Educational Researchers Paul Ashwin and Elizabeth Noonan gave keynote addresses at the Innovative Teaching Conference (Inno-methods) held in September 2023 at the University of Trieste, Italy. The conference was part of the Transform4Europe Alliance, a group of 10 European universities working together to find ways of educating students that better equip them to contribute to addressing societal challenges.

Paul Ashwin is a Professor of Higher Education in the Educational Research Department at Lancaster University. Elizabeth Noonan is Director of Quality Enhancement at University College Cork and a student on Lancaster University’s PhD Higher Education: Research Evaluation and Enhancement programme, supervised by Malcolm Tight.

Paul ‘s keynote address “Developing innovative approaches to teaching” argued that the key to innovative teaching is developing an education focused on giving students access to transformative knowledge that changes the way they understand themselves and what they can do in the world.

Elizabeth’s keynote address “Quality assurance and innovative teaching: competing or complimentary activities?” examined ways in which quality assurance and enhancement practices can support the development of innovative teaching.

Paul commented that: “It was wonderful to be a keynote speaker alongside Elizabeth, a student on one of doctoral programmes. It’s a great demonstration of the ways in which so many of our students are experts in their fields. This expertise means, as a Department, our role is to help our PhD student to research topics which they are deeply committed to and of which they already have a rich knowledge and understanding. This is what makes our PhD programmes so exciting and PhD supervision so rewarding”.