Dr Emily Danvers

Conversations around teaching rarely happen beyond formal training opportunities that often take place early on in our careers. After this, and especially during term-time, space for talking  in our busy working lives is often limited. Incidental corridor chats are seen to generate a collaborative and positive working culture and, for some, were mourned during the pandemic and its aftermath. Indeed, post-COVID (or maybe this was always the case?), we rarely have time to talk to our colleagues about anything at all. When it comes to teaching, who do we approach when things go well, or not so well? Who is talking? Who is listening? And who cares? This was the premise for our project, drawing colleagues together across the then newly formed Faculty of Social Sciences, to talk about how we facilitate conversations about teaching, and our wider working lives, to enhance a sense of community and belonging for staff.

The conversation theme was inspired by Jarvis and Clark (2020) whose work emphasises how the informality of a conversation about teaching flattens power relations and allows people to make meaning together without the intensity of an agenda or outcome. They position this work in contrast to formal teaching observations with their traces of surveillance, performance and measurement. Too often we rely on these individualised encounters to ‘develop’ teachers, where in fact, authentic conversations might more meaningfully transform teaching, where colleagues hear something, share together and be inspired by each other in the everyday. This reflects Zeldin (1998, p.14) who notes that: ‘when minds meet they don’t just exchange facts; they transform them, draw implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. A conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards; it creates new cards.

With the provocation to encourage transformation through talking together, Emily, Suda and Verona set up an initial launch event for all the faculty to generate some initial conversations about teaching. The questions and topics that emerged from this focused on the following questions.

1. Why is community and belonging important for diverse academic flourishing?
2. How and where is community and belonging created and developed?
3. How might the labour of community and belonging work become visible, valued and rewarded?

The 12 colleagues who attended were afterwards put in cross-faculty threes and connected by email, with suggestions that they meet again to continue these conversations. As project leads, we were deliberately hands-off at this point, as the purpose of this project is to see if and how these conversations form organically.

A couple of months later, 5 of us met to blog together for the day, about our response to the questions, along with other themes that came up along the way. What we share in this blog collection is the story of our collaboration conversations.

In Jeanette and Fiona’s blog, they talk about what we can learn from student collaborations, which are often and rightly prioritised in the work of higher education.

In Suda and May’s blog they write about the value of time and space to slow down the academic pace and to generate community.

In Emily’s blog, she talks about the joy and challenges of teaching across different disciplines and how collaborations are structurally challenging.

What we learnt from this project is the ethics and timeliness of the conversation format, as a collegiate response to the complex and evolving challenges facing the sector, our students and ourselves as teachers. We all relished time to talk and think about the uncertain, the tricky, the everyday, the thorny, the unequal, the caring and uncaring practices – all of this important ‘stuff’ that sustains us as teachers but has no space in our working lives. We also did not only talk about teaching but about other collaborations that we value.

Our recommendation is that teaching (and other) collaborations should be exploratory and conversational rather than only a tool for appraisal, What we are seeking is regular open and meaningful dialogue about teaching and academic working lives that is not  ‘done to academics at the behest of institutional leaders’ but conversations  ‘with or among colleagues, characterized by mutual respect, reciprocity, and the sharing of values and practices’ (Pleschová et al, 2021:201).

References

Jarvis, J., & Clark, K. (2020). Conversations to Change Teaching. (1st ed.) (Critical Practice in Higher Education). Critical Publishing Ltd.

Zeldin. T. (1998). Conversational Leadership https://conversational-leadership.net/ [Accessed 15.07.2025}/

Pleschová, G., Roxå, T., Thomson, K. E., & Felten, P. (2021). Conversations that make meaningful change in teaching, teachers, and academic development. International Journal for Academic Development, 26(3), 201–209.

Read the blog collection on Conversations on Teaching for Community and Belonging

• Getting the ‘social’ into Social Sciences: how can we learn from LPS student initiatives to build cross-faculty relationships? – Jeanette Ashton and Fiona Clements
• Slowing Down the Hamster Wheel: Space to Reflect and Create Communities. – May Nasrawy and Suda Perera
• Cross-faculty teaching: favour culture vs collaboration – Emily Danvers