The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics: - Higher Education ...

The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics
the work of the PSA Teaching and Learning Specialist Group (PSATLG), to
which I will now turn.
The establishment of the PSATLG was a direct result of the award of
FDTL5 monies to the politics projects. When the project initially received
funding, the project directors were keen to explore how we could work
together to present our work to the rest of the politics profession. An initial
round-table event at the 2005 PSA Annual Conference at the University of
Leeds, facilitated by Jon Cope of C-SAP, had proved a little disheartening
as only one person present was not already involved in the projects. As
such, while the round table did provide an opportunity for further
information exchange between the projects, it did not enable us to engage
others in our work. It became clear to us that to reach beyond those who
were already involved and to ensure that the projects would in future have
space within the work of the PSA we needed to take the initiative in
constructing an infrastructure to support this. In pursuit of this, in 2005
Philippa Sherrington (director of the Scholarship of Engagement for
Politics project) and I successfully put forward a proposal to the PSA for
the creation of the Specialist Group. The proposal was supported by
colleagues from each of the FDTL projects and identified the aim of the
group as being to create ‘a network for those who are interested in
pedagogic issues within the discipline, to communicate with one another
and to debate and discuss the challenges ahead’.
In the four years since its foundation, the membership of the group
has grown to more than fifty academics at over thirty different institutions,
with the majority of current members being drawn from beyond the
original FDTL5 project community, including the current group treasurer
Stephen Thornton (University of Cardiff). Group members have been
successful in organising at least two teaching and learning panels at each of
the last four PSA Annual conferences in Manchester (2009), Swansea
(2008), Bath (2007) and Reading (2006). Papers have explored a wide
range of topics including podcasting, information literacy, the use of drama
and novels in teaching, as well as topics such as citizenship, research
methods and placement learning which relate to the areas explored by the
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