted though is what is broken in Higher Education. There is, more often than not, a lack of recognition and reward for the breadth of skills that make up the full picture within academia.

So, although it doesn’t necessarily fix all my problems of feeling that I don’t fit, at least I now have a name for what I am good at. I can also now do what academics like doing best; wave academic papers in the direction of anyone who questions the validity of my argument.

Before I share my revelatory moment with you, I invite you to come with me on my journey of how I got there.

The least revelatory revelation of the decade.

A cold, wet evening in January 2024.

Over the last year, I have have listened to a lot of the podcasts You’re Dead to Me and more recently Mythical Creatures on BBC Sounds (They are very good, I highly recommend listening to them). Every episode has an “expert” from academia alongside other guests who have varying levels of knowledge on the topic themselves, plus the friendly presenter who displays an interest and sufficient knowledge on the topic to make the programme flow.

It got me thinking though. Why do the “experts” on these shows all come from academia?

What is it that academia gives that other walks of life get less chance to do?

It struck me whilst washing up, that academia gives the time to specialise in a very niche topic and become an expert on it.

At this point you are probably thinking “well yes, we all knew that already, why are you saying this as if it is some sort of big reveal?”

The reason that this felt like a revelation to me is that this is not in any way how I would describe my life in academia.

So did that mean I was not really an academic?

Jack of all trades?

I have tried for years to succinctly describe to people what I do. I have failed over and over again.

My elevator pitch would require the elevator to break down for me to be able to describe to you what I do.

I don’t consider myself to have a “research specialism”. Instead, I consider that I have a broad and varied skill set. I get very bored if I research the same thing for any period of time. Once I have discovered something interesting about a topic, I want to see how I can apply it to other areas. I am driven by doing something meaningful, pragmatic and immediate.

Not a perfectionist

I also think “good enough is good enough”.

Just to confirm, I strongly believe in the importance of academic rigour and research integrity. What I struggle with is having to spend days, or even weeks, re-editing papers to meet what feels like the whims of reviewers of papers. I want critically constructive peer scrutiny to ensure what I have done meets the threshold for being good. What I want though is a minimum bar to get over. It feels like heresy just writing that statement.

I saw a post online (in Harvard Business Review, I think) that was encouraging those in industry to consider perfection the enemy of good. The post said we should ask ourselves “will any harm be caused if the document I am working on is shared in its current form? Would the author’s time be better spent on their next project or tweaking the wording of this document?”

It made me think of the law of diminishing returns and especially the peer review process in academia. The stats I saw recently for one of the big journal houses was that only 33% of papers submitted to any of their journals would be successful in getting published. On that basis, two thirds of the time and effort we put into submitting a paper to a journal will be wasted. If you want your findings out in the world quickly to make a difference to people, I think we have to question whether this is a good system to be using.

You can probably tell that I get very frustrated working within a system which I feel wastes so much time and effort on continuously reworking documents when we could be moving onto a new endeavour. I want my findings checked to make sure they meet the threshold and then get them out there as quickly as possible, starting to serve their purpose of letting others know what has been discovered.

So, again, I ask myself “does this mean I am not, or maybe should not, be an academic?”

Does this place me in a pickle?

So my ongoing quandary. Am I not cut out to be an academic?

• I am a generalist not a specialist (a jack of all trades, a master of working across many fields).
• I am more interested in developing my breadth of research and transferable skills, not in developing a narrow, detailed knowledge of a specific subject topic.
• I am a practical problem solver not a theoretician. 
• I get bored if I spend too long on one topic, I need to regularly change the problem I am solving.
• My ethos is to be happy that “good enough is good enough”. I don’t want to rework something for months (sometimes even years) until it is the pinnacle of perfection by someone else’s criteria. Quick, accurate and accessible meets my requirements.
• I want immediate impact from my work. I want something that makes a difference there and then for the people I work with.
• I want to write in a language that is understandable to the audience I want to be impacted by my research, not in unintelligible technical terminology for publication in journals.
• Finally, I want to move with the times and the latest challenges, picking projects that need to happen there and then. I want to plough my time into projects with a high likelihood of going forward (or at least to know quickly if we should be on to plan B).

If I am honest with myself, this doesn’t sound like the traditional stereotype of an academic to me.

So, does it matter that I don’t fit the traditional mould of an academic? Is there still a place for me in academia?

What does this mean for diversifying academia?

