CHER History
2024-
2023
2023 was a transition year with Ken as sole Director, but recruiting an advisory board, who will help manage and promote the Centre from 2024.
The emergence of CELPiE as a strong component of the education ecosystem at St Andrews, and the presence of strong links between other contributing institutions, allows CHER to focus its attention on proving and supporting higher education research.
CHER worked closely with CELPiE in running the first CELPiE conference in October 2023. We hope this will be the first of a series of annual conferences.
2019-2022
During this period, Ken Mavor and Anita Laidlaw took on the co-directorship of CHER to re-invigorate and update the Centre. A number of initiatives were pursued during this time:
- This new website was created, including a calendar of higher-education related events and conferences.
- The membership lists were updated and a mailing list created. There were regular mailing to notify members of conferences and workshops and opportunities to submit abstracts for presentations at conferences.
- Both Anita and Ken were members of the board for SALTI and built a cooperative arrangement around shared events and funding for small research projects and a conference bursary. We ran a research funding round in 2020 in spite of the disruptions of COVID.
- We updated the PURE lists for CHER regularly. Staff who are formal members of CHER are linked to the PURE system, but while we only wish Higher Education publications linked to CHER, by default all outputs often end up linked. During this period we tried to keep the PURE databased trimmed of non-relevant items.
- RIS undertook a review of all university Research Centres and the updated Centre passed this review.
- Ken was heavily involved in the most recent enhancement theme committee (2020-2023) in order to build stronger connections between CHER and the research done within the enhancement projects. This included supporting a visit from leading researcher in Belonging in Higher Education, Greg Walton (Princeton). The visit included a very successful lecture and workshop in June 2022, organised by Ken and funded by the enhancement committee as part of the resilience theme.
- During this period, the SALTI initiative was re-formed as CELPiE (Community for Evidence-Led Practice in Education). The emergence of CELPiE has allowed a clearer division of focus with CHER. Two members of the CHER governing group are ex-officio members of the CELPiE Advisory council.
- Ken Mavor and Gerald Prescott organised the first CELPiE “showcase” event in October 2022.
- Ken was involved in the organising committee for the HEIR (Higher Education Institutional Research) conference in 2021, hosted by St Andrews.
- In 2022, Anita took up a senior position in the Medical School at the University of Aberdeen, leaving Ken as sole Director.
2010-2019
A number of people were involved in the Directorship of CHER during this period. In the early 2010’s research and scholarship of teaching and learning did not have the level of attention and support that it does now. These early pioneers sought to raise the profile of teaching and learning, and to support those who wished to do research on these themes.
In particular we are grateful to those who offered leadership to CHER during this time:
- Anita Laidlaw (Medicine)
- Lorna Sibbett (Biology)
- Antje Kohnle (Physics and Astronomy)
- Ruth Woodfield (Management)
- Fabio Arico (Economics)
- Stephen Holmes (Divinity)
Toward the end of this period, CHER was not as active, and the teaching and learning ecosystem at St Andrews was evolving. A new organisation was emerging to focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning: SALTI (St Andrews Learning and Teaching Initiative).
2010
The Centre for Higher Education Research was originally created in 2010 with the aims of (1) conducting evidence-based higher education (HE) research to inform local, national and international policy and practice; and (2) promoting a reflective, analytical view of HE activities; empowering professional engagement in teaching and educational provision.