This page celebrates and publicises exceptional work taking place within the learning development community, highlighted through the Tom Burns Memorial Award nominations. Here you can read about individual and team nominees’ work from the 2026 awards.
2026 Winner: To be announced at the AGM and Awards Ceremony 30 April 2026. Book a ticket via the Events Calendar.
Name of nominee: Blessing Maregere (self nomination)
I wish to nominate myself for the Tom Burns Memorial Award for my contribution to advancing Professional Discussions as a dialogic learning development practice in higher education. My work centres students’ interpretations of their learning experiences and uses these insights to inform more inclusive, reflective, and meaningful approaches to assessment and development, particularly in degree apprenticeships.
Through my doctoral research, I have examined how apprentices, tutors, and quality staff experience Professional Discussions in degree apprenticeships as spaces where learning is articulated, challenged, and developed. Using interviews, focus groups, and transcript analysis, I have foregrounded students’ own accounts of reflection, confidence, belonging, and professional growth. This work has enabled learner voice to shape both scholarly understanding and practical intervention.
I have translated this research into staff and student-facing practice through workshops, tutor development sessions, learner guidance resources, and conference presentations. These outputs support students to express what and how they have learned in ways that traditional written assessment can overlook. In doing so, my work promotes approaches that recognise diverse learners, professional identities, and work-based forms of knowledge.
I have also published and presented on dialogic assessment and Professional Discussions, contributing to wider sector discussions about inclusion, authenticity, and the future of assessment in higher education. Across this work, I have sought to represent students not as passive recipients of learning development but as active interpreters of their educational experiences whose voices should shape pedagogy and practice.
My contribution lies in building a research-informed and practice-focused approach that elevates student voice, strengthens belonging, and supports more equitable forms of learning development.
Publications:
Maregere, B (2026). Professional Discussions as Dialogic Assessment: A framework for Inclusive, AI-Resilient Online Learning and Assessment. In Exploring Effective Online Teaching and Learning Strategies (pp. 443- 461).
https://doi.org/10.59668/2124.24746
Wonkhe article: Dialogic assessments are the missing piece in contemporary assessment debates https://wonkhe.com/blogs/dialogic-assessments-are-the-missing-piece-in-contemporary-assessment-debates/
Name of nominee: Kathleen Normandin (practitioner), Abbie Allan, Allison Hodge, Katie Campbell (student collaborators), nominated by Kerith George-Briant
To enhance inclusivity and engagement with academic support at Abertay University, Kathleen Normandin has effectively utilised student work-placement projects within Learner Development Services (LDS). These projects, set by Kathleen, position students as collaborators to investigate best practices and propose lived-experience improvements for LDS service delivery. To date, Kathleen has supervised seven projects for 12 placement students across four academic programmes.
Most recently, Allison, Abbie and Katie joined the LDS team for a fourth-year Psychology placement project. They were tasked with researching learning modality in its widest sense, interpreting their findings, applying their lived-experiences, and creating a student-facing resource, as part of the LDS self-study guidance. As with previous projects, the students were positioned as contributors, researchers, co-designers, and interpreters of their own learning realities in higher education.
The students’ lived experiences were translated into practical strategies relevant to the student population at Abertay, adding a richness to their research-informed booklet designed to help learners create personalised study plans. The booklet utilises scholarly frameworks such as Universal Design for Learning, goal-setting, gamification, multimodal learning, emotional regulation, and technology-enhanced environments, with the students’ interpretations shaping the booklet’s tone. This ensured that student perspectives were authentically represented.
Beyond the placement project, Kathleen has supported the students in presenting their work, coaching them to articulate the rationale for the resource, demonstrate its application, and advocate for inclusive learning approaches from a learner’s perspective. Kathleen and the students have, to date, co-presented internally at an academic staff-focused CPD session and externally at the 2026 City of Glasgow College Learning and Teaching with UCAT and ALDinHE conference presentations to come. As such, Kathleen and this team of students have contributed to wider learning and development practice by modelling a collaborative way of working in which student research and voices are systematically gathered, theorised, and transformed into practical guidance and changes to service delivery.
Name of nominee: Nahid Huda nominated by Sandra Sinfield & Sandra Abegglen
We nominate NAHID HUDA for the Tom Burns Award, in particular the liberatory work she has done transforming student approaches and attitudes to academic reading. Nahid initiated the academic reading circles (ARC) project in 2021 – and has published on the outcomes: Towards the Setting Up and Evaluation of Academic Reading Circles (Huda, 2022) and shared resources on her: Padlet. ARC introduces students to a structured reading approach where they undertake different roles in the reading circle. In each role the students realise their own agency in this tricky part of academic practice and start to see themselves as readers:
“It has become the project where you can hand over the reins to the students. They discover that there can be joy in reading academic texts and learning from them. Students quickly learn that they can achieve this through reading as a social act, where collaborating and engaging in dialogue with each other facilitates analysis and meaning making as well as a sense of accomplishment and autonomy. For me and the module tutor, witnessing students engage with the various tasks, was the equivalent of fairylights switching on, shining brightly. There is something beautiful in seeing them twinkle. I have witnessed students skipping out of the room with joy or excited at the prospect of completing an assignment.”
