All entries for Tuesday 28 February 2023

February 28, 2023

Reflecting Back on Researcher Development: Spring Term

A few thoughts from last week’s researcher development session on publishing, editorial work and reviewing.

Last week I co-facilitated the second workshop sessions for the Leadership and Management Development course for early-stage researchers[1]. While the course is intended to take a look and share thoughts around various aspects of researcher development, my contribution was focused on publishing – specifically editorial and reviewing work. After the previous session in November I’d reworked my contributions, as I felt after that session how there was less interest in talking and quite a bit more desire for some learning and explanatory content. As matters turned out for this second version, this was a slight error on my part, as the delegates last week were far more interested in discussions. For early-stage researchers too, they also seemed to have a much broader range of experience within publishing, which meant I could have gone much deeper into some areas of argumentation than I did!

In terms of what was covered in the session by myself, this included:

Exchanges mission, purpose & opportunities
Metrics, esteem and publishing
Editorial workflows & processes
Peer-reviewing models & ethics
Trash publishers
Call for papers for a forthcoming special issue

On post-event reflection, I can see my next set of materials for the summer session are going to need revision once more – possibly finding a middle way between directed learning and discursive exploration. I confess, the online nature of the workshop rather reduced the degree of interaction I felt would have benefited my session, and certainly my ability to adapt on the fly to delegates’ specific interests. It’s one reason why last terms Exchanges AMA worked so well, as I was able to let attendees specific interests direct the entire event’s focus. Certainly, even after three long years of teaching online, while I note it offers some advantages, I feel for myself at least that it forms more of an effective barrier to learning than I would like.[2]. Undoubtedly, talking to a blank screen with slides on it utterly denudes the experience for me in gaining any affective resonance with the delegates, which I rather think is to the detriment of the experience for all.

It's not that it was a terrible session – far from it[3] – I just came away thinking there was a whole lot more I could have explored, or emphasised more, than I did. This is in rather stark contrast to last month’s CADRE session where I couldn’t have been happier with the delivery and delegate response. Of course, that session was face-to-face rather than online – so this might be a personal delivery style preference. Or it might have been that, for myself at least, online sessions work best when they are discursive rather than didactic in structure. A learning point I think for my own future delivery planning.

All this aside, there were however, some wonderful questions from the delegates – and if anything the discourse part of the session was a rich exchange of insight. I learned a few things myself too in the meanwhile. So, I don’t believe my time was squandered, but I am beating myself up slightly over offering a session which I didn’t feel like it reached my normal level of teaching excellence. I can, in the final evaluation, utilise the experience to improve the next session I deliver!

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Endnotes

[1] The course lead’s preferred term for newly minted academics. Roughly analogous to early career researchers.

[2] Which is slightly concerning as, at time of writing, I’m hosting another lengthy workshop session this afternoon.

[3] Delegates may disagree!