Monthly Archives: February 2011

Life after subject centres

I have an unstated objective to write something for my blog at least once a week. Preferably that something should be fairly interesting.  Now I realise that two weeks has past since I wrote anything at all.

Not that nothing is happening. In subject centres there is a lot happening. We face an uncertain future as the HEA withdraws our funding. Whatever I am doing on 1 August 2011 won’t be what I am doing now.

In 2010 I had an article published in the Points for Departure section of Teaching in Higher Education. The Invisible Developers: Academic Coordinators in the UK Subject Centre Network sought to draw attention to what I saw as the neglect of subject centre staff in narratives about educational development in the UK. With the impending closure of subject centres the whole point of the article is largely redundant. Even when I wrote that article at the end of 2009 I had imagined a bright future for subject centres, a (relatively) inexpensive alternative to sporadic rounds of short term project funding.

What next? I don’t know, but in a few years time some report or other will recommend a UK-wide network of discipline-based centres to support teaching and learning on a national basis.

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