O'Really?

All your dreams are made, when you’re chained to the lecture and the teaching trade. Was that lecture, lab or lesson a dream or a nightmare? Exactly what did you learn from the experience? When you reflect on it, how will you tell yourself and others the stories of your study?

The stories students tell about what they have learned, the teaching they experience and research they are exposed to are a key part of the story of every University. These stories demonstrate the value that a University adds to society through the people that it educates, the knowledge, skills and abilities that students at that organisation acquire alongside the research that the institution does.

How are teaching and learning represented in stories online? We analysed the frequency of the keywords TEACH*, LEARN*, STUDENT*, RESEARCH* and SCHOLAR* in ten years of stories summarised in annual press releases. These stories were published by the University of Manchester every December from 2015 to 2024. The main results of the analysis were presented this week [1,2,3] at the Institute of Teaching and Learning (ITL) conference are shown below in Figure 1. There is bad news and good news:

Figure 1: Average frequency of keywords per article over ten years, 2015-2024. On average the words TEACH* and LEARN* occurred just 1.3 and 0.6 times per article in comparison to STUDENT* and RESEARCH* which occurred more than 9 and 15 times in each press release respectively. In theory, teaching has parity of esteem with research, but in practice, this is clearly not the case when counting words in press releases. See [1] for full data.

The BAD NEWS is, the words in our press releases are a long long way off from the words in our strategic vision. [4] This will be disappointing and demoralising for anyone who cares about teaching and learning because our press releases mis-represent a huge amount of important learning done by thousands of our students. They also under-represent massive amounts of teaching delivered by our colleagues across the University. As Duygu Candarli and Steven Jones have shown, this a common pattern repeated across the Higher Education sector. [5] This isn’t just a Mancunian problem, there is a lack of integrity in much of the UK HE sector, what Steven Jones calls “integrity deficits”. [6]

However, the GOOD NEWS is there’s plenty we can do to improve the narrative, by getting on what Sue Beckingham calls the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) staircase [7]. There are some simple and easy steps we can take to tell better stories that represent more accurately what our University (and wider HE sector) actually does. There is a good chance these steps could lead us upwards towards better teaching and scholarship, with students learning more skills and knowledge to prepare them for the world beyond University.

The presentation makes some suggestions for how academic staff can go about climbing the SoTL staircase to deliver even better teaching and an even better learning experience for students. For example, you could:

• Write for the ITL blog at blogs.manchester.ac.uk/itl
• Share your newsworthy stories with the media relations team
• Share your stories where appropriate via the social media channels of the University
• Listen to and be a guest on pedagogical podcasts at the University such as Good Practice in Teaching

These are small steps that go in the right direction towards rebalancing the imbalance above. So whatever you are learning and whoever you are teaching, what’s your story, learning glory?

References

1. Hull, D. (2025) What’s the Story, Learning Glory: Why we need to hear more stories about teaching and learning at the University of Manchester, White paper DOI:10.5281/zenodo.15684409
2. Hull, D. (2025) What’s the Story, Learning Glory: How we can get better at telling teaching stories at the University of Manchester, Poster presentation #ITLConf25 DOI:10.48420/29360969.v4 (Low resolution screenshot below, for higher resolution use the DOI above)
3. Blake, J (2025) University of Manchester Teaching and Learning Conference: Abstract Booklet, DOI:10.48420/29371811.v1
4. Rothwell, N. (2024) Our future: vision and strategic plan. manchester.ac.uk/about/vision
5. Candarli, D., & Jones, S. (2022). The representation of students in undergraduate prospectuses between 1998 and 2021: a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse study. Critical Discourse Studies. DOI:10.1080/17405904.2022.2130952
6. Jones, S. (2022) Universities Under Fire: Hostile Discourses and Integrity Deficits in Higher Education. (Palgrave Critical University Studies). Palgrave Macmillan. DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-96107-7
7. Beckingham, S (2025) SoTL Staircase, National Teaching Repository. Figure. DOI:10.25416/NTR.29438096.v1

You can cite this blog post using DOI:10.59350/oreilly.11284 and get Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for your blog posts at rogue-scholar.org

Thanks to Hannah Cobb and Jennie Blake for organising the conference. There is some extra commentary, acknowledgements and discussion of this post at linkedin.com/pulse/whats-story-learning-glory-how-we-can-start-telling-better-hull–dwyxe