Topic outline

  • Feedback from Previous Participants

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    • Sharron Jones

      Education Futures Unit; 2022 RWT participant

      Collegial, impactful, and amazing. Participating in the Research While Teaching series throughout 2022 took me from being a 'long time listener' to 'first time caller' in academic research and writing. As a classroom teacher and leader in regional schools for more than two decades, and now an early career academic and researcher, RWT mirrors the collegial and collaborative immersion of daily school and community life and locates it alongside the undergraduate teaching and learning experience, connecting theory to practice, research, and writing.

      The structure, process, and scaffolded experience of deep and deliberate professional learning through RWT paralleled my daily teaching and academic participation enabling the identification, clarification, and exploration of a regionally specific and locally significant challenge of practice. What kept me awake at night resonated strongly with my final year Education students and together we embarked on the journey of Action Research, exploring the collegial, pedagogic, and interpersonal relationships between pre-service, supervising and university teachers - from their perspective. This was impactful and relevant for all of us as the final year Education students cross the boundary from pre-service to beginning teachers.

      The collegial and generous collaboration between and among the participants and leaders of the RWT 2022 series, along with the scheduled monthly sessions, supported and built professional insight and fostered personal connections across academic disciplines, and kept our Action Research project moving along to a realistic and manageable timeframe, with the goal of sharing and showcasing our research firmly in our sights. The RWT series is not a single serve, 'that was nice' kind of experience, it's a 'keep coming back for more' opportunity that is indeed amazing.

    • Dylan Chown

      Education Futures Unit; 2021 RWT participant

      I have been pushed, inspired, and encouraged by such meaningful engagement with our colleagues across Education Futures and the insight into the innovative teaching they are engaged in. There is no doubt it has enhanced my teaching (I don't recall such impactful shifts in my practice in many years), as well as my emerging scholarship, and most significantly, as my students' (colleagues') feedback (data) attests, their student experience in the course. As we all know, there is tick a box development (that we survive through), and there is meaningful professional learning that hits the mark (that we thrive in) - this has most certainly been the latter. I am very excited that this will be offered next year and look forward to picking up where I left off here to advance my SoTL further (towards publication and sharing).

    • Anne Brady-Smith

      Education Futures Unit; 2022 RWT participant

      As a newer academic, I was unclear of the processes required to complete research at university. Whilst I had done research in my studies, it was done during COVID-19 when all Ethics approvals were stopped. Being guided through the process from choosing a topic, developing the 'hopeful idea', to being able to clearly articulate the concepts I wanted to investigate, provided me with new skills and knowledge.

      Being guided through the Ethics process by Dr Hattam was an enormous help, as I had an irrational fear of this process, thinking it was 'too difficult', and thus would make me shy away from wanting to research. Dr Hattam's guidance through this process helped me learn that when applying for Ethics approval, it was more of a 'back and forth conversation', designed to protect both myself and my participants. Once Ethics approval was obtained, I was able to begin my research via anonymous survey.

      My project was focused on language and the way it is used around the LGBTQI+ community. Understanding the need to be using pronouns in classrooms and in email signatures, are small ways of creating a safe space for students. Many students were aware of when gendered terminology was used, indicating that teaching staff and researchers need to keep up-to-date with non-inclusive terms, especially when writing course content and reporting on research.

    • Dr Cate Hudson & Dr Michele Jarldorn

      Justice and Society Unit; 2022 RWT participants

      We participated in the Research While Teaching Program across 2023. While at first, we were unsure of what we would research, or where that research would lead us, we were excited to have the opportunity to address our teaching challenges in a methodical way. Although we could have attempted to address these challenges without the program, it's unlikely that we could have done so in such an organised and systematic manner.
      Early in the program, we were introduced to an action research framework as a tool to help examine and address our respective teaching challenges. Doing so in a group mean that we could raise and discuss our own teaching challenges, but we could also learn about the challenges our colleagues faced and the way they chose to address these during the program.
      The structured monthly online meetings provided 'just in time' information to help us keep up the momentum with our projects, and meet deadlines to keep the projects moving forward, while the peer support we gave and received contributed ideas for addressing teaching challenges outside our own projects. Other benefits included the opportunity to build relationships with colleagues across Justice & Society, and the level of collegial, moral support when other demands threatened to overtake progress with the project.
      Despite the breadth of projects across the Research While Teaching program, the ethics application process was made easier with a template for completing the ethics application, which effectively saw our individual projects as a variation of a larger ethics application lodged by Sarah and her team, thus saving us a lot of time.

      Cate's project sought to explore the reading habits of students. The student voice provided evidence to inform changes to course design and therefore boosted the chances of success in addressing the challenge. Students were participants in the research and provided suggestions for changes to the way that readings were presented on the course website. Data were gathered, strategies developed and piloted on the course website in SP5 2022.
      These strategies were then integrated into a different course website for SP2 of 2023. A second round of the project will gather evidence of the strategies' influence on student engagement with reading. From a scholarship of teaching perspective, the program has provided peer support, evidence to inform and support changes to Cate's course site. Outcomes also include three conference presentations, a paper in draft form for publication and later in 2023 a fourth conference presentation will present the findings from the project's second iteration.

      Michele's project sought to learn what students wanted and needed during their honours year and was based upon the understanding that although an honours year can be rewarding and transformative, it is also demanding and stressful. This is often due to the 'unknowns' of designing and completing an independent research project from start to finish. Michele was joined by the Social Work Honours students in co-designing the project as a series of in-class exercises. We designed a qualitative survey, and then used Photovoice to elicit data, which aimed to answer our research question: "What are the expectations, experiences, and needs of social work students as they enter and complete their honours year?" The outcomes have included a conference presentation and a paper currently in draft form co-authored by Michele and all students.

      We are really looking forward to seeing where Part 2 of the Research While Teaching program takes us in 2023.
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