Wednesday 29^th June, 9.00h – 11.00h (UK time)

Spanish university recruitment processes require a previous positive evaluation conducted by ANECA as a compulsory requirement for any applicant, both in public and private universities. The Academic Staff Recruitment Assessment Programme (PEP: Programa de Evaluación del Profesorado) assesses academics’ teaching and research performance for this aim. What are the teaching figures in Spanish universities? What is the purpose of ANECA? What are the requirements to be accredited? When to be accredited and how to do it?

In this 2-hour workshop, Carmen Sánchez Cañizares, postdoctoral researcher at University of Oxford and positively evaluated by ANECA, will provide answers to all these questions and will discuss the peculiarities of being accredited if you are a researcher in the UK.

This workshop will be online and will take place in the week previous to the in-person symposium.

UKRI is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). It brings together the seven disciplinary research councils, Research England, which are responsible for supporting research and knowledge exchange at higher education institutions in England, and the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK. UKRI is the UK’s largest public funder of research and innovation, with funding opportunities spanning the whole research pathway from PhD to fellowships, training opportunities, project and programme grants and community networks, among other opportunities.

In this 2-hour workshop, Rocío Gaudioso, Senior Funding Policy Manager at UKRI, will introduce the ins and outs of UKRI, what kind of funding might be available for you and how to effectively interact with the funder. This workshop would be better suited for early career researchers and those with an interest in UKRI.

This workshop will be online and will take place in the week previous to the in-person symposium.

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion. Epistemological theory states that there isn’t just one form of knowledge. However, Western scientific paradigm has been the main method for accessing knowledge in the last five centuries, undermining other forms of knowledge.

This workshop aims to establish a bridge between thinkers, practitioners, researchers and individuals from multiple disciplines and cultural backgrounds, to push the boundaries of our own forms of knowledge and rediscover new ones.

We invite attendees to be open to be vulnerable and reflect on the persistence of colonial structures by encouraging critical approaches and bridges of thoughts between different geographical and cultural spheres, across Europe, Latin America, and further. This is an invitation to encounter and link dialogues that emerge and discuss the different epistemic perspectives.

This will be an in-person workshop during the symposium and will be taught by members of Team Ventana.

Unconscious bias occurs when individuals favour others who look like them and/or share their values. For example, a person may be drawn to someone with a similar educational or social background, from similar cultures, or who is the same ethnicity as them. Unconscious bias is important. There is robust evidence that unconscious mental associations about social groups impact our perceptions and decision-making and that people tend to hold more negative associations toward a variety of historically oppressed groups. This can have serious impacts on people’s lives. In academia, unconscious bias can influence decisions at all stages, including areas of research, funding, publishing, recruitment, promotion and performance management.

In this workshop, we will explore ways of detecting, understanding, dealing with and reducing unconscious bias, both when it is us who haves biases against/in favour of others, and when others have biases against or in favour of us.

This will be an in-person workshop during the symposium, and will be taught by Sonia Contera, Professor of Biological Physics at the Physics Department of the University of Oxford and Associate Head of the Physics Department (Equality, Diversity & Inclusion).

There is nothing more memorable than having fun when playing. This strategy has been used for centuries in primary and secondary education, but unfortunately, at some point, it got lost and did not reach higher education. However, Universities across the UK are increasingly interested in bringing games and fun again into the classroom. Educators create a wide variety of games to make students engage with their disciplines and become active learners. This is the case with games such as Escape Rooms, Microbial Pursuit, Quidditch World Cup and Alice’s Adventures in Fungusland.

Come to this workshop to discover how to use elements of games as a means of innovating higher education. We will use online and in-person game boards and other props to show you how you can convert your teaching into an enjoyable activity while students are learning. 

This will be an in-person workshop during the symposium, and will be run by two enthusiastic Lecturers and Fellows of the Higher Academy, Isabel Murillo and David Wareing, who are passionate about gamifying higher education. Isabel Murillo is a Lecturer in Microbiology in the School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of Bristol, and co-author of the children’s book “Science-me a story. Stories for young researchers”. David Wareing is a Lecturer in Medical Microbiology in the School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Central Lancashire and a finalist for The Most Innovative Teacher Year Award (Times Higher Education Award, 2021).