Message from Denise Everitt, Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Chief Operating Officer:

Yesterday’s failure to find support for the settlement suggested by UCU and UUK following talks at ACAS is obviously disappointing to everybody concerned.  We are aware that many staff, as well as the University itself, had high hopes that these discussions would allow us all to move forward with a better pension outcome for staff and certainty for our students.

In response to this setback, we will continue to urge all those involved at national level to return to the table to continue discussions with a view to resolving the current industrial dispute as quickly as possible, as well as lobbying for an outcome that protects the interests of our staff and students. Alongside this, our priority is to support schools in seeking to mitigate the impact of the action on students as much as we can.

We continue to be engaged in talks with Kent Union and the local branch of the UCU and will use a joint voice wherever we can to press for positive change. In the meantime, we remain committed to the sentiments underpinning our joint statement of 9 March in which we called for a solution that reflected Kent’s core values of fairness, equality, collaboration and respect. It is these values that will continue to make a career in Higher Education an attractive choice for both current staff and those just beginning their working lives.

We will continue to keep you informed with any developments relating to this situation.

Stephen Connolly, an artist filmmaker, Lecturer in Film Production, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham and Fine Art PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the School of Music and Fine Art (also a Kent 50 Scholar), has been shortlisted for a 2018 British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) Award, in the Moving Image category under Best Practice Research Portfolio for Machine Space. The results will be announced in April.

BAFTSS encourage best teaching and research practice, promoting the training of postgraduate students in research and giving researchers and practitioners the opportunity to attend and present a paper at the annual BAFTSS conference.

Connolly’s Machine Space is an essay film exploring a city as a machine; a place of movement and circulation. The city is Detroit, a place that has changed from producing the means of movement to producing space itself.  The film uses formal representational devices to explore this content, and addresses issues of complicity of audiences in the state of affairs in the city. It is a visualization of the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, philosopher of space and urban life.

The film was shown at London Film Festival and Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University.

You can read the LFF Review (in which it is described as “brilliant”) on MUBI.

Connolly’s work investigates cinema and representation through place, politics and history. His award winning single screen work which explores the interface between spectatorship, material culture and subjectivity, has been widely shown internationally since 2002. A FLAMIN award recipient, he has had solo screenings at the ICA and BFI Southbank in London, and was a juror at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Michigan, USA) in 2011.

Image credit: Stephen Connolly

Colleagues are invited to attend the Learning and Teaching Network session on Wednesday 28 March, 13.15-14.30 in Rochester R2:09, Medway.  The session titled ‘External Examining and Boards of Examiners at Kent’ will be presented by Malcolm Dixon, Head of Quality Assurance.

This session will give an overview of regulations and requirements relevant to External Examiners and Board of Examiner meetings. Participants will be given up-to-date guidance about the Credit Framework and related examination conventions/procedures for the classification of awards, in accordance with Annexes J and K of the Code of Practice. The relevant policies and procedures will be reviewed, and there will be time for questions and discussion.

This session is for University staff and external examiners who are involved with organising, attending or recording Board of Examiner meetings. Staff new to Boards of Examiners are strongly encouraged to attend.

To book a place, please email: cpdbookings@kent.ac.uk

The University is one of the key supporters of the first Ableism In Academia conference (AIA) being held at UCL on 23 March 2018.

Even in a field where inclusivity and diversity are given due priority many pressures and challenges are faced by disabled, chronically ill, and neurodiverse staff in HE. By engaging in debate around academic ableism, including how it intersects with gender, race, class, age, and sexuality, AIA aims to create a policy-facing manifesto that will challenge academia’s existing notions of able-bodied perfection and provide impetus for change.

AIA organiser Nicole Brown, is Academic Head of Learning and Teaching within UCL’s Institute of Education, as well as undertaking PhD research here at Kent with Dr Jennifer Leigh (CSHE).

The event will be live-streamed to ensure wide accessibility and members of staff are warmly invited to participate by following the steps summarised on Nicole’s website.

The AIA keynote speaker is Fiona Kumari Campbell (University of Dundee), author of Contours of Ableism.

Message from Karen Cox, Vice-Chancellor and President:

As you know, as part of my commitment to meeting as many colleagues as possible and getting views on the University, I am working my way round our schools and professional service departments and having open conversations as part of school meetings and department updates.

In addition, I will be holding three Open Forums for anyone to ‘drop in’. These are currently scheduled for March, May and July. The first of these will be held on Thursday 22 March from 10.00-11.00 in Woolf Lecture Theatre, Canterbury campus (with the next one being held at Medway). These will be open sessions for colleagues to share with me their thoughts on the University, what works, what doesn’t work and how they would like to see things done differently. This will all help to shape the review of the University strategy and priorities over the next few years.

If you are able to attend the first Open Forum, please register your attendance here.

If you have never had the opportunity to visit Liberty Quays, the University of Kent accommodation for Medway campus students, here’s your chance.

Kent Hospitality are hosting an open afternoon for Medway staff on Thursday 22 March from 12.00 – 14.00 to view a student flat and see what facilities are available on site.

We’ll be there to answer any questions you have, plus there will be cakes and coffee on offer at Liberty Quays.

While down at the accommodation site, you are more than welcome to visit Cargo, our Bar and Bistro, for soft drinks and savoury snacks. It is also a great opportunity to speak to our Food and Beverage Manager about how we can help with school and departmental events and the services we provide.

Register for the event now online and if there is strong demand from our registered attendees, we will also be providing transport between the Dockyards and Pembroke Campus to and from Liberty Quays.

Please note registration closes on Tuesday 20 March.

For further information please visit the registration page or contact: conferences@kent.ac.uk

Dr Bike returns to Medway campus Tuesday 20 March 2018. Find Dr Bike outside the Student Hub 11.30-14.30 for your free bike check up.

Dr Bike’s services are available to University of Kent and University of Greenwich students and staff. The Dr Bike service is provided by Chris and his team at ByCycle, working with the Transport Team, Estates department.

Additional work will be quoted individually but will always be at a special University of Kent reduced rate.

For more information visit our web page.

Colleagues are invited to attend the Learning and Teaching Network session on Monday 26 March, 13.15-14.30 in the UELT Seminar Room, Canterbury.  The session titled ‘The Use of Interactive Classroom Experiments in Teaching’ is presented by Sylvain Barde, Edward Cartwright and Anna Stepanova from School of Economics.

Classroom experiments have become an increasingly common way of teaching economics and other social sciences in an engaging and fun way. But, implementing an experiment in the classroom involves significant costs and this understandably deters many lecturers from using them.

In this session we will discuss our experience running classroom experiments over many years and also chart progress on a recent project to develop experiments using o-Tree. o-Tree is new open-source software that allows for interactive experiments that can be performed easily on smartphones and laptops etc. This has the potential to revolutionize how we run classroom experiments because it allows for easy to run, quick, large scale interactions. For instance, an asset market, social dilemma or voting mechanism could be run in a large lecture theater with instantaneous feedback on the overhead to inform learning. This is a step beyond existing classroom response systems. Students can also be given unique identifiers to participate in a number of experiments over the course of a module or degree program.

To book a place please email cpdbookings@kent.ac.uk