We ReLaTe addresses the challenge of creating synergy among the increasingly more specialised and centralised supports for four key higher education activities – research, writing, teaching and learning – which frequently fail to capitalise on their shared territories and common ground.

In many institutions, central support for these four areas continues to grow, repeatedly in a reactive rather than strategic manner, in the form of sometimes overlapping programmes or activities, centres, institutes and other units

This responsive growth, often influenced by external forces, can result in the goals, structures and services of these central supports being less than optimal. Equally, what contributes to success, productivity and quality of outcomes, across research, writing, teaching and learning, can remain tacit, ill defined or indeed invisible.

This Action addresses the dearth of professional conversations and research around the shared territory of support for, and development of, these four areas. Such dialogue and research, across units and institutions, will illuminate intersections and contribute to institutional transformation based  complementary, coherent and integrated provision.

Our Action will address the identified challenge through two key goals. They are:

1. classifying, as frontier taxonomies, the common ground in terms of shared purposes, processes, knowledge, values and skills among centralized institutional supports for research, writing, teaching and learning in order to capitalise on their synergies.
2. offering the most advantageous models and practices for supporting these four areas that are mindful of the availability of new technologies and assessments, and that prompt a reworking of current institutional supports which will be valuable and far-reaching.

Our Action began in October 2016 and will end in October 2020 (extended until April 2021).

There are five Working Groups in the Action:

• WG 1 – Teaching and Learning (Group leader Dr Peter MUSAEUS)
• WG 2 – Researching and Writing (Group leader Dr Djuddah LEIJEN)
• WG 3 – Frontiers and Borderland across Teaching, Learning, Research and Writing (Group leader Dr Ide O’SULLIVAN)
• WG 4 – Seeking and identifying new knowledge (Group leader Dr Jolanta SINKUNIENE)
• WG 5 – Articulating new models (Group leader Dr Aleksandra FIGUREK)

Click here to download the Action’s Memorandum of Understanding which provides an overview of the Action.

This website is associated with our COST Action 15221 and is supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a pan-European intergovernmental framework. Its mission is to enable break-through scientific and technological developments leading to new concepts and products and thereby contribute to strengthening Europe’s research and innovation capacities. It allows researchers, engineers and scholars to jointly develop their own ideas and take new initiatives across all fields of science and technology, while promoting multi – and interdisciplinary approaches. COST aims at fostering a better integration of less research intensive countries to the knowledge hubs of the European Research Area. The COST Association, an International not for- profit Association under Belgian Law, integrates all management, governing and administrative functions necessary for the operation of the framework. The COST Association has currently 36 Member Countries. www.cost.eu

Partners

COST Actions are made up of partners from COST countries, the Cooperating State, Near Neighbour Countries and International Partner Countries.

All COST Actions have a Management Committee (MC). According to the COST Vademecum, the role of the MC is to ‘take charge of the coordination, implementation and management of the Action’s activities as well as supervising the appropriate allocation and use of the COST funds with a view to achieving the Action’s research coordination objectives and capacity building objectives’ (COST, 2017: 6). Each partner country has two representatives on the MC – MC members. A list of the MC members and substitutes for We ReLaTe can be found here

Within our Action we use email, Google Drive and Adobe Connect as our asynchronous and synchronous communication tools.

In line with COST policies we are seeking to grow the Action and to be inclusive. If you would like to join our Action, please do not hesitate to contact us. You can find our contact details here