Developing Practice - University of Liverpool

Developing Practice is a University of Liverpool series focused on the everyday craft of improving higher education. It listens closely. The show brings together staff, researchers, lecturers, students, and network members to describe how development happens inside a university, not as a slogan but as a set of choices, tensions, and support structures. Many episodes begin with a personal route into the work. Those routes matter, because they explain why guests care about apprenticeships, doctoral supervision, inclusive teaching, research culture, or widening participation. The series has a steady institutional register, but it leaves room for uncertainty. A conversation on staff apprenticeships, for example, looks at training providers, line-manager support, tripartite meetings, workload, and the breadth of roles across the university. A discussion of autistic student support moves from labels and literature into laboratories, bright lights, belonging, and the need to ask students what actually helps. Doctoral supervision is treated as a relationship shaped by trust, emotion, power, and mutual adjustment. Research culture appears through hidden curricula, postdoc advocacy, informal networks, and the limits of telling people what best practice should be. The show also makes space for care. In episodes on motherhood and fieldwork, the pressures of travel, childcare, networking, and institutional expectations sit beside the intellectual value of lived experience. Conversations about empathy in leadership examine communication during crisis and the burden carried by staff networks. Teaching episodes give equal weight to innovation and access, including widening participation and micro-learning. The pacing is thoughtful rather than performative. Guests are allowed to explain how messy change can be. The recurring lesson is that universities improve through attention: to students, supervisors, colleagues, workloads, informal knowledge, and the systems people are asked to fit. Developing Practice suits listeners who want the human mechanics of academic change.