Our research group members have a range of exciting projects. Current research projects We get knocked down. How do we get up again? Responding to failure and the role of collegial leadership in creating resilient research communities Participating members: Fiona O'Hanlon and Gale MacLeod HERG members Fiona O'Hanlon and Gale MacLeod are co-leading a project as part of the InFrame initiative, which aims to improve collegial research leadership and research culture in Higher Education. The project will include research on staff experiences of academic failure - reflecting on aspects of the local research culture that supported them and on elements that would have been helpful. The project will use this data to inform the development of resources to support research leads to create resilient research communities. The project runs between August 2025 and May 2026, and further information is available on the InFrame webpage.Visit the InFrame webpage How students define and relate to the curriculum The University of Edinburgh is undertaking a large-scale, long-term Curriculum Transformation Programme and we are members of the Curriculum Transformation Programme Support Group.An influential study by Australian researchers Fraser and Bosanquet in 2006 examined academic staff definitions of curriculum. Yet there is very little literature exploring higher education students’ perspectives on curriculum. We have identified that conducting a small-scale pilot study to investigate student definitions of curriculum would be an extremely helpful and timely contribution to a deeper understanding of curriculum informing the University’s Curriculum Transformation Programme. We asked students about their definitions of curriculum and their role in relation to the curriculum using a short online questionnaire. This research was undertaken by:Dr Catherine Bovill, IADDr Ian Glen, Curriculum Transformation SpecialistOne Pusamane, Student Intern Academic ServicesEmma Taylor, Student Intern, IAD Read the project outputs on PURE Student-staff identities and their impact on building student-staff relationships Participating member: Dr Catherine BovillHigher education research consistently demonstrates that student-staff relationships matter for a wide variety of positive outcomes for students. However, the influence of student and staff identities are a less-explored area of relationship development. Research in sociology and psychology, mostly conducted outside of higher education contexts, suggests that identity similarities often contribute to meaningful human connections. We gathered data from students and staff using an online questionnaire and our findings include some evidence that shared gender identity was the most frequently mentioned identity considered to support relationship formation. Many students and faculty thought other factors were more important, such as shared interests, an opportunity to talk about identity, and staff behavior and attitudes. Read the article: Using scenarios to explore the complexity of student-faculty … Previous projectsYou can find information about our members' previous projects on their staff profiles. These are linked from our 'Members' page. Visit the members page This article was published on 2024-10-07
