Campus Talks: Teaching strategies to get students reading and speaking up in class

Drawing on research into the experiences of Chinese academics in the UK, we hear how these subtle but powerful discriminatory acts manifest in universities and what could be done to address them - - - Microaggressions are often overlooked in the official literature on discrimination which tends to focus on more explicit behaviours that can be readily identified and dealt with. Yet these seemingly subtle acts can have a big impact on those subjected to them, as this week’s podcast guest explains. Ming Cheng, professor of higher education at Sheffield Hallam University, carried out research into the experiences of Chinese scholars working in English universities and found a striking prevalence of microaggressions. On this week’s episode of Campus Talks, she shares her definition of microaggressions and gives examples of how they manifest within universities, drawn from her research. We hear about the impact of these behaviours but also what action universities could take to prevent microaggressions going unnamed and unopposed. You can read Ming's full research paper here: Navigating microaggressions in the workplace: experiences of Chinese international academics in England | Higher Education | Springer Nature Link.

As open research moves closer to the mainstream, how it is practised is also responding to broader changes in technology and the research ecosystem. Uses of generative AI – to synthesise data, write academic papers and create funding applications – challenge the status quo, even as the tools bring gains in accessibility and efficiency. How can young scientists take on practices that align with open research goals for outputs that are findable, accessible, reusable and interoperable while still working within traditional measures of academic success? To provide insight and practical advice, this episode talks to two experts in open science, with expertise in teaching, research, publishing and policy: Julia Priess-Buchheit is a professor and researcher at Kiel University in Germany and, since 2018, has been scientific director and chair of the board of the Centre for Constructive Science. Priess-Buchheit has provided scientific advice to international and European initiatives, including the Global Research Initiative on Open Science and the European Open Science Cloud Association. In June, the report she co-authored with a large interdisciplinary team, Open Science and the Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Scientific Exchange, was presented at the meeting of the Panel for the Future of Science and Technology at the European Parliament. Sarahanne Field is an assistant professor in pedagogy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. With a background in psychology and metascience, she teaches on ethics, research practice, scientific knowledge production and its relationship to society, as well as qualitative research methods. Field is editor-in-chief of the open access Journal of Trial and Error. To learn more about how to foster an open research culture, head to our latest spotlight guide. You’ll find a previous Campus Talks episode about open access here.

While academia offers some well-trodden career paths – from PhD then post-doc to lecturer, professor, departmental head and ultimately into university leadership – there are plenty of alternative routes to success in higher education. On this week’s episode of Campus Talks, we find out how individuals can carve out their own unique careers within the university hierarchy while still demonstrating the necessary knowledge and skills to those all-important promotion and recruitment panels. Harriet Dunbar-Morris, the new deputy president and chief academic officer at South East Technological University (SETU), in Ireland, offers her take on how those in higher education can best prepare for the next career move and what university recruiters themselves could do to attract a greater diversity of talent. Harriet, who was previously pro vice-chancellor academic and provost at the University of Buckingham, shares her own career building strategies, what success looks like for her and why demonstrating impact can and should go beyond just publication and funding records.

An expert in student-centred instructional design talks through the process of creating effective university courses, including the potential of artificial intelligence to support feedback and revision

A world leading data visualisation expert talks about leading the global Human Reference Atlas initiative and how collaboration enables researchers to think far bigger - - - “Oftentimes it's said that if you want to go fast, you go alone, but I don't think you can go far this way. If you want to go far, you have to go together.” So states Katy Börner during this episode of Campus Talks, in which we ask her about her ground-breaking project aimed at mapping all the anatomical structures and human cells in the human body, the Human Reference Atlas (HRA). This project relies on the input of thousands of researchers across multiple disciplines from all over the world, including several other ambitious physiological ‘atlasing’ efforts which are working in parallel to the HRA. The Victor H. Yngve Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Information Science at Indiana University, Katy is also a founding director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science (CNS) Center and she is a curator of the international Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibition. She explains how she developed such an interest in data visualisation work and why she has embraced an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to research throughout her career.