Doing Scholarship

The Description of Activity Related to Scholarship in Higher Education (DARSHE) framework: (Gann & Hulme, 2025) is a practical tool to help individuals reflect on and develop their scholarship.

The framework is organised into four quadrants, shaped by two key dimensions: whether activity is private (e.g. confined to one’s own teaching context) or public, (shared with colleagues or wider audiences) and whether supporting evidence is implicit or explicit.

Scholarship often begins in our routine teaching practice – Delivering Higher Education – as we encounter challenges or seek to improve student understanding or engagement, we often draw upon (and contribute to) Evidence-Informed Higher Education. From here we may communicate our ideas through blogs, podcasts or toolkits (Sharing Higher Education) and/or make our evidence-based work explicit through Knowledge Generation, Evaluation and Impact. A unique feature of the framework is that all four aspects (quadrants) are equally valuable and interconnected.

Why don’t you have a go yourself by taking one aspect of your work and mapping it across the DARSHE framework to identify which quadrants you might want to develop?

Gann, R.J., Hulme, J.A. Scholarship reimagined: creating the DARSHE, an inclusive and flexible framework for developing scholarship in higher education. High Educ (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-025-01562-5

Hulme, J.A. & Gann, R.J. (2025). Introducing the DARSHE: moving beyond the debate about ‘contested definitions’ of scholarship? ANTF blog. https://ntf-association.com/introducing-the-darshe-moving-beyond-the-debate-about-contested-definitions-of-scholarship/

The SOTL Staircase: At a time when evidence-informed teaching and reflective professional practice are gaining prominence, the SoTL staircase (Beckingham, 2025) provides educators with practical approaches to share their work that can help to build both their confidence and the visibility of their scholarly work. Each step reflects a different form of dissemination. It illustrates how educators can build confidence and capacity in SoTL through staged dissemination. Beginning with informal conversations, practitioners reflect on teaching interventions, including successes and failures, to refine practice. Subsequent steps involve creating and publicly sharing accessible outputs such as blogs or guides, or developing structured case studies or posters. Presenting at conferences and publishing articles or books represent advanced stages, requiring deeper critical engagement and validation. Each step expands impact, encourages collaboration, involves students as partners, and strengthens professional identity, ultimately contributing to disciplinary knowledge and sustained enhancement of student learning and engagement.
Beckingham, S. (2025) The SoTL Staircase. SoTL@SHU Blog.
https://blog.shu.ac.uk/sotl/sotl-staircase/
Beckingham, S. (2025) Making SoTL Visible: Every Step Counts. The EuroSotl Network. https://eurosotl.org/?p=1990

At Arden University, we are Serious about Scholarship. Scholarship isn’t something colleagues do on top of the day job. Scholarship is the day job.

Scholarship is the small, often unnoticed, yet profoundly impactful work that quietly transforms learning, teaching, and the student experience. Our approach starts from the belief that everyone is already a scholar. The challenge is helping colleagues recognise it, capture it, and share it.  To make that tangible, we developed the SERIOUS about Scholarship model (Irving-Bell, 2026), a practical framework that names the things we already value, and gives colleagues a shared language for them:

• Scholarship as Practice
• Everyday Impact 
• Reflective Inquiry 
• Inclusive Engagement 
• Open Practice 
• Useful Knowledge 
• Sector Contribution

Nurturing scholarship, for us, is about creating the conditions in which it can flourish. That means designing spaces where colleagues can think aloud, try things, fail safely, and celebrate the small wins. To support colleagues, we have our ‘Lunch and Learn series’, school-based conferences, writing groups, compendiums, reciprocal visiting scholars, a virtual staffroom. As colleagues gather evidence of the impact of their practice, we ensure  reward and recognition via promotion pathways, Advance HE PSF Fellowship, internal awards, and our Teaching Scholars Scheme; visible, supported routes that say, your scholarship matters here.

It also means believing in people before they believe in themselves. Helping an emerging scholar audit what they already do, build a profile, find their tribe, and amplify their voice. Whether someone is a SoTL Explorer dipping a toe in, or a Scholar already shaping practice across the sector, the invitation is the same; come and join us.

Small stuff equals big impact, and at Arden, thought our approach ‘SERIOUS’ about scholarship, we are building a thriving scholarly culture.