Positionality and power: A Student Research Experience Placement with LITE

My research sits within the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence (LITE), a space where staff at the University of Leeds can explore their educational practices to inform ways of understanding and improving student education. I undertook an exploratory Student Research Experience Placement on professional identities in scholarship, which I directed in ways that I’ll explain below.

I began the placement by familiarising myself with the research context and understanding key terms such as SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) and PedRes (Pedagogic Research), which played a central role in my project.

To build my understanding, I explored relevant literature and websites on both SoTL and PedRes. I must admit, this was a particularly challenging stage for me as a student new to SoTL research. Entering the field required me to adopt a completely new approach and new perspectives I had not encountered before. It felt as though I was walking into unfamiliar territory and trying to engage with it immediately.

Positionality wasn’t my initial focus when I started this placement; it emerged gradually as I immersed myself in the literature. As I got more familiar with SoTL research, positionality is something that began to stand out to me as a way of better understanding professional identities in SoTL. Additionally, from my disciplinary perspective as an arts and humanities student, I’m particularly aware of the power dynamics that exist within academia. This gives me a deeper insight into the positionality within research.

The importance of positionality came across when I conducted more research on SoTL identity. Positionality offers a framework for recognising the assumptions, biases, and privileges researchers may potentially bring to their work.

One of the most important things that I learned about positionality is that positionality is not fixed. Our positionality is constantly shaped by our interactions with new ideas, disciplines, and communities. For researchers, positionality is an important factor of a SoTL identity that can be reimagined and reshaped to produce more credible, inclusive, and reflective studies that deepen understanding of ways to improve student education. Moreover, this also benefits student learning by creating a more inclusive learning space with the added consideration of the impact of positionality in class.

To share my findings, I’ve been developing a Padlet: ‘Reflecting on your SoTL identity through positionality: a student resource’. I hope university staff and students engaged in SoTL/PedRes will use it to reflect on their positionality and consider its impact on their research and wider work.

You can access the Padlet here.

Having the experience of working at LITE this summer really made me reflect on how my disciplinary backgrounds shape and impact how I interpret and approach things through a certain ‘lens’. This also began to impact how I interpret things outside of my subject. I am extremely grateful to have the opportunity to work at LITE, and I strongly encourage more people from diverse disciplines to engage with SoTL, a space where collaborative work is essential based on its interdisciplinary nature.

This research was conducted in summer 2025, supervised by Robert Averies and Gabriel Cavalli. Visit our website to learn more about Student Research Experience Placements.