THE TOM BURNS MEMORIAL AWARD
In recognition of the contribution Tom Burns made to Learning Development – and to the championing of students and their voices: the Tom Burns Memorial Award recognises work that focuses on students’ interpretations of aspects of their learning experiences. This award has been established to celebrate those who also make space for student voice.
The award encourages the practices of eliciting, representing, promoting and/or publishing work focusing on students’ interpretations of aspects of their learning experiences, in service of learning development practice or research, with students and/or staff in higher education.
Tom Burns was an Associate Teaching Professor in the Centre for Teaching Enhancement at London Metropolitan University, developing innovations with a special focus on praxes that ignite student curiosity, and develop power and voice. Tom was one of the co-founders of the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE) and a leading participant in its LearnHigher CETL. After Tom’s death, ALDinHE initiated the Tom Burns Memorial Award (TBMA) as a permanent memorial to his life and achievements. The award is presented on an annual basis at the online annual general meeting (AGM).
The Tom Burns Memorial Award
The Tom Burns Memorial Award was launched in 2025 to celebrate work focusing on students’ interpretations of aspects of their learning experiences.
Nominations are invited from colleagues by sending a brief (300 words) account of a practitioner’s, group’s or team’s contribution to encouraging the practices of eliciting, representing, promoting and/or publishing work focusing on students’ interpretations of aspects of their learning experiences, in service of learning development practice or research, with students and/or staff in higher education.
Eligibility for the award could be demonstrated through research, learning materials, papers or presentations, creative or artistic outputs.
Our previous winner and nominees can be found here for: 2026, 2025.
Nomination guidelines:
- You can nominate a colleague, group of colleagues or team. at your own institution or a different one. You can nominate yourself!
- The nominations will be reviewed by a small group of past and present members of ALDinHE Steering Group.
- The committee will be looking for a link to the five ALDinHE values and the contribution made to learning development linking to themes of voice, belonging, community, criticality, opposing injustice and inequality.
- We will publicly recognise all nominees and celebrate the shortlisted nominees.
- Neither you nor the person you are nominating are required to attend the conference.
- Members of the ALDinHE Steering Group are permitted to be nominated as part of a group or team, but not eligible for individual nomination.
2026 Winner: 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.”
Reflections on winning the Tom Burns Memorial award 2026.
Thank you Sandra Sinfield and Sandra Abegglen for nominating me. I am honoured to have won this award, especially so as I have collaborated with Tom as well as being fortunate to be taught by him. The values imbued in his practice (and Sandra Sinfield’s) have influenced the way I want to shape my own – kind, collaborative and collegial. Winning this award feels like an acknowledgment of those qualities in the work I do in partnership with students and staff.
I started the academic reading circles (ARC) as students wanted to produce the best possible assignments for their modules but were not sure how to go about this. It became increasingly clear that engagement of academic texts was the key to this. How to foster meaningful reading practices for students with multiple demands on their time as well as acknowledge the constraints on curriculum delivery, became the challenge to be solved. Collaborating with students and staff to develop an ARC model rooted in reading as a social act and integrate it within the taught curriculum has been a joy to experience. It has allowed for an authentic, immersive learning experience, rather than a transactional one and that seems, to me, an act of resistance in the ever marketised landscape of higher education on offer to students. Having this work recognised reinforces the idea that compassion and collaboration offer so much to learning experiences. Thank you ALDinHE for acknowledging this.
Read all the 2026 nominations.
An example from the past work of Tom Burns and Sandra Sinfield
Tom Burns and Sandra Sinfield co-facilitated a project back in 2010 called “Tell us the secret of your success”, to elicit students’ representations of their higher education experiences. Tom and Sandra made the decision to invite really successful students, not to be exclusive, but to demonstrate that in widening participation spaces, even so-called successful students ended up being hurt by their experiences. Here are two student outputs from this project:
Maze of confusion – of lost feet and desperate hands across real assignments and feedback
Z-A of University life produced by a London Met graduate
Z-A is a short documentary and educational resource about the experiences of university, from the perspective of a student who graduated with a first class honours degree.
Stylistically designed to resemble a children’s television programme, Z-A incorporates key academic words, themes, topics and moments from this journey. Z-A aimed to inform and encourage other students.
Tom Burns (1959 – 2024)
Tom was an extraordinary man who lived an extraordinary life. His life was made extraordinary by circumstances and by dint of his own personality and spirit – Tom was a very likeable person with a wonderful sense of humour and had a spirit of adventure. He was an inspirational figure and pioneer in the evolution of Learning Development. He had a tremendous ability to draw on personal experience to tell stories that engaged and inspired his colleagues, peers and students in all walks of life.
Tom delighted in all aspects of teaching and learning and leaves an enduring legacy. For his work with London Metropolitan University and for his work in the wider Learning Development Community. Tom was an Associate Teaching Professor in the Centre for Teaching Enhancement at London Metropolitan University, developing innovations with a special focus on praxes that ignite student curiosity, and develop power and voice. Always interested in theatre and the arts and their role in teaching and learning, Tom set up adventure playgrounds, community events and festivals for his local community, and fed arts-based practice into his learning, teaching and assessment practices.
Tom has “always been interested in theatre and the arts and their role in building identity and community – and the power they can have in teaching and learning. When at school and first working in the building trade, he formed and led the Hainault Action Group setting up adventure playgrounds and devising community events and festivals for his local east London community” (LMU, 2024).
Tom was co-producer of the innovative #Take5 blog that shares great practice nationally and internationally as part of the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE). He is co-author of Teaching, Learning and Study Skills: A Guide for Tutors and Essential Study Skills: The Complete Guide to Success at University (5th Edition) and co-editor of the book Collaboration in Higher Education: A New Ecology of Practice, published by Bloomsbury. Tom was a Certified Leading Practitioner in Learning Development and University Teaching Fellow and was part of the #creativeHE collective that won the Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) by AdvanceHE 2022. Tom was also interested in writing as a learning process, collaborative writing as a method of enquiry and creativity as liberatory practice.
Tom was a remarkable man. He became an advocate and spokesperson for so many, always supporting inclusivity and diversity. He welcomed everyone and used his personal experience to influence policies and practice, and made a difference to so many people’s lives. Forthright and outspoken as he often was, he was also kind, warm-hearted, generous, fun and joyful. Many of us have so much to thank Tom for, in supporting our careers and spurring us on to do good and make a difference. Tom had an amazing capacity to give so much of himself to others, and to touch many lives.