staff or student

On Friday I had to do this big'ish formal presentation to the staff in my department about my portfolio of responsibility in the department - i.e. my academic staff development function. This is the primary role I 'sort of' play in my department. I also have a big'ish administrative function associated with quality assurance activities linked to an institutionally driven curriculum development project. Then in between these two big'ish tasks I'm also expected to teach, and I want to do research (by no means a core requisite for academic staff in our institution). In this academic staff development role my energies are focused on helping staff to find ways of improving their teaching practices and to nurture an awareness and interest in the general scholarship of teaching and learning.

Later that afternoon in conversation with a colleague about a possible research project to explore engineering students' experiences and perceptions of learning mathematics, I realised that I'm still too interested in students and their experiences to shift my research agenda. I may work in academic staff development, but I don't want to research that aspect of my work. I'm still not ready to let go of the student as my central focus. This same ideal ensured that my PhD research was firmly grounded in the academic literacies tradition - to allow me to place the student in core position of my research design and to ensure that their perceptions and experiences directed everything else I did in my research and analysis. This strong leaning towards the student is a very common feeling shared by many of the academics I know and respect. We are constantly pulled towards all sorts of other enticing or not so enticing activities associated with our work in higher education, but the student is always king/queen - the alpha and the omega - the core element that defines our identities and usually gives us a reason to get up in the morning. I might have suggested that staff and their concerns somehow can share the same platform as students. But that's misleading because for now my interest, and especially my research interest, are firmly locked-in on the student.