Brave Conversations in SoTL: Series 3

Launched in February 2022, Brave Conversations in SoTL is a collaborative speakers’ series that brings together an international slate of scholars to discuss ideas around critical approaches to themes of epistemic justice, students as knowers, and threshold experiences in higher education.
Brave Conversations in SoTL Series #3 features two presentations. Julie Rattray’s presentation is titled ‘But they don’t know what they don’t know’: Threshold scholars as a hindrance to partnership and consideration of ways to challenge this. Sophia Abbot’s presentation is called Uncomfortable Feelings: Embracing Circles and Being an Amateur in Partnership.
Julie Rattray is Professor in Higher Education at Durham University in the United Kingdom. Her research interests include the threshold concept framework, liminality, affective dimensions of learning as well as other aspects of policy and pedagogy in Higher Education. In particular, she is interested in the ways that learners deal with troublesome knowledge and the extent to which affective characteristics and attributes might influence this.
In recent years Julie has been involved in research projects and conference organizations in the area of Higher Education. She was a member of the UK team of project IBAR working with 6 European partners to explore the potential barriers to the implementation of pan-European standards and guidelines for higher education the findings of which are described in Eggins, H. (Ed). (2014) Drivers and Barriers to Achieving Quality in Higher Education, published by Sense). Julie has had an ongoing involvement in the biennial Threshold Concepts conference which started with the 5th conference held in Durham in 2014. Since then she has contributed as a paper reviewer and member of the organizing committee for all subsequent conferences and gave the keynote at the most recent conference in London 2021. In 2016 she was the chair of the Improving University Teaching (IUT) conference held in Durham. She was also the UK lead for the DASCHE (Developing, Assessing and Validating Social Competences in Higher Education. www.dasche.eu/a...) which focuses on the identification of practice in relation to the development of Social Competence in Higher Education. This project included 5 European partners along with the UK and was funded by Erasmus +.
​​Sophia Abbot is a doctoral student in the Higher Education Program at George Mason University (Virginia, USA). She currently works as a graduate assistant in Mason’s Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning, where she is a member of the Anti-Racist and Inclusive Teaching team, supporting resource development and assessment. Sophia has studied the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), inclusive pedagogy, and students’ perspectives on higher education for the last decade, focusing particularly on pedagogical partnerships and co-creation among students and faculty. She is the co-editor (with Lucy Mercer-Mapstone) of The Power of Partnerships: Students, Staff, and Faculty Revolutionizing Higher Education (Elon’s Open Access Book Series, 2020) and she has written and presented extensively on partnership, SoTL, and educational development. She currently serves on the International Advisory Board for the International Journal for Students as Partners (IJSaP), as a Special Projects Associate for the journal Teaching and Learning Inquiry, and as a co-chair of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning’s (ISSOTL) Student Engagement and Co-Inquiry Interest Group.