Our education vision
At the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences, our vision is to deliver undergraduate and postgraduate education of the highest quality by supporting best practices in pedagogy, using innovative teaching practices, building across our breadth of disciplines, and broadening participation in education.
This is pursued both through major, School-level initiatives, and through supporting our departments and faculties with individual initiatives, while being reactive to rapidly changing contexts.
Our education projects
The School has planned and is executing a programme of major education projects in 2020-30, each linked to our vision for education. Some of these projects are listed below:
Education research
Our School Education team regularly undertake major research initiatives into humanities and social sciences education. These reflect the live concerns of our Council leadership; address urgent questions around teaching and learning in SHSS and beyond; draw on the expertise, values and views of staff and students across the School; and more broadly support our work across the full set of Education vision aims. Existing projects include lecture experience, which reflect on how lecture recording can help or hinder pedagogy; education workload, which considers aims, obstacles and efficiencies in the provision and sustainability of teaching; generative AI and assessment; and part-time postgraduate provision.
Technology-Enabled Learning Advisory Group
The School TEL Advisory Group [TELAG] has evolved to be a cross-School forum for deliberating on School views and priorities regarding education technology. TELAG, chaired by one of our Academic Project Directors, is currently supporting Faculties and Departments in communicating and monitoring their local lecture recording policies, consolidating strategies around generative AI in relation to learning and assessment, and liaising on infrastructural needs in relation to software/hardware/teaching spaces/teaching practice.
Workload
This is a major research project to understand education aims, how workload issues interfere with them, and pathways to ameliorate these issues. We are conducting qualitative surveys, focus groups, and invisible labour task mapping. This project, which dovetails with a University project on student workload, will advocate for the standard inclusion of workload impact assessments in all education policy making.
Part-time postgraduate provision
The aim of this project is to address unmet need for diverse routes into postgraduate study, drawing on enhanced provision for blended and distance learning, as well as existing good practice. Our Academic Project Director is leading research and recommendations on PT provision models, while the Fundraising team is seeking out studentship opportunities. The School is also supporting faculties and departments in modelling, rolling out, and monitoring part-time MPhil provision.
Social Sciences Research Methods Programme
Our School hosts this programme which provides research training for postgraduate students studying social sciences across all six Schools of the University.
Social Science and Humanities Access to Research Experience (SHARE)
SHARE is a four-week, paid, summer research experience programme in partnership with Gonville and Caius College. SHARE aims to enhance diversity and inclusiveness within the social sciences at Cambridge, and in UK academia more broadly through improved access to research experiences for undergraduate students from under-represented backgrounds who are interested in applying to postgraduate research programmes.
ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP)
SHSS hosts the current DTP, a cross-School initiative and partnership with Anglia Ruskin University, to fund and offer training for cohorts of interdisciplinary social scientists.