Book reviewers for PLAT

PLAT (Psychology Learning and Teaching journal) are looking for book reviewers. Reviews are typically 1000 words in length and reviewers are given 6-8 weeks to submit their reviews. If you're interested, please contact platjournal@psych.york.ac.uk.

Different books will be available over the course of the year, so email PLAT to get your name added to the list of potential reviewers!

Enhancement Themes conference 2013

Next year's Enhancement Themes conference (11-13 June 2013) will be held in Glasgow. The draft conference programme can be found here:
http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/enhancement-themes-conference/conference-programme

The deadline for abstracts is 5pm on 30th November 2012, so there is still plenty of time to apply. Last year's conference was an exciting mix of presentations from across higher education in Scotland, so this is a great conference to attend to hear about new and innovative teaching practices.

Next round of HEA funding available

Funding opportunities from the Higher Education Academy (HEA) are ongoing, and there are some upcoming opportunities for Teaching Development Grants (TDG):
HEA Teaching Development Grants

Deadline for Departmental grants is 27th September 2012 (call opens on 28th August), and the deadline for the Collaborative TDG is 3rd March 2013 (call opens 7th January).

The second round of the Doctoral programme awards is due to close soon (31st August 2012) and all information can be found here (including a video of the first round of award winners talking about their upcoming projects):
HEA Doctoral Programme awards

Best of luck in your applications!

Employability event at Glasgow Caledonian Uni

There will be an 'Embedding employability in the Psychology curriculum' event at Glasgow Caledonian Uni, next Friday, 22nd June (10am-4pm). This is a Higher Education Academy sponsored event, and will be free to attenders (just make sure you book your place):
Employability event at Glasgow Caledonian 

New PBL journal launched

A new peer-reviewed journal for research and articles on problem-based learning has been launched:
Journal of PBL in HE
This is the first and only journal to specialise in PBL in higher education. 

HEA doctoral programme winners announced

The Higher Education Academy (HEA) have announced the winners of their new doctoral programme awards:
HEA doctoral awards
Psychology did very well in this round - attaining 4 out of 16 awards - and there was also success for psychology in the international scholarship awards.


For those who are keen to apply this year, watch the Funding pages of the HEA for the next call for studentship awards, due out mid-summer 2012.

Employability in psychology

Employability is fast becoming a core issue for many HEIs and related organisations. The Higher Education Academy has recently set up a new Special Interest Group (or SIG) on employability, so we can look forward to future developments in this area. Readers might also be interested in a recent STEM blog (so encompassing a range of disciplines, including psychology) on employability: STEM blog on employability.

You can also access the student employability guide in psychology here:
HEA student employability guide, and a new guide for psychology staff on employability is in preparation.

As employability events become apparent, we'll make links to them and advertise them on the 'Events' page as soon as possible.

New events

See the events page for some new events:

• Visual methods in psychology workshop @ Nottingham Trent Uni, 10th May
• Supervising qualitative dissertations @ Huddersfield Uni, 26th June

PBL summer school in Dublin

The 'facilitate' PBL summer school on 24th-25th May is now open for registration and payment:
http://facilitatesummerschool.eventbrite.ie/. 
A bargain at only 50 Euros for the two days of PBL workshop and talks!

Annual L&T conference at Glasgow

Registration is now open for the University of Glasgow's Annual Learning and Teaching conference. Closing date is 3rd April. 


The Conference will be held on the Main Campus of the University on 17th April 2012.  The main theme is "Empowering Student Learners in Higher Education". 

University of Glasgow Annual Learning & Teaching conference

Teaching Qualitative Psychology

For those who teach qualitative research methods, we have good news. The TQRMUL working group ('Teaching qualitative research methods at undergraduate level'; they never did find a better name!) which was part of the now defunct Higher Education Academy (HEA) Psychology Network, has now been reformed. The TQP group ('Teaching Qualitative Psychology'; okay, its a small improvement on the name) is now one of the HEA's 'Special Interest Groups', or SIGs. As soon as they have a website, we'll post the link up here.


The remit of this group is to support and develop teaching of qualitative research methods to both undergraduates and postgraduates. Coming soon will be a workshop for those who currently, or wish to, supervise undergraduate, qualitative psychology dissertations. Links will be added to pollen as soon as we have the details. 


See the link to the right to access the online resources developed by the TQRMUL group: a set of video-recorded interviews with 5 students about friendship, all available to download, alongside two versions of transcript for each.

VIP: Vertically Integrated Projects

Vertically integrated projects - whereby staff and students from across disciplines work together on applied projects - are being tested out at the University of Strathclyde across a number of classes/

See the link for more details:
http://www.strath.ac.uk/viprojects/

Conferences

The provisional programme for the Europlat 2012 (July) conference is now available (the details of presentations/workshops etc will follow soon). The Enhancement Themes conference in March 2012 has now revealed their programme of workshops and papers too. Click on the links on the right hand side of the blog for more details. Plenty of examples of innovative practice - including problem-based learning developments - to be seen here. 

And so it begins

Welcome to pollen! At the moment this blog is maintained by an individual, but the idea is that at some point other people will be able to add to, and develop this site for themselves.  This site should be treated as a resource and a shared space to bring together ideas and issues relating to the teaching of psychology and the psychology of teaching. Keep watching.