Advance HE Conference 2026

The Advance HE conference 2026 at Sheffield was a chance for me to escape the office and reflect on my practice and the wider HE sector. I enjoyed sharing my passion for collaborative drawing, by facilitating a workshop with Dr. Lois Woods and Gemma Sayer entitled ‘Co-Creating a collaborative drawing toolkit with student researchers’. We provided delegates with an overview of our research and then they drew together. For the warm up activity we asked them to draw the first thing that comes to mind when they thought about one of the following words, relating to the future challenges of Higher Education: Lifelong Learning, A.I, Wellbeing, Changing Student Demographics, Financial Pressure, Skills & Employability.

This led to a lively drawing and discussion on the main activity which was to brainstorm the challenges HE is currently facing. Some delegates who were from creative backgrounds were comfortable drawing, but others weren’t so. We had someone participating from a medical background who was reticent to draw at first, but once they put pen to paper, they started to build some confidence. Participants responded to one another’s drawings through drawing which led to some interesting conversations around HE today.

It was great to see others valuing the act of drawing together!