Facilitated and chaired by: Dr Rita Hordósy who is the co-convenor of the Student Access and Experience Network. For more details about the network and its activities, please click here.

Overview

This event will explore the research and teaching interlink from perspectives not often seen included in these debates, including that of senior university leadership, doctoral students and university graduates. To do so, it will draw on perspectives from England, South Africa, the USA, Hungary and the Netherlands.

Schedule

Speaker bios

Paul Ashwin is Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University. His book, Transforming University Education: A Manifesto (Bloomsbury, 2020), argues for a focus on the educational, rather than economic, purposes of university degrees in order to understand their transformational impact on students and societies. He is also the lead author on Reflective Teaching in Higher Education (Bloomsbury 2015, 2020) written by an international team to support the development of research-informed university teaching and joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal ‘Higher Education.

Helga Dorner is Associate Professor and Director at the Institute of Research on Adult Education and Knowledge Management at the  Eötvös Loránd University. She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK, and was coordinator of the Higher Education Special Interest Group (SIG4) (2017-2023) of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI), and Board Member of EDEN Digital Learning Europe (2016-2021; 2021-2024). Her research revolves around higher education, namely, universities as sites of organizational, workplace and collaborative learning; academic professionalism and teaching innovations; as well as mentoring. 

Nicola Dandridge is Professor of Practice in Higher Education Policy at the University of Bristol and a M-RCBG Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in the US. She is former chief executive of the Office for Students (2017–22) where she led the creation of the OfS as a new organisation; prior to this she was chief executive of Universities UK (2007–17), the membership organisation for the UK's universities. She originally qualified as a lawyer in England and Scotland, specialising in employment and equality law.

Didi Griffioen is the pan-university professor of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (HERI) at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands. Her research group focuses on connections between education, research and professional practice in higher education. Her most recent book is entitled Creating the desire for change in higher education (2022). She is a Comenius Leadership Fellow, selected by the Dutch Ministry of Education, and was the first Principal Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy in the Netherlands.  Didi is a member of the National Centre for Teaching & Learning Committee, the former Chair of the higher education special interest group of the Netherlands Educational Research Association (VOR-HO), and a former governing council member of the British Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE)