Deborah Molloy, a member of the Graduate School team, has been named the International Women’s Day competition winner by the Transatlantic Literary Women team for her ‘fascinating and informative piece on Canadian author, Margaret Atwood.’

You can read the official announcement and Deborah’s piece here.

Deborah joined the Graduate School in November 2014 and began a part-time PhD in 20th Century American Women’s Literature in September. Congratulations to Deborah on this accomplishment from the Graduate School team!

Earlier this week, the Vice-Chancellor & President Professor Karen Cox  wrote of her concerns over campus relations between us all, staff and students, and announced that the University will not  be deducting any pay for action short of a strike (ASOS) for this period of action and that we were talking to Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) about our Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) and hourly-paid lecturers (HPLs) positions to ensure there is no long-term detrimental impact if they choose to take strike action.

As a result of these discussions, the University has made the following changes to the position of GTAs, HPLs and other timesheet colleagues involved in the current action.

Changes to our Pay Policy

With respect to our GTA colleagues, and in recognition of their positions both as students and employees, we will be making no pay deductions at all related to this current period of UCU industrial action. There are no conditions attached to this decision.

With respect to HPLs and timesheet colleagues we will guarantee the offer of additional hours to match any hours they lose through industrial action once they have ceased their participation in the action. We will exercise this offer positively and flexibly where HPLs or timesheet colleagues, for reasons outside of their direct control, may have difficulty in accepting initial re-offers of work. With respect to HPLs and where it makes sense to do so (eg because a HPL contact hour has been missed due to strike action but there is still a requirement to undertake exam marking) we will pay for work at flat rate. Schools will make clear to HPLs in advance of requiring marking to be done whether they regard this marking as connected with earlier contact hours which have been worked (and therefore payment has already been received for the associated marking) or whether the relevant work will be paid at flat rate. No staff will be expected to work without payment.

This position, will be reflected in the HR FAQs and pay policy as soon as we are able. We will also edit our pay policy and FAQs so that there is no longer a reference to deductions for Action Short of a Strike (ASOS). These changes may though take a couple of working days to be made. In the meantime, all Timesheet and HPL colleagues should now complete a ‘Record of Hours Not Worked’ form for the hours they were due to have worked, but have missed due to industrial action. Once signed by the relevant Head, a copy will be returned to the member of staff and another retained by the school/department as a record of the hours to be offered in the future. The new form will be available on the HR website by Monday 12 March – https://www.kent.ac.uk/human-resources/pensions/uss-industrial-action2018/.

Want to try something new in your teaching? If so, why not apply for a TESSA – our new Teaching Enhancement Small Support Awards?

TESSAs, introduced last term, are intended for Kent colleagues who are interested in encouraging and enabling teaching and learning innovation; or who have a great idea that would improve the quality of teaching, teaching-related activity, support for teaching, or the student learning experience at Kent.

We already have University Teaching Prizes, which reward colleagues on their achievements. But sometimes what’s needed is a bit of funding to try something new, or test out an idea or a different way of working – and now you can apply for a TESSA to do just that.

We’re piloting this small grants scheme during 2017/18. You can apply for funding of between £500 and £3,000, with up to £5,000 on offer for large, high-impact, collaborative projects across the University. All colleagues who contribute to teaching, learning or teaching support are eligible to apply – you don’t have to be an academic, or based in a school.

In our first round, we were delighted to be able to fund 11 high-quality applications from all around the University, and we are now all set for Round 2. The deadline for applications has just been extended to 12 noon on Thursday 17 May 2018, for projects starting during summer 2017/18 or Autumn Term 2018/19. Successful applications will be announced by Monday 4 June.

Find out more, and download the short application form for a TESSA, on our Teaching webpages. You’ll see that previous applicants have been generous in allowing us to publish their forms, so you may be able to link up with someone doing a project similar to the one you are planning.

If you have questions, please get in touch with April McMahon or Jess Sutherland.

The University of Kent has affirmed its commitment to the fair assessment of research through the signing of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and adopting the principles outlined in the Leiden Manifesto.

Professor Philippe De Wilde, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research & Innovation, says: ‘I am happy to endorse the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, and I have signed up to it on behalf of the University. We have never used journal-based metrics for performance evaluation, and have no intention of doing so. I hope that in future the publication landscape will become more fluid. University repositories, preprint servers, professional societies, start-up publishers and established publishers all have a role to play in disseminating research. With modern IT, there is no reason for a hierarchy between those players. Let us recognise the limits of metrics as well as those of peer review.’

With the adoption of these principles, as an institution, we commit to:

• Be explicit about the criteria used to reach hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, clearly highlighting, especially for early-stage investigators, that the scientific content of a paper is much more important than publication metrics or the identity of the journal in which it was published.
• For the purposes of research assessment, consider the value and impact of all
  research outputs (including datasets and software) in addition to research publications, and consider a broad range of impact measures including qualitative indicators of research impact, such as influence on policy and practice.

The implementation of these principles at Kent is supported through the Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC). We recognise that the adoption of these principles is a statement of intent and that there will be a gradual aligning of the policy and embedding the practice at Kent. As issues are highlighted and areas in contradiction with these principles come to light, we will review the policies in light of the principles, ensuring Kent has a robust and fair approach to the use of metrics for research evaluation.

The OSC is providing a route for researchers and professional service staff to report policies, procedures and behaviours that they felt were out of line with the principles included in the DORA and the Leiden manifesto. If you have any such concerns, questions or requests for training then please get in touch so that we can prioritise these requests.

Professor Jane Reeves from the Centre for Child Protection will deliver this Rutherford Grass Roots Lecture, next Wednesday 14 March, at 18.00 in Rutherford Lecture Theatre One, Canterbury Campus.

Thinking differently about topics, particularly those as complex as child protection can be very difficult. There are currently 50,000 children and young people on child protection registers in the UK (NSPCC 2016) and probably many hundreds of thousands more who are groomed and abused online or via online contacts. In order to tackle this level of abuse we have to change the way we think about child abuse, how we train professionals and how we encourage children to protect themselves and their friends.

This lecture will take you on a journey of innovation, gaming and educational theory; from the germ of an idea on how to change child protection training, to the development of a suite of child protection serious game simulations which are used across the UK and all over the world.

For further details, please click here.