What’s the Story, Learning Glory?

The stories students tell about what they have learned, the teaching they experience and research they are exposed to are a key part of the story of any University. At the University of Manchester, these stories describe the difference the organisation makes locally, nationally and internationally through its communities of:

• 40,000 students, studying over 1,000 different degree programmes
• 12,800 staff, including almost 7,000 academic and research staff

What are the most important stories that students and staff tell about their learning, teaching, scholarship and research?

The Stories from Staff in Media Relations

Staff in the media relations team are employed to tell stories about the University. These stories are summarised each year in an informative annual review published in December and circulated to students, staff and the wider world. We analysed these stories by counting the occurrences of keywords in ten years of reviews published from 2015 to 2024.

Figure 1 below shows an analysis of the frequency of keywords STUDENT*, LEARN*, TEACH*, SCHOLAR* and RESEARCH. For example LEARN* = learn, learning, learner etc. The frequency of these words is measured in average occurences of the words per annual review article over a ten year period.

Figure 1: Frequency of keywords in annual reviews published by the media relations team, see Table 1 in the references below for details

---

The Story in the Vision

Alongside the media relations story, there’s more stories to be found in the organisational vision of the University. These stories are centred on three ambitious top level goals:

1. RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY: “The quality of our research will place us among the top 5 UK universities in the Research Excellence Framework”
2. TEACHING AND LEARNING: “We will achieve a top quartile sector position for student satisfaction”
3. SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: “We will measure our success against a portfolio of measures and quality marks of social, cultural, economic and environmental impact”

These core values are illustrated in Figure 2, lightly adapted from the original version published in the vision.

Figure 2: Teaching and Learning are stated core values of the University of Manchester, alongside research (discovery) and (corporate) social responsibility (CSR).

---

So, What IS the Story?

All your dreams are made, when you’re chained to the learning and the teaching trade. What’s the story, learning glory? There are many stories we can tell, from different perpectives:

• THE STORY OF THE STUDENTS With over 40,000 students studying at the University of Manchester, it is not suprising to see the word student appear frequently, on average more than 9 times in an annual review. It is good to see the strength of the student voice in Manchester reflected in press releases.
• THE STORY OF THE RESEARCHERS As a research intensive Russell Group University, it is not surprising to see the word research appear so frequently either, on average nearly 16 times in each annual review. This aligns closely with the vision the University has of itself and its core values
• THE STORY OF THE LEARNERS There are lots of students and lots of research, but what are they actually learning? Mentions of learn are much less frequent, between ten and twenty times less frequent than research, when averaged over a ten year period. Sometimes, learning is completely absent. Students might be disappointed to learn that none of the skills and knowledge they’ve developed at University is newsworthy.
• THE STORY OF THE TEACHERS There is lots of research, but how does that relate to teaching? Mentions of teach are much less frequent, between ten and twenty times less frequent than research, when averaged over a ten year period. Sometimes, teaching is completely absent. This is disappointing and demoralising for anyone involved in teaching and learning. Why is there such a mismatch between the vision and the reality?
• THE STORY OF THE SCHOLARS Scholar is a more ambiguous term, with multiple meanings. The word scholar* could refer to winning a scholarship to study, or it could mean being a scholar (of anything) or it could mean Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Whatever the meaning, scholar is an infrequently used word by media relations, although more commmon than pedagog* which appears exactly zero times in a decade.
• THE STORY OF THE VALUES The value story looks different to the media story. Why are core values not reflected better in these annual reviews? Why is there a mismatch between the words in our values and the words in our press releases?
  • Could it be that not much teaching takes place?
  • Perhaps there isn’t any learning going on?
  • How much are teaching and learning (T&L) overlooked?
  • How much are T&L undervalued or misunderstood?
  • How newsworthy is all this learning and teaching anyway?
  • Maybe its difficult to find good stories to write about, despite plenty of examples at blogs.manchester.ac.uk/itl and www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/umitl/events/itl-conference see reference [1] below
  • It could be that learning isn’t glamorous enough, too mundane and therefore not what most readers are expected to be interested in?
  • Maybe learners are just not telling their stories? Or their stories are too personal or trivial to merit any media attention?
  • Could teachers be too busy to have the time to tell and document their pedagogical stories? See Reference [2]
  • Why is this? What is going on? Are we missing something?
• We’ll leave these interesting questions as an exercise for the reader to answer. What do you think?

Any queries or comments on this data and article are welcome and any constructive criticism or suggestions for improvements can be emailed to duncan.hull @ manchester.ac.uk

If you work in Higher Education but not at the University but not Manchester, how do the words in your organisations values match up to the words in their press releases?

References

1. Cobb, Hannah (2024) The Institute of Teaching and Learning - Teaching and Learning Conference 2024 - Abstract Booklet Published by the National Teaching Archive DOI:10.25416/NTR.25997314.v3
2. Hull, Duncan (2025) Where Have All the Papers Gone? Priming the pump of pedagogical publishing in Europe in Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Computing Education Practice (CEP ‘25), Page 35, Edited by Maria Kallia and Ryan Crosby. Published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York, NY, USA. DOI:10.1145/3702212.3702224
3. Table 1 below summarises and links to the original data used in Figure 1.

YEAR / WORDS	STUDENT*	LEARN*	TEACH*	SCHOLAR*	RESEARCH*
2024	9	3	1	0	21
2023	10	5	1	1	11
2022	13	1	0	3	9
2021	13	0	0	0	9
2020	13	2	1	0	34
2019	2	1	1	0	13
2018	7	1	0	0	9
2017	15	0	0	1	11
2016	9	0	1	2	12
2015	1	0	1	1	10
Average	9.1	1.3	0.6	0.9	15.9

Table 1: Frequency of keywords in annual reviews published by the University of Manchester from 2015 to 2024

---

Figure 3: A visual summary of ten years at the University of Manchester from 2015 to 2024

---