Ah the literature review, important, yup.  Also mindboggling at the start, the literature-verse seems so vast, where to start, search terms…procrastination.  For a creative structure and organisation are a little challenging, I start with a nice table detailing each paper I find, it’s usefulness and search terms, referencing.  However, over the last few weeks this became the focus and I wrote…. nothing.  I took a book out the library on literature review and haven’t read it – doh. I did think a lot though and that still counts.

Today I decided to abandon my table and just allow myself to go down a rabbit hole, just a small one but one that meant I wrote a massive 347 words.  Well, okay, not massive but significant in my motivation to allow organisational abandonment in favour of going off-piste and take a little rocket into the world of policy, tertiary beginnings and the shifting landscape of quality in further and higher education toward an integrated model.  I even used RefWorks, kinnda.  I liked this a lot:

“although the term tertiary education is being used with increasing frequency, the people proposing this way forward rarely define what they mean by the term, nor do they specify the form that tertiary education might take in the nations and regions of the UK.” (Morris 2024: 123)

Morris, H. (2024) “What is meant by the term tertiary education? Past developments and recent activity,” Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 8(2), pp. 122–145. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/23322969.2024.2383602. 

I think about tertiary-ness a lot, and what it actually means.  Not in relation to model of tertiary education but in relation to those who practice in it.  If working in further education, do you consider yourself tertiary? In higher education do you consider yourself tertiary?  At UHI how do we define ourselves? not as an institution but as educators?  I popped a proposal into our UHI Learning and Teaching Conference happening in the summer.  I think for my research to be able to consider professional standards in a tertiary context we need to understand what it means to be tertiary, really.  This is the title of my proposed presentation ‘Future proofing for the move towards a T’.  It wasn’t until my colleague collated all the (34!) proposals to send around the organising group that I realised I couldn’t think of a catchy title so was going to go back to it and forgot!  I quite like it though, who doesn’t love a cup of tea.

The presentation plans to explore participants’ understanding of what it means to be tertiary through the lens of the student journey and expectations, professional standards and participants’ own professional values.

I have a feeling it might raise more questions than answers.

So today feels like a win, a small one. If like me and you need to read every word to process meaning, or your inner monologue takes you off into the world of news, dinner or movie night with the kids before you realise you are reading words but not taking them in.  Or if you are just trying to find your way in literature-verse and can’t quite imagine how it’s all going to come together then you are not alone.  And it’s gonna be alright huh?