I do wonder if when we say we want to increase diversity of those working in academia, what we really mean is that we want to change the backgrounds of those who enter academia. I don’t believe there is a drive to diversify the way people are able to work, think and develop once they get here. I think it is still the case of fit the mould or leave.

So, I am left wondering, given all this… is it possible that academia can be a home for those of us that like to work more broadly and to spend time thinking about how findings can be explored across a wider range of applications?

…

Now back to the present day

How hadn’t I heard about this before?

In 1990 Boyer wrote about four scholarships. The scholarships of discovery, application, integration and teaching. Despite having been in academia for nearly 20 years, would you believe I only heard about them for the first time about six months ago? I only properly started to learn about them in more detail four months ago.

Boyer’s four scholarships are summarised in a great paper by Hofmeyer, Newton and Scott as:

Scholarship of discovery: the “creation of knowledge for knowledge’s sake”. It expands or challenges the current knowledge in a discipline. It is what we might class as traditional disciplinary research.

Scholarship of integration is about “making connections across disciplines and shaping a more coherent and integrated use of knowledge.” It is about “creative connectedness, interpretation and synthesis”. “This form of scholarship interprets meaning to isolated facts and creates new perspectives that can answer questions not originally possible to answer.” Scholarship of integration is required in order to move beyond disciplinary silos.

Scholarship of application is “the translation of knowledge into new applications”. It is about building “bridges and collaborative relationships with other disciplines, decision and policy-makers and communities in order to apply theory to solve every-day problems”.

Scholarship of teaching is about “transforming and extending the learning of students and scholars” and crucially goes “beyond simply transmitting information…It is about stimulating active learning, critical thinking and the commitment to life-long learning.”

*** THE LIGHTBULB MOMENT***

Three of those described what I love doing. All four are things I do on a daily basis.

Going old school

What sprung into my mind as I thought about the different scholarships was the sound levels on a HiFi. For each scholarship I have a level of interest and a level of expertise. The levels vary over time and make up the musical tapestry of my academic work.

If I think about where I would place my levels of interest in each of the four scholarships right now, I think I would be up high on my levels of scholarship of application and integration, just slightly lower on scholarship of teaching and probably lowest on scholarship of discovery. I definitely feel at my happiest when I am creatively making connections across disciplines and translating research into new applications. I like trying out these new ideas within my teaching in the classroom too. I do want to generate new knowledge and to share it widely, but I would never consider myself as being someone who wants to generate knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

So, this made me think. Is there any wonder that I feel out of place, because if you asked me to put levels on where I thought my institution placed most value, it would be on the scholarship of discovery.

So that is what I do!

After writing this blog, I have realised not just where my strengths are but also where I focus my efforts. I spend most of my time carrying out scholarship of teaching, scholarship of application and scholarship of integration but also crucially, developing the skills of others in these three scholarships. I find it hard to believe I had never thought about it this way before.

My institution places a lot of focus and resource on developing colleagues skills in the scholarship of discovery. As a nation, that is where we focus most of our research training from undergraduate upwards. There is some work being done on the first stages of scholarship of teaching. I would argue that there is little strategic skills development in the scholarships of integration and application.

So, again, an explanation for why I have felt I haven’t fit.

So, what shall I do with this new found understanding?

Good question.

Number 1, I am going to go talk to as many people as possible about this and ask them the same two questions I asked myself. How would they map their levels for each of the four scholarships and how would they rate their institution’s levels of value for each of them?

I will also see if I can map my institution’s progression criteria to the four scholarships and see what that tells me. It could be that I am being unfair in saying that we don’t value the other three scholarships as highly as discovery. If it turns out that we are giving them equal status in our policies, the next question is whether this is playing out in practice.

I am also fascinated to map what training we have available to staff and students across the four scholarships. If we have training for application and integration, what have we been calling it? Are we developing depth of skill in scholarship in these areas or just scratching the surface (an interesting checklist for good practice in undertaking scholarship is available in this paper)? 

I am pleased to say that in relation to the scholarship of teaching, we are making good progress at our institution in this area, and I will aim to share what we have developed with you soon.

What next?

Once I know the answer to the questions above, I will know where I need to go next. I suspect it will be a long road, however I believe it is a road worth travelling if it helps more people feel they have a place and are valued in academia. I at least now know that someone out there thinks that what I do has value within academia and it has given me an unexpected sense of worth to be able to give what I do a name.

I hope some of these thoughts can help others to find their place in academia too.