Sharon Markless
Senior Lecturer in Higher Education
Contact
Franklin-Wilkins Building,
Waterloo Road,
London, SE1 9NN
Biography
Sharon Markless is a part-time Lecturer in Higher Education within King's Learning Institute. She taught in secondary schools, further and adult education before becoming a Senior Lecturer in Professional Development at Canterbury Christ Church University College. In addition, she was a Senior Research Officer at the National Foundation for Educational Research for six years.
Sharon is a consultant to the Global Libraries Programme of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She is contributing to the development of impact evaluation methodologies and methods. Sharon has been awarded a National Teaching Fellowship Award for 2009 from the Higher Education Academy.
Sharon teaches on the Postgraduate Diploma in Academic Practice (PGDip), the Masters in Academic Practice programmes and is a PhD supervisor.
School Liaison
Teaching Approach
I began teaching in Higher Education in 1990 and ever since then I have had a consistent focus on enhancing the quality of teaching and on sustaining student learning wherever this occurs. I have pursued these goals with lecturing colleagues in a variety of F and HE environments; with hospital consultants and nurses in various medical settings; with academic librarians working to support student learning and research in their libraries and across their institutions and when contributing to national and international initiatives.
In all this work there are four principles that define my professional practice:
1. Investing in a dialogical approach to teaching (drawing on Freire, 1993) which has led to my emphasis on collaborative learning. My teaching is conducted as a dialogue through which the participants and I problematise aspects of academic practice, share and construct meaning, and formulate concepts and models that are relevant to participants’ individual contexts. Fundamental to this process is a sense of joint learning and shared exploration. For this reason I do not think of the participants in my Programmes as my students and do not refer to them as such. This approach is also underpinned by my interest in the work of Carl Rogers (1969) who put emphasis on enabling learning rather than focusing on teaching.
2. Challenging people to be creative and innovative in their teaching. I strongly believe that an important part of my role is to move people out of their disciplinary ‘comfort zones’. It is my responsibility to create a safe learning environment in which people are able to respond constructively to new ideas; can reflect critically on their own practice; can share with colleagues from other disciplines and can engage with challenging literature on academic practice.
3. Adopting an iterative approach in teaching and professional development. This approach is based upon systematic reflection and review, which is fundamental to my work as a teacher and in conducting professional discourse more generally. From my earliest encounters with the work of Lawrence Stenhouse (1975) I have been convinced of the power of the concept of ‘teacher as researcher’ as a means of developing practice. This conviction has led to sustained engagement in my own action research and in supporting other people to undertake research to enhance pedagogy and develop the curriculum.
4. Fostering an expansive, global view of teaching and learning that reaches well beyond the classroom. This approach has been sustained by a range of national and international development opportunities, from teacher training consultancy through university library-focused development to engagement with the international information literacy research and development communities, as well as work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Libraries Programme designed to improve on-line access to information across communities.
My overall aim is to engage people in thinking critically about how they interact with students, rather than seeing teaching and learning as a mechanistic transaction.
References:
Freire, P. (1993) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Continuum Books, New York.
Rogers, C. (1969) Freedom to learn: A view of what education might become, Ohio: CE Merrill Pub. Co.
Stenhouse, L. (1975) An introduction to Curriculum Research and Development, London: Heineman
Research - King's Research Profile
My research has been focused in two main areas:
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Information literacy teaching and learning: projects have explored the pedagogy of Information Literacy; how students learn to become information literate; and the possible scope of information literacy in the digital learning environment. Work in this area has been on both national and international levels, with a particular interest coming from Scandinavian countries.
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Evaluating the impact of library and information services and related initiatives: projects have focused on developing rigorous ways of evaluating impact in complex environments. The research approach is predominantly qualitative. The work has been adopted nationally and has attracted international attention leading to consultancy on impact evaluation for the Global Libraries Initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I have more recently become interested in professionalism; both what it means in academic practice (linked to professional values and identity) and how it might be taught and assessed.
Publications - Full publications (pdf, 74KB)
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Markless, S and Streatfield, D (forthcoming) ‘Do we really want to know?’ The politics of qualitative impact evaluation of Library and Information services-finding an ethical response. Information Research
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Streatfield, D. and Markless, S. (2011) Impact evaluation, advocacy and ethical research: some issues for national strategy development Library Review 60(4) 312-327
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Markless, S. (2009) A new Conception of Information Literacy for the Digital Learning Environment in Higher Education, Nordic Journal of Information Literacy in Higher Education 1 (1), 25-40.
Presentations - Full presentations (pdf, 45KB)
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Markless, S & Streatfield, D. (2011) Evidence – what evidence? Trying to counter methodological fundamentalism in LIS evaluation i3 Conference, Robert Gordon University, June
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Jones, A. & Markless, S. (2010) Academic Development: adding to the mess? SRHE, December
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Markless, S. and Streatfield, D. (2010) Keynote presentation: Impact evaluation, advocacy and ethical research: some issues for national strategy development, August 10-14th, IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden.