Paul believes his role as a teacher is, in the words of Paulo Freire, “to unveil opportunities for hope”. Paul’s work explicitly rejects the idea of students as consumers of higher education, instead situating them as independent thinkers and researchers, discovering for themselves how to transform their world. Paul has been a champion over many years of methods called “problem-based”, “enquiry-based” and “research-based learning”, which allow students to develop research skills while providing engaging settings for learning within the formal curriculum. However, Paul is probably best known for his work on co-curricular undergraduate research opportunities, including his time as Director of the Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research.
Paul has promoted the provision of summer research internships and collaborated in the development of dissemination opportunities for undergraduates including ‘Reinvention: an International Journal of Undergraduate Research’, ‘The British Conference of Undergraduate Research’ and the futuristic, video-linked ‘International Conference of Undergraduate Research’. Paul’s pedagogic research has showed that students rate these firmly “high impact experiences”.
Many of Paul’s most significant achievements have arisen from collaborations with students, working in partnership to change our universities for the better. He has also written and presented scholarly research on this topic of student engagement.
In his home discipline of Chemistry, Paul has driven changes to widen participation and develop more inclusive teaching practices that allow all students to succeed. While enjoying classroom teaching, Paul is at his happiest sitting round a table with undergraduate project students, helping them analyse and publish their scientific data, currently in the field of Molecular Biology and Evolution.
More recently, as Paul has found himself in management positions first at the University of Warwick and now at the University of Leeds, he has developed scholarly approaches to being a leader in higher education, based in critical management studies and also in the hopeful pedagogies of Paulo Freire.