What’s your story, learning glory?

There are plenty of stories we can tell about how teaching and learning have changed in higher education in the last three years. Unfortunately, these stories are either untold or overlooked. If Universities want to be better understood, they need be telling lots more stories about the learning they enable for the students that they teach.

What’s your story?

I counted the occurrences of keywords in five annual press releases that get emailed to the inbox of every member of staff at the end of each year. You can repeat this analysis on any University press release as follows:

  1. Count the words that begin with LEARN* or TEACH*
  2. Count the words with RESEARCH*
  3. Calculate the ratio of the two numbers you’ve just counted

Here’s the results for the University of Manchester from 2018 to 2022:

Words / Year 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022
TEACH* or LEARN* 1 2 3 0 1
RESEARCH* 9 13 34 19 19
Article source 2018 2019 20/20 2021 2022

So where all the teaching and learning stories?

Learning glory?

PROBLEM NO.1: Any stories that are being told are also being overlooked. Here is a small selection of overlooked stories from the University of Manchester between 2020 and 2023. NONE of them made it into press releases (annual or otherwise) from the media relations team.

PROBLEM NO. 2: Teachers don’t tell their teaching and learning stories, so there is nothing for the communications team to overlook in the first place.

We need to solve both of these problems. If Universities want to be better understood, they need be telling lots more stories about the learning they enable for the students that they teach.

So what’s your story, learning glory?