Congratulations to Dr Loy Lising from the Department of Linguistics who has been recently awarded Advance HE Fellowship.
The Advance Higher Education (HE) Fellowship program (formerly HEA Fellowship) is a formal recognition scheme for professional practice in higher education teaching and learning support. Fellowships are awarded to individuals who successfully apply to the Advance HE Academy, for their teaching and learning support experience, accomplishments and practice.
Loy highly recommends that others apply for one of these fellowships and she tells And Gladly why…
Could you tell us a bit about your teaching and perhaps share an example from your case study for your fellowship application?
I have over 20 years of teaching experience in higher education. Throughout this time, I have been fortunate enough to teach (and learn from) students of diverse heritage and language backgrounds. This experience has been instrumental in helping me hone my craft as a teacher particularly in the way I communicate content that is engaging and meaningful to my students. One of the case studies that I highlighted in my HEA application was my initiative in running seminar workshops for both postgraduate international students and colleagues at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. These aimed to introduce both students and colleagues to the various ‘norms’ in learning and teaching that different sociocultural contexts may have — and which may be different to the ‘norms’ we have in Australia — with the end view of helping my international students learn more meaningfully and working with colleagues to gain a better insight into students’ diverse learning trajectories. I hope to be able to contribute to the same kinds of initiative here at Macquarie.
Would you recommend others do this – why?
I highly recommend that colleagues consider applying for one of the HEA Fellowships for the main reason that it gives one a platform to reflect on one’s teaching philosophy with an added bonus of an institutional recognition. I would like to believe that all of us who are in the privileged position of teaching others often ruminate on the various principles that guide our best (or worst) practices. Often, these come in a form of informal chats with colleagues or in the applications for promotion that we write in various stages of our career. An HEA application is quite similar except that at the end of the exercise you gain institutional recognition for your best teaching practices. In addition, an HEA Fellowship is internationally recognised and is one of the accepted pieces of evidence for the scholarship of teaching.
Why is it important to recognise teaching in this way?
For most of us, we get our sense of fulfilment through the way we help our students think more critically about the world. However, international institutional recognition of our teaching can be a great source of personal encouragement and can help highlight the importance of teaching – a core business of the university. We often lament that teaching does not get as much recognition as research does. Here is one way of doing something about it.
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