Fellowship

If you engage in teaching and learning as the main part of your role or have considerable experience in supporting learning in HE, you may be considering Fellowship.

You may come from a wide variety of contexts but your practice should have both breadth and depth and enable you to evidence all PSF 2023 Dimensions of Practice.

Whilst it is not role dependent, some typical roles and experience for people applying for Fellow are:

• staff in the early stages of their academic career
• staff in an academic-related and/or support role holding substantive teaching and learning responsibilities
• experienced academics relatively new to higher education
• staff with (sometimes significant) teaching-only responsibilities including, for example, within work-based settings

Fellowship at this level carries the expectation that the full range of academic practice in HE (level 4 and above) will be evidenced. Fellow candidates should have a good repertoire of teaching approaches and experience with a variety of assessment instruments and associated feedback strategies.

Read the Getting Started pages initially if you are unsure if Fellowship is right for you.

Routes to Fellowship

There is a taught route to achieve Fellowship in the Postgraduate Certificate: Teaching in Higher Education - only available to academic staff who are new to HE teaching and do not hold a teaching qualification in HE.

Staff can also apply for Fellowship on the basis of existing practice/experience.

Applying for Fellowship

Fellowship Application Requirements

Context statement 

This is optional – not assessed and not included in overall word count.
3 minutes verbal/digital story or 300 written words max.

Overall word count

When selecting your case studies below you should bear in mind that you are aiming to produce approximately 30 minutes verbal/digital stories or 3,000 written words in total with an absolute maximum of 35 minutes verbal/digital stories or 3,500 written words. Within those boundaries, however, there is considerable flexibility and it is up to you to decide both how many case studies you produce and how long each case study should be depending on the scale and depth of each.

A range of Reflective Case Studies

Variable but to a suggested minimum of 5 minutes verbal/digital story of 500 written words each.

Reference List

500 words max – written only. This is not included in the overall word count.

Two Referee Statements

Approx. 5 minutes verbal/digital story or 500 written words

• At least one must be a Hallam employee; 
• At least one must be a Fellow, Senior Fellow or Principal Fellow;
• If Referee One is both a Hallam employee and a Fellow/Senior/Principal Fellow then Referee Two can be either Hallam or External and may or may not hold a category of Fellowship. 
• Referee one should confirm that a practice observation has taken place within the past year.

What should your submission cover?

The Professional Standards Framework 2023 Descriptors (D1 – D4) each consist of a set of three statements that form the final criteria you should be able to provide evidence for to achieve the relevant category of fellowship. The Dimensions of Practice (Areas of Activity, Core Knowledge and Professional Values) are incorporated within these criteria, but there are additional elements for each Descriptor that will also need to be met within your submission. It is important that you map against these criteria across your submission Case Studies and reflective pieces and make sure your referees focus their written statements towards the Descriptors also.

For Fellowship these are the requirements (Descriptors) you must show in your application:

• D2.1: use of all five Professional Values
• D2.2: application of all five forms of Core Knowledge
• D2.3: effective and inclusive practice in all five Areas of Activity

You should refer to Advance HE's guidance for Fellowship which will help you to understand the purpose and meaning of the Descriptors in more depth and, in particular, how they relate to each other and how you can use them effectively within your submission evidence.

Preparing your application

1. Download an application form (DOCX, 290.6KB)
2. Choose your topics and gather evidence for your case studies. Decide on the format for your case studies.
3. Identify your referees.
4. Arrange your observation of teaching practice.
5. Create your application, taking advantage of cohort support like peer advice and writing retreats.

We recommend you map the dimensions of practice inside your application as this will help ensure you have met all of the criteria.

Finalise and submit your application

1. Finish creating your application.
2. Send your referees your application and a link to the referee guidance and form (DOCX, 283.1KB).
3. Each referee writes their referee statement and sends it back to you.
4. Submit your application and all referee statements to recognitionofteaching@shu.ac.uk as Word documents.

Get Support 

For further questions about Advance HE Fellowship and teaching recognition programmes, you can email recognitionofteaching@shu.ac.uk