Having run the ARC project over the last five years, the legacy of this LD project has been that students are prepared to engage with reading. They know it forms a strong foundation of their studies, and they do well in their assignments because it has become a natural part of their learning process. This is all the more meaningful as focussing on reading practices seems to be the “”uncool”” academic literacy as we are increasingly distracted by GenAI and efficiency.”
Name of nominee: Elora Baishnab, Heather Cockayne, Adam Danquah, Sadia Habib, Katie Newton, Emmanuel Oladipo, Christopher Sutton nominated by Heather Cockayne
The Reframing Stopford Project at the University of Manchester offers a situated example of how the learning development values of belonging, voice, community, criticality and opposing inequity can be enacted through interdisciplinary, arts-based practice. Emerging from collaboration between the School of Environment, Education and Development and the School of Medical Sciences, the project operates at the intersection of pedagogy, representation, and institutional culture.
Central to its contribution is a commitment to partnership as a mode of inquiry. In addition to working with various student partners throughout, The planned creative workshops extend the exhibition’s intervention by positioning students and staff as co-producers of knowledge and culture, engaging them in processes of eliciting and interpreting their own experiences of belonging. In this sense, partnership is not simply participatory but epistemic: it reshapes how meaning is made within higher education contexts.
The project’s engagement with diversity is underpinned by a critical pedagogical stance. By disrupting the visual orthodoxy of medical art—historically dominated by narrow and exclusionary representations—it foregrounds the partiality of disciplinary knowledge and creates space for alternative narratives of the body. This aligns with an understanding of learning development as attentive to power, voice, and the conditions under which learners are recognised.
At the same time, Reframing Stopford demonstrates how learning development practices can be adapted and mobilised beyond traditional settings. The use of public exhibition and creative methods functions as both a pedagogical tool and an advocacy mechanism, making visible the relationship between representation and student and staff experience across institutional spaces.
The project is also grounded in a scholarly orientation, supported through institutional funding and informed by arts-based research methodologies that explore belonging and inclusion. Such approaches invite ongoing critical reflection among participants and facilitators alike, positioning professional learning as iterative and relational.
Taken together, the project illustrates how learning development values are not discrete principles but are enacted through practice—through collaboration, criticality, and a sustained commitment to rethinking how students experience and interpret higher education.
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/cross-faculty-team-combine-art-and-education-to-promote-diversity-and-inclusion/
Name of nominee: Lesley Black & Glenn Fosbraey nominated by Elizabeth Munro
Sunny Side Up: Positive Affect Journaling for University Students and Staff
I wish to nominate the ‘Sunny Side Up’ project led by Dr Lesley Black and Dr Glenn Fosbraey at the University of Winchester.
The ‘Sunny Side Up’ project is rooted in the principles of critical pedagogy, conscious positivity, equity, belonging and mattering. In this project students were supported to engage in positive affect journaling (PAJ) through a series of structured writing prompts embedded within teaching sessions (e.g., as a warm-up activity, or aligned with weekly content / themes). Unlike traditional journaling, PAJ focuses on events, thoughts or interactions that evoke positive emotion. The key benefit of PAJ is that it directs writers towards observing their strengths, successes and moments of joy, thus, over time, leading to improved mental wellbeing and an increased sense of belonging.
In keeping with the spirit of the Tom Burns Memorial Award, the ‘Sunny Side Up’ project embodies the importance of students’ interpretations of their own learning experiences. Furthermore, this project continues the legacy of Tom’s work with its focus on engaging with writing as a creative practice and method of enquiry. These imperatives are reflected in student feedback on the project, with one student describing their experience of PAJ as: ‘the first time writing stopped being about fixing myself and became about noticing what makes me feel alive.’
Finally, the project fulfils ALDinHE’s values through its commitment to partnership, respect for diverse learners, rigorous research-led approach, and robust outputs advocating effective learning development practice (including an online presentation to AMOSSHE, and publications via HEPI and THE). The institutional impact of the project includes the implementation of PAJ as part of transition work for prospective and new students.
Further information about the project may be found here:
Times Higher Education – https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/benefits-positive-affect-journaling-university-students-and-staff