Academic Career Self-Reflection Stimulus Framework

Developed for use with academics who have moved into higher education from professional careers this resource was created to enable them to conceptualise their own career trajectory and to stimulate discussion to identify next steps. It has been designed to be used for those pursuing either a teaching and learning career trajectory or a more traditional research trajectory and allows for comparisons between the two routes.

The resource has been adapted from the work of Kern et al. (2015). This adaptation presents the transition between undertaking the internal and public spheres of research/ teaching and learning scholarship along a horizontal axis and between the informal and structured experiences of research/ teaching and learning scholarship along the vertical axis. The career trajectory is presented as a diagonal from the bottom left to the top right. The bottom left represents the start of an academic career where research, teaching and learning roles are new and individual development is specific to the individual (internal) using relatively unstructured and informal approaches . As expertise develops more structured approaches to research and the development of teaching and learning are adopted, leading to increased opportunities to disseminate their expertise and the academic will move to the top right of the diagram

Colleagues have used this independently, as well as when working with mentors and line managers to identify next steps. This has led to colleagues becoming more strategic in the work that they do, for example, applying for University fellowships which recognise their expertise in teaching and learning as well as providing opportunities to engagement with colleagues outside of the their subject area. In turn these opportunities have been used to stimulate colleagues to identify ways of disseminating their work.

Kern, B. Mettetal, G., Dixson, M., & Morgan, R. (2015), The Role of SoTL in the Academy: Upon the 25th Anniversary of Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. (15 (3), 1-14