How Senior Fellowship during lockdown became a journey of awareness and introspection that helped me connect with others

While the UK and the whole world were immersed in a collective madness to accumulate toilet paper and pasta during the spring of 2020, I will always remember the lockdown months as a time of personal and professional growth as well as a time of community service. Like the character of Raymond Rambert in Albert Camus´ novel ´La Peste´, when the global pandemic struck, I found myself trapped in a remote land which I felt I had no connection other than being my geographic workplace and, from which, I had always been able to travel easily and frequently to Europe in the past. Like Rambert himself, I broke my way out of isolation by supporting both the Spanish community in the UK and the local community where I live. 

From a professional perspective, working through my Senior Fellowship through the lockdown worked as a ‘therapy’ that helped me to keep my mind still and focused: the process provided me with the tools that I needed to reflect on who I was as an educator and how my professional practice had been informed through all those years. 

For those who are not familiar with Senior Fellowship, this is part of the Advance HE Fellowship scheme aimed at demonstrating personal and professional commitment to professionalism in learning and teaching. From the four different categories of Fellowship, the senior fellowship in particular is focused on demonstrating leadership, mentoring and influencing other colleagues. 

In my case, I had started the application process through the pathway support programme that the Learning and Teaching Academy (LTA) had put in place at Heriot-Watt University. I was part of the first ‘cohort’ of staff members that joined the pathway in January 2020. This initiative was led by Alex Buckley, who acted as my mentor and whose support was crucial to achieve the fellowship. In a world that had been “globally interconnected” until recent weeks, and whose borders had been closed for the first time in decades, I found solace and stillness reflecting on the influences, pedagogical models and theoretical frameworks that had informed my professional practice as well as how I was able to put those influences into practice by leading the development of online international postgraduate programmes.  

The world, as I had known it, seemed to be now hibernating and I took the application as an opportunity for introspection and inner awareness. Like many international staff, I was alone… I was completely alone and who knew when I was able to travel to Spain again… Rather than despairing and panicking, I had the choice of becoming a strong leader for my community as a Councillor at the Spanish Council in the UK (position that I held in the Spring of 2020); I also had the choice of intellectually ‘immersing’ myself in the drawing up of the 6,000 words that the Senior Fellowship applications comprises.  

I chose helping others. I chose transforming the fellowship application into an introspective tool to understand who I was as an educator. By doing so, I will always remember the spring-summer 2020 lockdown as one of the times in which I have felt so much aware and connected to others.  

One of the aspects that strikes me about the Advance HE Fellowship scheme is that not many colleagues working under the ‘category’ of professional service know or apply for it, at least in the university where I work. It is a common misconception that only staff members directly involved in teaching hence, mainly academics, can apply for those fellowships. Yet this is not true as the UK Professional Standard Framework (UKPSF) acknowledges a variety of support roles and environments in higher education, in addition to the roles that have been traditionally associated with the act of teaching.  

While working on my application I realised how difficult is for a staff member who is not in an academic position to address descriptor 3 (D3) of the UKPSF unless the staff member is in a management position. This represents a disadvantage for so many colleagues in professional roles supporting learning and teaching who have developed an academic knowledge and mastery in the use of pedagogical approaches and theoretical frameworks to provide students with the best learning experience.  

As someone who obtained a Senior Fellowship coming from the route of professional services, I would like to encourage experienced educators who may be reading this blogpost, and who are not academics, to consider applying for Senior Fellowship even if they do not hold management positions. There are so many ways in which experienced learning designers, academic developers, technologists, advisors, librarians as well as many other roles, can show leadership, mentoring and influencing academic colleagues without having to wage the name of ‘manager’ in their job titles. The Advance HE Fellowship scheme, also including the categories of Associate Fellowship (AFHEA) and Fellowship (FHEA), is the recognition of our commitment and expertise to HE. 

Since obtaining my award, I have become a mentor for the next cohort of Heriot-Watt University staff that benefits from the LTA Pathway support programme. This experience has been particularly rewarding as it has made realised the challenges that colleagues with children experienced during the second lockdown in the UK: trying to make time to work on their applications while ‘homeschooling’. As a mentor, I need to find ways of supporting and encouraging my mentees in those circumstances. I was lucky that I was able to use all my leisure time to work on my application but institutions should consider allocating time for this to staff members who are struggling in lockdown times, either looking after children or elderly parents as we do in Mediterranean, Asian, African and Latin American cultures.  

That is why it is important to bring back the values of kindness and compassion to our universities and all aspects of our academic and professional lives. As a society, we were supposed to come out stronger and more compassionate from the successive lockdowns. And this should also apply to HE.  

Mari Cruz García is an expert in digital education and a former international telecom consultant. Working for Telefónica Móviles International, she was the founder of the Interconnection Department at the start-up company Group 3G-Quam (Germany). In the United Kingdom, she has worked in three top-ranked universities and was part of the initial team that started the Kuwait Scotland eHealth Innovation Network (KSeHIN), an educational partnership between the Dundee Medical School and the Dasman Diabetes Institute. She is a Senior Fellow at Advance HE  and currently works at Heriot-Watt University (Scotland).