CILASS: Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences

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Dr Nadine Wills

CILASS Academic Fellow and Teaching Enhancement Advisor
0114 2220428
email: n.wills@sheffield.ac.uk

In my role as a CILASS Academic Fellow, I want to look at how professional services staff can develop an inquiry-based approach to learning and teaching outside the classroom. Implicit to this approach, will be understanding different ways that professional services staff function within Higher Education. This is an important relationship for me personally to break down and understand as I transition from academic to professional services. In the hierarchies of universities, many see this as a step down, but it is one that I find personally more rewarding at the moment but also more challenging to explain and negotiate as an identity.

I work in Learning and Teaching services (LeTS) on the teachingcommons@sheffield project My position there is to help facilitate the way people share what they value about their learning and teaching experiences. I do this in a variety of spaces, such as:

Web 2.0/online:

• The Case Studies Wiki database
• The Good Practice Blog
• The teachingcommons YouTube channel

Face-to-face facilitation of workshops and teaching circles

• The teachingcommons Launch
• Almost weekly events

This year I will be working closely with 3 students on the teachingcommons project and look forward to developing the possibilities of the student aspects of my work.

This role as Academic Fellow will interact with my current position more broadly to:

• develop the way students are consulted and engaged in the teachingcommons project and more generally within LeTS and across the University
• develop the inquiry-based aspects of the teachingcommons events to improve my facilitation skills
• develop further understanding of how institutional initiatives, projects and CETLs can strategically work together

I formerly lectured in the areas of Cultural and Film Studies (at the University of Exeter and Bielefeld). I found that this has a great influence in the way that I approach my job as a Teaching Enhancement Advisor. My former research was on patterns of female sexual display specifically, but more generally I have always been interested in what allows certain people to get rewarded for certain acts and understand this within issues of identity creation and these community interactions as generic products/patterns.

Outside of work, I try to find ways to combine the physical, spiritual and community more and more. I dance salsa, bachata and tango as often as often as possible. I am active in the Sheffield Quaker Meeting and volunteer for the U.N. Refugee Council. You may see me being pulled along to my weekly knitting group by my dog Betty Boop and am considering knitting a dog fur scarf but will never wear it, so if there are any takers....