Making the impact of discipline-based educational research and scholarship more sustainable: Opportunities for innovation and leadership

Discipline-based educational research and scholarship (DBERS) play an important role in advancing evidence-based pedagogy and reflective teaching. However, many DBERS projects – often with limited financial support – are based on evaluations of relatively small-scale pedagogical interventions. As a result, the impact of these projects tends to be local and short-lived. By making references to an institution-wide initiative, I discuss how the impact of DBERS can be made more sustainable by adopting a participatory research and scholarship consortium model. Leadership efforts to build a consortium may consist of (i) creating a transdisciplinary portfolio of linked discipline-based projects that are aligned with institutional priorities, (ii) building transdisciplinary teams and widening participation by reaching out to students and a wider range of staff, (iii) using research methods such as collaborative autoethnography and participatory action research, (iv) co-creating outputs as the projects progress, and developing links with stakeholders to amplify and sustain the impact of the outputs. By building participatory consortia, academic development units can play a crucial leadership role to inspire innovation and help make pedagogical research in higher education more sustainable.