That’s a wrap but what did we learn?

This is the final day of Fellowship Week at NTU- this was a bit of an experiment. Our way of testing out some ideas to stretch and develop the ways in which we support NTU colleagues pursuing fellowship. We were at a good juncture to refresh our guidance and touchpoints with staff. Our observation was the often the completion of a fellowship submission, outside of the PGCert route, is isolating, fear-inducing and at times the response is to retreat, save it to later or hide out! In the back of our minds was the aspiration to turn up the volume on fellowship and the ambition to bring in the celebration to the process!

We have learnt a lot and we will be taking this learning forward as we develop our scheme. How annoying that we need to eat our own words here and become a more reflective provider of support (not just one that advocates others to reflect!) A couple of major learning points include:

• People like to share and individuals gain a lot from the reassurance that others are in the same boat- how do we best encourage this sharing and the good conversations that can happen about fellowship?
• Supplementing our “formal” documents with ones that use a more of a community-led voice rather than institutional branding/or text derived from accreditation documents. The intention here is to bring out the people side of fellowship with a hint of honesty and being purposeful about tapping into the personal motivations around fellowship
• People tackle fellowship in many different ways- so our support mechanisms need to be flexible and agile.
• We need to be making more use of the learning and teaching connections we have at the University- ensuring that fellowship isn’t a bolt on but an obvious link to scholarship and academic career development
• How do we harness the wealth of support from a wider fellowship community?

A Fellowship Community

We started the week with a blog describing the local fellowship community at NTU- we end the week with recognition that this fellowship community doesn’t need to have a geographical boundary- in fact connections have been made with people working to schemes in Australia and Thailand alongside people who are working outside of an institution making direct applications to AdvanceHE. The community spirit has brought together different disciplines, institutions, roles and career phases, the unifying factor being the pursuit of doing a good job in learning and teaching.

#fellowshipat4 was a means of extending our fellowship community- on the hunch that there is fellowship life out there! What a response- I don’t mean numbers or trending (#brexit took care of that!) but the depth of investment in replying to one another, sharing and understanding about where people are at with fellowship (and their careers in learning and teaching) was impressive.

There was warmth, sharing, motivational soundbites and advice- a sense of gone through the pain and come out the other side. So the real beauty of #fellowshipat4 was that the advice came from the community rather than the guidance documents that we use to support fellowship. The authentic voice, lived experience voice wasn’t lost here.

Now what?

• We have to take stock. There’s the beginnings of a rich resource but currently the raw material needs curating. We will share as we develop this.

• We will continue to embrace the learning aloud philosophy and openness to share resources to our newly found community.

• We will continue to provoke the fellowship conversations on twitter via @NtuTilt

• We will be creative in our approaches and not shy away from prototyping. In fact watch this space as we begin a collaboration with NTU Writer in Residence @brizzaling 
• We think we might have another bash at Fellowship Week next year!