Deakin is poised

Ask Professor Marcia Devlin about her overarching impressions of Deakin University after 12 months in her role as Chair of the Higher Education Research Group (HERG) and her response is unequivocal: “The people here are just fantastic!"

“And I can’t believe how many of them there are who are interested in research into higher education. The intellectual maturity of staff here is wonderful.

“I came to Deakin to take up the offer of an outstanding job and the opportunity to build this research group.

“It now has more than 200 members, with representation from all the faculties and divisions within the University.

“So it is much bigger and more vibrant than I could possibly have imagined. My initial prediction, based on my experience elsewhere, was that there might be 20-30 people interested.

“But I have found this great openness to fresh ideas on research into higher education, and a great willingness to work and share information across faculties and disciplines.

“It is something I have not experienced before.”

HERG aims to provide a mechanism for Deakin staff to participate and collaborate in research, scholarship and consultancy in the field of higher education, including university teaching and learning.

The group provides support for members applying for Australian Research Council and Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) grants, as well as internal grants from the Deakin University Strategic Teaching and Learning Grant Scheme (STALGS).

“Led by HERG member Professor Jill Blackmore and including HERG members Ruth Arber and me, we have just won an ARC Linkage Grant,” Professor Devlin said.

“I’m delighted to be working with Professor Blackmore, an internationally renowned expert and scholar.

“The research will investigate mismatches between the employment of international student graduates and national skill shortages in Australia.

“We have lodged 19 applications for ALTC grants in the past 12 months and we are seeing some very promising signs there already.

“With STALGS, the University provides some funding which helps its strategic goals in teaching, but these projects also become pilot schemes that can lead to applying for bigger external grants.

“The group is multi-disciplinary and really starting to work together across disciplines and faculties and schools. People are finding out that for instance there are other people outside their faculty who have an interest in student engagement and are wanting to find out what they are doing.

“I am really encouraging them to do that, and to facilitate it we have set up the HERG expert data base so people can log in and see who, in another part of the University, is interested in the same sorts of things as they are.”

Another area in which Professor Devlin is working hard is encouraging Deakin staff to write, both for refereed publication and for the media.

“There are now three members of HERG, besides me, regularly writing articles for the media,” she said.

“There is a lot of debate about policy in higher education at the moment and at Deakin we have many people more than qualified to participate in it.”

The burgeoning membership of HERG has meant a slight change of emphasis for Professor Devlin.

“Initially, I thought I could take responsibility for most of the mentoring,” she said.

“However, with 200 people, I need to capacity build in the sense I need to contribute to developing other people who can help with the mentoring process and that is something I am already working on.

“Success has presented HERG with a problem in that regard, but it is a great problem to have.”

Born in Belfast, Professor Devlin came to Australia as a seven-year-old, going to school in the New South Wales country town of Young, and then Canberra.

She obtained her first degree at the Australian National University and has since gained qualifications from La Trobe and Macquarie Universities, Swinburne University of Technology and The University of Melbourne and worked at RMIT, The University of Western Sydney, Central Queensland University and the University of Melbourne.

But Deakin is the place where she has found the most colleagues of like mind, sharing her great love for research into higher education, student engagement, the student experience, curriculum development, university teaching and learning and higher education policy.

She believes Deakin is well placed to achieve its goal of national leadership in teaching and learning. As she says: “Deakin is poised”.

To see video presentations by Professor Marcia Devlin, click here:
http://www.fyecd2009.qut.edu.au/resources/fyecd2009_movie.jsp

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