LTEC L&T Festival University of Salford

Some final thoughts....

Four days of sharing best practice and celebrating Salford’s achievements in L&T.

A huge thank you to everyone that contributed to our L&T Festival. Four inspirational keynotes from 5 speakers: Khadija Mohammed, Jonathan Sands, Gillian Fielding, Richard Gibbons and Stephanie Marshall; 20 engaging best practice presentations, three daily round-ups and a final community workshop.

Here are some of the key takeaways: strength in “practice”, lots of lived experiences - great examples of frameworks for learning and also technology, the festival brought together a real sharing of individual practice. Our next theme was “developing student capital” – it was great to see so many people included student voice in their presentations, lots of video clips which made us all feel proud demonstrating the lived experience of our learning community. We continued with student voice”, which was heard in many different ways, through many different channels and through authentic routes. There were opportunities to empower students through innovation, building communities of practice and most importantly learning from each other.

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We identified some “challenges” – but there’s comfort that we all have similar challenges. Are we as connected as we can be internally and externally? This picks up on how we started the week with the inspirational and thought provoking keynote from Khadija who encouraged us to ‘learn into our discomfort’ and have difficult but engaging conversation in safe spaces. “Diversity” and ?“Social justice” were other themes explored in the workshop – being more diverse = better student outcomes. ‘Are we mature enough to have some the difficult conversations required?’ Do we connect with wider sector challenges including “anti-racism”, recognising this as a challenge and continue discussions through the lived experience of staff and students? Further to these conversations, more widely we discussed how we felt valued and how this translates into sustainable career paths for L&T, building profiles into established frameworks, so everyone can develop and grow.

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There was the theme of “interdisciplinary activity” and how to embed this within learning; we also had expert advice on how to network your networks, which lead directly into the “employability” theme. A range of options and opportunities were presented in relation to how to promote skills for the 21st century within our individual practice from an industry prospective. Johnathan Sands from Born Ugly provided examples of how they support staff placements as well as students which could open up new opportunities.

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A further significant theme was “communication, value and recognising the talent from within”. Do we shout about successes and feedback to the student community and within the sector? There was a wider debate about how we join the dots between the many activities people are engaging with, so we create critical mass (and space to critically reflect, learning from each other). How do we create a synergy between Schools, making it easier to co-create across and within disciplines, to establish thematic excellence and best practice and practice metacognition more widely?

The final two themes are of no surprise, the importance of “evidence-based research” to underpin impact. The L&T festival demonstrated we are producing a strong body of scholarly evidence which underpin our institutional priorities. However there is scope to develop some of these into more formal outputs to share with the sector.

The final theme from the workshop was “Technology” which is of no surprise given the pandemic and how staff at Salford (and withon the sector) adopted to virtual delivery during an extended period of lockdown. Gillian Fielding and Richard Gibbon’s keynote offered a demo of some of Blackboards new features which make learning more inclusive and authentic and the wish list of new technologies grew significantly as more people provided experiences of different software they adapted to support learning during lockdown and beyond. Thanks to all!

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I wanted to end with a comment made by our final keynote Stephanie Marshall, who talked about our learning and teaching principles and alignment to industry, and I quote… “Salford are stars: in many ways ahead of the sector in their thinking surrounding industry engagement embedded within L&T”

On that note… I will end were we started: with a thank you to all for your dedication, enthusiasm and devotion to L&T.

There are too many people to mention individually but there are three key people I would like to name and thank personally, Sian Everington, Frankie Baines and Lynn Crankshaw, who did a fantastic job of pulling together the operations group to make everything run so smoothly I would also like to put a call out to the wider LTEC members who assisted in planning, operation and post festival follow-ups, you were all so great! THANK YOU!

Well done University of Salford, it was a wonderful festival and lovely to meet so many people in person.

@SalfoduniLTEC #SalfordLTF

Hope the first week of teaching goes well,

Jess x