We have been offering the Fellowship program at Deakin University for six years. When we started this program, we knew we wanted to offer both an opportunity for professional recognition, but also a process through which our staff could build their capability in teaching and learning. Early on, it was clear that many sessional academic staff who applied for Associate Fellow were looking for opportunities to learn more about teaching in higher education, and the Fellowship seemed like a perfect place for us to offer this support.
Although our Associate Fellows submit their applications as a written reflective narrative, we have built a set of modules and workshops around the program that help them to learn more about the theory of teaching and learning as they develop their application.
The program, developed by Dr Julia Savage, has been scaffolded to achieve two outcomes. Firstly, we wanted sessional academic staff to have access to teaching and learning literature so they could apply to their own teaching context and engage with prior to the workshops. Secondly, we wanted to create a collaborative experience where staff could come together in workshops and talk together as they addressed the application writing process.
