Senior Academic Developer
Email: claire.loffman@canterbury.ac.uk
Tel: 01227 921814
Profile Summary
I'm passionate about high quality, student-centred teaching in HE. I have a particular interest in Compassionate Pedagogy and try to apply this to all I do; it informed the phrasing for referred grades in the 2022-23 revisions of CCCU’s institutional Assessment Criteria for levels 0-7 and underpins work I’ve contributed to other institutional projects including: the Compassionate Pedagogy webpages and workshops, the HyFlex teaching pilot, anonymous marking, and blended learning guidance. I lead the first module of the UCAP and PGCAP as well as mentoring and assessing direct applications for Advance HEA fellowships. I’m also the Senior Academic Developer affiliated with the Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Education.
My current research is on the impact of CCCU’s PGCAP and UCAP on the longer-term practice of staff in supporting student learning; and on the impact of the revised grading criteria 2022-23 on assessment practices. For me, teaching and engaging with students have always been the most energising and exciting parts of my academic life. My background is in early modern literature and manuscript studies, but from 2015 I found that my intrinsic drive to ask and answer questions about seventeenth century texts was eclipsed by my interest in the natures of teaching and learning processes themselves. From 2016-2019 I worked as Education Adviser for Early Career Teachers at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), designing, teaching, and convening modules on their PGCAP and carrying out research into academic integrity and contract cheating. I Joined CCCU as a Senior Academic Developer in 2019.
I completed my PhD on Early Modern English Manuscript poetry in 2012 at the University of Sheffield before working as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant and teaching undergraduate and postgraduate modules in QMUL’s School of English. Previously, I had taught on Early Modern Literature courses at King’s College London, the Universities of Cambridge and Sheffield and catalogued antiquarian books and manuscripts at Bernard Quaritch, and Balliol College Oxford’s Historic Collections Centre.
I’ve been a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2018; I’d received my PGCAP with distinction in 2015 (QMUL).
Teaching and subject expertise
My academic interests include Compassionate Pedagogy; enhancing cohort identities for improved peer-to-peer learning; wellbeing and work-life balance for Early Career Teachers; threshold concepts; effective assessment and feedback practices.
Publications: (Previous surname: Williams)
Loffman, C., & Phillips, H. (2018). A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts. Routledge.
Gaunt, T., & Loffman, C. (2018). ‘When I say… threshold concepts.’ Medical Education. 52(7).
Loffman C. B. (Forthcoming). Notebooks, co-ed. with Antonia Moon & Harriet Phillips in vols 6 and 7 of OUP’s forthcoming Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne, general ed. Claire Preston.
Loffman C. B. (Forthcoming). ‘The Choise of Valentines’ (ed.) in vol 3 of OUP’s forthcoming Works of Thomas Nashe, general eds Joseph Black, Andrew Hadfield, Jennifer Richards, Cathy Shrank.
Williams, C. B. (2017). ” This and the rest Maisters we all may mende”: Reconstructing the Practices and Anxieties of a Manuscript Miscellany’s Reader-Compiler. Huntington Library Quarterly, 80(2), 277-292.
Williams, C. B. (2014). ‘Manuscript, Monument, Memory: The Circulation of Epitaphs in the Seventeenth Century’ in Literature Compass, 11, 573-82.