Professor Penny Jane Burke is Global Innovation Chair of Equity and Director of the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE) at the University of Newcastle in Australia. She is providing global leadership to support both equity and excellence in Higher Education. She is an influential scholar and practitioner, whose expert advice has informed national policy and impacted WP practice at universities across Australia, South Africa, and the UK, including, for example, on selection practices of Fine Arts degrees. She has played a key role on a number of national expert panel and was selected as a member of the Australian government’s Research & Innovation Equity Panel, advising the Minister of Education.

Professor Burke’s Global Chair is hosted jointly by Professor Andrea Abbas and Professor Carol Taylor in the Department of Education, and by the Centre for Learning & Teaching. Bringing together academic and professional expertise across Bath, her Global Chair is helping to develop a joint UK-Australian research project to provide new, critical perspectives on current approaches to gender equity in STEM. Drawing on her international experience, her Global Chair will further enrich our University’s WP initiatives, including the design of inclusive campus spaces and transformative pedagogies, and sharing this learning through the development of a MOOC with practitioners worldwide.

Bringing together academic and professional expertise across Bath, her Global Chair will help develop new research, organisational practice, and transformative pedagogical approaches that will further enhance our University’s innovative initiatives in widening participation and share this learning with practitioners worldwide.

Professor Abbas said:

We are delighted that Professor Burke has been appointed a Global Chair at Bath. In her role as Director of CEEHE, she is providing global leadership in the field of Higher Education equity, having developed a unique praxis-based framework that supports both equity and excellence in higher education. One of the focal points of Professor Burke’s activities at Bath will be the development of joint and comparative UK/Australian research on gender equity in and through STEAM, which will draw on Indigenous and decolonising methodologies as well as feminist theories to critique the current instrumentalised agenda of women into STEAM.

Activities at Bath

Since her appointment as a Bath Global Chair in 2020/2021, Professor Burke has:

• Worked with colleagues at Bath and CEEHE to develop new communities of praxis for Widening Participation, connecting research and theories of inequality with practical approaches

• Engaged with three different academic and professional staff groups at Bath to run regular meetings and explore inclusive pedagogies, campus and educational spaces (both physical and online), including trialling methodologies based on walking on university campuses and incorporating transdisciplinary, embodied, historical, personal and emotional experiences of inequality.

• Worked with the Bath team to co-design and plan a half-day symposium in September 2021. The symposium will launch an (online) cross-institutional community of praxis bringing stakeholders in Australia and the UK to trial transformative methodologies within educational settings, including, for example, in pedagogy, the curriculum (in particular online delivery), and campus support systems.