Scholarship reimagined: creating the DARSHE, an inclusive and flexible framework for developing scholarship in higher education

Abstract The expansion and marketisation of Higher Education (HE) over recent years has prompted significant growth in the number and proportion of education-focused academics (EFAs) within the academy. Recognition and reward for these staff has however been a persistent challenge, in part because of debates around the nature of scholarship, variation in institutional criteria pertaining to scholarship, and lack of clarity around recognition of the work undertaken by EFAs. As part of our remit to develop scholarship in our own institution, we conducted workshops with academics from six departments within a post-1992 English university, capturing lived experiences of scholarship, understandings of what it comprised, and perspectives on how scholarship could be supported. We reflect on these discussions, on the literature defining scholarship, and on our own lived experiences as EFAs and supporting EFAs, to reimagine scholarship through an integrated framework, the DARSHE (Description of Activities Relating to Scholarship in Higher Education). The DARSHE framework offers a synthesis of some of the different approaches in the current literature, taking into account the development needs we have identified, and subsequent evaluations with wider stakeholders. The framework can be used by individuals to reflect on their scholarship, as a tool to support the development of an inclusive approach to scholarship by academic developers, and to enable reward and recognition for EFAs in university policy. We suggest that this will lead to a positive impact on colleagues seeking to develop their scholarship, the HE sector, and the students that study within it.