Robert Averies
- Position
- Higher Education Research and Support Officer
- [email protected]
- Location
- Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence
As Higher Education Research and Support Officer, Robert conducts, advises on, and contributes to cultures for, pedagogical research (PedRes).
With the former, he is currently developing a long-term research piece which forms part of both LITE strategic research and his PhD in the School of Education. Currently, this project is called "Becoming in SoTL: developing and evaluating a rhizomatic approach to supporting scholarly identity development."
His aims for this work are not to responsibilise individuals for their scholarly 'success', but to provide an evidence base for cultural change that helps to make pedagogical inquiry possible. Robert hopes this will inform strategies for fostering accessible, relational, and integrative identity development as an important aspect of scholarship across varied educational communities, including schools, services, and scholarly communities. You can read more about his research in this LITE blog.
As part of his wider role, Robert provides a sounding board to LITE Fellows from research design, to ethics, to planning for and tracing the impact of their scholarship. He supports the development of the Active & Experiential Learning Incubator, led by Alex Holmes and Clare Tweedy (visit the Incubator page here). He also introduced the spotLITE workshop series (visit our spotLITE hub here), is a regular host on LITE’s podcast offering (visit our podcast hub here), and has co-delivered several sessions on PedRes impact.
Prior to joining LITE, Robert worked in English Language Teaching (ELT), culminating in his role as Director of Studies of a leading adult language centre in Rome, Italy. This sparked further academic interests at the intersection of pedagogy, sociology, and international studies. As a result, Robert went on to conduct educational research exploring how educational stakeholders re-imagine and enact transformative educational experiences in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina. The inspiring individual and collective agency of these educators continue to inform Robert’s ethos and work today.
Knowing all too well that one experience or conversation often leads to something new, exciting and unexpected — Robert looks forward to collaborating with colleagues across disciplines and job functions as part of LITE's efforts to empower PedRes that makes meaningful contributions to student education — and educational theory and practice more broadly.