Reflecting on higher education through a psychological lens
In the UK, new professors are usually expected to give what is known as an 'inaugural professorial lecture', a public lecture that offers some insight into how the person became a professor, drawing to different extents on the personal and professional stories that intertwine to bring them to the current day. When I was appointed… Continue reading Giving psychology away: Making a difference in higher education
On 29th November, 2024, I was super excited to join T-FUN - the Teaching Focused University Network (Psychology) - to talk about education-focused careers in Psychology. T-FUN is an exciting brand new network for teaching-focused psychology academics! The inaugural webinar featured founders Dr Katy Burgess (Cardiff University) and Prof Louise Taylor (Oxford Brookes University), plus… Continue reading Shining a spotlight on scholarship: Building and developing your profile in an education-focused career in psychology
Summary of a keynote talk given at the Association for the Teaching of Psychology Annual International Conference, University of Lincoln, July 2024. First published as a blog by EFPTA (the European Federation of Psychology Teachers' Associations). Within the UK, there has been an increasingly noisy rhetoric about “low quality” university courses, which has focused on… Continue reading Psychology? It’s a Mickey Mouse subject…is it?
How has psychology education changed in the UK over the past decade? As we await the new QAA subject benchmark, due in summer 2023, we can expect a growing emphasis on psychological literacy, the ability to apply psychology to personal, professional, and societal domains, within our degree programmes. We can expect the new benchmark to… Continue reading Psychological literacy in the UK: Outcomes and pedagogy
During the covid-19 pandemic, I presented a talk at the AusPLAT (Australian Psychology Learning and Teaching) 2021 conference, which was uploaded to YouTube by the conference organisers. Here is the abstract - and the link to the video follows. Psychological literacy (the ability to intentionally apply psychology to personal, professional and societal goals) has grown… Continue reading Psychological literacy in the UK: post-pandemic opportunities to bring psychology to life
During the coronavirus pandemic, we saw lots of changes to learning and teaching, and there have been a lot of commentators in the media asking “What should we keep?”, “What do we throw away?”. This is my attempt at a response (280 characters on Twitter just won’t cut it!), drawing on a class I taught… Continue reading Learning and teaching in a ‘post’ pandemic world: facilitating student engagement using psychology
Today is an important day for the higher education sector, with the publication of the long-awaited Augar report. My intention here is not to comment on the whole report. There is much that I could (and probably should) comment on, particularly around inclusive education, but I have a writing deadline approaching, so I’m trying to… Continue reading The value of higher education: psychology (and other stories)
Occasionally, I have the privilege of working at the Keele School of Psychology open days and offer holder days. These are action-packed days when aspiring students and their family or friends explore the campus, meet staff and current students, and ask lots of questions about our courses. The question I hear most often comes, not… Continue reading Studying Psychology? What will you do with that?
Psychology is one of the most popular subjects of study at A level (over 100,000 students choose it every year!) and at university. What is it about psychology that makes it such an interesting subject? And, once we’ve studied it, why is it worthwhile? I recently conducted some focus groups (Hulme & Kitching, 2017), asking… Continue reading Psychology in everyday life
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